Hyacinthe stopped outside the stables, breathing hard, heart pounding, but keeping himself silent and out of sight of the numerous servants. The amount of servants, alone, would have been enough to make Hyacinthe's head spin. He'd never had memorable interaction with servants, or the institution of keeping servants.

But here they were, as numerous as the villagers in that little village with the little bridge.

Hyacinthe hid away from them for a few agonizing minutes, then crept into the stables to see the horses. To see if any of them would accept him enough that they might take him home. To his real home. Back to the Wood and the cottage and everything he had grown up with and known so intimately.

He found one that poked her head over her stall door curiously. Her coat was gold and dappled white. Her nose was pink. Her eyes were dark, with long lashes and a white star nestled between them.

Hyacinthe thought she might be worth the risk and opened the stall door for her. He winced when he heard the metallic clop of shoed hooves. A rational part of him knew that the hooves were as much for the horse's benefit as for her owners' benefit, but the rest of him hated the idea of nailing a slab of metal to an animal's foot. "What should we call you?" Hyacinthe asked, as the horse drew bashfully out of her stall.

The horse nuzzled his ear. The boy smiled and ruffled her combed mane.

"I will call you Kindly. Whatever your name might be, that can't be incorrect," Hyacinthe whispered to her.

He patted her ribs as he walked beside her, then hoisted himself up onto her back. She was bare of saddle and reigns, but there was a bridle. Not for long, though. As soon as Hyacinthe figured out the buckle, the bridle was dropped to the stable floor.

"Come on, Kindly, I want to go home."

Horse and rider burst out of the stables a moment later, scattering and startling the servants that loitered outside. They went with the wind, fast as the preying hawks and gliding fishes.

How they managed to get out of the palace grounds, and out of the capital city beyond, was a mystery, really. Hyacinthe paid no attention to their surroundings. He merely spoke to Kindly the horse and squinted or closed his eyes against the tendrils of wind that whipped against his face and into his eyes.

Kindly seemed to know where to go. And not just to escape palace and city, but to find her way to the Wood so desperately missed by the new prince, who was really the older prince. When Hyacinthe finally thought to pay attention to his surroundings, Kindly was slowing her hoofbeats and approaching part of the Wood. Granted, not a part of the Wood Hyacinthe had ever been to, but a part of the wood, nonetheless.

Hyacinthe could feel the Wood's great and encompassing energy, he could feel the inhuman emotion that the very trees of the Wood put out. He even thought he espied the Lady of the Wood, creeping among the trees and watching him on his gracious steed.

"Home," Hyacinthe breathed. He might have been crying. His eyes needed to be wiped twice or so with the backs of his hands, anyhow. "Thank you, Kindly."

Hyacinthe dismounted the horse and bid her to be on her own way, to wherever she might go.

He couldn't have known for sure, but, as he watched the horse walk off, Hyacinthe felt that she would return to the stables at the palace. Kindly was a good horse, and a good horse deserved a good home. To that end, Hyacinthe sincerely hoped the stable hands treated her well.

--

The Wood sang its welcome to Hyacinthe. His namesake was a native of the Wood, and those native hyacinths almost seemed to turn and watch him as he walked past. Usually, the edge of the Wood was nowhere near as magical as the further-in of the Wood. But, short as the time away had been, the Wood and its Lady had missed their human child.

Forget kings and politics. Hyacinthe was the Wood's prince, and no one else's.

The Wood's singing was like a siren call. But there was a portion of the Wood where the singing was strongest and most compelling. Hyacinthe answered the call of this song with the movement of his feet, seeking out the source of the strongest song. Part of him expected it to be the Lady of the Wood. The rest of him knew it could not be. She never sang to him. She appeared to him. It was different.

The call, as it turned out, was not from the depths of the Wood, where the other songs of the Wood generally originated. It came from the edge. In particular, from the garden of a cottage, not very unlike the one Hyacinthe had grown up in, and fond of.

Hyacinthe wavered outside the cottage's clearing. On one side were the thinning trees and a glimpse of fields. On the other side, the Wood grew denser. To most, that density was forbidding. To Hyacinthe, it was a sign that he was home, safe, and where he belonged. The cottage's clearing seemed to hang onto both the Wood's edge, and the humans' domains beyond the Wood, and the thickening Wood, and the magic the Wood bore. It was a liminal space, like...

Like.

Hyacinthe had no examples. What was it like? Had he ever known a liminal space in the Wood? One of both magic, faerie, and human natures? Perhaps not.

