by Zoe Chant
Ansel closed his eyes, listening to the din of the merry chatter coming from the living room.
He’d gotten used to the quiet: just himself, and the dogs, and silent Tadra, and he ached to have that back. He’d missed his friends, and Robin, but that wasn’t who had come through the portal. These were strangers. Worse, they were strangers wearing the faces of his friends. Frauds.
“Anything wrong?”
Kevin.
Ansel opened his eyes. “I was just thinking how weird it was to have all you guys home again. It was really quiet without everyone here, and there was some reason I was really anxious to have you back, but I don’t really remember why now.” He shrugged like it was no big deal and forced a big dumb smile onto his face. “Guess I just missed you all.”
Kevin’s satisfied look made Ansel want to slug him. He wrapped his fingers around the handles of the serving tray instead. “I have to put cola on the shopping list,” he said, trying to sound the right amount of dreamy and distracted.
Robin’s chair and table had remained set up on the dining room table, but the scale was large for them in his much-diminished form. That didn’t seem to be a bother to them—nothing seemed to be a bother to any of them.
Ansel ate with the others, forcing tasteless food into his mouth as he pretended as hard as he could that he was just like them, under some kind of careless enchantment where nothing mattered at all.
Chapter 21
The mall, which had been a scene of noise and chaos the first time Tadra went, was much, much worse without Ansel.
Tadra thought at first that it was just that she felt completely on edge around Kevin, knowing the lie behind his too-nice grins and light-hearted humor, hating how she had to smile and act like everything was normal.
But it was also the way that none of them could understand anything she signed at them. Writing on the notepad she’d brought was awkward and time consuming, and they didn’t remember any of the signs that they’d practiced together just that morning. She had learned many new things with her shieldmates and she knew that they ought to remember at least the basics of what she and Ansel had taught them, but the thoughts seemed to run through their minds like water through a sieve.
Tadra felt like she was out of step with all of their conversations. She had nothing to add, and they seemed confused about how to include her.
And most of all, it was the way they all acted like nothing at all was wrong.
There was no hurry in any of them, no anxious awareness that they needed to be worried about the pending thinning of the boundary between their worlds. They acted like there was no danger, no pressing need to do anything but select gifts for other people and eat messy food in a loft filled with tables and chairs.
They sat crowded close together at the noisy meal and Tadra could barely make it through her own dish, a greasy pile of fries and a round meat sandwich with a sugary drink of bubbles. None of it was to her taste, least of all the company. Kevin was wretched, but her shieldmates were worse, because none of them were real.
She might have asked to return to Ansel’s house, perhaps even feigned weakness. She was fully recovered from what she now knew was Kevin’s use of what little magic she had. But she had to keep them all occupied long enough for Ansel to break Robin from his enchantment...if he even could.
Everything was awful and loud and a stark contrast to Ansel’s quiet safe house, and his agreeable, genuine company.
“Let’s go shopping!” Daniella said eagerly as they threw their copious trash into a bin. “Christmas is the day after tomorrow and I haven’t found anything for Trey or Kevin yet.”
She led the way down the moving stairs towards a shop full of incomprehensible electronic things and Tadra trailed along, trying to look dazed and not just dismal.
How long would it take for Ansel to talk with Robin and break the spell on the fable? Tadra couldn’t let herself wonder if he would be able to at all. Ansel was wise and smart, but he didn’t know faery magic, and Kevin was clearly a witch of great skill.
And he was using her power.
She had to turn away to look fixedly at a rotating Christmas display, her hands in fists at her side, because she desperately wanted to attack the charlatan. She knew that if she did, he could merely drain her strength, and worse, that her shieldmates would take his side, which was a chilling and depressing realization.
“Don’t worry,” Gwen said warmly at her elbow. “I know that money is a little strange at first, but we can cover a few small gifts for you and steer you right.”
Tadra looked at her pleasant oval face, at her soft brown eyes. There was a real person in there, she reminded herself. These keys were cut from the same cloth as knights, true-hearted and good. It was her duty to release that person, to free all of them, from Kevin’s evil influence.
Tadra lifted her chin. This was all no more than a slight setback; she had a mission to focus on and there was no room for self-pity or doubt. She would figure out how to sever Kevin’s control and bring them all back.
“Have you thought about anything you might like to get for Ansel?” Daniella asked Gwen. “He’s so impossible to shop for.” They were standing in front of the colorful map of the great mall.
“What do you get the guy who has everything?” Gwen agreed.
Ansel. A present for Ansel. The idea of choosing a gift for him was a ray of light in the gloom of her heart.
Tadra found her pencil, which had dropped to the bottom of her pocket and pulled her notebook out. I know! she wrote.
Chapter 22
The house was weirdly quiet with all the knights and their keys gone again, but Ansel found himself missing silent Tadra most of all. It was unsettling not to have her in the house with him, and he was surprised by how much he’d gotten used to having her nearby in their few weeks of companionship.
He kept looking around to make sure he wasn’t missing her hand signs, to let himself drink in her beauty under the pretense of maintaining communication. He found himself wanting to make observations to her, to explain something about his world’s technology, or just to see how she was reacting to some new wonder. She was so interested in everything, so alive and full of life.
