Preparations hardly occupied any time; the kingdom swirled with excitement for him. A Crown Prince, and a Vision Quest—about time, joked the elderly Keeper of the Armory, and Oliver rolled eyes and accepted a sword—and a Happily Ever After. Ballads got sung. Women and men cooed happily over romance. Flamelight crackled in hearth-fires. Oliver’s sisters both sent messages telling him it was his turn to do something with his life, and rather smugly reminding him that they didn’t have to go on quests to prove their worth, neither of them being the Heir.

Some Heirs, every once in a great while, might find neither a Prince nor a Princess in the Seeing Pool, instead achieving a Happily Ever After with only themselves, content that way. Oliver, running through available aristocratic children of the bordering kingdoms in the library’s creaky annals of the peerage, concluded that this might well be his own case. He made a list, and stared at it.

Most of the appropriate royal age-group had either married or gotten betrothed already; at least one was far too young, and he was a hundred percent certain that the handsome eldest son of the Firezian royal family wasn’t interested in men, which wouldn’t necessarily preclude True Love but would make wedding-night consummation difficult. He tried physically turning his list around on the table in case that provided a clue. It did not.

Oliver himself could be flexible as far as gender—he hadn’t hopped into and out of beds as carelessly as Cedric, but then no one in the kingdom could compete with his little brother in that category, and Ollie had been discreet both because he was the Heir and because he wanted to at least like the person he was bedding—and he was willing to consider a certain age range, but even so he couldn’t come up with any single eligible person of appropriate rank.

Certainly no one he felt a flicker of interest in.

Certainly no one who seemed to be in need of rescuing. Which ought to be the point of the Quest: proving his worth, and so on.

He ran his list by Tir in case he’d forgotten someone. Tir observed, “You’ve forgotten Princess Marguerite, down in Fleur-de-Lys, but she’s not eligible; you’re some sort of distant cousin, I believe.”

“Oh. Right.” He sighed melodramatically. Sprawled across the library divan. “I’m going to end this Quest alone with myself. Just me, forever.”

Tir, who’d been already occupying the divan, moved legs to let Oliver overact, and then plopped them atop Oliver’s own. Nothing unusual about this. Fifteen years of closeness, after all. “Terribly alone. Yes. I plainly am worth less than your furniture in this scenario.”

“Oh, you…” He waved a hand. “Of course you’re there. You don’t count.”

“Ah.” Tir picked up his book again. This one seemed to be another terrible sensation novel from the brand-new printing press over at the University, which had been invented by a group of students and consequently produced copies of both serious philosophical texts and gruesome melodramatic romance with startling enthusiasm. The cover depicted a ghost rising out of a well and a lady with six fingers standing atop a man’s body; if asked Tir would claim, somewhat guiltily, that he was studying humanity. After several years, this had become a transparent excuse to vanish into dreadful over-the-top thrills. “Thank you for clarifying.”

Oliver poked him with a toe, which required some flexibility, though Tir didn’t seem impressed. “You know what I mean.”

“Actually I don’t.” Tirian’s tone was oddly defensive; Oliver frowned, confused, but in the next second got a headshake from that direction. “Never mind. Look, there’s no point to you worrying about it now. The Seeing Pool’ll show you whatever it shows you; we’ll find out what that is when we get there. For all we know there’s a long-lost Prince or Princess right under our noses, someone we’ve both forgotten, and your task’ll be to find him or her. Does that help?”

“Um. Yes?” He ought to say more. He knew he ought to say more. He didn’t know what else might belong in that reply. Tir was back behind decadent pages and buried in unlikely plot twists, and the silence stretched out enough to swing from normal to prickly to unremarked again.

It did help. He could set aside that worry for now. It’d come back later, but Tir was right and the vision offered by the Seeing Pool was never predictable in advance; no point in racking his brain.

As the pause extended, he figured out that Tir wasn’t going to say anything more; he got up after a minute and got his own book, an account of solitary explorer’s travels through the Northern Territories, but restlessness scratched under his skin like a task left undone when he glanced at that dark bent head. He didn’t know why.

