I sat there for a moment and looked at Anna, and she shared the look back, the green of her eye large from the slight squint of her pupils.

Confusion mostly, though there was a little annoyance at the sound.

“Do you mind if I let her in?” I asked her, my hand almost closing the book, before I stopped, not wanting to lose my place amongst the pages.

Anna looked away from me, and towards the short entry hall, thinking for a moment before sighing.

“Go on, bring her in if you want, she sounds distressed,” Anna agreed, waving over toward the door.

I nodded and pulled myself away from the table and towards Selly’s unstoppable yelling.

I saw the door rattling in and out, the strap to keep the door closed flexing back and forth while she yelled, “I swear… Oh no, they’ve seen me.”

She started yelling when I opened the door and hit a bird on accident, the bird shrieking in fright and flying off. I looked around, and then feeling stupid, looked down to check for Selly.

I found her on the other side of the door.

My rough opening had tossed her out, and into the wall, where she was pressed against the crack where the wall and floor met, with a tiny sword in one outstretched hand.

She was much the same as she had been, a little bug-like body of white and black chitinous armour plates making her look like she was wearing armour, little wings behind her like a dragonfly to let her buzz through the air.

The blade in one of her hands was not silvery but white and a little reflective, the shape of it thin but long, like a porcelain sewing needle would be. She held it in one hand, the blade held out while her body was in a panicked, desperate stance.

The needle sword quivered in her hand pointed up and in my direction.

She looked at every part the dying soldier, ready to fight as a monster rolled over her in a dramatic last stand. Well, every part, except she, was fine, untouched. She was a little bit dirty, but that was all.

“Was that the second time in two days I’ve saved your insectile behind from a bird?” I called down to her.

She took a moment to connect the door with my words, and two more to answer pride in her voice.

“I would have been fine… Fighting a beast like that? T’would have been nothing.”

“Sure… Sure.” I told her, not believing a word she said, “That’s why you were desperately knocking on the door for us to let you in.”

That being said, I looked at the exterior of the door to see how she had done that. I had to look carefully, but when I did, I noticed a small incongruity. There was, as it turned out, a tiny hole in the wood; presumably, it was a perfect fit for the tiny sword in her hands.

She had stabled the door, the crafty little shit. It certainly wasn’t much damage, she was small, positively tiny, the sword was as big as a toothpick.

I looked down at her, but she raised a set of hands in surrender before I even chewed her out over it.

“Sorry about the door… I needed a way to move it, and get your attention, I’m too small to knock normally, I suppose.”

“I heard you, I just didn’t know it was for the door. You know there are windows you could have shouted into?” I told her, “Or just like, yelled because we could hear you.”

“You could hear me? Well, I guess that was for the best. You got that flying beast regardless-”

“A songbird,” I cut her off, “It was some kind of songbird.”

“Aye, that’s what I said. A great big flying beasty. Anyways… I… May I come in? Speak to the lady [Druid] of this place? I have, um, something to tell her.”

I could have been a pain in the ass about it, but I just reached out so she could hop on my hand, and I brought her inside, closing the door behind me.

I walked my way over to the table and saw Anna glaring at the sprite. There was a tad of hostility in her expression, a dislike of Selly leaking through in her face.

I moved over and let her hop off my hand and onto the table before I took my seat next to her.

Then there were two of us, and both of us focused on the little sprite, and she looked between the two of us, awkwardly. She went to raise a hand and then seemed to realize she had her sword out, and she almost stabbed it into the wood, caught herself, and laid it down, the tiny thing clattering lightly on the table.

Anna just stared at her, annoyed, but not more so by the time she took to not damage the table.

Selly cleared her voice, the sound more like a high-pitched humm than humans.

She opened her mouth and then paused in confusion, and turned to look at me.

“I just realized she can’t understand me.”

I nodded, and I waited for her to ask, an ever-increasing smile on my face as she eyed me, hoping I would just tell her I was willing to translate for her.

“Gods but you are smug looking… Fine. Will you t-”

“Of course,” I told her, merrily, “For an old friend? Of course I will.”

“You make me want to kick you,” she told me.

I took the better of two paths, and instead of responding, I translated it.

Selly looked at me and sighed, composing herself again before looking to Anna, and beginning her spiel.

