The night is bitter, and Derek can hear wolves howling all around. It feels like it lasts longer than the age of mankind, with him cowering in primordial terror behind the scant protection of a raincoat and a little fire.

He stays as far from Deirdre as he can in the confined space. She looks badly damaged by her fall into the river. It takes a long while for her to stabilize and be able to sit up without leaning on anything. He worries she has a concussion and may not wake if she falls asleep.

Despite his exhaustion, Derek tries, indescribably hard, to not let himself sleep while a person whose fate he is responsible for is in such dire straights. And he is still afraid of the thing of air that tried to kill him in that leaf-littered hole. These woods are dark and terrible.

But sleep comes even for the unwilling, and he wakes eventually to a frost-coated morning. Coals still glow in the little campfire, and steam rises from the protected little cove. His feet still ache, and his calves feel taut within his warm, snug boots from their miserable exertion of the day before. His back feels every one of his nearly 30 years, and it is a struggle to sit up with his shoulder aching miserably from falling asleep on cold, solid ground.

Deirdre snores lightly within arm’s reach, a stone for a pillow beneath her battered head.

Derek feeds Bootsie from their meager stash of food. There is not enough to last another day, and he lacks the means to spend another night in these woods. They have to make it back to town.

But he doesn’t want to touch Deirdre to wake her.

So he waits instead. And he watches the regular rise and fall of her back as she breathes. A tiny smile touches her lips, her face faintly flush with some secret joy. And he worries less that she will die in the immediate future.

And worries more that she will hang in the more distant future.

It’s dark thoughts like this that cloud his mind to the point of distraction when she finally does wake on her own, shivering as the embers die down without added fuel.

They share what little food there is between them and neither choose to speak as Derek politely stays on the opposite side of the makeshift privacy screen while Deirdre changes and gives him back his shirt. Goosebumps prickle his exposed skin. His raincoat is stiff with frost when he shakes it out. The weather has turned colder overnight.

With so few navigation aids available, it is by common unspoken decision that both turn their warmed and dried boots toward the icy river.

Derek prays to the silent sunrise above that neither one of them falls in again.

Frost sparkles in the morning sunlight and his breath clouds the air. Yesterday’s rain clouds are nowhere to be found. The sky that peeks through the tree canopy above shines clear and blue and pink and gold. It is a beautiful apology for the prior day’s misery.

A single white stag watches them from across a clearing. His antlered crown has dozens of points. He stands tall and proud, watching them pass through his demesne without the slightest shred of fear. Derek spies his charge, rolling the broken arrow across her palm as they cross before the stag’s unflinching gaze.

Their feet crunch through the frost on the fallen leaves. Bootsie’s wagging tail thumps loudly against Derek’s leg.

Deirdre limps slowly, still favoring one side and hugging her arms across her torso. Derek cannot see the damage through her layers of clothing, but he fears it may be significant. It comforts him that her breathing at least does not sound overly laborious.

“When we get back to Aegis,” Deirdre says, as if speaking to the woods themselves and not the man walking at her side, “I can confess.”

Derek is taken aback. After everything else that had happened, he did not think it would be her to actually decide to take this course of action.

He says nothing, and waits for her to continue. Walking is tiring enough, and he chooses not to multi-task.

After a few minutes of additional silence, Deirdre speaks up again.

“It’s a cycle, isn’t it?”

Derek looks at her and raises a curious eyebrow. He opts to continue not saying anything.

“Everything that was done to me,” Deirdre says, wincing as she speaks, “I passed it on to others who were even less deserving. I gave them worse than even I got.”

Derek keeps walking.

“It’s not possible to make it right, is it?”

They walk in silence, with Derek thinking hard about how many people have sat in miserable conditions, suffered in the questioner’s chair, or received permanent disfigurement in his career as a lawman. The magistrate’s rulings had ended the severing of hands as punishment, but that was after decades of enforcing it. Derek has been the one to bring in a thief to have that punishment applied before.

There’s no reattaching a hand.

You can’t unknot the noose.

They’d hang her for that confession, for sure. But would it make anything right?