Even if everyone else had been home, the house would be empty without her.
But it wasn’t. Robin was still here, and Ansel had work to do.
“Robin? Hey, Tinker Bell?”
Robin wasn’t watching television, or lounging in the living room. The dogs, feeling very miffed that their people had finally returned and then abandoned them again, clearly forever, followed at his heels through every open room and up the stairs and back down.
Ansel finally found Robin in the dining room, sitting at their little table-on-a-table, on a chair close to their scale as they browsed the Internet on a phone propped up beside them. They shut off the screen when Ansel and the dogs came in.
“Looking up faery porn?” Ansel ribbed him as Fabio flopped down in the doorway so he couldn’t escape.
Robin flipped him off. It was uncanny how true to their character they seemed, and how quickly that illusion was broken when Ansel asked pointedly, “I want to know what we’re going to do when the dark forces from your fallen world break through the weakened veil in about a week.”
Robin had been looking at him, and their gaze simply slid from Ansel’s like he’d been oiled, just as all the knights’ did whenever any serious topic was brought up.
“I was just thinking how much nicer this place was than that hole of a warehouse I stayed in for a whole year,” they said casually. “I should have squatted at the Marriott or something. Better room service, too.” Robin acted like the pending battle hadn’t even been brought up, just as Ansel had expected.
“I don’t remember you paying any rent,” Ansel pointed out as he sat in one of the chairs facing Robin. “You know, you’re pretty ungrateful for a freeloader. We’re here because we’re prepping for the invasion from your dark-sparkle faeryland, r
emember? We should plan our defense.”
“I was in the middle of a game of Candy Crush,” Robin protested.
“End of the world, faery,” Ansel pressed. “I think this is a little more important.”
“I’m not a faery,” Robin said, as if that was the sticking point of Ansel’s statement.
Ansel suspected by now that a direct discussion would go nowhere. His previous attempts to crack into whatever compulsion had been cast on the knights and their keys had ended the same way; they simply could not absorb the conversation, it ran off of them like water off a duck.
But he was hopeful that a sideways attack might work. “Robin, if there was some magic at work that kept someone, say me, from talking or thinking about certain topics, how would I go about getting free of that constraint? Theoretically, I mean. You’re a fable who would know how to do that, right?”
Robin looked suspicious, but slightly flattered, and just as Ansel wondered if this was going to be a dead end, too, they shrugged. “I’m a creature of magic. I don’t need trappings and ritual. I would simply burn the foreign magic from my system.”
“How do you do that if you don’t know that you need to?” Ansel persisted. “Is there...an...I don’t know, like a cleaning cycle you could run to just sort of scrub out any spells that you wouldn’t know about?”
“I would know if I were enspelled,” Robin scoffed. “I am—”
“A fabulous magical fable,” Ansel finished for them. “But if you didn’t know?”
Robin’s familiar scowl hesitated just a fraction and Ansel pressed at the possible weakness. “You’ve been mistaken about things before. What if you were wrong about this, too?”
“I’m not wrong,” Robin said, but they said it thoughtfully. “If I was…”
“Theoretically,” Ansel added.
“If I theoretically was under a spell…” Robin closed their dark eyes and Ansel, watching them carefully, didn’t see anything change until their eyes opened again, blazing in anger. “This is a violation!”
Then, to Ansel’s surprise, their face changed to an expression of grief and guilt. “What have I done?”
“Can you talk about it now?” Ansel said cautiously. “Will you remember this? Can you remember the coming battle and how Kevin…”
“Cerad,” Robin snarled.
“Cerad is controlling Kevin?” Alarmed, Ansel started to rise to his feet. “Is Tadra in danger? The others?”
“Cerad is Kevin,” Robin said flatly. “It’s just a name that he assumed here. We have all been his puppets.”
“Why didn’t the knights recognize him?” Ansel remained on his feet, hands flat on the table.
“Only I ever knew him. And I was already compromised when they got to Ecuador.” It was hard to look at Robin now, they were so angry. Ansel felt like they were glowing without light; there was an energy coming off of them that wasn’t light or heat, but some other under-the-skin kind of power. Even their voice was different, deeper and vaster and more musical.
“He doesn’t know,” Robin growled. “He doesn’t know that I have slipped his leash.” As quickly as they had angered, the energy seemed to drain away from them. Ansel wondered if he imagined the fact that they were a little smaller than before, and he frowned to think what breaking even just that much of the spell had cost the fable.
Ansel was the focus of a sudden sharp look. “You and Tadra have eluded his enchantment?”
“Not for lack of trying,” Ansel told him, settling back into his chair. “Her dizzy spells. He said he took the key connection, and he’s able to drain her power. He tried to use it to enspell me.”
Robin’s eyes narrowed. “And you shook it off. How?”
Ansel shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve just been playing along as best we can, pretending that we can’t hold a thought in our heads, like all the rest of you.”
“He sometimes only saw what he was looking for,” Robin said. “He must have stolen the bond that would have made her your key during the battle when we first came to this world.”
