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Kalice’s garden.

Without a gleaming tree, the dark is dimmer there, thicker and with a weight to it, but I blink once, twice, and the faint emerald glow of the pond illuminates the garden enough—

Enough that I see the natural, ugly whitish coat of a faerie hound, the sort of pale fur that has a pinkish hue to it, the sort that at first glance, might look like it isn’t there at all.

The faerie hound prowls around the pond, the emerald gleam of its fierce stare speared into the golden fish. The upper lip curls to reveal the wink of black metal-like teeth.

The fish taunts the beast.

It dips underwater, deep, then soars up through the surface, flips in the air, and lands with a splash—all before the faerie hound can get its metallic, needle-like teeth into it.

I let a smile whisper over my lips.

My hands find their grip on the arrowheads of the fence, and, for a time, I watch the hound. I watch it snap its death jaws at the pond, but never quite catching the mischievous golden fish; I watch it paw at the mossy water, as though to lure the snack in closer, but it winces at the bite of the cold.

“They love fish,” a dull voice comes from the dark.

I look up as the cloaked female comes down the stone steps from the house over. Shadows are thicker in that garden, so it’s near impossible for my litalf vision to make out more than the grey hue of her cloak, the hood pulled over her head.

“But they are afraid of water,” she says, and though her voice is muted, as though she couldn’t care less about anything she’stelling me. A determined set to her jaw is revealed as she pulls the hood back.

Loose mousy hair spills over pale shoulders.

Kalice spares me no glance before she wanders over to the wild hound. It bows at the rim of the water, its chin rested on the moss-smeared stones, and its rear lifted in the air. It’s the stance I’ve seen many hounds take before rushing into play, but it’s such a casual thing to see on a beast like a faerie hound, and it stuns me quiet for a moment.

All I know of them, I read.

Father never let me keep one, but to have one is a thread in my woven assortment of dreams.

“I have to muzzle her just to bathe her.” Kalice sits on the tree stump beside the pond. She reaches out her bare hand, long and slender, for the spine of her pet. She strokes, and it ignites those chesty thumps again.

I listen for a moment,thump, thump, thump, before I ask, “What are those sounds she’s making?”

“Grunts.” She shrugs, disinterested. “Just another way they communicate. She is telling me to get the fish for her.”

Her face is as expressionless as it often is, as though nothing interests her, not me, not the hound she strokes, not the goldfish who spurts out of the water then smacks the hound’s snout with its tail.

I make a face, eyebrows raised and lips pouted.

That is one courageous, stupid fish.

Kalice reaches for the neck of her cloak. She loosens a sigh as she tugs the strings, and it falls open to reveal a plain white chemise.

She doesn’t speak.

Neither do I.

I have little to say, and all I can think to ask to reignite some form of conversation to fill this tranquil silence between us is inappropriate.

Aleana said she is a changeling, a human babe stolen from her realm, and brought here to be raised by fae.

I want to know more about that.

But to ask of someone’s changeling story is improper in my lands, so I swallow down my curiosities.

Instead, I ask, “Do you always live in Kithe?”

Some folk have other homes in other lands, further out in the Midlands, or a home in Licht, or—like Daxeel’s family—a primary home in Dorcha.