“No,” Derek answers. “But there is definite value in trying.”

They have little else to talk about while walking through the calm woods. Birds chirp cheerful good mornings overhead. The sun shines and air is cold and biting.

They hear the moving water long before they reach the river itself. Concerned that the villainous sheriff may yet still wait in ambush, Derek steps ahead. He requests Deirdre stay hidden in the deeper woods. Just in case.

Just in case.

She stands behind a wide trunk, still pressing a hand to her injured ribs and her spine into the bark like the old oak will give her healing grace that nature withholds in deference to time.

A narrow clearing lies between that tree and the willows that perch on their tangled roots on the pebbly bank. Derek focuses so hard on the fear that in case is the current case that he cannot notice what is directly in front of him.

His boot brushes gently against the top of a ghostly white mushroom cap.

The dust that falls from it glitters faintly in the morning’s sunlight. Drops of thawed dew sprinkle his brown leather boot with gold. His second step crushes a round puffball beneath his careless heel.

It explodes with a faint pop. The crunch releases golden spores to float in the air. They smell faintly of urine, the sharp ammonia scent a dire warning.

Derek thinks it’s a strange place for someone to be playing a harp.

Something small and fast buzzes past his ear with a high-pitched whine. It swings a wide arc around the clearing and returns to buzz past and cuts a nick on his cheek. Flecks of blood join a shower of pale sparks that trail in its wake.

Bootsie barks and snaps at the tiny flying thing. It skims low to the ground, carving a long arc around the clearing. Passing over their tops, it illuminates the perfect circle of mushrooms that Derek failed to notice.

Additional tiny things emerge from beneath the mushrooms.

They buzz and shriek around him wildly, drawing wild patterns of trails of glitter about the clearing. Derek freezes in place, terrified to move even a single muscle. He dares not even blink.

He accidentally stepped into a fairy circle.

“Villain!” a tiny voice shouts, right next to his ear. “Treacherous monster!”

“Great brute!” another chimes in, darting close to his face and then quickly away.

“House squasher! Home wrecker!”

“No Marble, that’s not the right word for that.”

“The home is wrecked! It’s a home wrecker!”

Derek’s eyes track downward to his feet. And indeed, he has trod directly on one of their many mushrooms. He gently lifts his guilty heel. One of the tiny fairies darts in again to slice a thin needle’s worth of pain across his nose.

He flinches and they scatter momentarily. All the tiny things whirl around him like angered hornets. They fly frantically and without pattern.

Minuscule hands beat tiny drums somewhere in the hollow of the old oak tree where Deirdre hides safe from miniature harm. She has the opportunity to leave at any time. Derek knows good and well that it would be the better choice.

One of the little fairies slices Bootsie’s nose with its tiny needle blade. The dog sneezes and barks, making a racket fit to alert the damned in their abyss below.

The little drumbeat fills the clearing with a rhythm to the maddened madness that is a hundred fairies flying, the sparkling dust of their wings casting the circle in a glowing haze.

“It must pay!” one chants, it’s tinny voice shrill with righteous fury. “It must be punished!”

Derek has been spending far too much time of late contemplating what it means to serve the unkind master that is Justice.

And he has learned, one must temper it with mercy that he does not deserve, not even in an act of this reduced scale.

“Forgive me,” he begs, for one can ask for forgiveness can for and one can earn it. “Please forgive my error!”

“Okay!” He recognizes the voice as the first one he heard. There is an upward squeak at the end of the word that he cannot place as a question. The other fairies have a brief disagreement over this turn of events.

“No!” one shouts.

“Not without punishment!”

“Okay!” the first fairy squeaks again. “I’ll forgive it - if it can dance.”

This delights the entire circle. They squeak so high their voices hurt Derek’s ears. Bootsie howls and continues to snap until he issues the Down command. She cowers against the forest floor, rubbing her stung nose against her paws. The faint harp music Derek was so unsure that he heard before begins.

And it is all he can do to step carefully into the ring.

The rhythm of tiny drums replaces his heartbeat. He must move in time. He must dance or he will surely die.