How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas (10 page)

“I heard that,” said Kit’s pop, sounding amused. “Never mind, it got better.” He picked up another garland, the gold one. “So where is it?”

“You haven’t got the last garland on yet,” Carmela said. “We’ll wait.”

And they did, the room more or less going quiet as the final glittery garland went up. There Filif stood, resplendent, glowing. Carmela produced the star—about a foot wide, golden, very simple, with a conical socket—and reached way, way up to put it on.

And couldn’t quite reach. “You’ve been getting taller without telling me,” she said. “Give me a hand here, shrub.”

Very carefully, so as not to disturb anything, Filif bent the top of him down just enough. Carmela slipped the star on; he straightened up.

“Merry Christmas, Fil,” Carmela said, and grinned, and hugged him carefully through the garlands and the tinsel.

The tremor in his trunk was unmistakable—all the tinsel rippled with it—as he stood there simply radiating joy. Nita stood there appreciating the view, the radiance and glitter and gleam of him, and the sight of those red, glowing eyes peering out from among the lights and the garlands. A spontaneous round of applause went up around the room.

Now, though, it was Nita’s turn to get nervous.

In her family, as Christmas approached everybody came up with a special ornament for the tree: either something they made, or something that they couldn’t make but that they saw and liked, or that had a specific meaning. Some of the ornaments on the tree at home were hilariously clumsy — kindergarten construction-paper cutouts plastered with glitter, or painted and varnished papier-mache shapes, or similar art-class stuff. Some were bought things, replicas of older glass ornaments, or keepsake ornaments in engraved metal or plastic. Some were toys, or expressions of temporary (or longstanding) media crushes—such as all of Dairine’s Star Wars collectible ornaments, including the no-longer-light-up Darth Vader TIE fighter with the busted left wing panel that had to be reglued every year because no adhesive seemed to exist that would hold the thing together, and using wizardry on it somehow seemed like cheating.

This year Nita had bought two ornaments, because she knew that the Party was coming and she wanted to leave something on Kit’s family’s tree. “To remember me by,” she’d said, not meaning anything in particular by it. And Kit had given her this completely shocked look. “What, are you
going
somewhere?” he’d said. Nita had been taken completely by surprise by the slightly panicked sound of it. “What? No! No, I just want to… I’m covering all my options, okay?” And he had wisely not pressed her to find out what she meant by that, because to tell the truth Nita wasn’t too sure herself.

In any case, there was an ornament ready to go on the home tree in a few days (her Dad steadfastly refused to get a tree any sooner than the 22nd: it was just the way things had always gone at their house). That one was a red and blue blown-glass hummingbird that Nita had simply liked the moment she saw it. But for Kit’s tree she’d gone privately back to the Crossings and had a word with Sker’ret about who in the shopping zone was good with custom glasswork, and had provided the craftsbeing (a many-legged Takapesh, one of an insectile species possessed of exquisitely detailed and accurate 3D perception) with images lifted from her manual. It had taken another visit or two to make sure everything was perfect, but by the end of November Nita had been completely satisfied.

“Now then,” she said. She reached into the empty air beside her, into her claudication, and pulled out the little white glazed-cardboard box she’d been peeking into at intervals for the last two weeks, and handed it to Kit.

“Early present?” Kit said.

“Early present for the tree. Go on!”

He carefully lifted the top off the box and peered inside, poked what he saw there. “Paper! Oh wow, thanks, we
needed
paper!”

Nita poked him, not too hard: having him fumble the box was the last thing she wanted. “I’ll give you paper somewhere else,” she said. “Don’t get cute.”

He threw her a sideways smile and carefully reached in to pull the paper out. Nita held her breath.

Suddenly Kit was holding his too. “Ohh…” he said, finally, letting it out, and reached down a little further into the box to slip a finger through the delicately braided bronze wire by which it would hang.

Carefully he pulled the ornament out. It could at first glance had been mistaken for a scorpion, if scorpions came in a deep metallic forest green. It had segmented legs, a thick body, big frontal claws, huge square heavy-mandibled jaws, and a lot of eyes. But the eyes had a goofy look in them that no scorpion could ever have managed, and the jaws were grinning, somehow.

“It’s a
sathak
,” Kit whispered, “from Mars, it’s
absolutely
Takaf, Khretef’s guy, his
dog,
and
Ponch
was in him
,
and—!” He swallowed. “Neets, where’d you
get
this?”

“Had it made,” Nita said. “Do you like it?”

“Oh wow,” Kit said, and all of a sudden he had one arm around Nita’s neck and his face sort of buried between her neck and shoulder. “Wow,” he said into her shoulder, and then laughed and straightened up again.

His Mama was looking at him a little curiously from the passthrough-window into the kitchen. “You okay, son?”

“Mama, look at this! This is
so great!”

He broke away from Nita and went off to show his Mama the ornament. Nita had broken out in a brief sweat of nervousness, but she was cooling down a bit now, and turned away toward Filif, who was standing there watching all this.

“That was a good gift, then,” he said.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Yeah. Don’t drop it when he hangs it up, okay?”

“Outlier forbid!” Filif said. “I’ll take good care of it for you, never fear.”

A few minutes later Kit was back in the living room looking for the perfect place to hang it. “Fil, can you move that branch up? Yeah, a little more… No. Wait. Never mind, this one works better.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah, it’ll catch the light there. Don’t want the light right on it, it looks green enough as it is… Yeah, here. This white light looks good by it. Picks up the eyes.”

“Should I move this frond?”

“No, you’re okay. Then again… I don’t know… You’re not going to get a cramp holding that branch up out of the way?’

