The wasp darted closer, circling her with unnerving hunger.
“No! No, no, no—don’t you dare!” she squeaked, zipping backward through the leaves. “Do I look like food to you? It's just a perfume!—expensive perfume! I'm not edible. I swear."
The wasp advanced, its stinger glinting in the sunlight like a drawn blade.
Amora darted sideways through the dense oak leaves, the branches whipping past her face. “Oh no you don’t!” she hissed, twisting sharply as the creature lunged again. The rush of its wings sent a gust that nearly knocked her off balance.
She wove through the green canopy in a chaotic blur of pink and gold, muttering breathless indignations between panicked gasps.
“Stay calm. Be graceful. You’re a fairy of poise— Aah! Not the stinger! Definitely not the stinger!”
The wasp buzzed closer, its stinger gleaming like a needle of doom.
Amora bolted. She darted through the branches, wings beating furiously as she wove between twigs and leaves. “Oh, stars above—no, no, no!” she squealed, diving under one branch and over another. “Go sting a fruit! I’m not on the menu!”
The wasp followed, relentless, slicing the air with its furious hum. It swooped so close she could feel the heat of its wings on her back. She spun, zipped sideways, then darted straight through a veil of leaves, trailing a faint scatter of pink shimmer in her wake.
“Stop following me!” she yelled over her shoulder. “You’ll regret it—I know curses that make apples sour!”
Below, the clash of steel filled the air—harsh, rhythmic, relentless. Alistair met every strike with precision, his body moving on instinct. But his attention was divided. The faint, erratic flicker in his peripheral vision refused to be ignored.
A shimmer in the branches. Too quick. Too wild.
He angled his stance to the left, feinting a parry just to steal another glance—and then he saw it. The dark blur of something large buzzing through the sunlight, hunting something small and bright that zigzagged through the oak’s upper boughs.
The shimmer was hers. The darker shape was hunting.
The realization slammed through him like a blow to the chest.
“Hold,” Alistair barked—sharp, commanding, nothing of calm left in it.
He didn’t wait to see if Gareth obeyed. His sword fell to the dirt as he crossed the ring in three strides, every motion stripped of formality, driven by a pulse-deep urgency that surprised even him.
The tree shook. Branches flared with motion—pink and bronze blurs colliding. His gaze locked on her as she burst through the sunlight, the wasp’s stinger catching the light like a drawn blade.
He moved without thought.
Hands came up, palms open—steady, ready.
And in that heartbeat, when her panic met his intent, something unseen snapped taut between them.
A thread—thin, incandescent crimson—flared into existence, connecting her to him in a single, brilliant instant. It shimmered once in the air, an arc of living light pulled by instinct, by reflex, by need.
Amora’s tiny form shot toward him, drawn along that thread as if it were the only path left in the world.
She hit his palms with a faint, desperate weight. He closed his hands, careful but sure, enclosing her completely as the wasp sliced past and veered away, its furious hum fading into the distance.
For a long moment, Alistair stood perfectly still, his heart hammering against the quiet. Then, slowly, he looked down at his closed hands.
They were warm — warmer than they should have been — and something inside them trembled faintly. Carefully, he uncurled his fingers.
Amora sat there in the cradle of his palms, small enough to vanish between his lifelines. Her wings were folded tight against her back, her arms wrapped around herself as if she were holding all her pieces in place. Glitter clung to his skin where she touched him, soft as the dust of a sunrise.
“Breathe,” he murmured before he could stop himself. The word came out low, almost foreign on his tongue.
At the sound of his voice, she stirred. Slowly, cautiously, Amora loosened her arms. One wing twitched, then another, unfurling like delicate silk banners after a storm.
Alistair’s gaze swept over her — not with curiosity, but calculation. One, two, both wings intact. Limbs accounted for. No blood, no bent edges. His pulse eased.
Then she moved again, blinking up at him in dazed confusion. Her hands, still trembling slightly, pressed against his skin for balance — and that was when she saw them.
Two faint lines of light — one a soft, pulsing gold, the other a deep, smoldering crimson — stretched from her chest toward his. They shimmered in the air between them, barely visible, like the afterimage of lightning behind closed eyes.
Her gaze followed them upward, tracing their paths until it landed on the source — the steady rise and fall of his chest, the light anchored there as though drawn to his heart.
She froze.
For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. Then, without warning, Amora’s wings flared and she began swatting frantically at the empty space between them — tiny hands batting at the air as if trying to shoo away invisible dust.
Alistair stiffened, instinctively steadying his palms but not closing them. “Easy,” he said quietly, though she couldn’t have heard the word over the faint hum of her wings. The sharpness of her movements—half panic, half disbelief—made his jaw tighten.
Still shaken. Hallucinating the wasp, perhaps.
That was Alistair’s conclusion — the simplest, most rational explanation.
And Amora’s thoughts weren’t entirely different from his.
