by Zoe Chant
Tadra frowned. It didn’t seem fair. But she had nothing in this world to offer him, so she let it slide. Now what?
“Now we decorate the tree!”
Ansel rummaged in the conveyance room where they sparred, Tadra and the dogs helpfully following him everywhere, and came back into the house with a large clear box full of wonders. There were strands with tiny shapes of colored glass, glittery ropes of minuscule ribbons, and carefully wrapped pieces of awe-inspiring art that ranged from silly depictions of Santa to beautifully crafted giant snowflakes.
The strings of glass were put on first, secured end-to-end as they spiraled up the tree. Ansel fastened the last to a wire of power and the entire tree lit up brilliantly. Tadra clapped her hands in joy.
They hung the ornaments all around the huge tree, and Ansel told her the story behind each one of them as they went up. There were ornaments from when he was a child with stories about his foster parents, and an ornament he’d bought his first year in college (a training school, Tadra gleaned). There was a set of thin, colorful metal fish that he’d found in a place called Mexico one year that he was traveling over Christmas, and a clear globe with a building painted inside.
There were a few that he shook his head over. “I have no idea where this one came from,” he confessed, holding up a fragile tear-drop in red and green with gold markings all over it. “I think an after-Christmas clearance sale? It’s also possible that it just came with the house. It came with rooms and rooms full of miscellaneous junk. That’s basically why I kept running the second hand store.”
He looked sideways at her as if he’d just realized how much he was saying. “I’m probably telling you more than you want to know,” he said sheepishly. “You don’t need all the details from my life.”
Tadra shook her head and gestured for more.
Ansel chuckled. “You already know more about me than the people who’ve been living here for a year,” he said with a soft, crooked smile.
The very last thing to go up on the tree, high up out of the reach of anxious dogs, were the glass ornaments of Tadra and her shieldmates. She cradled hers in her hand while Ansel tied the golden string securely and tested the knots. They had to stand very close to do the work, and Tadra watched his clever fingers and reminded herself that he wasn’t her key, no matter how good he smelled and how tenderly she felt for him.
Her real key would be a hundred times this, somehow, and Tadra’s imagination failed at the idea of it. It seemed impossible that there would be someone she liked and trusted more.
But it hadn’t been an instantaneous bond. He had earned her trust and affection and Tadra was conflicted by the idea that someone else might simply have that from her without merit. She comforted herself to think that of course her key would be worthy, she would just know it at once and not have to learn it.
“Where do you want to hang it?” Ansel asked quietly, and Tadra realized that they were still side-by-side, though he had long since finished the knot. “You don’t have to, if it’s too painful to see.”
Tadra’s fingers curled around it. The glass firebird had been her prison for an indefinable time. It had broken, and left her frustratingly unable to speak. The seams where it had been repaired were obvious in the fractured light from the Christmas strings.
But Ansel had put her back together. He’d taught her to speak without sound when her voice was lost.
She smiled at him and shook her head, then stood on tiptoe to put it in the last clear space on the side of the tree facing the room. I want to see it, she signed, pointing.
Ansel smiled slowly at her, perhaps guessing some of what she’d been thinking. Then he stepped back and looked critically at the tree. “There’s supposed to be a star at the top of it,” he explained. “Or an angel. I had a star last year, it ought to be in this box somewhere.” He turned away, a trifle fast, and riffled through the bubble wrapping that had protected all the mundane ornaments.
Tadra laughed, and when he looked back up at her, shifted and flew to the top of the tree.
The dogs went wild and Ansel grabbed Fabio by his collar when his tail threatened the decorations dangling at his level. “You can’t have the firebird, goon.”
Tadra preened at the crest of the tree, trailing harmless sparks, then flew to land and shift back to her human form.
Ansel let Fabio go to greet her and Vesta pranced forward for her equal attention.
“You could be the star or an angel,” Ansel said, shaking his head and chuckling. “Maybe both at once.”
What is? Tadra signed.
“An angel?” Ansel’s voice softened. “It depends on what you read. It’s been a creature of both vengeance and mercy, a guiding hand, a guardian. Usually they are depicted in white, with feathered wings.”
Wings like Robin’s? Certainly Robin had been her guard and guide.
She didn’t have a word for fable, but Ansel must have followed her thought. “A little less bad-tempered than Robin, usually,” he said wryly.
Names, she wrote on the whiteboard. She should have signs to talk about her shieldmates. They had been making do with spelling, but that was awkward.
They picked easy to remember signs that started with the letters of their name. Robin was given the sign R touched respectfully to the forehead. Rez was an R that turned into a pointing finger, for his unicorn horn. Trey was a T that morphed into the wiggling-fingered sign for flame. Henrik’s gryphon proved difficult to come up with a sign for, so they decided he should be an H with fingers turning to be a snapping beak. Daniella was a D that became the second half of the sign for sing, because that was how she reached the magic in this world. Gwen was a G that went to two thumbs playing a console. Heather was an H that became two knitting fingers.
That left the two of them.
Ansel signed toilet, because it started with T, and she laughed and punched him in the arm. He proposed a T and turned his hand into a fist.
