by Zoe Chant
You’re...my key? she signed again, her face the question mark at the end.
“No,” he said, and his voice was gruff. “No. I didn’t mean to imply it, I’m sorry. I’m just the guy who put you back together. I wasn’t supposed to release you from your prison. Robin dowsed your key in another country—on another continent—really far away. I’m not him. I’m not supposed to be.”
Tadra stared. She could see the grief in his face, the regret that he felt, and she couldn’t make sense of what her instincts were telling her. Was this attraction misplaced? Could she not trust what she felt? She shaped the sign with her hand: I love you.
Ansel made a noise of dismay and caught her hand in his, gently folding down her fingers before he drew back. “You don’t,” he insisted. “Listen, I...feel things for you, on a lot of different levels, but your key is coming, and what you have in your heart now will be like a distant shadow of what you’re going to feel. He will complete you in ways you’ve never known, in ways I never could. Don’t confuse this—this friendship—with what you’re going to have.”
Tadra’s imagination failed to supply the idea of anyone she would like more than Ansel. More kind? More generous? More handsome? She struggled with the limits of the language they had cobbled together. How did she explain the flutter in her chest and the yearning she felt, and the way that she trusted him? She’d thought that was all part of him being her key, and if it wasn’t, what was it?
Not being able to speak only made it more obvious that she didn’t know the words to describe what she was feeling. Sorry, she signed, because it was the only thing that came close to her emotions.
But Ansel knew what she meant, and he knew exactly what to say.
“Don’t feel bad, we’re even now! I wasn’t supposed to kiss you, either, but here we are. And I can’t blame you if I swept you off your feet,” he teased her kindly. “I’m a good-looking guy, ask anyone! But when you meet your key, it’s going to be electric—amazing! You’ll know, and you’ll be so glad I didn’t let you settle for me. I’m sorry, if things were different—really different, like you weren’t a stranger in my world and I wasn’t the only person you’d ever met here, and you weren’t destined for someone else, and the end of the world wasn’t at stake...I mean, you’re gorgeous, and you’re smart, and you’re funny and your key is the luckiest guy in the world.”
He drew a breath at last. “I feel a lot of complicated things for you,” he said with raw honesty, “but this can’t be love. Don’t think for a moment that I don’t want it, or don’t care for you. We’re not meant for each other, but maybe we were meant to be friends.”
Friends.
Tadra nodded, because she had nothing better to say. Like, she wrote on the whiteboard.
“Yes,” Ansel agreed. “Like. Not love. Just like.”
He looked up the sign on his phone—it was a motion like he was pulling a thread from his heart with his thumb and middle finger. I like you, he signed at her. Just a thread of affection, not the flame of passion that Tadra had confused it for.
She signed it back. He’d made everything safe again, after her terrible stumble.
“Here,” Ansel said, offering his hand. “When we meet people, we greet them by shaking hands.”
He demonstrated with a warm, firm single shake, then took his hand back.
Tadra suspected that he let go a little more quickly than he might have with someone else, but she knew how he felt, like if she touched him too long, she’d never get all the parts of herself back.
She still had the taste of him faintly on her lips, and it tasted like regret.
There was a sudden blast of shrill noise that had her startling back off of the stool, snatching up the whiteboard as the closest weapon-like item of any heft.
“It’s just the timer,” Ansel explained, getting off his own stool with far more decorum. “I have to check the pizza.” He went around the counter to open the shining oven, the dogs hard on his heels with their hopes high.
Tadra slowly lowered the whiteboard. She had smudged the word like. It looked more like live now.
She wasn’t hungry any more, though she felt more empty than ever. Ansel was wise, and he was gracious, and if he could put aside what he wanted for her own greater purpose, so could she. She just...needed a moment to get herself together, to remind herself that she was a firebird knight, not a lost girl pining over a man she couldn’t have. A man she barely knew, anyway.
