Derpy had learned to watch his grandmother’s feet.
Her hands were a distraction. So were the petals drifting from her sleeves, the enormous pink tail moving behind her, and the expression that suggested she had found something mildly entertaining to do with the afternoon. Her feet told him where the next blow would begin.
Until they stopped telling him anything.
Okamihana stepped into the space he had chosen for his retreat. Derpy twisted, brought both arms across his chest, and caught her palm against his guard. The impact drove him backward through the grass. His heels cut two dark lines in the training ground before he managed to stop.
“Again,” she said. “And this time, finish moving before you decide you’re safe.”
Derpy lowered his arms. His white fur had collected soil along one elbow. A strand of long white hair clung to his mouth; he pushed it aside with the back of his hand and tasted blood where he had bitten his cheek.
“I hadn’t decided anything yet.”
“That was part of the problem.”
Beyond her, the Petal Fields continued being beautiful with very little regard for him. Flowers stirred beneath the trees. Pink drifted across the open ground, catching against his clothes and disappearing beneath his feet. Somewhere past the training area, people had the freedom to spend an afternoon without being thrown across it.
He found that difficult to appreciate.
He had already spent several days in Petal Fields, measured in lessons and nights waiting for news. One year remained before the Alpha Wolf Festival, postponed after his late approval as Okamihana’s champion. Some of those attending seemed likely to hold him responsible for every additional day.
His grandmother appeared determined to make him use those days.
He had agreed to be her champion in Briar Glen. He had not agreed to belong to her. Until he understood what the festival required, he intended to keep those two things separate.
First, he wanted his people here. Lewd. Lenora. The pets he had spent too long missing. Once he knew they were safe, he could decide how much of himself he was willing to put into his grandmother's contest.
“Your left shoulder,” she said.
Derpy corrected it.
“Now you’ve moved your weight too far.”
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong before you hit me?”
“I just did.”
She crossed the distance.
Derpy caught the first strike, missed the second, and felt the third compress the air from his ribs. He turned with it instead of fighting the impact. Okamihana’s sleeve brushed his face. He reached for her wrist.
Her hand was gone before his fingers closed.
At the edge of the ground, Tina shifted forward.
Revy’s arm moved across her path without touching her.
“Let him find where feet belong,” Revy murmured. “Catch too soon and teach him wrong.”
“I know what training looks like,” Tina said. “I also know what it sounds like when his breathing changes.”
“So do I, my watchful dear. That is why we’re standing here.”
Tina did not look reassured. Her bare hands flexed, pale fur shifting over her knuckles. She followed Derpy through each exchange with the concentration of someone measuring how quickly she could reach him if the next one went badly.
Sera stood a little behind them. One hand rested against her collar. She had stopped pretending she was only adjusting it.
Mk.1 watched without joining the conversation. Teal stood nearest the open ground, her attention moving between her mother and the white wolf who refused to stay where he was put.
Derpy saw all of them when Okamihana turned him toward the boundary. Tina’s tense jaw. Revy’s small smile. Teal waiting for him to make another mistake.
He looked back too late.
Okamihana struck his guard and sent him stumbling.
“Stay with me,” she told him. “They aren’t the ones in front of you.”
Derpy dragged in a breath.
He knew the way she approached now. The slight settling of her weight before the pressure arrived. The interval between her fingers opening and the force passing through his arms. His body had begun answering those things without waiting for him to name them.
That was the part he had not explained.
Each exchange left more than a bruise. Something in him kept what it learned. An angle that had failed became a correction. A pressure that had folded his guard began to feel less unfamiliar the next time it touched him. He could not have described the whole process if she had asked.
He could feel it working.
Okamihana advanced again. This time, when her palm came toward his chest, Derpy stepped inside it.
Her eyes sharpened.
His forearm slid against hers. He turned his shoulder, kept his feet beneath him, and forced her to change the direction of the strike. The pressure passed beside his ribs instead of through them.
Tina’s hands stopped moving.
“There,” she said quietly.
Derpy heard her, but he did not look.
Okamihana tried to take his balance. He recognized the attempt early enough to move with it. His tail swept low over the grass as he recovered, and his returning blow made her lift an arm to defend.
It was a small thing.
It felt enormous.
“You’re improving,” Okamihana said.
Derpy barely had enough breath to answer. “You sound surprised.”
“I’m deciding how pleased to be.”
He pressed forward before she could finish deciding.
The next exchange came faster. He followed her shoulder, then stopped following it when he felt the trick beneath the movement. His palm met her forearm. His other hand drove toward the opening she had used against him twice already.
Okamihana gave ground.
One step, then another.
Teal straightened.