He continued to not know why as the days moved ahead, an odd distorted blur of speed and slowness. Research about previous Quests. Last-minute training down in the weapons yard. Crawling nights during which he couldn’t help revisiting nagging questions—if he didn’t know what sort of True Love he was looking for, how would he know when he had to rescue the person, and what if the person didn’t love him back, and what if he didn’t want to change his life, to accommodate someone new, to shape his world around another person, to—

To grow up, he thought; and sighed. His mother was doubtless right; it was about time. Responsibility. Stability. An Heir with a partner, settling down.

Tirian got noticeably quiet the night before they were due to depart. Thinking back, Oliver realized that he’d been quieter than usual for a while; a few days, anyway. Not humming absentmindedly under his breath. Not jumping in to make fun of the youngest prince across a breakfast table when Cedric fell extravagantly and fleetingly in love with yet another theatre actor.

“Tir?”

“Hmm?” Tirian was studying a map, eyes intent, while the library lay quiet around them. At least Oliver thought he was studying the map; he might’ve been trying to scorch a hole through parchment with his eyes. “I’ve packed your heavier traveling coat, if you’re looking for it. And three different antidotes to various poisons; the dangers of the Vision Quest change for each person. You may as well be ready. Do you want me to bring any sort of—”

“Stop,” Oliver said, and put a hand on the map. “We are every kind of ready. We couldn’t be more ready. It’s a tradition every Heir follows, I’m prepared—” He flexed a bicep, knowing the ridiculousness’d earn a reluctant smile. “—and you can take out anything with those knives, I’ve seen you. Come up to the astronomy tower with me.”

Tir laughed. It wasn’t really an astronomy tower. It did happen to be the tallest and windiest tower in the palace, an old guard signal station; at the ages of eighteen and seventeen respectively they’d wheedled one of the newfangled experimental telescopes out of the University masters and spent nights speculating about far-off stars.

“I brought beer,” he added. “Brewed with cocoa nibs.”

“In that case, lead on.” Tir fell into step beside him, going up. They didn’t speak much on the way, companionably so; they didn’t need to. At the top, through slitted windows, stars twinkled cold and clear.

Oliver handed him the beer—a large earthen jug, unpretentious, happy to help—and sat down on the frost-bitten window-ledge, night at his back. “Okay, you want to tell me?”

“Do I want to tell you what?” Tir took a drink, took the chair by the telescope: a big battered ripped-velvet scarlet beast that’d once happily held them both. He tucked one infinite leg under himself and handed the jug back. His eyes stayed in shadow.

“Seriously?”

“It’s not…” Tir shrugged at him—annoyingly graceful even when slouching in a chair—and accepted another drink. “Not something you need to worry about.”

“You tell me everything,” Oliver said. “I tell you everything. I told you when I was desperately in love with Lady Katherine that whole year, remember? It’s me, you can say anything.”

“I remember you constantly wearing that awful orange leather riding outfit because she told you she liked the color.” And if an emotion other than amusement hid in his voice Ollie couldn’t pinpoint it. “Oliver, it’s nothing you can do anything about, and I don’t want to distract you. It’s your Quest.”

“I’m distracted right now. And you’re not talking.” He got up, came over to the chair, flopped inelegantly down on the dusty tower floor by fairy feet. From here he could look up, an odd sort of role-reversal for a Crown Prince and a companion, at those winter-pale eyes. “Don’t make me talk to myself, it’ll be a boring Vision Quest if I have to, come on.”

Tir stayed silent for a minute, but it was a loud silence; Oliver had the impression that he was trying to decide, turning possibilities over.

He tacked on, because he’d never been good at letting things go, “You can’t say anything that’ll make me stop being your friend, you know that, right?”

And Tir reached down, plucked the beer out of his hand, and finished off half of it. Then answered, “I know.”

“So…”

“So it’s just that we’re heading North.” Tir got up, held out a hand. “Stop sitting on the ground. We’re heading back toward Fairyland, and that’s all it is. Magic. More of it. And not nice. It’s just that, and I meant it about getting you off the ground, it’s cold.”

