The landscape grew rockier. Drier. More grey. Hills sprouted stone boulders and crags like bewildered stone faces. Temperatures fell precipitously; plants took on iridescent hues, shimmering white and turquoise and primrose. Magic in the air.

Tirian shot him a look of sheer delight, the second day into the North, and nudged heels into his mare and took off: a streak of fairy wildness, person and horse, enchanted as the wind. Ollie sighed internally—he couldn’t breathe magic like vitality, and this wasn’t home for him—but Tir all lit up and glowing and daring him to follow, well. That made him want to follow. Made him grin.

This was home for Tir. More or less. The borderlands. The closest he’d got. Ollie wondered, pounding after his fairy-companion down a crooked defile, leaping a stream, catching up and playing tag on horseback among merry towering rocks and indecently iridescent hummingbirds, if he missed it.

He wondered also for the first time why Tir had never ridden North. Never come so close to home. With that joy in each breath, in those chilly excited eyes.

He thought that this might be because of him. Because of himself: Tirian’d spent years looking out for him, finding his missing boots and correcting his arithmetic sets before the tutor checked. Ollie had never cared to ride North.

His chest did that odd twist and ache again, the way it had over bacon and toast the morning they’d left.

“Oliver,” Tir yelled over, laughing, pink-cheeked in brittle wind, “you’ll get stuck, that ravine’s a dead end—!”

“Carrot can turn on a penny!” Ollie shouted back, tugging at reins, getting Bellemare’s Autumn Harvest Joy to rear and spin obligingly, “and you didn’t tell me where we were going!”

“North!” Tir came back and reined Sprite in and waited helpfully while Ollie figured out directions. “You know. That way. Not down a dead-end ravine.”

“Bloody fairies and your bloody country,” Oliver grumbled at him. “How do you know it’s a dead-end, anyway?”

“One, because I, unlike you, pay attention to my surroundings. Two…” Cool grey eyes got a little more cloud-like, pensive. “I don’t exactly know. It’s like…knowing.”

“Oh, right, that’s completely clear, thanks.”

“No, I mean…” Sprite matched Carrot’s pace amiably, without active direction from her rider. Ollie’d always half-suspected Tir had a mysterious magical bond with most animals, though when asked his fairy’d only started laughing hard enough to be useless for answers.

“I mean,” Tir said now, thinking aloud, “no. It doesn’t work if I think about it. It’s a little like remembering.”

“Like…you…” Came this way? When you were only twelve and alone in a brand-new human land?

He thought: I couldn’t’ve done it. I don’t know how you did. And you don’t talk about it. And I can’t ask. In case it’s a spell or a geas or a charm. In case it hurts you.

He said, “Like you spend a lot of time in ravines?”

And Tir laughed, weightless and untroubled. “Maybe if you count the University archives. I swear some of those manuscript stacks haven’t been touched in centuries. It’s funny, though, if I try to push it, to really think about it, that headache…”

Oliver gathered rein. Carrot stopped. This meant that Sprite stopped too; Crown Prince and companion regarded each other for a minute. Wind flirted with unnaturally indigo-and-magenta rock-grass behind Tir’s head.

Tirian looked away first. “I know. I know what you’re saying. Not saying. You know my answer. Just—just don’t. Please.”

“You’re hurting,” Ollie said, “because you’re riding North with me.”

“It’s not like—”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s…hard to explain.”

“Try.”

“I know,” Tir said carefully, even gingerly, “what I’m supposed to do. And I…this feels like going home. Before I’ve done it. And that—”

“Oh,” Ollie said. “Oh. No. Stop. Nothing you’re not allowed to say,” and then they looked at each other for another second, until one corner of Tir’s mouth quirked up. “I’m okay. It’s just…a reminder. From—from the magic. Land-sense. It won’t matter; we won’t be going into Fairy proper.”

“I’ll believe you,” Ollie told him, “if you tell me that again. Right now. Honestly.”

“I am being honest, you turnip.” Tir was smiling, crooked, but his eyes were serious. Graveness; gravestones, that grey. Ollie swatted that thought down. “I don’t lie to you, Oliver. It’ll hurt a little, and it won’t get much worse, and I can live with it for now. It’ll go away after we’re done.”

“You’ll let me know,” Ollie said.

“Of course.”

“Then…” He bit his lip, wavered: a pebble making a choice. Could be an avalanche. Might not. No way to know. And he had a traditional quest to complete, and Tir had…also a quest. Of some sort. A mission. “If you’re sure.”

Tir gave him the most affronted look Oliver’d seen on anyone not a palace cat. He had to laugh. “Fine. But you’ll tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I just said—”

“Not only when it gets worse. Check in with me. Talk to me. Did you call me a turnip?”

“I’ve called you worse before. I’m all right, I promise.” Wind tugged a strand of dark hair across grey eyes; Tir tucked it back, and made even that motion elegant: ruffled as silk, as water, a fairy framed by ravine walls and cinnamon rock-roses. “Still going to beat you to that stream, up ahead…”

“That’s not a fair start!” Oliver yelled at his vanishing back, and took off after.

Tir and Sprite won. This was not a surprise.

