Now, it should be said that fireflies are not, as a rule, sentimental creatures.
They do not linger. They do not wait. They light what needs lighting and move on, and if something stops being worth lighting they have no particular opinion about it and simply go elsewhere.
These fireflies, however, had apparently decided to make an exception.
The great swarm that had lit every path in the forest drifted to a halt at the treeline, as though they had reached a border they had agreed not to cross. The boy stood on the road and looked back at them — hundreds of small green lights, patient and hovering, watching him the way the house had always watched him. Aware. Attending. Waiting for him to be alright before they let themselves rest.
He raised one hand. They brightened slightly. Then held.
He turned and walked the rest of the way home in the dark. Three small lights drifted just above his left shoulder, because they had apparently decided he was their responsibility now, and nobody had asked them and nobody needed to.
It was the kind of dark that is not frightening so much as honest — the dark of a world that has stopped performing and gone to sleep. The same fences leaned like tired old men. The same laundry lines hung still. The cobblestones said nothing, which was courteous of them.
His father was standing outside.
Thump went the boy's stomach — quickly, without asking permission. His feet slowed on their own. His body had a longer memory than his mind, and it was not yet certain which version of the evening this was going to be.
The King of Chores was standing very still in the way of someone who had been pacing and had recently stopped because pacing was not helping. His arms were folded. His expression was the careful blank of a man holding something tightly that he did not want seen.
The boy came down the road and stopped a few feet away.
The three fireflies, to their considerable credit, immediately hid behind his head.
The King of Chores looked at the boy. Then past him, at the forest. Dark and still and offering nothing to a reasonable person.
"Where have you been," he said. Not a shout. The low voice. The controlled one, which was in some ways its own kind of weather.
"The forest," the boy said.
"Alone."
It was not quite a question.
The boy thought about the fireflies behind his head, about the First of Wings, about a hand held in his for several hours and a kiss still faintly present somewhere near his left ear.
"I made a friend," he said.
The King of Chores looked at the forest again. Dark. Quiet. Nothing visible to a man who had stopped believing in things that could not be seen.
He opened his mouth. The boy could see the familiar shape of the words being assembled — something about real things and imaginary things and the difference between the two.
Then the King of Chores looked at his son's face instead.
He stopped.
Whatever was on the boy's face, it was apparently enough to interrupt something that had been building for a while. The King of Chores closed his mouth. The words did not arrive. And the quiet between them was a different kind of quiet from the one that had existed before.
"Get inside," the King of Chores said. "It's late."
The boy went.
And then, from the doorway — quiet as something said to the night air rather than to anyone in particular —
"I hope you guys had fun."
The boy stopped in the hallway. He stood there for a moment with those words settling somewhere they had not expected to land. Then he kept walking.
He did not say anything. Neither did the house, which understood that some moments need silence and had the good grace to provide it.
Now, it is a well-known fact that the things a person does when they think no one is watching say rather more about them than the things they do when they know someone is.
The living room had been put back together.
Not perfectly — the painting that had shattered was simply gone, a blank space on the wall that said something without saying it. The spoons were lined up. The floor was clean.
And there was the chair.
The one that had been the wooden knight. The one that had hit the wall first and fallen apart in defeat on the carpet. It was standing again — one leg repaired with mismatched screws, the joint holding at an angle that was almost but not quite right. It would never be exactly what it had been before.
But it was standing.
The boy stopped and looked at it for a moment. He did not try to name what was in his chest. He walked past and let his fingers trail along the back of it as he went — just briefly, just his hand reaching toward something without deciding to — and then he went upstairs.
The three fireflies settled near the window. Flit, flit, flit. Dim and patient, like nightlights that had seen better days but were doing their best. The boy lay down still slightly damp from the forest, still carrying the smell of pond water and something older, and was asleep before he finished thinking about tomorrow.
The morning arrived, as mornings sometimes do, before he was ready for it.
Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.
RING! RING! RING!
"Wake up, wake up! You alright, my highness?"
The alarm clock said this with the particular enthusiasm of something that enjoys its job rather more than is strictly necessary.
The boy opened one eye.