Oh. That made sense. Tir was magic-sensitive; he’d not be bothered by good-hearted kindly-meant white-witch attempts at curing cattle, but he’d had nightmares for a week when the peddler with sadistic tendencies and a minor gift for love-spells had come to the closest village. He’d been the reason they’d figured that one out.

“Oh,” Oliver said, understanding, thinking he understood. “Do you want to…would you rather not come?”

“I’m your fairy companion,” Tir pointed out, an echo of his own previous statement, with bonus withering sarcasm. “I accompany you.”

“Yeah, but if you’re—”

“Shut up, Oliver.”

“Ow, hey,” Oliver protested, “I was trying to be nice.”

Tir looked at him across the moonlit tower. Their telescope, older and outdated now, yearned voicelessly for the sky. It stood framed by the space between them. “I didn’t mean that.”

“I know. You’re too sweet for that.” He’d used the word once to describe his fairy for a printed broadside news sheet, eight years ago; Tir’d never let him live that one down.

“I’m not really,” Tir said, low enough to be only for himself. Oliver heard him because the tower was quiet, but said, “What?” anyway.

Tir said, “I’m coming with you because otherwise you’ll forget your own underclothes,” and Oliver agreed that this was probably true, and followed him downstairs to lamplight and family and early bed so they could ride out in the morning.

His room sat next to Tir’s, spiraling off the same branch of the East Tower; his mother’d distributed them by age. They didn’t have a connecting door but might’ve used one, as often as they ended up in each other’s space, sharing books and late-night ale-warmed discussions. Tirian closed his door first tonight, without looking back. Oliver kicked his own shut and kicked off boots and then stopped, left boot stuck on his toe.

Tir was magic-sensitive, yes. Tir might’ve even been embarrassed to admit a potential liability.

But that was hardly anything the family didn’t already know. It might even be useful: awareness of upcoming danger. Either way strategic sense would dictate that Tir would tell him, liability or asset.

So why the quietness?

So why the omission?

He couldn’t call it a lie—Tir’d never, not in nineteen years of growing up entwined with each other, lied to him. Small polite stretching-of-truth, maybe; Oliver was certain that yes he did look terrified as hell before every royal address he was expected to give, no matter what fairy-friend eyes told him. But nothing important.

Nothing potentially life-affecting.

Maybe Tir was scared, he thought, successfully kicking off the boot. It hit the floor and toppled over. It was a terrible metaphor for his life, he decided. Mocking him.

He hated the idea that Tirian would keep that fear from him, hated it with a virulence that astounded him as it twisted in his gut; but he did understand. If Tir didn’t know precisely how proximity to wild magic might affect him, of course he’d be scared, and Oliver knew very intimately how deep the insidious irrational claws of anxiety could sink.

He’d just have to be there for his fairy, he concluded, falling into bed. Not like that’d be a hardship. Not like they’d not been each other’s shoulders their whole lives. He’d just have to be more subtle about it. If Tir was embarrassed to admit to being afraid.

Solution reached, he closed his eyes, and resolved to be as nice as he could to Tir in the morning, and every day of the stupid traditional quest thereafter.

He even managed to keep that resolution, at least for the morning. Hot spiced cocoa pressed into fairy-hands. Assiduous fetching of porridge and eggs and bacon. Asking whether Tir wanted yesterday afternoon’s book thrown into a saddlebag. The latter question earned him a suspicious gaze. “No, I’ve finished it. Are you all right?”

“Me?”

“You don’t normally stare at me while I’m eating breakfast—oh no. This is about last night. You’re hovering. Because of last night.”

“I am not.” He was. “I just, um, want to make sure you eat…so you, um, can…keep up. With me. Riding.”

Tir gave him a long flat look. Held out the last piece of toast. “We both know who needs it more. I’ll pick you up if you land on your face in a mud-puddle again.”

“One time,” Ollie said. “One time. And we were kids. No, you eat it, I had some.”