Derpy felt the change and nearly ruined it by smiling. He swallowed the impulse, kept his attention on his grandmother, and moved again. Her pressure touched him; his own answered before he consciously called for it. The force between them disturbed the petals at their feet.
For the first time that afternoon, he thought he could finish an attack.
He saw where it belonged. He could already feel the movement that would carry him there.
Okamihana saw his decision.
Her hand closed on him.
The sky moved where the ground should have been.
Derpy recognized the mistake—she had allowed him close enough for this—just before his back hit the earth with a force that drove the breath out of everyone watching.
A shallow ring of dirt broke around him.
His eyes remained open for a fraction of a second. The pink above him blurred into white.
Then he knew nothing.
Tina reached the edge of the disturbed ground before the falling petals settled.
“Derpy?”
“He’s breathing,” Okamihana said.
Tina knelt anyway. She checked for herself, one hand hovering near his face before resting against his shoulder. His chest rose. The next breath came easier than the first.
“You could have stopped the match without burying him.”
Okamihana looked at the mark his body had left in the ground.
“He was about to get through.”
“Then let him finish a move you can correct afterward,” Tina said. “He can’t learn where his control ends if you keep ending the match for him.”
Okamihana looked at the hollow in the ground. Tina stayed beside Derpy while Teal came closer.
“Let me take over when he wakes,” Teal said. “He’s learning your movements. A different opponent would make him adjust.”
Okamihana glanced at her daughter.
“He has become much stronger since he came here.”
“I watched.”
“You watched him make me change my footing. I felt what he was putting behind it.”
Teal looked down at Derpy. Unconscious, with grass tangled in his long white hair, he seemed smaller than he had a moment earlier. The female wolf body softened the shape of his face. It did nothing to soften the memory of what had once emerged from him.
“You think I can’t handle him?” she asked.
“I think you remember why putting yourself in front of him again might not be wise.”
Teal’s mouth tightened.
Okamihana did not raise her voice.
“The last time, he lost control. He attacked you. He broke your god weapon.”
“That fight ended in a draw.”
“Yes,” her mother said. “And you remember what it cost.”
Teal remembered arriving at the White Tiger Kingdom as an envoy, charged with recruiting him. What remained clearest was the clash that followed: the force gathering in front of her, her need to meet it, and the realization that neither could keep the next exchange contained.
Rikka was part of that memory.
The red-panda princess had been there. Teal could still pick out the color of her hair and the shape of her tail from all the motion around them. Remembering her alive required effort; the aftermath kept replacing it.
Luna was there too.
The rabbit girl was Derpy’s friend. That mattered now with a precision Teal had not understood before the fight. A friend was someone whose absence kept happening. Someone could die once, and the person who loved them would continue finding places where they should have been.
Both girls had died in the course of that confrontation.
Teal could remember the result more easily than she could bear to put the whole sequence in order. She did not try to make it cleaner for herself. There was no version in which calling the fight a draw restored either of them.
And there had been the harpy.
It had come out of Derpy.
Even in memory, Teal struggled to hold the sight still. One figure becoming two, then the two folding together before she could understand what had separated them. The temporary joining had changed the fight. Derpy’s control had gone with it.
She remembered the eyes. The movement that no longer carried the hesitation of someone deciding whether to hurt her. The moment her god weapon ceased to feel unbreakable in her hands.
Then it had broken.
The remembered sound made her fingers curl now.
“You see why I’m being careful,” Okamihana said.
Teal looked at the shallow hollow in the grass.
“Is that what you call this?”
Her mother followed her gaze. For a moment neither of them spoke.
Tina had eased Derpy’s hair away from his face. Revy stood over them, her smile reduced to something that did not quite reach her eyes. Sera had moved closer without appearing to notice she had done it. Mk.1 remained near enough to watch his breathing.
A small light rose beside Derpy’s hand.
Teal thought at first that the afternoon had caught a drifting petal. Then the light changed direction against the wind.
Another appeared near his shoulder.
Okamihana grew still.
The tiny shapes circled him, pale glimmers gathering above his chest and passing over the white fur at his throat. There were more with each breath. They did not scatter when Tina moved her hand.
“Mother?” Teal asked.
“Fairy sprites,” Okamihana said, watching one pass close to her sleeve.
“You’ve seen them do this before?” Teal asked.
“Not around him.” Her mother followed a shape small enough to disappear beneath a cupped hand. It held her attention more completely than his strength had.
One sprite hovered above Derpy’s closed eyes. Another settled briefly into the shadow of his hair, then rose again.
Tina checked his breathing once more.
She had no intention of moving merely because the match was finished. Derpy could argue with her when he woke. Until then, she kept one hand near his shoulder and watched the lights travel over him, waiting for any change that would give her a reason to interfere.
Whatever had brought the lights, Derpy slept through it.