They stopped playing around after a while, settling into a long journey’s pace. They wouldn’t go as far as the border, despite the Northern Wild also settling in around them. Strangeness in the knots and whorls of tree-bark. Near-faces. A kind of invisible presence, heavy and curious and bright, lying like a gaze between shoulderblades.

Towns and villages dwindled and became thimble-sized outposts and ultimately faded out altogether; the far Northern air became difficult for humans to survive in, at least not without being changed. Like the plants, Oliver mused, glancing at a particularly verdant clump of unnaturally sparkly sage. Fairyland protecting itself. Tir could breathe fine in the human kingdoms; this was not exactly equitable.

He ran over folklore, family history, research and expectations, in his mind. Sometimes aloud; Tir listened and contributed details when he forgot them. Preparations. Plans.

The Seeing Pool tended to move around, though it stayed on the human side of the dividing line, and it also liked to protect itself. The Vision Quest, while traditional and mostly a formality these days, was and always had been a true quest; Oliver could be injured or maimed, and in a rare few cases Crown Princes or Princesses had even died, so it’d be a proper test of wits and strength and commitment, the idea being that these were good qualities for an Heir. There’d be three obstacles, traditionally; three was a tidy number, stable as tripods, as telescope legs, as an artist’s easel. The obstacles weren’t always the same, though some repeats had turned up; Tir suggested that the magic tended to throw what it thought the Heir could or needed to handle.

“Maybe,” Oliver said. “I can wave a paintbrush at it. A pencil.”

“You’re good with a sword,” Tir said.

“Against our weapons-master, sure. In practice-yards.” Bellemare hadn’t been involved in conflict for centuries. Too much nervousness about the odd unknown quantity to the North; too much demand for luxury goods moving South; too many strategic marriages and treaties, such that any diplomatic squabbling generally turned out to be a result of someone’s aunt not having been sent a thank-you note for the silver wedding-teapot. “I can sing tavern-ballads at a black knight until he goes away.”

“It wouldn’t work, he’d stay to listen…your first idea might not be a bad one.”

“What, sketching a basilisk or whatever to death?”

“Making bargains.” Tir shrugged. “A lot of fairies like art. Creative pieces. Not because we can’t, we can, but human art is different. Quicker. Vibrant. I’m just saying, you might be able to please a mysterious stranger and they’ll do us a favor.”

“Huh.”

“Or you might not.”

“Thanks for that.”

“Any time.” Tir tossed him an ironic salute. “No, honestly, I think you’re good enough to make it work, but anyone we encounter this far up will have an agenda; they might take offense on purpose. Nothing to do with the quality of your art. Did you get around to submitting that piece for the University showcase before we left?”

“Yeah, it’s under the Vertir Rioli name, like always…” Oliver, while not technically a student, had been using that pseudonym for several years; he’d not wanted anyone to look at his work and think of the Crown Prince. Tir had listened patiently to his complaints about this, way back then, and gone to talk to the University’s fine arts Masters, and come back and told him to send that first piece under a name only the two of them and Master Stephen would know.

He didn’t have enough time to devote to study, to practice. Never truly going to be great. Too many demands: the throne, the kingdom, his people, learning all he could. His family. He’d accepted that.

He was decent enough, though. He’d accepted that too. He didn’t have to be a legend. He wanted to make people smile: with watercolors of village life, with quick sketches in a pub, capturing life and jokes and laughter. The piece he’d sent in last year’d come second, which had both surprised and embarrassed him: a riotous color-drenched scene of the tavern framed by the doorway, seen by someone standing on the brink of coming in.

This year he’d told Tir he’d sent in something different, a quieter more pensive study of the castle’s library, leatherbound jewel-hued spines and solid wood furniture; that’d all been true. But last-minute he’d decided he wanted a figure in the scene, interacting with the stories; he’d impulsively painted Tirian in, a slim dark curl of person in an overstuffed chair, no detail but simply a bent head, absorbed in a tale.

“Good,” Tir said, “because the deadline’s tomorrow, I forgot to remind you…I’ve no idea how long we’ll be. Some Quests’ve finished in three days. Some in three weeks. I brought extra food. And a lot of honeycakes.”

“You always think of the important things…”

The sun came and went, flickering palely through misty clouds above them. The air got chillier, and bit at bones, but uneventfully so.

The first of the hazards finally appeared around mid-afternoon, and proved to be more inconvenient than insurmountable: an invisible barrier across an otherwise unremarkable plain that refused to permit horses through. People seemed to be allowed, both human and fairy, but not animals. Both Sprite and Carrot stopped dead in their tracks, and snorted indignantly at riders; a half-hour’s exploration in either direction uncovered no change or loophole. They met back up in the center, where they’d started; Tir dismounted, strolled across the imperceptible line, came back, and shrugged.

“So we can’t carry as much,” Oliver summarized. Stripping them of supplies, then: that’d be the first test. “Take what’s most essential, I guess. Any idea how far we are?”