“It looks pretty good,” he said, giving her a thumbs up. “I’m going to rotate them and put them in another few minutes.”
Privacy, she signed, but Ansel was already bending back over the oven, and he didn’t look up when she slipped out of the room.
She wandered through the living room for a few moments and found herself looking at the perfect painting of her shieldmates. Her key. Ansel wasn’t her key. Her key would be someone else, someone she felt an immediate connection with. Someone she recognized.
Fabio came to the door to the outside and looked at it expectantly. Tadra patted his head and opened it, looking out on the alien terrain. There was a layer of slushy snow over a broad expanse of lawn and wide walkways and more was falling from the sky. A giant, awkwardly shaped conveyance, low for a carriage, but clearly on wheels, was dusted with more of the snow. A few trees and a tall hedge led away to a street where another similar vehicle suddenly barrelled by, drawn by some power other than horses.
Fabio went out a few steps and immediately turned around and went back in, but curiosity drew Tadra out. She closed the door behind her and wandered down to see if another of the things would pass. She wrapped her arms around herself; the wind here cut through the light fabric of her clothing and her feet swiftly became damp and cold.
Not far away, someone screamed, and Tadra was running towards it before she could give conscious direction to her feet. She was a firebird knight of the fallen crown, and it sounded like a child.
She had not run more than a few hundred feet down the empty road, following the twin tracks of the thing that had passed by through the snow, when there was a second scream. She slowed, realizing that it was not a scream of fear or pain, but of play, and came across the curious sight of a pair of cloth golems, riding down a side road on a bright, flat board. They came to the road and tumbled to the side into a snowbank, emerging to reveal that they were not at all golems, but children, thoroughly encased in padded suits.
They stared at Tadra.
Tadra forgot that she couldn’t speak and tried to greet them, then settled for signing hello.
The girl shyly waved, and the other child snatched her hand back down. “We’re not supposed to speak to strangers,” he said hesitantly.
“Maybe she’s lost,” the other lisped. It sounded like lotht.
“Janice? Logan? Are you sledding into the road?!” a woman’s voice demanded from out of view, followed by the sight of her hurrying down through the snow. “What did I tell you about that? Hello? Hello! Who are you?” She was wearing very tight breeches and a large sweater, her feet in hefty boots lined with fur, and she was carrying a shovel.
Tadra, she tried to tell them. I am Tadra, defender of the broken crown, a fighter for light, a firebird knight. But as hard as she tried, nothing came out. She used some of the signs she used with Ansel. Hello. I thought danger.
They all looked at her blankly and the woman moved to put herself in front of the children, her shovel held like a weapon.
“Are you hurt?” the woman asked, as suspiciously as her son. “Can I call someone for you?”
Could this woman summon people? Would she be able to bring Robin, her shieldmates, and her key directly to this place?
Tadra signed enthusiastically, cursing her limited vocabulary, but none of them showed any indication they understood a thing she said. Which of the signs had Ansel said were universal? I love you seemed wildly inappropriate here. She gave them a thumbs up, then a second one when they cautiously smiled at that.
The woman seemed to relax a little, but still kept herself protectively in front of the kids. “Honey, I’m just going to make a phone call and get you some help, okay?”
“Tadra!”
Ansel’s voice made Tadra turn, and she told herself firmly that her heart should not leap like that at the sight of him and the sound of his voice. He was not her key.
Chapter 9
Ansel was glad for the interruption of the oven timer, and more glad when Tadra slipped out of the kitchen so he could curse in private over the pizzas. Neither was quite finished, and he frowned at his unattractive pie with frustration as he put it back in. The dairy-free cheese never melted quite right.
His pizza was something like real pizza, just like being Tadra’s friend was something like being her key. He just had to accept that this was the way to less heartache and appreciate what he did have. At that moment, however, he hated Tadra’s key with his entire being, and was made of nothing but jealousy and regret. His whole life was fake pizza.
