Sera rubbed the edge of her collar until the skin beneath it warmed.
She knew she was doing it. Her fingers kept tracing the boundary between the Collar Warden’s metal and the throat that still belonged to her beneath it.
Derpy lay a few paces away, surrounded by little drifting lights.
The white wolf had offered to take her along. He wanted her taught, wanted her to learn to protect David properly. He had asked for nothing between them in return.
Sera looked down at her shaking hands. How could she protect David from here?
Across the grass, Teal said something quietly to her mother. Okamihana answered without taking her eyes off the sprites. Then the two moved away together, leaving the others beside the disturbed earth.
Sera scarcely followed their departure. Her thoughts had returned to David, to the distance between them, to all the things that could happen in a room she could not see.
Someone could sit beside him. Someone could make him laugh. He could have a difficult day and reach for a person who was not her.
The collar pressed beneath her fingers.
She loosened her grip.
That was exactly the kind of thought she was supposed to change.
Recognizing it was humiliating. Failing to stop it was worse.
“You’ll rub yourself raw,” Tina said.
Sera dropped her hand so quickly that it looked like guilt.
“I wasn’t trying to do anything.”
“I said you were rubbing your neck. That wasn’t an accusation.”
Tina remained beside Derpy, one knee in the grass. She had checked him often enough that Sera understood his breathing was steady, but she still looked down whenever his fingers moved.
Revy watched Sera instead.
“The little clasp has had its turn. Leave skin alone before it burns.”
Sera folded her hands together. They continued shaking, but at least one could hide some of what the other was doing.
“Why did he bring me?” she asked.
Tina looked up.
“You heard him explain it.”
“I heard what he said to them. That isn’t the same thing.” Sera glanced toward Derpy’s face. “People say things when they want permission.”
Revy gave a small chuckle. Tina’s mouth moved too, though the amusement faded when she saw Sera flinch.
“He’s David’s friend,” Tina said. “Start there.”
“I know that.”
“Then let it mean something.”
Sera looked back at the white wolf. The horns at his temples made the familiar shape of his face seem stranger. One red, one purple. She had seen power come from him and watched people change their minds about what they could do in his presence. Now a blade of grass lay across his sleeve while tiny lights circled his chest.
“He went that far because they’re friends?”
“A friend may cross a crooked street,” Revy said, “To keep the knives from someone’s feet.”
Sera’s fingers tightened together.
She could hear the part of that rhyme Revy had left for her to understand.
“You mean me.”
Tina did not rescue her from it.
“We mean David has already been through enough. Derpy wants him to have a chance to live without waiting for the next thing to happen.”
“I want him safe.”
“I believe you want him safe,” Tina said. “What you do because of that matters.”
Sera looked away. The training ground offered nothing useful to stare at. Flattened grass. A smear of dirt on Derpy’s elbow. Petals collecting in the marks his heels had made.
She had watched Okamihana knock him unconscious and felt frightened for him. That concern tangled with everything else: he was helping her, keeping her away from David, and refusing to answer every question filling her head.
“Does David know what happens to me here?” she asked.
Tina’s expression softened slightly, but her answer stayed practical.
“Derpy made arrangements for you to travel with us. He didn’t bring you out here to forget you.”
Revy’s gaze moved over Sera’s hands.
“A road is long, a room is small. You cannot guard him through a wall.”
“I can’t guard him from the Petal Fields either.”
“No,” Tina said. “Right now, you can learn.”
“And then I go back to him?”
Tina glanced toward Revy before answering. “That depends on David, too.”
Sera's hands tightened. She had been treating the journey like a task with a reward waiting at the end. David had never agreed to be that reward.
Sera did not have an answer that would make the distance shorter. She let the conversation stop while a sprite traveled between her and Tina, so faint she almost mistook it for dust.
Revy followed it with her eyes.
Then Tina spoke again.
“And while you’re worrying about who is where, your family has its own situation to understand.”
Sera looked up sharply.
“What situation?”
“The foundation’s funding. The assets involved in the wager. They’re going into the Petal Cafe under Lewd’s name.”
“The foundation?” Sera stared at Tina. “Why would they do that?”
Revy’s smile returned, small and edged.
“Your sister set the counters down,
And thought her purse could buy the crown.