“Specifically, no. That’s impossible. But…” Tir shook hair out of his eyes again; it was coming loose from its knot at the nape of his neck. Like Oliver, he’d dressed for Northern weather; unlike Oliver, he’d brought an extra coat and a scarf, because he tended to feel the cold more to begin with. Ollie wondered vaguely why—his fairy was from the North—but got distracted because his fairy was also talking, getting out a map, pointing and waiting for him to pay attention. “No past Quests’ve gone further than here—that’s the blue dot—and I do know where we are; that’s this ridge. It shouldn’t be too bad on foot.”

“I trust you,” Oliver agreed amiably. “What do we do about the horses?”

“I’ll send them home,” Tir decided. “I might be able to help direct you more clearly, if it’s not some sort of unfair navigational advantage. The headache’s a bit worse if I think about going northwest, which likely means more magical defenses and closer to the border.”

“You’re allowed to help.” Fairy-companions could do whatever they wanted; might turn out to be why they’d come. “But don’t if it’s going to hurt.”

Tir folded up the map. Both he and the parchment wore a long-suffering look. “I can’t exactly turn it off. We may as well use it.”

“I don’t like it,” Oliver grumbled, and made sure the medical supplies ended up in his pack. Tir breathed a word or two into attentive horse-ears, fingers stroking necks, ruffling manes; their mounts headed merrily and safely South without them.

They walked northwest, through narrowing stone-slab canyons and tufts of sparse wild grass. They walked cautiously.

The second obstacle turned out to be acid quicksand: those deceptive tiny pockets that resembled regular swampland until boots started dissolving, and shortly thereafter flesh.

Oliver did know what acid sand looked like, had done research, had read up on the North—but he was preoccupied, thinking about Tir and the cold and the evident headache and what he might do to help. This combination led to a very bad misstep.

“Sit down,” Tir said sharply, not panicked yet, and shoved him onto a convenient log. Oliver’s feet felt hot but not on fire, not quite; the sand was working away at his boots. He had a few seconds.

Tir yanked off Oliver’s left boot bare-handed. He did panic, then. “You’ll die—that shit eats right through—”

“I’m a fairy, idiot.” Ollie’s right boot went flying. “Hardly anything to worry about.”

Oliver—who had spare boots and socks in his pack; he did come prepared—bolted to bare feet, safely on grass. Grabbed his fairy’s arm.

Tir’s arm had avoided being eaten away to bone, true—but long musician’s fingers were blistering already, discolored by what looked like massive burns. They shook slightly; Ollie stared, horrified. “You—don’t move, stay still, I’ve got the medical supplies, we have burn ointment—why would you—what the hell, Tir—”

“It’ll heal.” Tir sounded distracted, a little vague, too unworried. Shock, Ollie thought. Shock and acid burns and nerve damage and—

It was healing. Both hands. Blisters beginning to shrink, red-black marginally less vicious. “Don’t worry,” Tir said. “And you still have feet.”

“You’re hurt.”

“One of us can recover,” Tir pointed out, exquisitely dry, “and one of us is human. It seemed the fastest way to get your boots off. Would you like spare socks?”

“I have spare socks,” Oliver grumbled, and insisted on winding bandages and burn ointment around his fingers anyway. Tir looked away while he did it.

He didn’t know what that avoidance meant. He couldn’t count how many times Tir’d saved his life—literally and metaphorically, every time the Crown Prince got drunk in a tavern or started hyperventilating before a public audience, soothed by the weight of one of those hands on his arm, his shoulder—over the years.

He wondered how many more times he’d get, before Tir walked back into magic and left him behind.

He couldn’t imagine a life without Tir in it. Marriage to an unknown Prince or Princess, a promised happily ever after, guiding and steering and caring for his kingdom? Without those pale happy eyes? Without those generous hands?

“Thank you,” Tir offered, yanking him back into the present and out of the melancholy future. “We should bear west a bit more. It’ll only be an hour or so.”

“How do you—oh, never mind, of course you know.” He released that last hand reluctantly. Belatedly. Well-bandaged. Tir said nothing, but curled fingers very slightly inward, as if checking the fit and flexibility of wrappings. “Are you…is that…”

“It’s fine, Oliver.”

“Yeah? Um. Good.”

“We’re good, yes,” Tir concurred. Getting up from the log. Steady as a compass-point, even when injured. Right there at Ollie’s side.

“Um. Okay. Let’s, um, go.”

And he walked North next to his best friend, and he wished—not for the first time, but the most ferociously—that he did not have to go and seek a One True Love in a Seeing Pool. That he could turn around and never rescue a prince or princess he’s never met. That he could…

What? Not fulfill his obligations? Defy thousands of years of tradition?

Tir was here for him. Because this was his quest. His family story. His mother’d found her love that way. Her story. Her partner. Ollie’s fairy-companion had said yes to coming along because this was important to them: the family.

He wanted to touch Tir again. He wanted to check those bandages. Just in case. Healing, sure, but maybe not fast enough. He wanted to know.

Tir’s face was turned away, remote: maybe some kind of fairy pain-management, maybe resolutely ignoring another headache, maybe only contemplating their path ahead. Oliver sighed inwardly, tried to stop thinking anything at all, and plodded along over rock and sand beside him.