When he reset the timer again, he turned to find Fabio and Vesta sitting at the edge of the kitchen staring at him avidly. “You’re not getting pizza, guys,” he scolded them. Two sets of tails pounded on the floor.
That was when he realized that Fabio had wet paws, puddles of melting snow around his feet, and that Tadra was not in the living room beyond them. “Tadra?” he called, and he stood a moment at the bottom of the stairs hoping she’d call back before he remembered that she couldn’t. Fearing the worst, he ran for the front door and flung it open, causing a chaos of dogs. There was a trail of footprints out to the road that he saw before Fabio bounded out to destroy them. Ansel herded Fabio back into the house to shut him in and then sprinted out to the road.
“Tadra?”
She was standing halfway down the block, facing two children and Ansel’s closest neighbor.
“Tadra!” He closed the distance between them at a sprint. “Oh, Mrs...ah...Kendall? This is Tadra, she’s from...ah...Norway.”
“Kensey,” the woman corrected, looking more relaxed but no less confused as Ansel skidded to a stop at Tadra’s side.
Ansel was pretty sure that the knights had given him a reputation for housing eccentric people. He sometimes wondered if the neighbors thought he was running some kind of hippy commune. A Norwegian hippy commune, maybe.
“It’s Jenny Kensey. From Norway, you say? Is she...um…”
“Mute,” Ansel said swiftly. “Genetic disorder. She’s here to see...ah...a specialist.”
He knew he was a terrible liar and wished he was a better actor, but Tadra nodded and shrugged and smiled winningly.
“Okay, sure,” Jenny Kensey said dubiously. “Well, kids, it’s time to come in.”
The two gave wails of protest and she herded them back up the way they had all come as Ansel faced Tadra. “You scared me,” he scolded her. “You’re not wearing any boots or a coat or a hat. Aren’t you freezing?”
She was starting to shiver and Ansel wondered if he would regret putting his arms around her to keep her warm. It was something a friend might do, he assured himself, and he put his arm over her shoulders as they walked swiftly back up to his house. It was impossible for Tadra to converse with her arms wrapped around herself, and Ansel didn’t try until they were back in the house, fighting their way through frantic dogs to get her to the couch and wrapped in an afghan. Her teeth were chattering.
One hand poked out and made a writing motion, and Ansel brought her a marker and the whiteboard, which was awkward and large on the couch beside her. She blew on her fingers and flexed them before writing in sloppy, tilted letters: Never been so cold.
“Doesn’t it snow in faeryland?” Ansel asked lightly.
Had magic to keep me warm in cold places. She tried three times to cap the marker before Ansel did it for her and took the whiteboard off the couch to sit beside her.
“You’ll be warm again when the others get back here with your key,” he promised, putting a strictly friendly arm around her. That certainly explained why the other knights had to be nagged into wearing hats and gloves by their keys.
Tadra exhaled and sagged into him, still shivering, and Ansel rubbed her shoulder in vigorous just-friends fashion. Fabio flowed up onto the couch to warm her from the other side and put his long head in her lap. His tail wagged against the arm of the couch.
He could do this, Ansel told himself. He could be a comfort and companion to this curious, beautiful woman who wasn’t his. He could warm her in his arms and keep himself from kissing the top of her head.
It was harder though, now that he realized there was a chance she might want him in return. The feel of her lips still burned on his mouth and he selfishly wished that he’d had a little less self-control so that he could have seen what it was like to really kiss her, to taste her, to have that one memory at least.
Other things were harder, too, and Ansel was afraid he was going to have complications standing up.
He was almost glad when the fire alarm went off.
Vesta went insane, barking and circling, and Fabio leaped from the couch to join her. Tadra, tangled in blankets, tried to rise to her feet and meet this new foe, snatching up the whiteboard like a shield.
“It’s just the pizzas,” Ansel shouted over the din of the dogs. “I forgot them in the oven. Hang on!”