Still shaken. Hallucinating those threads, perhaps. Then why do they linger?
No. No, no, no. That’s not— it can't be true.
It must be a magical feedback loop. A stress-induced hallucination from the wasp! Yes, that’s it. My system is overloaded.
Or…
Her eyes, still wide, darted over his face, then down to his chest—bare, flushed from sparring, a faint sheen of sweat catching the light. His heartbeat pulsed steady beneath the skin, and for some unholy reason her glow flickered in rhythm with it.
…Or maybe it’s just a… purely physical, aesthetic reaction. A primal appreciation for a well-executed rescue by a… a logically proportioned torso. That’s a thing, right?
But then a cold, mortifying clarity slid over her like ice water.
Wait. I’ve seen him bare-chested before. I watched him train for four months. I saw him sweat, I saw him swing a sword, I saw him
—
Her wings sagged. Her tiny shoulders slumped.
Oh, no. He’s right. I really have been… stalking him.
Stars above, she thought miserably. I’m not just a failure. I’m the creepy fairy who spies on dukes and then develops feelings about it. This is so much worse.
She gave her head a tiny, frantic shake, as if she could physically dislodge the thought. Her glow wavered again, scattering faint motes of pink light across his palms.
No. No, it’s the panic. And the sun. It’s… it’s very bright today.
Yes. That’s it. It’s just the sun and the panic and the… the residual wasp-related adrenaline. Definitely.
And these threads—absolutely imaginary. The crimson one made a kind of sense, sure, given the life-saving and the hands and the heart-pounding and all that—but the golden one? Impossible. That one proved it was all nonsense.
Because there was nothing remotely admirable about the way she’d been shrieking and flailing from a giant insect. If that could create a thread of admiration, then the entire emotional-bond system of the universe was broken.
So yes. Hallucinations. Entirely.
Definitely.
Alistair studied her in silence.
For a moment, she seemed to have slipped into some private storm — eyes darting, wings twitching, expression flickering between panic, disbelief, and the kind of mental arithmetic only she could possibly follow. He watched the movements ripple through her — the subtle tremor in her fingers, the faint dip of her wings before they steadied again.
He exhaled softly through his nose. She was still trembling, still dazed. The rapid shifts of her expression weren’t nonsense; they were the mind’s way of climbing out of shock.
She’ll need time to come back to herself.
Carefully, he shifted one hand to the bench beside him. The folded linen of his shirt lay exactly where he had left it, still crisp at the edges, faintly dusted with earth from the air. He eased her onto it, letting her settle into the shallow dip where the fabric folded over itself.
She didn’t resist. Her glow dimmed against the linen, half-muted by the weave, her expression distant—lost somewhere deep inside whatever storm her mind was still weathering.
That was enough. Concealed by shadow and cloth, she was safe, unseen.
Alistair lingered only long enough to be certain she would stay where he placed her. Then he straightened, the movement clean, composed, and deliberate.
Gareth.
He’d dropped his sword mid-bout, barked an order, and walked off without explanation. The man would have questions.
Alistair’s mind began composing the answer before his body even turned. Distraction. A glint in the branches. Sunlight interference. Enough truth to sound convincing, enough vagueness to end the inquiry quickly.
He drew a slow breath, forcing the rhythm of his pulse back to its steady, measured pace. One last glance at the shirt — at the faint, glittering motes that still clung to its folds — then he folded his composure back into place.
Alistair turned, composure already rebuilt by the time he faced the ring again. Gareth stood where he’d left him — sword lowered, expression puzzled, still near the center.
Without a word, Alistair walked back across the packed earth toward him. His stride was steady, unhurried. He stooped to retrieve his sword, the movement smooth, deliberate — as though the interruption had been no more than a brief recalibration of form.
“False alarm,” he said before Gareth could speak. “A glint in the branches. I thought it was movement.”
A pause — measured, effortless. “Just a wasp, as it turns out. Aggressive little thing.”
Gareth let out a short, breathless chuckle, still catching his wind. “Your instincts never sleep, do they, Your Grace?”
“They can’t afford to,” Alistair replied, straightening to his full height. The words were calm, crisp — but his gaze flicked, just once, toward the oak and the bench beneath it before settling back on his opponent.
“Again,” he said.
As Gareth mirrored the stance, something faint caught his eye — a shimmer on the Duke’s hand, pale pink in the sun. Glitter? His gaze flicked toward the folded shirt resting on the bench.
And in the private theater of his own mind, the conclusion formed with weary inevitability.
Of course. The Duke had taken a moment mid-bout to apply some sort of perfumed balm. Perhaps something medicinal. Or scented. Nobles had their rituals.
He nodded to himself once, the mystery solved to his own satisfaction.
The Duke, apparently, possessed a bizarre, secret fondness for expensive, glittering hand balms— and the decency to hide them under his folded shirt.