Tadra shook her head, dissatisfied with a name rooted in violence. She couldn’t use the sign for fire, since that was already Trey’s name.
Ansel made a T and made wings of his fingers to fly away. Her firebird. Tadra smiled and nodded.
That was when she realized that Ansel hadn’t spoken aloud the entire time they spent deciding on names; they were speaking entirely in their silent language.
He gestured at himself and shrugged. What name should he have?
Without hesitating, Tadra made the sign for privacy at him. It already started with an A, and she had come to realize that he was a private person. Every story that she coaxed from him felt like a little victory.
Not her key, she reminded herself; what she felt for her key would be different, would be more. He was just a friend, and she only yearned for him from loneliness. She tapped his name against her mouth again with regret and she couldn’t help remembering the feeling of his lips against hers when she’d tried to kiss him.
Chapter 16
I like it, Ansel signed, imitating her gesture. He held two fingers together from opposite hands. Double meaning.
But he didn’t feel like he was private with Tadra; it was too easy to talk to her, to fill all the silent spaces with his own words. He had already told her more about himself than he’d ever shared with the knights and their keys, for all that they had lived there an entire year contrasted against most of a week.
He realized that he was gazing at her more tenderly than he ought to and schooled his expression. It was too early for dinner and normally he might watch television, but he’d seen what happened with the knights when they absorbed their knowledge of the world that way. Trey had entreated him to eat his shorts many times.
“Do you want to play a game?” he offered. “I think that Life or Monopoly would be a good way to talk about money and I’m pretty sure I’ve got Sorry and a chess board.”
Play, Tadra signed agreeably. They had learned that word talking about the dogs.
Ansel found the games on a she
lf in the garage and brought them into the living room with a triumphant honor guard of dogs. “Here we go,” he said, blowing the dust off of them. “All we need to teach you about capitalism and economics.”
The Game of Life fascinated Tadra and as he had suspected, it opened a can of worms involving ownership and careers.
Who owns, Tadra asked, waving her hand around and showing him a starter house card.
Ansel frowned self-consciously. “The house? I do. It’s mine. It was...kind of out of the blue, honestly. I was looking into my parents—my birth parents, I mean. It wasn’t really that I missed them, you know, but I got curious. I wanted to know where I’d come from. Roots, you know?”
Tadra nodded knowingly.
“My parents were dead, but I found an obscure great-uncle in Michigan. We met for lunch, he told me stories about grandparents I’d never known, and I figured that would be the end of it. But about a month later, he died and left me everything he owned, including this giant house and a second hand store and a warehouse that happens to be a weak place in the veil between worlds, though I wouldn’t know that for a while. It’s still all...pretty unreal. I was just lucky. Like rolling a dozen double sixes in a row.”
He stopped. This wasn’t something he ever talked about.
Did you mourn? Tadra asked, tracing an imaginary tear down her cheek.
“I didn’t know him well enough to feel true grief,” Ansel said. “But I mourned the chance to know him, to ever repay him for what he did for me. I wondered about it a lot, the timing of everything, I mean. Was it just luck?”
She squeezed his arm across the table, a kind, genuine gesture, and he missed her hand when it was gone.
Tadra signed more that Ansel didn’t understand, then reached for the nearest whiteboard. They had to do that less and less every day, as their language expanded. Magic? she wrote.
“You think magic let us meet at just the right time?” Ansel wasn’t as skeptical of the idea as he would have been a year before. Not looking across the table at a half-magic knight from another world. She was wearing normal clothing, and her hair was back in a modern-looking ponytail, but there was something about her eyes and her face that said fae. Something that said she was used to six impossible things before breakfast.
Magic can behave in unexpected ways if it’s not well-directed, Tadra wrote. You ask it to do what you need, but sometimes you aren’t entirely clear what that is. That is why a knight’s heart must be pure, so that our intentions are never clouded.
“Robin once said that they thought it wasn’t entirely chance, either,” Ansel said quietly. “That it was part of something they’d cast years ago. They thought that each of the keys was in the right place at the right time to find their knights by a whole cascade of events that was set in motion long ago.” But he wasn’t a key, he reminded himself. He was just...the hound-keeper. The land-owner. The guy who’d divided the ornaments and sold them like they were just ordinary pieces of glass.
Tadra licked her lips thoughtfully and Ansel tried not to think about her tongue.
If Robin had some larger plan in mind, the magic might have known that even if they didn’t, she wrote. And big changes can be made with little nudges.
Her last words were very small and running up the side of the board. She capped the marker and signed, Play! as she put her car on the board.
Tadra picked up the rules of the game swiftly and looked through the career cards in interest. What? she asked, pointing at Ansel. What Ansel? she signed.
It could have meant a few different things. “What’s my career?”
She nodded encouragingly.
He told her about his job working as a freelance business consultant, analyzing data.
“It was something I turned out to be good at,” he said modestly. “After college, I worked at a startup in Detroit and I ended up helping to turn the business around. It became a multimillion dollar overnight success and everyone wanted to hire me. That was when I inherited the house and...everything was sort of coming up roses. I kept raising my prices, because I didn’t need the work, and now I charge an absolutely criminal amount to important people who don’t really need my help to point out the obvious things.”