“No, not at all.”

Finally the
sathak
ornament was placed the way Kit liked it, and he stood back to admire it. Nita came up next to him and let out a breath, finally having relaxed enough to enjoy it too.

“That is so super. Thanks,” Kit said. His voice actually sounded a little wavery.

Nita just nodded.

Nita’s dad turned away from where he’d been standing near Tom and Carl. “And one more thing—” he said, more or less in Juan’s direction.

A few people turned to look at him, alerted by something in his tone.

“Well, it’s kind of an event, isn’t it?” Nita’s dad said. “So I thought I might as well bring this over to visit.”

He reached down into a small box that had been sitting unremarked on a nearby table, and started carefully unwrapping something from the tissue paper in which it nestled.

Nita’s breath caught. What her dad brought out a moment later was one of the last things her Mom had bought before she got too sick to go out any more: a beautifully photorealistically-painted Christmas ornament that looked like the Earth—but not like a globe with grid lines and single-color countries painted on its continents. It was the Earth the way one saw it as a planet, blue, shining, swirling with weather. Her Mom had seen it that way when she and Kit had first taken her and her Dad to the Moon. The experience had apparently struck some profoundly deep chord for her; she had been muttering about it when she came out of surgery the first time (to the confusion of the critical care nurses, who’d thought she was hallucinating) and the mere passing mention of it, afterwards, had always made her eyes go soft.

Nita’s dad went over and found a spot for it amongst Filif’s decorations: not tucked in too deeply to be seen, but safely positioned toward his trunk. Then he stepped back. “Looks good,” Nita’s dad said, and then stopped, as if his voice had briefly failed him.

Kit’s pop turned to the tray sitting off to one side, handed Nita’s dad one of the glasses sitting there. “Absent friends,” he said softly.

Nita’s dad just nodded and clinked his glass to Kit’s pop’s. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they both drank.

“Kit? Would you turn the lights off?” said Kit’s pop.

Kit headed over to the switch for the main room light, flipped it. In the darkness that fell over the room, Filif had become the only bright thing. Everyone held still, caught in the warm light as if in amber.

The Demisiv stood there quietly, glittering, glowing. Nita saw that he was shivering with some emotion, or some combination of them.
But then he was always good at picking this stuff up,
she thought. To him, silently, she said:
are you okay?

More than okay,
he said.
I am honored to bear this weight.

Slowly, softly, conversation started up again around him as lamps were turned on around the edges of the room. People got themselves more cider and cocoa, and everyone spent at least some time in front of Filif commenting on how terrific he looked decorated, some of them adding details on how they did it at their place: all white lights versus colored, or all blue: matched ornaments all in one color versus the “chaos theory” approach that Kit’s family favored: blinking lights or steady ones…

Around them, people started hitting the buffet trays again: the mulled wine came out. Nita stood off to one side with Sker’ret for a few moments, enjoying the sight of Kit pulling people over one at a time to point at his ornament and explain it to them.

“That worked, then,” Sker’ret said to her.

“As the boy says,” Nita said,
“more
than. Thanks for helping me with that.”

“Well, thanks for keeping my facility and everything I hold dear from being overrun by hostiles!” Sker’ret said. “You don’t pull down
half
the perks you’re entitled to for that.”

“I’ll start working on that, I promise.”

“No you won’t,” Sker’ret said. “I know you too well. Expect me to start bothering you about it.”

“Hey Legs,”
Kit’s mama called from the kitchen, “I need the rest of those trays, it’s time for more of the buffalo wings!”

“You do that,” said Nita, “and I’ll tell your broodmates you’re slumming doing catering work!”

Sker’ret laughed that ratchety laugh and headed for the kitchen. “Don’t get me started,” he said. “I might get my revenge some other way. She’s got the right attitude for liaison work, and we can always use more hominid staff…”

Nita turned back to find Kit’s pop standing next to Filif again, now with something of the air of a workman taking a break with a co-worker. “You going to be okay standing there all night like that?” said Kit’s pop. “I don’t want you to be stuck away from the fun.”

“Oh, this
is
fun! But I don’t have to be stuck. If I want to, I can just leave all this here.”

Kit’s pop blinked at that. “Uh, am I missing something?”

“Watch.”

The “Christmas tree” seemed to shake itself gently. Then there was a strange sort of a sideways blur in the air, as if the whole scene was a watercolor painting that had had a wet brush pulled across it. A second later the watercolor haze was gone, and the Christmas tree was standing exactly where it was, not a light or ornament jostled, not a needle out of place… but Filif was standing a couple of yards to one side of it, wearing nothing but a twin of the star.

“That being is an
artist,”
Ronan called from across the room, “and if he drank, I’d buy him one.”

Filif burst out laughing. “Of course I
drink
,” he said, “what do you take me for, some kind of rockmoss?”

“No, I didn’t mean
water…”

“Drinking habits aside,” said Kit’s pop, “that is
some stunt.”

“Nothing much at all,” said Filif. “It’s a constructed appearance, what we call a
mochteroof.”

“I won’t even try to remember how to say that…” Kit’s pop said. “Or to pretend I’ve got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Think of it as like a hologram, but solid,” Filif said. “I can slip in and out of it, and of the ornaments, at will. And back in…”

And suddenly Filif was conducting a masterclass in
mochteroof
construction for the layman, translating the most technical terms out of the Speech into English on the fly. Juan leaned back on the wall nearest him, absolutely fascinated. At the point where Filif dropped into Spanish without warning, Nita’s jaw dropped.

“How is he
doing
that??” she said to Sker’ret as he passed with his third trayful of buffalo wings, from which she pilfered one.