by Zoe Chant
Then he seemed to feel Tadra’s hands, cool, over the top of his. Her ring and middle fingers curled in. I love you.
Resolve hardened in him, like he was fighting against a strong wind and suddenly had a handhold. He was aware of everyone, everything. He could see the battlefield, spread out as if he was watching it from above. The battered warehouse. The arches of the broad portals and the scarred landscape beyond. The knights, fighting in their magic shapes at the sides of their human keys.
Most of all, he saw Tadra, kneeling with her unbroken firebird in her hands.
Ansel felt Kevin—Cerad—give a shudder of alarm and the attention of every bleak and dour and ridden human turned unerringly to where Ansel stood, the magic of the crown spilling down around him like a cloak of lightning and music.
The dours flung themselves at him and dissolved away at his touch, because he imagined that they would. The ridden humans raised weapons, then dropped them as they regained their own will, because he believed that they could. The bleaks howled into nothingness, because he knew that they should. The warehouse exploded outward in all directions, opening the roof to the dark sky above.
The power was dizzying. It yanked at his mind like a whole kennel of dogs on leashes trying to pull him in every direction. It was like trying to keep his attention on a single thought in the middle of a tornado of sparks, each one of them worlds. It was like scrolling through an infinite spreadsheet of data and trying to make sense of a completely unknown system. He felt everything at once, saw everything, smelled it and tasted it and was deafened by the sound of it.
Ansel had unspeakable power, all the deep magic that had been the pillars of an entire faery world were at his command, and he could feel it coursing through his veins. He could smite Cerad where he stood, take him apart to his very molecules, destroy what remained of the man that had been and stop the war in its tracks.
I created the evil, Robin had confessed. I took his grief and left a hole for darkness.
Ansel looked at the light that streamed from his palms and fingertips. What would burning Cerad away leave room to grow? Was there more to magic than destruction and pain?
Every key’s interpretation of magic was different. Daniella heard music she could make harmonies with. Heather saw fibers she could weave. Gwen saw her power in controls and dialogue boxes like a video game. He saw it as fire, like snaking vines of raw energy, capable of burning away anything in its path.
It was just a way for his mind to make sense of a power so vast and complicated that human minds weren’t meant to understand it.
But that didn’t mean that it was limited to what he thought he could do with it. He didn’t have to use fire to burn, he could do anything with magic that he could imagine…
He didn’t have to destroy Cerad, but Cerad did not know that, and he raised his sword for a last defense as Ansel appeared before him, unconstrained by distance and physical reality.
“I give you imagination,” Ansel said, laying a glowing hand on his forehead.
Imagination was lock-step with compassion; no one could understand someone else if they could not imagine themselves in other shoes. Where Robin had taken Cerad’s grief and left emptiness, Ansel gave him empathy, pouring it down into Cerad as if he were an empty vessel.
Cerad staggered back in horror, dropping his black sword with a cry before he went limp and fell to his knees. Tadra toppled beside him. What remained of his army collapsed in confusion. All Ansel had to do now was close the portals, and the danger to earth would be done.
Ansel was still on unearthly fire, and he could feel himself losing his last sense of himself. His mind was not magic, and no mortal could control this power so long without letting it consume him completely. His only chance at surviving this was to cast the crown off now.
Beyond the portals, he could see the faery world, still blackened and broken, and he knew in a brilliant moment of clarity that the only thing stopping him from fixing it all was his own sense of limitation.
He also knew what it would cost him.
Could he sacrifice the last shreds of his humanity to save a world that was already given up for lost?
He closed blazing eyes and remembered how Tadra had been ready to smash her glass firebird. She’d been willing to give up her life and all of her magic to try to save his world. He could give his mortal mind for the world she loved.
Ansel—already feeling more crown now than man, like he was composed entirely of light—reached out with all of his strength and will and imagined the dark world unfurling new green, clear water washing out muddy streams, bright sky bursting through storm clouds. He touched every ridden human, burning back their dark riders, and purged the taint from the leylines beneath the surface of the land, chasing it back to every corner of the world: every deep place and every high breath of air.
He was everywhere at once, too much, spread too thin in an inferno of magic and when his final, gasping breath drove the last of the darkness away, he felt suspended in nothing for a moment, exhausted and undone.
There was nothing left of himself, only ashes.
Chapter 34
Tadra felt the full power of her firebird when Ansel unleashed the crown, but she could do nothing but struggle uselessly while Cerad held the reins to it through their wretched, wrong key connection.
Cerad cackled, sure of his victory as his forces swelled and paraded in through the portals. The fight of her shieldmates took a turn for the defensive; she could barely see their desperate light through the swirling darkness.
Cerad threw her easily aside, and she landed by her miraculously unbroken glass firebird. The seams where Ansel had repaired her sparked in the angry light.
Did she have a third chance to make this right? If she broke the glass avatar now, was it too late anyway?
