I turn to look at Olly with no small amount of disbelief, only to see my expression matched on Ayre’s face. The same undercurrent of annoyance and disbelief, …though maybe she’s actually angry. Why would she be mad?

  “What? Why are you looking at me like that?” I flutter over until I’m floating before her and feel waves of heat rolling from her and bits of Ignia floating loose in her eyes.

  “‘What?’, you say?” Her voice is as hushed as she can be, but she gestures away from the fire for me to follow her. I cast a look back at Olly, who’s dutifully packing up his few possessions and moving onto mine and Ayre’s without complaint or request. After a dozen or so steps and many more wingbeats we come to a stop behind a tree relative to the camp. “What exactly is your problem, Lilly?” Her voice comes through clenched teeth, veritably hissing, “I was trying to give Olly a bit of hope that there might be a solution ahead of him. Everything that happens to him is just another layer of damage and trauma. Why, for all of the Breath of the sun, did you immediately undercut that?”

  It’s been a while since I’ve seen Ayre this mad, so I’m a bit taken aback, “I wasn’t trying to undercut anything!” I match her hushed whisper. “Of course I want to get Olly help. I wouldn’t have an issue with a simple, boring solution!”

  “And what do you think *he* thought when you said that?”

  I stop, realizing what Ayre’s getting at. “I… I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just talking about stories.” Ayre doesn’t seem to calm at all, so I follow up, “Look, obviously I didn’t mean anything bad by it, he knows that, right?” I peek around the tree and see he’s more or less finished organizing and is tossing handfuls of dirt into the makeshift fire pit. His face answers my question more clearly than Ayre could ever have. It's guarded and carefully neutral. The sort of face you'd never look at twice if you were just caught it in a glance. But as I look more closely and focus, I see the pain there, sitting entirely in his eyes. I stare for a while, but he eventually turns his back to me and sits on a nearby log. There's a great weight coming down atop me, like a crushing boulder pressing down on my chest. Guilt.

  I fly slowly to a nearby branch where I can see Olly and sit, crossing my legs and putting my elbows on my knees to brace my chin with my hands. “I see you caught on.” Ayre’s voice is softer. Not accusatory or judgemental. Like she flipped a switch.

  “Yeah, I think so. Olly isn't too savvy with that stuff, so he didn’t really have the context to take it well. I’ll need to apologize to him.” I sigh a little, “You’ve had plenty of years to get used to me, and I was just acting the same way I always would with you.”

  “Well…you’re getting there, at least.” Ayre extends a hand for me to step onto, and I oblige and am lifted to her horns. It dispels some of my morose mood. “I’d wait until you two have some private time to do so, and not right away. I know if I was in a similar mood, the last thing I would want is for someone to come up to me right away and try to explain away my feelings.”

  She makes a slow movement to nod along with her words without jostling me much, and I agree. “Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks Ayre.” I feel a bit pensive as I say the next thing. “If he says something about it to you, can you let him know I’m sorry? I know you two have been getting along better than he and I have.” I think back to the last time I thought I hurt his feelings — just yesterday — and all the times he's pulled away from me, and frown.

  “If he comes to me, sure. But I’m probably going to do so by telling him to go talk to you.” She responds with a bit of a taunting tone as we make it to Olly, who has broken camp as much as he can with one hand. The tent poles and other traveling gear has been neatly collected, but he seems to have attempted to put some things in their proper places and not had the best time of it.

  Sitting beneath the big backpack, I see one of the straps is hanging frayed with a small pile of that weird dust beneath it. “Hey Olly, what hap-” I begin to ask, but am cut off by Ayre.

  “Don’t worry about it, Olly. You did your half, I’ll take care of the rest. Lilly, can you try to mend the strap as best you can?” Ayre’s tone is a bit sharper, seemingly trying to impart some specific message to me.

  It takes a moment -- too long, probably -- but I realize she stopped me from asking a stupid question.

  I hop off of Ayre's head and incant to change my size on the way down halfheartedly.

  Stretch and shift, my shape and size, let me see through mortal eyes.

  The change happens more slowly than usual, something that is honestly quite unpleasant. Normally, I try to finish it quickly to avoid the uncomfortable stretching sensation across my entire body, but that’s not the case today, apparently. Less wear and tear on my dress at least, since it usually causes small tears when I go quickly. Fixing it is trivial, but it’s still effort, so I’ll take the small win.

  “Yeah, can do, Ayre.” I move to walk past Olly, and he physically recoils as he seems to notice me for the first time, stepping back a few steps as if I struck him. He’s seen me change shape a few times, it really shouldn’t surprise him to see me in this form, but maybe his head is just elsewhere.

  I gesture in the air as I pick up the bag, drawing a circle of rapidly solidifying essence with a finger. A mirrored lens appears in the middle, filling the golden circle in a few moments with an eternally whirling pool of quicksilver. I reach my hand into the pool and my small storage area beyond that I maintain with a bit of essence every day and pull out a thin metal tin. It’s made of a pleasant blue metal and large enough for me to stand comfortably in my fairy form. I've used it as a sort of armory where I stored all of my “equipment” over the years. It came from some distant country my father visited, and it used to have just the *best* little cookies in it, but they have long since run out. Regrettably, I’ve never quite been able to replicate them. Had I had the forethought to not eat all of them in one sitting when I was little, I might have tried to break one down to replicate…but I ate all of them in one sitting while I was little.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  I smile at the memory as I pop the lid off and pull out a kit I use for sewing up Ayre’s clothes when she’s needed it. She made patches more often than not, but when things got too bad, she’d usually give me a small pile of things to fix up. Much as I am loathe to admit it, this is the one type of physical work I actually enjoy doing. I find it cathartic to fix things and to be able to see them whole at the end.

