Hi, readers! A small holiday note to say that we’re up to 172 copies ordered - wow! Thank you so much - only 78 copies to go! We can make this happen! *waves pom-poms*
I also wanted to give you a preview of Chapter Three - I’m hoping to get that up sometime this week, but in the meantime, here’s the opening scene...
##
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, human 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 ruffled 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 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.”
