When Hyacinthe fell to the ground in the cottage, Honeybee didn't know what to say. It seemed strange to her that their guest would react to a spinning wheel that way. But then, she was hard to startle. "Mother," she alerted.

It was the hermitess who reacted. The kettle fell from her fingertips, though not because her guest was on the ground. "The Wood," she said. "Honeybee, do you hear it?"

"No, Mother," the little girl said. She stepped carefully away from the still form of their guest. "I cannot hear the Wood the way you do."

"No, I suppose you can't," the hermitess said, shaken. "It cries, my Honeybee. It screams and shouts and cries. If it had a throat, it would be raw. It says a name." She closed her eyes to listen. "It cries out his name, I think. But it sounds like two names, when the Wood is saying it. Two names overlaying each other and obscuring the other."

"He is dead?" Honeybee asked.

"What?" the hermitess looked at her daughter, opening her eyes to do so, then turned her gray eyes -- gray as her daughter's unearthly complexion -- to Hyacinthe's still form. "No, Honeybee. Look at his chest, how it rises and falls."

"Then he is asleep?" Honeybee knelt, then scooted on her knees closer to the boy.

"Yes, I think so," the hermitess said.

"But he will not wake."

It was neither hermitess nor Honeybee who said that. It was the Lady of the Wood, hovering just beyond the threshold.

"He will not?" Honeybee asked.

The Lady did not enter. She never did, not that she visited often. "No. He is under a Curse of the Usurper's design, and a countercurse only just able to stave off death... Daybreak he might be, but the boy will not rise with the sun, as he has for all his days. He will sleep. And sleep."

"What to do," Honeybee hummed and looked back at the boy. "Is his name Daybreak?"

"Sometimes," the Lady said. She smoothed her skirts, long and short, and gossamer thin around her legs. "I will call his friends. I will tell him of what has happened. In time, they may forgive you. But the humans will not. Come deeper into my home, so that I may protect you. It is not your fault where the Curse transpired, after all. Be my daughters."

Honeybee looked at hermitess, hermitess looked at Honeybee.

"An agreement," the Lady of the Wood said. She nodded once. "Good. Leave. He will fine in my care, and it would be best if you were not here. If your personal things were not here."

Honeybee and her mother didn't exactly spring into action. But the hermitess picked up the kettle while Honeybee went over to the bed and stripped it down to its mattress.

"Andleave the wheel," the Lady instructed.