  That thought carries me to my sitting place on a stump. I set about carefully working the little engraved bone needle back and forth across various connections on the backpack, synthesizing string as needed to both repair and strengthen fraying seams. I begin to hum along to my work—one of my fathers’ favorite songs he sang to me when I was young: The Wily Weasel. It was one of my favorites too, and father assured me it was a true story, despite nobody else quite believing him about it. It was a short, melodic, and rhyming song detailing The Traveller going on his grand journeys only to have several climactic ends denied to him by a recurring rival of his, an unnaturally large ferret.

  He assured me back then ferrets are weasels, despite my protests to the contrary, and I’d accused him of fibbing (Entirely different from lying) to get the alliterative title. He’d never admitted it at any point, though. Which wound up making sense, as years later in one of Ayre's boring encyclopedias I found out that I'd been mistaken. Never told father that, though, he would have (perhaps rightfully) been smug about it.

  I smile as I work, remembering the countless times he sang or hummed it while I was falling asleep, or while carrying me around when I was feeling down for one reason or another. The thought brings me back to Sir Henry Slinks, and how I first tried to coax him into being my rival like my father had had. It worked out better than expected, thinking on it now. I always dreamed of having such a devoted “rival”.

  Casting my eyes up, I see Ayre trying to cheer Olly up by chatting at him about a favorite book, apparently to mixed success. He seems to be nodding along, asking questions, but it's all very muted with no real animation. It reminds me that I should probably feel bad, and I promptly feel bad. My reverie is utterly dispelled and that weight returns to my shoulders along with the knot in my stomach.

  “I’ve gotta say something. I don’t want him to think I don’t care. If I wait too long, he might think I don’t regret how he reacted to my statement. If I don’t wait at all, I’ll probably just make his mood worse.” I ponder, thinking of ways to communicate my feelings and trying to search my memories of similar situations in tales I’ve heard.

  Something from a story, like in On The River To The Moon? No, too romantic, probably not appropriate.

  A gift? But what? I don’t have anything handy that would be useful or valuable to him. I could pick him some flowers, maybe? That doesn’t show that I’m putting in effort to improve things, though.

  I could carry the backpack? He said it was heavy with the tents in it and uncomfortable because he couldn’t use both straps.

  Pick flowers as we go, while wearing the backpack so Olly doesn’t have to. For a little while at least. If it’s actually really heavy, this might be short-lived. I have my limits for how much work I’ll do. A playwright needn’t sully her hands with callouses, after all. Nobody’s ever fallen for a dainty princess with sandpaper hands, either.

  Though maybe that could be an interesting story… A girl cursed with hands so coarse they destroy anything she touches! I kick the idea around in my mind for a little while but end up discarding it, thinking the idea is a bit contrived since I’m traveling with someone who actually has that happen. Not original enough….though maybe there’s someone like that out there for Olly? That could be cute, as long as their cursed hands were on opposite sides so they can still hold hands.

  “Done!” I announce, as I hop up, hold the empty backpack aloft. I’d managed to reattach the strap by synthesizing a bit of fae fabric—the same my dress is made of. It’s very durable, but somewhat stretchy, so I had to loop it back on itself a few times in order to get the strength I needed without the strap having too much flex. It would have left one strap with an anomalous glowing gold strip, though, so I sewed a matching section onto the other, serving the dual purpose of aesthetics and reinforcement.

  They both look over at me and smile, blessedly. Olly’s is guarded, but Ayre looks pleased—she’s always enjoyed my work, same as I enjoy her talking about magic. But, turning away, I start to gather and put things in the backpack while Ayre stares at me with surprise. “Hah! You never thought I’d do something like this willingly, didn’t you? Well, you’d be right normally. So I guess you’re still right, since I am basically doing this under duress. But that doesn't matter! Because I'm doing it!”

  I get halfway through packing the bag when I realize I’ve run out of space. Which shouldn’t be the case. I watched Ayre and Olly unpack the bag earlier. Everything fit. Why doesn’t it fit now? Did the backpack change? Frustrated, I upturn the bag to start over and hear a nearly concealed chuckle from behind me.

  I purse my lips, but set about trying again. This time I collect all of the like-shaped things, poles with poles, fabric folded and rolled, and the little spikey things that hold the tents down in an outside pocket. At the end of it, I have *nearly* everything inside. Everything except for Ayre’s copper lantern. Not to be defeated, I quickly sew a little loop onto the side of the pack and hang the little lantern from it. “Looks better that way anyways, if you ask me.”

  “You about done, Lilly? I didn’t want to interrupt because you seemed to be having fun.” Ayre says with no small amount of taunting in her tone.

  Olly spots the lantern as I haul the backpack onto my back—with considerable effort— and gives it a smile as it rocks back and forth, making a fairly pleasant metallic *ting* each time it rocks against the bits of metal on the backpack. “That’s a good idea. Frees up someone’s hands if we need to travel in the dark.” His smile drifts from the bag to me directly, and I turn away, purely because I want to get moving on, since the backpack is heavy. That also being the same reason my cheeks are getting red. It's really heavy. Really.

  “Oh it’s nothing. Let’s get going.” My voice comes out a bit less composed than I’d hoped it would, so I play up the effort I’m putting in to explain it away as the others start to follow along behind me.

  “You want me to take that, Lilly?”

  “No, Olly, I don’t. I’m doing this as penance, you silly man!” I shout at him (fully within the confines of my own head) and shake my head. With careful steps, I focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it, Olly. Lilly loves doing this kind of thing. She’s helped me a ton over the years by carrying my burdens.” I hear the smile on her face, and it’s definitely a gloating one. She knows full well that’s a lie just as well as I do, but Olly just nods along, believing every word.

  Traitor.