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Chapter 434: The Birthday Gift

Anna mentioned it in passing: Tilly’s twentieth birthday was coming.

Roland hadn’t thought about it at all, which was not quite the same as forgetting. Prince Roland’s memories were a database he accessed only when relevant, and most of what that database contained was a record of mischief—schemes, pranks, small cruelties, the kind of archive you stopped consulting once you recognized what it was. Politics and statecraft barely featured. Anything related to Tilly had been buried deep and labeled with a particular kind of avoidance, as though the prince had not wanted to revisit it.

He understood why when he dug into it now.

As an Extraordinary, Tilly had never experienced the Months of Demons bite. No awakening day to mark, no magic forcing its way through her blood. Her birthday was simply that—the anniversary of her birth—and so the only meaningful milestone she had ever had was the one her father had made of it.

King Wimbledon III had thrown Tilly a birthday celebration every winter while he was alive. Not even Timothy, his obvious favorite, received that particular attention. It was a luxury the king gave his youngest child and no one else—and Prince Roland’s memories contained a theory about why: that it was compensation. The king ignored Tilly the rest of the year; these annual celebrations were how he assuaged his guilt about neglecting her, or perhaps how he kept faith with her mother’s memory.

Whether that theory was right hardly mattered. Timothy and Garcia had believed it, and that belief had made them furious.

The extravagance of Tilly’s eighteenth birthday had been remarkable even by royal standards. The four border guardians came to King’s City for it. Gifts arrived from the Kingdom of Dawn, the Kingdom of Wolfheart, the Kingdom of Everwinter. Even the Fjord Islands sent an emissary delegation. Timothy and Garcia had been seething—determined to teach Tilly that her father’s attention was pity and not preference—and they had tried to enlist Prince Roland in their lesson.

He had refused. Eight years before that occasion, Tilly had taught him something he had not forgotten: that she looked meek at first glance and had iron underneath. He was not willing to cross that again.

The siblings had acted without him. He didn’t know the mechanism—something gone wrong with her gift from Wolfheart, a pair of bear cubs. He did know that when he saw Tilly cradling the dead animals with a blank face, the prince had been entertained.

No wonder the prince had been the family’s disgrace. The full catalogue of what he had and hadn’t done would be unpleasant reading for anyone.

Roland set the memory aside and picked up a sheet of paper.

He began to draw.

“What’s that?” Nightingale appeared at his shoulder. “A bear?”

“Yes. A stuffed one—the kind you sleep with.”

From his limited experience giving gifts, he had concluded that most women appreciated things that were soft and appealing and warm to hold. A life-sized stuffed animal satisfied two of those conditions easily. But a simple stuffed animal was too ordinary. He had witches. He could do considerably better.

On Tilly’s birthday, he carried the gift to her room himself.

She opened the door alone and looked mildly surprised to find him standing there with a large wrapped box under each arm. “Why are you here?”

“It’s your birthday. I’m hosting a feast in the castle tonight—but first, this.” He mopped sweat from his forehead and set the box down. Nobility in this era gave small, elegant gifts—flowers, rings, things that fit inside a coat and appeared as surprises. Arriving at someone’s door red-faced and sweating with a large paper package was, he was aware, not the usual approach.

“You’ve never given me anything,” Tilly observed, with a tone he couldn’t quite decode.

“I gave you a goose-feather quill when you were born.”

“That wasn’t worth anything.”

“It’s a Graycastle royal tradition.” He shrugged. “Can you open it?”

She untied the ribbons. The box fell open.

Tilly went silent.

Then: “What is this?”

“A bear.”

“No bear looks like this.” She circled it slowly, then patted it. “It’s so soft…”

Soraya had made the fur cover—modeled on the coat of Northern wolf cubs, treated with something that gave it a silky finish. The design itself Roland had drawn from a future he had left behind: black and white, round-faced, the particular kind of creature that had survived for millennia purely on the strength of being irresistibly appealing and had once been deployed as a diplomatic instrument between nations.

“I’ve never seen a bear with these markings. The coloring is strange…”

“You don’t like it?”

“I mean—” Tilly seemed to run out of words, but her eyes said everything.

“It’s called a panda. It’s a… widely-loved animal.”

She caught his meaning at once. “It’s from your other world.”

He nodded. “And it’s not just for holding. Try pinching its neck.”

She did. The panda began to move—legs working, body pitching forward, making its unsteady way toward her. Tilly took a sharp breath and stepped back. The stuffed animal kept coming, deliberate and unstoppable, waving its limbs with the absolute commitment of something that had no concept of giving up.

The weight had not been decorative. Inside the body: connecting rods, gears, small generators in each leg powered by miniature Dawn I engines. Reduced magnetic flux extended the run-time considerably—three or four months without use, somewhat less with frequent operation. Even when Tilly returned to the Sleeping Island, the panda would still be moving.

“Pinch its neck again and it’ll stop,” Roland said. “I hope you like it.”

Tilly did not answer. She was watching the panda with an expression she hadn’t managed to put away in time.

She didn’t need to.

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