He scrambled for the kitchen, snatching a dish towel from the rack to wave at the smoke detector over the island. “Shut up, shut up, I know.”
Smoke was seeping out of the oven and Ansel turned it off and flipped the fan on over the range before he opened it. A black cloud rolled out of it. Most of it was caught by the fan, but the room became noticeably smokier.
The pizzas were burned inedible, but not actively on fire, and frantically fanning the smoke detector finally silenced it.
Tiny firebird Tadra flew into the kitchen and circled it before landing on the counter. She clacked her beak and shifted into human Tadra, sitting with her legs dangling off the counter. She put her hands over her ears and glared up at the ceiling.
Sorry, Ansel signed at her. “It’s a device that’s supposed to wake people up if there’s a fire while they are sleeping.” The charred pizza was too hot to throw into the trash, so he put the pan in the sink. “Why don’t I make something else?”
Tadra looked at the oven and gestured with her hands like billowing smoke, then pointed two fingers at her eyes, then hesitated before spelling d-o-u-r and shrugging.
It took Ansel a moment to put it together. The black smoke from the oven had briefly looked like a creature of darkness. “It did look a little like a dour,” he said. “But it was just bad cooking. This world didn’t have dours before you guys came here, so there’s not a sign for them. We should make one!”
After a few experiments, they settled on making a d with their finger and slashing it across the heart. “It seems appropriate,” Ansel said. Dours were little wisps of warped magic, dark and not quite solid, able to twist their shapes into shadows and shade. They did not directly control a human, but with their evil grip, they could change their host into a violent and irrational agent of chaos, stealing away their compassion and rational thought.
“And we could maybe raise that into the air for a superdour?”
Tadra shrugged her question at him.
“Oh,” Ansel realized. “You wouldn’t know about those. They’re...sort of a new wrinkle on the dours. See, the bleaks, the dark counterparts of the knights, they have a problem drawing power here just like you do. They can...choose a key, persuade a human to help them, but it’s not like a true key, they don’t draw power through them but from them, eventually leaving them a shadow husk of what they were. Like dours, this...not-a-key—”
The phrase from his own mouth startled him, poking the raw place in his chest where he wanted so badly to be a part of the grand adventure. He was a not-a-key, too. Not like that, of course, but not any more a true key than they were.
&nb
sp; Ansel cleared his throat, aware of Tadra watching him closely. “This not-a-key is burned away into something like a dour, but they are able not only to infect a human, but to control them. There’s a bleak here, at least one, who is making these.”
Tadra shook her head in sympathy and dismay.
Neither of them tried to say anything for a long moment and the pan cooling in the sink creaked as the metal contracted. Ansel didn’t want to leave the conversation on such a note and searched for something more cheerful as he scooped up the cooled burnt pizza and threw it out.
“Well, there aren’t many bleaks on this side, so we just have to figure out how to stop them before their reinforcements get here at the end of the month.”
Tadra rolled her eyes and shrugged. That’s all.
“I’ve seen you guys in action,” Ansel said reassuringly. “Or at least, lots of practice stunts and the aftermath of the damage you can cause, in my warehouse, I might add. No one will even insure it anymore!” He realized that he’d have to explain insurance and quickly added, “Don’t worry! When your key gets here, you’ll see what you can do. He’ll probably fix your voice. And I have all the faith in the world that the eight of you—nine with Robin—you’ll have no trouble saving us at all.”
The nine of them.
While Ansel stayed home with the hounds.
But Ansel didn’t have time to feel sorry for himself, because Tadra suddenly fell forward off the counter and collapsed into the reach of the dogs.
Chapter 10
Tadra thought at first that it was just dismay and shock that made her feel like all of her energy had drained suddenly from her bones. She had been so relieved that all of her usual strength had returned in full after her long sleep. Her firebird form was stunted and she could touch no magic whatsoever, but her human body was still in fighting form.