The gardens and clearing continued to sing Hyacinthe a sweet lullaby of a song. It beckoned him closer, insisted that he meet the cottage's dweller. Almost against his own accords, he moved forward from the shadows, out of his hiding, and into the clearing. The liminal nature of the place flooded his senses like pleasantly thick clover honey, still warm from its time boiling gently over Loch's outdoor cooking fire.

"Why, who's this?"

Hyacinthe's eyes snapped to the side of the cottage, where a solitary human woman knelt, smiling, in her garden. It had to be her garden. Her voice was almost as honeyed sweet as the garden's siren song. She wasn't very old, but nor was she very young.

"Are you a witch?" was the first question out of Hyacinthe's mouth. Then he flushed. It was not a polite question, at all. And it brimmed with uncalled-for wonder. Maybe hope.

The woman laughed, musically. "No," she said. "I am just what they call a hermit. I live alone. Or, hermitess, if you prefer. Some seem to. And who are you? One of the Wood's or one of the humans'?"

"The Wood," Hycinthe said, quickly. "The only human thing about me is the blood in my veins. Everything besides my breeding is of the Wood. My care, growth, the way I was nurtured, my teachers, everything was of the Wood."

"How novel," the hermitess stood, dusting her hands off on her pants.

Hyacinthe hadn't seen a single woman in pants while among humans. "Are you really not a witch?" he asked.

"No, there are other reasons that the human folk rejected me. But let's not get into that. How would you like a cup of tea, child of the Wood? I have not had company, except the Lady herself, for a very long time. I should thank you for the chance to entertain someone."

"You needn't thank me for anything..." Hyacinthe moved forward. "I would be glad to accept the hospitality." What else was there to do? Seek out the empty cottage?

The woman smiled and went to the door, opening it gladly to her guest. She then left it open behind them. "It's so nice out, today. I should like to have some of the outdoors in," she explained. Her cottage was small and sparsely decorated, but not claustrophobic or austere.

Inside, there was also a little girl, standing beside a great wheel and untangling a burr from some cotton, presumably from the nearby fields that Hyacinthe had noted, through the trees. The little girl looked up and jumped a little. "A boy!" she said.

"Clever girl," the hermitess said. "Son of the Wood, this is the Daughter of the Hermit."

"Son of the Wood?" the girl asked.

"And Daughter of the Hermit," the hermitess laughed a little and moved to put a kettle over the fire. "She may look gray or sickly to you, Son of the Wood, but worry not. That is her skin, not an ailment, which you note." And it was true. The little girl, as she stepped out of the shaded corner, did appear very gray or pallid. Like a layer of dust coated her skin. It was at odds with her peach dress, a dress which was far shorter than any Hyacinthe had seen on a girl.

He didn't find it indecent any more than he found the Lady of the Wood's styles of dress indecent, though. It was a little girl with her little-girl legs. Just as Hyacinthe generally went around wearing his knee-length tunics, and little else.

"She is of the dark elves' bloodline, as well as human. The humans, though, they don't like it," the hermitess offered. "I call her Honeybee, but her name is properly Clover."

"Honeybee," Hyacinthe echoed.

"And Son of the Wood," the hermitess said, serene.

"What is that?" Hyacinthe pointed at the great wheel. Honeybee and hermitess, both, turned to look at it. Strange names weren't all that strange, to him. And what should he care if Honeybee's blood was dark and human, all at once?

"A spinning wheel," Honeybee said. "I just learned it."

"And I just taught it," the hermitess bustled around a series of tins on the hearth, putting pinches of dried things into a small bowl. "Tea," she said, when she saw Hyacinthe look over. "I like to mix the tea leaves. Dark with light, light with dark, and bits of cinnamon and dried things. The tastes you can make are quite wonderful."

"Oh," Hyacinthe offered, nodding a bit hesitantly, just to show he was listening.

"Do you want to see how it works," Honeybee held up the cotton, newly divested of its burr. "I can show you."

"Oh," Hyacinthe repeated. Somehow, he felt a bit awkward, sure, but he didn't feel uncomfortable with the little gray girl in her little peach dress, or the hermitess herself. "I would like that, yes. What does a spinning wheel do?" And what did it have to do with cotton?

"It spins thread," Honeybee said. She looked to the hermitess for approval.

"That it does," the hermitess agreed.

Honeybee smiled and turned to the wheel. "This is sharp," she said, pointing to a needle hung off part of the great wheel. "I once hurt my finger quite badly on it."

Hyacinthe moved closer to inspect the needle indicated.