She didn’t even have the opportunity to raise it above her head before everything suddenly hushed and the warehouse walls and roof blasted out. Cerad’s army seemed to collapse in on itself, dours disappearing, bleaks shrieking to nothingness. Dazed humans stepped out of shadows, lowering weapons and shaking themselves.
Ansel himself was standing before them, but he wasn’t Ansel at all, he was the crown, all the power of faery shedding off from him like roaring wildfire as Cerad raised his sword. He laid one hand on Cerad’s head, fingers glowing, and Cerad collapsed.
Beneath them, the earth heaved and groaned and if Tadra had not been standing, she may have fallen. The power from Ansel was blinding, and it swept over her to the portals of faery like a vast, inexorable wave. She didn’t look to see what he was doing with it, if he had any control of it at all now; she knew that Ansel needed her, that he was flying to pieces in the maelstrom he’d created, and that she would lose him if she didn’t act. She surged to her feet and wrapped her arms around his flaming body.
She didn’t have a hand free to sign to him, and her voice was still silent when she tried to speak, to tell him how much she loved and needed him. All she could do was beg him, silently, to stay, to open her whole heart, completely.
He shuddered in her embrace and tried to speak, and when he couldn’t, Tadra took his face in her hands and pressed her forehead to his, feeling the crown burn into her brow.
He still didn’t answer, and Tadra felt as if he was dissolving in her embrace, spilling out like water from a broken vessel, faster than she could catch him back...and she knew that it was because he wasn’t her key. If they’d had that connection, she’d be able to buffer him from the magic and share his burden, sparing him this.
“It is too late!” Robin cried from near her ear. “The crown was too much for him to take up! He cannot survive this.”
Tadra would not accept it. She refused to lose him now. He was her closest friend and greatest love. He was her trust and her compass direction, he completed her emotionally and physically and mentally, in every way that she could imagine.
He wasn’t only meant to be her key.
He was her k
ey.
Deep within her, something fell into place, like a wandering song finding its melody.
He was her key.
Tadra wasn’t later sure if she somehow tore the key connection away from Cerad to return it to where it was meant to be, or if she wrought some completely new wild magic with her absolute certainty that she and Ansel were meant to be. She only knew that she could not let the crown destroy him, and that she would hold him here with her forever if that’s what it took.
“Ansel! You are here!” she told him. “You are here with me now in this place and I love you!”
It was strange to hear her own voice out loud again after so long, and it seemed to dampen the crackling fire that was consuming Ansel.
“Tadra…” he croaked. “Tadra...my heart…there is so much...I am everything...”
“You are my key!” she told him. “You are my heart! You are my everything!”
He raised his hand slowly and ripped the crown from his head, letting it slip from his fingers to the ground, where all of its fire extinguished.
The earth went still beneath them and Ansel collapsed in Tadra’s embrace. “Ansel,” she pleaded, balancing him upright. “Ansel?”
Ansel coughed as if he’d forgotten how to breathe, then croaked, “You sound exactly like I’d always imagined.”
She kissed him then, and they would have fallen together if Henrik hadn’t caught her by the arm as Rez appeared at Ansel’s far side to keep him standing.
“Hound-keeper. Ansel.” Trey was there, too, sweeping all of them into his arms in an expression of support and affection.
“People...in this world...don’t...hug...all the time…” Ansel gasped.
“I feel that this is a remarkable occasion,” Rez said firmly.
Heather added wryly, “What with the whole rebuilding of faeryland and everything.”
Then, at last, Tadra could look around and see what Ansel had wrought.
Through the flickering portals, her world stretched out in its full glory again. The taint of darkness that had faded it for so long had been rolled away, replaced with life and beauty like Tadra had never imagined would be possible again. It was the stuff of Robin’s tales, the color plates in the human faery tale books, and most of all, it was Ansel’s vision, pure and full of magic again.
The earth was still again, but far away, Tadra could hear car alarms screaming.
“It is...unbroken.”
Tadra wasn’t sure if Robin was referring to the crown, or to faery, fueled again by the magic that Ansel had unlocked and unleashed.
Robin was standing at their true size again and Tadra had to blink to look at them, because she seemed to see the fable with a hundred kinds of wings, and a hundred different faces, all at once in a dizzy overlay.
“I couldn’t image it whole again,” they said quietly.
Gracefully, with entirely too many arms and eyes, Robin reached out and picked up the crown that lay, inert, at their feet. It was a crown in truth now, with graceful clear points of faceted crystal in a circlet. Robin raised it to their own head and settled it in its rightful place.
When the shieldmates had released Ansel to stand unsteadily on his own feet, one hand in Tadra’s, Robin strode forward and took his face in both their hands, tipping their forehead to touch his. If the crown burned his brow, Ansel didn’t flinch.
“Cerad,” Ansel said, when Robin released him.
Cerad was still kneeling where Ansel had left him, holding his head.
Robin glided to him and knelt at his side.
“I...remember,” Cerad said. “I remember it all.”
“Your memories are part of who you are,” Robin said regretfully. “You cannot separate a man from his meaning.”
Cerad looked at his own spread hands. “What do I do now? Who am I after all of that?”