He lay there for a moment in the particular confusion of someone who has had something enormous happen to them, slept on it, and woken up in an ordinary room that has no idea. The ceiling was ordinary. The room was ordinary. He was in his bed.
He sat up slowly. Looked at his hands. Ordinary.
He reached up and touched his left eye carefully. It felt the same as always from the outside. He held out his hand and tried the power.
Nothing.
He tried again. Nothing. Just a boy with his arm out, asking the empty room for something he was no longer certain had been real.
Maybe, said the doubt, settling into the chair by the window.
Then something moved under the bed.
A small green light drifted out from beneath the dust ruffle — blink — followed by another — blink — followed by a third, the three fireflies emerging with the air of creatures who had been perfectly comfortable where they were and were relocating entirely of their own accord, thank you very much.
They rose to the level of his outstretched hand.
He pointed toward the window.
All three flew directly into the glass.
Bonk. Bonk. Bonk.
A pause.
"Was that a cockroach?" the old wooden chair said.
"Fireflies," the boy said.
"Ah," said the chair. "Glass enthusiasts."
"Right, right. Use me — I can reach from here," said the book on the nightstand, helpfully.
"Nobody is hitting them."
"They miscalculated," the alarm clock said.
"They repeatedly miscalculated," the chair corrected. "That was a series of poor decisions."
"Statistically impressive," the book added. "Three attempts, zero success. Very consistent."
The fireflies righted themselves and hovered at the window with considerably more dignity than the situation called for.
"So, he has magic now?" the book announced to the room.
"He always had magic," the alarm clock said.
"No like different magic. Real outside magic. Forest magic. The kind that does things."
A pause from the chair. Then — "Turn me around. I cannot see from here."
"Nobody is turning you around," the boy said.
"I am just saying," the chair said. "I have been facing this wall for three years. Three. Years. Yesterday I memorized a crack."
"It is a very nice crack," the book said.
"It has layers," the chair snapped. "But that is not the point."
"This is not about you."
"It is a little bit about me."
"It really is not."
"Turn me around just slightly —"
"No."
The boy crossed to the window and opened it. The three fireflies sailed out into the morning with great dignity. He watched them rise toward the treeline, and in the distance the swarm was there — green and vast and steady. He moved his hand slowly. They shifted with it, all of them, like a slow green tide.
He breathed out.
Still got it.
"He is doing it right now, is he not," the book said to the chair.
"I cannot see from here," the chair said, miserably.
A little while later the stairs creaked under his feet and the kitchen smelled of coffee and morning, and the boy came in and sat at his usual place.
Breakfast was the particular quiet of two people who have agreed, without discussing it, to set something aside for now.
The King of Chores was at the table — paperwork, coffee, spectacles — the familiar morning assembled around him like a slightly battered fortress. He put food on the boy's plate without looking up. Slightly more than usual. He did not remark on it.
The boy ate.
Afterward he sat by the window watching the road with great casualness, as people do when they are waiting for something and have decided not to admit it. Knowhere went about its morning. The fences leaned. The laundry line swayed as if whispering to the sky.
From behind him, the King of Chores glanced up and looked at his son.
The boy was sitting completely still. Not playing anything. Not building anything. Not talking to the furniture or the spoons or the jacket hanging by the door. Just sitting. Looking out at the road with his hands in his lap, calm as a morning that does not know anything is wrong.
The King of Chores looked at his son's back for a longer moment than he meant to.
He thought about last night. About a boy coming down the road with nothing in his hands — no sword, no cape, no crown. He had left with all three and returned with none of them. The King of Chores had assumed, in the sharp guilty hours of the previous night, that the boy had thrown them away. That he had taken the most beloved things he owned and left them somewhere in a forest because a man had told him they were nonsense.
He looked at his son's calm face in the window's reflection.
He went back to his paperwork. He did not read any of it.
Then the boy sat up a little straighter.
A figure had appeared at the far end of the road.
She was small and walking with great purpose — a handmade bag swinging at her side, something wrapped in cloth tucked under one arm. Her dress was frilly and pale and had clearly been chosen with care, the kind of careful that happens when you do not have many things and treat the ones you have well. She walked with her chin up and her steps neat, the way of someone who has decided this morning matters and is dressed accordingly.
