Not Magic Enough by Valerie Douglas

to look at him.
    “You’re an Elf,” she said, wisely. “You’re a secret. I’m not supposed to tell.”
    With a chuckle and a nod, he said, “Yes, yes and yes.”
    Her gaze went to his shoulder. He still wore his harness and his swords; he’d been in the process of taking them off.
    “You have swords.”
    “I do,” he said, watching her as he shrugged them off his shoulders.
    Tilting her head at him, those big steel blue eyes wide, twisting on one foot, she said, “Can I touch one?”
    “Just one?”
    She looked at him gravely. “The long one would be too heavy.”
    “It would. I’m Dorovan,” he said, already enraptured. He’d seen her before of course, when she’d been little more than a baby but not recently. “And you would be Ailith.”
    It meant ‘light’ in the old tongue and she was a light that was certain.
    Sweet Selah’s daughter.
    This one wasn’t quiet, like her gentle mother - she had the warmth, fire and energy of her grandmother.
    Her eyes studied him and then she smiled. “Yes.”
    Drawing his short sword he held it out to her, watched her take it in her small hands, the weight of it heavy.
    “You teach people to use a sword?” she asked.
    He nodded.
    Looking at him with her head tilted, she said, “Would you teach me?”
    She wouldn’t ask if she didn’t wish it, he understood this.
    Dorovan’s eyebrows lifted, as did his heart. She was a charmer - this one - full of curiosity and mischief.
    “Fetch the fireplace poker,” he said. “And we’ll see if the sword is for you.”
    She ran over, ran back with it and before he asked, took it in a two-handed grip without being told.
    Dorovan was delighted.
    “You’ve been watching,” he said. Probably the guards and the Hunters at the castle.
    Nodding sharply, she said, “Yes.”
    It was clearly her favorite answer. There were no doubts, no fears in this one, she wanted to try everything, do everything.
    Carefully, he adjusted her stance a little. “Like so.”
    Being careful not to move out of it, she looked around then shifted her little body to get the feel of it before her blue eyes lifted to his and she nodded - her smile brilliant as she understood.
    Delae walked in the door and her heart caught with both wonder and love at the sight, her throat tight as she watched them together. She’d known with that empathy they shared that Dorovan had been completely engrossed, enthralled, but at what she hadn’t known, nor that Ailith had arrived.  That last had obviously been meant as a surprise and everyone had kept it.
    There was that about Ailith that folk did such things.
    Now she watched them, young Ailith a perfect mirror to Dorovan as he walked her through the movements of what he called the ‘forms’, as he’d taught Delae herself all those years ago.
    For a moment her eyes burned, before she leaned a shoulder against the door to just watch them in silence. If there was grief in her for what she couldn’t tell Dorovan, she buried it deep beneath the joy, the pleasure of watching them together, child and Elf. His granddaughter.
    Whatever else, that child was the best of all of them. She could see touches of herself and Telerach in her, in the glints of red and gold in Ailith’s chestnut hair, of them and Dorovan in the color of her eyes and now, mirroring his movements, Dorovan’s grace, his strength and her father, Geric’s. There was a stillness to her, too, that Selah must have inherited by way of Dorovan and passed down to her daughter. 
    Ailith became aware of her first and came running, putting the fireplace poker carefully aside first, to Dorovan’s approving nod. “Delae! Look who I found!”
    It was so like Ailith, as if she’d discovered an unknown country all by herself.
    “I see you’ve met, again,” Delae said, her gaze lifting to meet Dorovan’s, her friend of the heart.
    As always, she saw the love there and if it wasn’t the depth of the soul-bond he sought, she could give him this much,