Robin tipped forward and put their forehead against Cerad’s, cradling his face in their hands. “You are my friend and you may choose your own life from here. Come back to our world and be my companion again. Or stay in this world, if you mean it no harm now. You choose your own destiny.”
Cerad looked with aching longing through the open portals. “I could go home?” he said, his voice full of yearning. “After all that I did?”
“It is undone,” Robin said simply. Tadra had to blink to focus on them.
“It will be remembered,” Cerad said with regret.
“Then we will make new memories, and in time, the old ones will lose their power to control.”
Cerad bowed his head. “I will return to our world. I have no memories here that I wish to keep close, and there is much I can atone for there.”
He made a swift circle of the knights. “I owe you an apology,” he said generally. “I used you without mercy and would have done worse.”
The knights all murmured acceptance, but Tadra drew herself up as Cerad came to where she stood with Ansel.
“You, most of all,” Cerad said. “I took something that wasn’t mine to have.”
Her key bond with Ansel.
Ansel’s arm around her shoulder squeezed, but he didn’t offer to speak for her.
Tadra only smiled at him. “A hard-won prize is more valued than a careless gift,” she said, looking aside to Ansel. “We made what was not given to us and I would not trade what we have for any spell.”
Ansel, whose face had been a masterpiece of conflicted emotion, softened into a tender smile.
I love you, she signed at him with her free hand. You are my key.
You are my heart, he signed back.
Cerad looked from one of them to the other and his smile was full of pain and understanding. He bowed to them and turned back to the nearest portal. Rainbow-colored grass was bending in a sweet breeze to a horizon of crimson hills. Tadra did not realize how deep it was until Cerad waded out into it and disappeared from sight.
The warehouse itself had been demolished, not just flattened to rubble, but replaced with a grove of living evergreen trees.
The humans who had been freed of evil influence were milling about in confusion, starting to shiver in shock and chill. The knights and their keys went to round them up and set them on the path back to their lives, the comfortable enchantment of faery forgetfulness already filling in the gaps of logic. Tadra suspected that they would carry vague memories of a very wild party for the rest of their lives.
That left her standing alone with Ansel and Robin, the winter night brightly lit by the glory of faery through the portals.
“The magic,” Ansel said, rubbing his head. “It’s all back in faery now?”
“Yes,” Robin said simply. “You returned it to where it had come from, as we will.”
Tadra looked at them in alarm. “You intend us to go back with you?”
Robin looked like they had considered no other outcome. “Your firebird cannot exist in this world with all of its magic in faery. Would you relinquish that to remain?”
Ansel’s hand in Tadra’s tightened, and she looked at him to find that he was frowning at her in worry. “You could return,” he said. “You are a protector of the crown and your kingdom is restored. I would come with you.”
For one split second, Tadra was divided. Her duty in the world she’d come from was once the only thing she’d known, and there was her loyalty to Robin and her shieldmates, and all the possibilities of the revitalized faery. And on the other side, there was a cold, curious human world with Ansel. Dear, brave Ansel, who loved her in ways she’d never dreamed. Ansel, who loved this world. She could not ask him to leave everything here.
The moment was gone as quickly as it had come. I stay here with you, she said, and she signed it, because she had forgotten that she could speak again. I love you.
Then she couldn’t speak, because Ansel caught her up in a desperate kiss and they had no need for words at all.
“Your firebird,” Ansel said achingly when there was space between their mouths. “You’ll lose all of your power.”
“All the knights who choose to stay here in this world will,” Robin said. “They can only access the power on our side where the crown is. I will be sorrowful to leave this world behind, but I know that it will not be long for me until I see you again, if you choose to remain here.”
The others had returned from herding the humans back to civilization, safely away from the faery portal that still sizzled brightly in the night.
“Our world has no need for us now,” Henrik said thoughtfully.
“We are only human here, but there is no shame in being only human,” Rez said firmly.
“Damn straight,” Heather said, elbowing him in the side.
“This world may need defending in the future,” Trey suggested. “There may be other threats.”
“We could not leave it unguarded,” Rez agreed.
None of them offered to cross the portal after Cerad.
“This is our home now,” Trey said. “Our home with our keys. Our duty is here.”
“We’ll have to get you driver’s licenses or something,” Daniella said.
“Maybe jobs?” Gwen suggested.
“I would be happy to sling burgers,” Henrik told her nobly. “If there are not occupations for knights.”
“The mall could use some better security guards,” Gwen suggested drolly.
“You have made your choice,” Robin said without judgement. “We must say our farewells swiftly.”
They exchanged long, meaningful embraces with each of the knights and keys, and when they put their arms around Tadra, she felt a deep sense of satisfaction and peace. Robin, her mentor, her crown. She would miss them more than she would miss faery.
Ansel didn’t say a word about unnecessary embraces when Robin enfolded him in their arms, and they traded a short exchange of words that Tadra couldn’t hear.
The portals shimmered in warning and Robin let Ansel go, stepping back into a forest of gleaming purple vines. “I’ll see you,” they said…