Tir smirked at him. Then licked marmalade off a fingertip: unfussy, familiar, casual as a kitten. Oliver’s chest did something. A strange little thump. Tir might not tease him over breakfast if he got married.

He ate the last piece of bacon. This saved him from having to talk, but even bacon couldn’t alleviate the sudden wistful hole inside.

They kissed the queen good-bye, hugged Cedric, waved at various castle staff and guardsmen; Ollie swung up onto his own horse, a big sturdy bay with a happy enthusiastic temperament, and looked at Tir. Tir, poised like artwork on his own favorite mare, blue riding leathers and black hair and sleek black horse dancing underneath him, tilted that head: are you ready?

No, Oliver thought, no, I’m not, not really, not for a Quest—

But he’d go. The kingdom needed him to follow tradition; his mother wanted him to follow tradition. She’d met her husband that way, a kiss breaking the Consort’s sleeping curse; they’d known love.

He nodded back. They took off, in flight, heading North. Toward fairy country.

The first day proved rather ominously uneventful. They did ride North, but they rode through fields they knew, villages where people recognized Oliver and Oliver’s fairy-shadow and beckoned them in for a meal or a cup of tea. They paused to help a widower fix a fence. Oliver jammed a stake into ground, triumphant, and looked up to see Tir calmly walking out of the forest with all six missing pigs docilely trotting behind him. He made a few jokes, but only the amount any reasonable person would, because he was being nice. Tirian rolled those expressive eyes.

Of course Tir could find lost pigs. Tir could do anything; Oliver entirely believed that.

An old question sidled up, as he watched his fairy scratch a sow under the chin with no thought given to any incongruity of elegant fingers and bristly hair. It was a question that nobody’d ever outright asked, but the subject of vast speculation in taverns and below palace stairs. No one would put it to Tir, of course.

In every single legend, fairies who came across the border had some sort of purpose. Some form of motive. Light or dark, mischief or protection: always a reason. A few wicked sorcerers in old tales claimed to be able to summon and bind fairies to their will, but those stories tended to end bloodily and badly; in any case no one had ever claimed responsibility for Tir being here.

Nobody would ask Tir because, in the first place, it’d be terribly rude: one should treat fairies with good manners. In the second place…

In the second place it could be not only rude but conceivably dangerous, if the fairy was offended, if the fairy was under a spell or a geas not to speak of it, if consequences arose.

They’d guessed he had to be some sort of fairy royalty from the inhuman fineness of his clothes and the Court polish of his politeness; not precisely the same as their own customs, but Tir clearly knew about orders of precedence and formal versus informal audiences and the proper term of address for a viscount’s second daughter. Queen Ellie had simply adopted him as yet another welcome addition to the royal brood, not one in the line of succession but only twelve years old and in need of chocolate biscuits. He’d spent the most time with both Oliver and Cedric at first, another brother underfoot. Somehow gradually he’d spent more time with Oliver, permanently right there when Oliver needed a hand in the weapons training yard or a sounding board before public speeches or a partner in tavern-related mischief; and over the years he’d become Oliver’s confidant and dark-haired capable companion and slim book-loving other half.

In the present day Tir continued petting the pig, simultaneously listening with apparently honest interest to the farmer’s story about the time the village cows ate strange indigo grasses after a wind out of the North. The cows had supposedly given blue milk for a month; the punchline of what was almost certainly a tall tale was, “…and they still do, once in a blue moon.”

Tir laughed. The farmer looked as if he’d just realized that he’d told this story to a fairy and was trying to work out whether he should be nervous or proud. Tir said solemnly, “Only once in a blue moon? If they ate moon-grass, you should be getting at least twice that amount of blue milk, or so I’ve heard,” and the man now looked as if he was trying to work out whether or not this was serious, at least until Tir grinned, and then he guffawed.