Ansel felt like he’d just been stabbed with hope. “I’m Tadra’s key?”
But Robin shook their head. “No. I think you would have been; that is why the magic took us to your warehouse. But there is no way to reset that kind of connection. It is Cerad’s now as surely as if it had been made for him.” They chuckled dryly.
“And he can just keep using it to drain her?” All the hope turned into fury inside Ansel’s chest. If he had hated Kevin, he didn’t even have a definition for the depth of emotion that he had for Cerad, for the man that had stolen the connection he might have had with Tadra and was using it for his own evil purpose. “Can we…can I...kill him?”
Ansel had never thought of himself as a violent person; he felt that there was always an alternative to hurting someone. And although he had grudgingly become skilled at sparring with the knights and their keys, he could not imagine using that hard-won expertise to harm another person. Until Kevin. Cerad. “Is he human? Mortal?”
Robin’s face was a mixture of anger and sorrow. “He was. He is...with one major difference.”
After a long silence, Ansel asked, “Are you going to tell me what that difference is or just lean into that whole mysterious asshole persona that you have spent your years on earth cultivating?”
Robin chuckled without humor. “Cerad is my fault. It was my error that made him what he is, and my guilt that kept me from correcting it with his death before it was too late.” They stood on the edge of the table and should have looked ridiculous, like a doll propped up for a children’s game, but they never did.
“I am not merely a fable. I am the fable. I have been the crown of faery for as long as faery has existed. Time and memory there does not flow as it does here, so I cannot say if I am centuries or millennia old, but after a time alone in the world of my own wonder, I desired more complex companionship. I had the ability to create anything I needed but not the imagination to conceive of it. Which was when I discovered a world just next to mine, separated by only a thin veil.”
Ansel absorbed this revelation. “You’re the crown. The broken crown they talk about.”
“All this time, you didn’t know you had a celebrity living in your warehouse.”
“I might have left out milk and cookies if I’d known.”
“That’s Santa Claus, asshole.”
Ansel had to laugh dryly, then ask, “And the stories of the faery queen stealing human children…?”
Robin's smile was wry. “Most stories have seeds of truth, however far they may be from their roots. Suffice to say that the time I came here two years ago was not the first time I have crossed this boundary. Your world has changed in ways I never thought possible.”
“And Cerad?” Ansel wasn’t ready to let go of the topic of stopping him.
“I raised him beside me as an equal, whatever he thinks now about how I wronged him. He had every power at his disposal, every luxury and advantage. I even gave him the tools to tap magic without being magical himself. I trusted him.”
“And it wasn’t enough, because humans are shallow and petty?” Ansel guessed.
“You’ve read the wrong books,” Robin said reproachfully. “He fell in love. He fell in love with a mortal woman. She...died and left him hurting so badly that he begged me to free him from the torment of it. I didn’t wish to lose him as my brother, so I took his pain away from him, and created a monster instead of a man.”
“You took his pain?”
“I took his grief away and left a hole for chaos and darkness to grow. His sorrow was tangled irrevocably with his love and with neither of them, there was no heart left in him. I created a pocket for evil to live. I didn’t realize at first what I had done, and the taint spread before I knew how to stop it. It poisoned the deepest cores of our magic, causing chaos and destruction in the form of the bleaks and dours, even before Cerad realized that he could control and direct it with the anger and malice that rem
ained inside of him unchecked by compassion. I was almost too late to save any of the magic at all. I only had enough untouched for four vessels.”
“The knights,” Ansel realized. Trey. Rez. Henrik. Tadra.
“I took my truest human warriors and gave them the last of the pure magic from my world, to protect it. They were at first my final hope to save my kingdom, and now, the only hope to save yours. I broke my crown to make them.”
Ansel let his breath out in a hiss of understanding. “Do they know?”
Robin’s wilting posture told Ansel as clearly as words that the knights did not know. “I could not put that weight on their shoulders, too. I thought...I honestly thought that it was a kindness. They know me only as a mentor and friend, and they thought that the crown fell long before they came to duty, not that I broke it to make them.”
“Tell her,” Ansel said fiercely. “Tell them all. They deserve the truth.”
“I was trying to protect them from the truth!”
“What truth?” Ansel demanded. “The truth of who you are? The truth of what they are? Or the truth of how you failed Cerad? You can’t pick and choose what to tell them and expect them to fight on your side just because you say it’s the right one. We all have to be able to make our own destinies, with all the hard choices that come with it.”
Robin drew themself up in bristling fury and Ansel had a moment of wondering if he’d badly overstepped at last—he was, after all, scolding the crown of faery, however diminished, like they were an errant dog. The air seemed to crackle.
Robin’s anger faded into sorrow and they shook their head in chagrin. “Being immortal and all-powerful didn’t always mean I was particularly smart.”
They gave Ansel a long, appraising look. “You asked if you were supposed to be Tadra’s key. Do you…” they paused.
“I love her,” Ansel said, and the words were so raw that they seemed to burn his mouth. “I love her. I tried not to, believe me, but it was like trying to stop the tide or turn back time.”