Tadra looked skeptical and Ansel laughed. “Well, they’re obvious to me,” he said. “I never accept that there’s only one answer to any question. I’m willing to search for unorthodox solutions and I’m good at looking at data and systems and figuring out where they’re broken, and at thinking outside the box. It’s just a knack.”
She moved her car a few spaces and drew a card. Twins! she showed him, laughing. Ansel paid her, comically grudging, and signed twice the farts, because they apparently both had the sense of humor of eleven-year-old boys. They laughed until the dogs got wound up and Fabio thought it was an invitation to try to climb into Tadra’s lap and lick her face.
When they finished Life, Ansel made pasta and garlic toast. Tadra helped in the kitchen, keeping the dogs back and handing him hotpads and colanders as he needed them.
It was a little frightening how much Ansel enjoyed this casual domesticity, he thought, straining the noodles into the sink. It felt so right to have Tadra dancing soundlessly around the kitchen island, teasing the dogs and tasting the sauce. He almost didn’t want the others to return, because that would mean that he’d have to share Tadra with someone...with her key, he remembered with a jolt.
He’d have to watch her fall in love with someone else, and worst of all, he’d have to be happy for her, because he wanted her to have that connection. He wanted to see her with the unabashed joy that all the knights had with their keys. She deserved that fortune, to find that one other person who completed her.
And as badly as he wanted to be that person, he wasn’t.
Ansel stuffed his despair down and loaded up their plates.
Meals tended to be quiet, Tadra’s hands occupied by eating, and their conversations were largely by expression and pointing at items they wanted passed. They mimed an entire exchange about parmesan cheese, with Tadra pointing to the word on the container and waving a hand in front of her face in concern after Ansel had sprinkled it on his spaghetti.
Small milk, Ansel signed back at her. Small—he waved his hand in front of his own face.
She giggled soundlessly and enjoyed her meal with relish.
Ansel watched her from across the table, telling himself that he was clinically monitoring her for communication reasons, not to watch her comically wrestle noodles and hope for a glimpse of her tongue. He wasn’t really gazing besottedly at her.
Was he?
He schooled his expression with effort.
She wandered away while he was cleaning the pots that didn’t fit in the dishwasher and when he was finished in the kitchen, he found her in the living room, gazing at the tree.
At the ornaments on the tree, specifically.
Uncharacteristically, her shoulders were slumped. Ansel felt terrible for focusing so hard on his own stupid longing that he hadn’t thought about how hard all of this must be for her.
She was in a strange world full of strangers, and she missed her shieldmates. The other knights had at least had their keys to guide them and unlock their power, but she’d gotten stuck with the hound-keeper, everyone she knew mysteriously missing, with a deadline to save the world galloping down on them. It was too much to ask of anyone, even a Firebird Knight of the Fallen Kingdom, Protector of the Broken Crown, Bravest and Most Foolish of the Shieldmates.
“We’ll find them,” Ansel promised, coming to her side. “I promise, we’ll find them.”
He tried to gauge the distance between them just right, leaving enough space that they wouldn’t accidentally touch, but close enough to provide her some comfort.
He forgot, though, that the knights valued touch, and he opened his arms without thinking when she stepped closer.
Embracing Tadra was like holding onto the sun.
She fit against him so perfectly
, her cheek against his, her arms up around his shoulders. She was strong and gentle and warm. Ansel willed himself not to betray how much the feeling of her against him disturbed his self-control. He wanted her so badly, was desperate to turn and kiss the velvety skin that was pressed against the short stubble that he’d allowed to grow in.
This was for her comfort, he reminded himself, and he felt a desperate mix of joy and grief to have her so close, to offer her some solace...and to know that she wasn’t his.
She gradually relaxed in his arms, and when she stepped away at last, she smiled sheepishly at him. Thanks, she signed. Sorry.
No, Ansel signed back. He could have spoken, but he didn’t entirely trust his voice. Don’t. You are alone here. Sad is okay.
Not alone, she signed back gratefully. Ansel. Her eyes were soft and bright.
Or maybe it was privacy that she was signing. Ansel only knew that he was going to need some privacy of his own soon, because his body was still reacting inappropriately to her intoxicating proximity.
His ardor was suddenly dampened when Tadra screwed her eyes shut and swayed in place.
He caught her as she staggered a step forward and nearly fell. This embrace was different than the last; she was limp and powerless in his arms, a shadow of the woman she’d been just moments before.
He helped her to the couch and pushed Fabio away when the dog came to lick at the face in his range. Vesta jumped to the back of the couch, but since she was out of the way, Ansel left her there.
“It’s okay,” he told Tadra, over and over as he covered her with the afghan from the back of the couch, displacing the nervous Italian Greyhound. “We’ll figure this out.”
Sorry, she signed, her face frustrated.
Ansel covered her hand on her heart with his own to still it and shook his head. Vesta found a suitable place on the back of the couch to curl up.
Tadra sighed and closed her eyes wearily.
Ansel laid a kiss on her forehead without meaning to, and his lips burned when he stood up to turn off the lights.