The closest Tir had ever come to revealing his reasons had been the night of his twenty-first birthday, which they’d celebrated by hosting an all-night party in his favorite tavern. Tirian could outdrink just about anyone, courtesy of fairy blood or maybe only fortunate inheritance, but neither of them’d been sober by the time they’d stumbled home. Tir’d said, leaning on Oliver’s shoulder in his bedroom doorway, obviously continuing a line of conversation only existing in his head, “Sometimes I think it won’t be that hard, when it’s for you…”

“What won’t?” Oliver’d asked, struggling to balance tipsy fairy-muscles and his own sloshing brain and uncoordinated toes. “Hey, d’you mind if I just pass out on your bed too?”

“I never do, do I…?” They’d fallen heavily onto the mattress; Oliver, vaguely recalling that it was Tir’s birthday, had managed to tug his fairy-companion’s boots off, though not his own. Tir mumbled words that sounded like thanks, and then something else that sounded like, “I’m going to die because of you, that’s what.”

“I didn’t make you drink the scary purple mead,” Oliver’d yawned, “you did that on your own,” and tumbled into sleep fully dressed.

He’d been thinking about that first sentence—the unusually revealing one, not the obvious attempt to blame the hangover of death on Oliver—on and off, not continuously but intermittently, ever since. It won’t be hard? What won’t be?

They’d all taken guesses in secret. Oliver, his siblings, even his mother. Wondering about their adopted fairy-brother. Coming up with ever more outlandish theories. Making it a game, though that’d been years ago.

Glancing at Tir—his best friend, the man who’d come along on Oliver’s Vision Quest despite unspoken personal concerns over magical distress—as they swung back into the saddle, he felt ashamed. He felt guilty.

He wanted to apologize, but he didn’t know how. After a few more hours of riding he forgot to keep coming up with ways to try. Distracted by pondering the present and the reason they were here. Riding.

Thinking about it as they camped under the big expansive glitter of stars, fire lit by capable fairy-fingers—Oliver’d been seeing to their horses and not watching, but Tir never did do much magic; friendly flame-crackles were more likely the result of a tinderbox and competence—he mused, “So I guess this is how True Love works, then? I see the person, whoever it is, in the Pool, I ride to their rescue, save them from whatever last Deadly Peril it is, some big romantic grand gesture…I mean, that’s what you do for someone you love, right? Completely sort of blow them away with the romance? And they fall into your arms?”

“I suppose,” Tir said. “Does only metaphorical falling need to be involved, or should we find you a convenient tree root to trip on?”

“You’ve never been in love,” Oliver retorted, as loftily as he could manage. “Not like that, anyway. Where you just catch a glimpse of the person—eyes meeting across a crowded room—”

“—or in a magical Seeing Pool—”

“—thank you, shut up, Tir—or seeing even the back of their head, the movement of a hand, and you just know, y’know, like fireworks, even if you’ve never talked to them before. That doesn’t matter. Whether you’ve even met them. It’s all sort of champagne and sparkles. At first sight.”

Tir was quiet for a second; Oliver wondered why, wondered whether Tirian had ever in fact had feelings for anyone here in this human land, but—he’d know, Tir would’ve told him, they shared everything.

Didn’t they?

“No,” Tir said finally. Their fire sent sparks skyward, red and gold dying against twilight. “I’ve never been in love like that.”

“Right,” Oliver declared, which should prove his point, except—

He glanced at his best friend in the whole world again. Something felt off. Something felt not…well, not right. Nothing he could put a finger on. “You okay?”

“Fine.” Tir set down his book. Of course he’d brought a book, a travel-sized dense compilation of exotic romances. “It’s…it’s the North. That’s all. It’s a fairy-place, of course. One that ended up on your side of the border. It’s just my head. Like an itch, but inside. Prickly.”

This was almost certainly true; Tir never had lied to him, he remembered again. He had the sense that there was more, though. Maybe some kind of actual not feeling well. Maybe the magic itchiness was worse than he was letting on. That’d be something Tir would do: not complete denial, but self-discipline. “Hey,” he tried. “You know I’m here, right? Whatever you need.”

And Tir did smile. And it seemed like a genuine smile, no trace of…whatever that’d been. Before. “I know.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Three: In Which Obstacles Appear