Oh wow - we’re at just under two weeks left to the deadline, and 212 of 250 orders reached - so only 38 to go! You are all amazing and I am so excited, and I know we can get there - if you can order one or two more, or send it along to friends or family, please please do; we’re so close!
Also, as thanks, here is a piece of chapter four, as a preview:
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The final hazard was a dragon.
Oliver, flattened against a canyon wall, hissed, “Did you expect this?”
“No!” Tir peeked around rock again. “That’s new. Not in any of my books.”
“I thought they were extinct!”
“Not at all. They don’t come across the border, though. They live on magic. Oh—of course, this is your Seeing Pool, it’s entirely magic…I wonder if it drinks from the Pool itself, or—”
“You can practice comparative magical zoology later!” He risked one more glance. The Pool itself was visible beyond the not insignificant obstacle of dragon. It formed a natural spring, welling up into a bowl shaped of smoky transparent stone, carved over eons by the drip of Fairyland-sourced water. It shimmered under the slate-and-cloud sky at the end of the skinny rock-walled trail. It lay only a few steps distant, but: dragon.
Not a cuddly faithful tamable beast as in some children’s puppet shows. Not huge, about the size of a big cart-horse, but absolutely not small as a house-pet lizard. Ugly. Black-scaled, spiky, fanged. Ochre glow down near its belly. Built to be a predator and bring death. It lashed its tail like a vicious cat, waiting. It knew they’d come.
Tir gave him a mildly annoyed glare. “If anything I’d be a writer of magical romance, and it’s research—”
“I know that!”
“Give me your sword, then.”
Oliver passed it over, no questions asked. It was a good sword; no fancy name or lineage, just plain strong steel and solid craftsmanship.
Tir closed a hand around the blade, not the hilt. Oliver almost interrupted right then, but no blood appeared; he kept an eye on Tir’s fingers, though. He’d grown up with legends about magic and the cost thereof.
Tir murmured low words and stroked his hand along bare steel, a disarmingly intimate gesture. Oliver might’ve been imagining the way the sword thrilled to his caress, a ripple passing along the surface. Might’ve been.
He had a flash of astonished wondering: was this how Tir would touch someone he loved? With strength, with coaxing, with unhurried deliberate fingers and palm?
He swallowed. He tried not to think about whether magic always moved like this for Tir: a slow sweet seduction, a pulse-beat, a swell of desire.
Everyone knew the Crown Prince’s loyal companion was a fairy. Oliver had never seen his best friend as a fairy before.
Tir blinked, shook himself, came back from whatever dreamy precipice he’d been on. “Here.”
“Was it good for you,” Oliver tossed back, a joke in the face of strange uneasiness. Tir’s hand stroking his sword, Tirian beautiful and inhuman and wrapped in invisible sorcery. The teasing landed badly.
“I put myself into it,” Tir said. No perceptible reaction to his failed joke-attempt. Only sincerity and practical focus, which of course should be the case, in the face of a dragon. “My own magic. It should work.”
“You could use it. Um. If it’s…yours?”
“You’re better with a sword than I am, and it’s your Quest.” Tir shoved the sword into his hand and pulled both long knives instead. “I don’t know if it’ll work. I’ll be your distraction. Just try to cut its head off; there’s no such thing as a mythical vulnerable spot. Ready?”
“No,” Oliver said. “Are you okay? I mean…I don’t know. Are you?”
And Tir’s eyes got less guarded, more affectionate, more familiar. “I’m fine.”
They ran into battle—for the first time ever—together. The world transformed. Became a crazy collision of black scales and lunges and scorching fire. Oliver had indeed trained with a sword, but never against a horse-sized heap of fangs and claws and spiked tail; he ducked, dodged, felt the sharp sudden sting of a tail-barb scrape one leg. A flicker of blue flowed past him: Tir, he realized belatedly, turning rock-dust into sparkling motes of magic, calling a Fairyland-beast to him.
He stumbled on a rock; the dragon’s head swung his way and snarled. Fire bubbled up: not ready yet but building. Tir threw a knife instead of magic this time. It whirled back to face him.