And on her head, slightly askew from the walk, was a paper tiara.
As she got closer and saw the gate she slowed — just briefly — and reached up with both hands and straightened it. Pressed the edge down. Smoothed it. Checked it was right. Then she smoothed her dress with both palms, lifted her chin again, and walked the last few steps to the gate as though arriving somewhere important.
Which she was.
The King of Chores had set down his pen without noticing he had set it down. He was watching the paper crown on this girl's head — small and careful and treated like it was made of something that mattered — and something in his chest was doing something he was not going to examine right now and possibly not ever.
The boy was already at the door.
"H-how did you know where I live?" he said, when he reached the gate.
Anastasia looked at him with the expression of someone for whom this was genuinely not a difficult question.
"It is a very small town," she said. "I asked the caretaker at the orphanage if she knew of anyone named Harley. She knew three. I described you." She tilted her head. "The eyes narrowed it down quite quickly."
She held up the cloth bundle.
"Look, I brought bread."
He opened the gate.
She stepped inside and they sat on the low wall together in the morning sun, and she opened the cloth and there it was — proper bread, dense and good, from an orphanage kitchen where nothing gets wasted. A small container of butter. And separately, in a careful twist of paper, salt.
"You brought the salt in a separate twist," the boy said.
"You said butter and a little salt," she said, as though this should be obvious to anyone.
For a moment there was only the quiet work of unwrapping, the faint crackle of paper, the smell of butter in the morning air.
They ate. And because they were eating they could not talk properly, which meant they talked constantly, in the cheerful half-muffled way of two children who have things to say and cannot wait for their mouths to be empty to say them.
"— so the fireflies actually came back —" the boy said, through bread.
"— I knew they would —" she said, through butter.
"— not at first, I tried and nothing happened —"
"— but then they did —"
"— bonked right into the glass —"
She laughed with her mouth full, which she then tried to correct because princesses do not laugh with their mouths full, which made it worse, which made the boy grin.
From inside the house, the King of Chores was not reading his paperwork at all.
He was watching two children sit on his garden wall eating bread in the morning sun, talking over each other with their mouths full, the girl's paper tiara catching the light, the boy's face doing something it had not done in a long time. The King of Chores watched this and kept very still, in the way of someone who is afraid that if they move, the thing they are watching will stop.
She reached into her bag and drew out a notebook — worn at the corners, many pages already filled. She opened to a fresh page, and the boy caught a glimpse of the previous entry before she turned past it.
Best day. I met him.
Tomorrow, I need to prepare to meet him properly.
He looked away before she noticed.
She hesitated, pencil resting against the blank page.
"Do you think there's more to it? The pond?" she said.
The boy thought about the light on the water. The way it had felt like a door left slightly open.
"Yeah," he said. "I do."
She closed the notebook with the quick decisive click of someone who had already made up her mind before she finished asking. "Wanna go back? It might show us more if we look properly."
He was already standing.
"Obviously," he said.
They stood, brushed crumbs off themselves with varying degrees of success, gathered the cloth and the empty container, and headed for the gate.
From the doorway, the King of Chores cleared his throat.
He had been trying to think of something to say for the better part of an hour. Something right. Something that landed correctly. He still did not have it, and the moment was now, and so he said the only thing that was ready.
"Don't stay up too late."
It came out gruffer than he meant. It always did.
The Garden Princess turned around first. She had a smile that was warm and easy and entirely genuine, the kind that does not perform itself.
"We won't!" she said, and gave a cheerful wave — bright and full, both hands, the kind of wave that means it completely.
The boy was already through the gate. He did not turn around. But his right hand came up — easy, unhurried, aimed at nothing in particular — and stayed up for a moment, and then came back down, and then he was walking.
The King of Chores stood in the doorway and watched them go down the road together toward the forest, the girl chattering and the boy listening and the morning very warm and very ordinary around them both, and he stood there for considerably longer than was strictly necessary.
Then he went back inside.
He left the door open.
He almost never did that. But the morning was good and he found, to his mild surprise, that he did not mind letting it in.
It is said that bread, when carried with good intentions into a forest, tends to arrive at exactly the right place.
This bread was no exception.