She weighed a life against her gold;
The game was played. Her hand was told.”
“Cassandra?” Sera asked. “All the funding?”
Revy answered before Tina could.
“No little coin tucked out of sight,
No purse kept back against the night.
She brought the whole to pay the cost,
And all she placed was what she lost.”
Sera stared at her. She knew her sister could speak as though an outcome had already agreed with her. She had never imagined Cassandra staking the foundation on that certainty.
“A game where the wager was supposed to equal a life,” Tina said.
Sera looked at Derpy. His chest rose beneath the sprites.
“They won't just accept losing it.”
“The losing hand may curse the chair,
Or ask who put the table there.
It does not call the counters home;
The purse has found a place to roam.”
Sera pressed her hands together. Her family had lost something she could not picture them living without.
“What about my mother and father?”
“They’re at the Petal Cafe too,” Tina said. “Cassandra as well.”
Sera’s hands separated.
“At the cafe doing what?”
“Working. And trying to understand what’s going on.”
“My parents are working there?”
Revy’s voice softened into something that might have suited a child’s game, if the words had belonged to a different conversation.
“An apron waits where pride once sat,
A working day comes after that.
Your sister looks, your parents too;
There’s much a borrowed view can do.”
Sera tried to picture it and found that she could not. Her family did not fit behind the counter she remembered. Cassandra did not belong carrying someone else’s order while trying to discover how she had lost control of the room.
The failure of the image frightened her more than the words had.
“What if something happens to them?”
Tina looked at her for a long moment.
“They’re working in a cafe, Sera.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” Tina said. “I do. But you’re already trying to get ahead of everything you’re afraid of. Hear what we’re telling you first.”
Sera lowered her eyes. Her parents were working at a cafe. Cassandra had lost the foundation. She touched the collar again, unable to imagine how any of them would return to the lives they expected.
Near Derpy’s chest, the sprites brightened.
Revy noticed because she had been following their movement between sentences. One had passed close to the place where his heartbeat moved his clothing. Another joined it. Then another.
The lights no longer wandered separately.
They gathered.
Revy stopped smiling.
Tina was still speaking to Sera, keeping her voice low and firm. Mk.1 watched the edge of the training ground. Neither turned toward the figure beginning to form above Derpy.
For an instant Revy thought the brightness had tricked her. Her bond with him had shown her strange things before, and the afternoon had given her enough reasons to watch him too closely.
Then a wing opened.
It was clear enough to see the grass through it, edged with pink and gold, its delicate veins carrying lavender light. A second wing followed. The shape between them settled lightly against Derpy’s chest.
A woman sat where the sprites had been.
She was larger than the tiny creatures that had gathered to form her, small enough to rest there without disturbing his breathing. Long lavender hair fell around her shoulders, interrupted by dark locks that framed a face wearing a private, pleased little smile.
Her broad witch hat dipped over one eye. Black and white roses crowded its brim among pale feathers. Fine crystals hung from the edge, moving though Revy felt no wind reach them.
Layered black-and-white fabric folded around the fairy’s seated body. Silver chains caught points of light; heart-shaped jewels rested among the dark straps and pale ruffles. Her butterfly wings shifted, scattering reflections too delicate to lie properly on the ground.
Revy glanced at Tina, then Sera. Neither had turned. The woman on Derpy’s chest was visible only to her, through the blood bond.
The Fairy Spirit Queen leaned over Derpy.
There was no uncertainty in the movement. She knew where to place her hand, how to lower herself without catching her hat against his hair. Her expression softened as she looked at his sleeping face.
Revy’s fingers curled against her own palm.
The fairy kissed him on the lips.
It was brief. Familiar. So quiet that the conversation beside them continued through it.
Then her wings drew inward.
Light slipped beneath the surface of Derpy’s body. Lavender hair, pale fabric, the dark sweep of the hat—each dissolved into the glow until there was no figure left to watch. The last faint spark sank into his chest.
Revy stared at the place where she had been.
“What?” Tina asked.
Revy looked up.
For once, the rhyme did not come immediately.
Derpy lay between them, breathing evenly, while the grass bent beneath a passing breeze.
Revy looked back at his face.
“I’ll ask him when he wakes.”