“Lady [Druid], thank you for inviting me into your home, at such a late hour. I have come to apologize for my actions yesterday on behalf of myself, those I led, and my Queen,” she said it like she was choking on each word, the apology seeming to hurt her.

“Is that all?” Anna asked, not particularly enthusiastic but not coldly.

“I would also like to thank you for your restraint. I am aware that you could doubtless have killed us, should you have wished it, and I am thankful for your understanding,” she continued like each word was the same as her rolling a bolder up a mountain.

“Of course,” Anna lied.

My mind spun that out

Wait… But Anna could absolutely have killed them. There’s no way that she couldn’t do that. Wait. Wait, did she just… forget to cast magic?

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

A tiny muscle in my arm twinged, wanting to slap my own forehead.

She kept talking, neither aware of my epiphany. Selly pausing for a second before she managed to push the next few words from her mouth. “For this… I, Selliban Citritan Titania… hereby swear a life debt to you.”

The struggle, the reason for how hard it was to say what was an otherwise normal apology, made a sudden sense.

Anna, however, didn’t seem to understand the severity of this, not quite getting the severity of the predicament.

I looked back and forth between them, and saw the disconnect.

“Anna… Do you know what that means?”

“No.” She said firmly, “I do not. But it has a ring of severity to it,” she confided.

“Hold on one second,” I told Selly, turning back to Anna. “So… A life dept, is exactly what it sounds like,” I told her, “She’s telling you she literally owes you her life. I think she’s here to pay that dept... Like right now.”

Anna looked at me, second on second, she thought, and with each second a dawning horror spread on her face. She started to shake her head in the negative.

“No. No way. I am not going to accept that. There has got to be another way to deal with this!”

I looked at her in confusion, only for Selly to kick my hand, the tip of her foot hitting the cuticle of my index finger.

“Your makin me sound like a crazy person you git. I’m here to serve her for life, Serve her! I’m not her to giver’ my life!” she shouted at me, waving multiple fists at me.

Ooh.

Sometimes, as I turned out, the smallest things made all the difference.

I looked back at Anna, who was looking at Selliban like she was about to predict the future in her own entrails. Horrified at her persistence.

“Anna, my bad. She’s here to serve you, not to die for you. Hehe… Whoops?”

Anna took a deep, silent sigh, placing a hand over her heart. “I would say that’s not much better, at least to me. But I can at least refuse to ask you to do anything.” She told the tiny fighter.

She then turned to me, “You had me going there. Sometimes I forget you picked up the language a few weeks ago, instead of a few years ago.”

“I have an accent. How did you forget that?” I asked confusedly.

She flushed and mumbled, “I got used to it.”

I looked at her and couldn’t help but snort to myself. I leaned over and gave her a kiss on the head.

Anna flushed, waving me off.

“Down girl, we have a guest,” she told me, gesturing over to Selly.

Selly for her part, was looking at us like we were covered in refuse.

“Ugh, this is going to suck,” she groaned, reaching up with a pair of arms and rubbing her face.

“Aww, what’s wrong?” I asked her.

“I thought you were better than that. Damn shame that you’re just as sick as everyone else,” she said.

She said it like I was terminally ill, or like I had some rare wasting disease.

“What?” I said, more a statement then the true question I meant it to be.

She looked at me like she wanted to explain, then quickly said, “You’re being all…Ugh… Lovey. Gross,” and spoke the word lovey like it had killed her entire family, pet bee included.

“Well, lovey or not, me and Anna are trying to see if we will work together or not. You know that, right? If you go giving her a life dept over you, you’re going to end up seeing us together a lot,” I pointed out.

“I know, you dolt. Don’t remind me. Honestly, I don’t care in theory; just don’t rub it in my face, and we’re square,” she said, “And keep any bedroom activity away from me… Please,” she shivered as she said it, revulsion in every ounce of her body, which wasn’t much in ounces, but all of her body was still all of her body.

Her plead not only hit me from an angle that I hadn’t expected, but also in a way I hadn’t wanted to think about.

The idea of bedroom activity was a bit daunting to me, and I still didn’t know how to approach that. For a moment, we both had a distaste for the conversation on being ‘lovey,’ but for two very different reasons.

I shied away from the topic, pulling myself back from the conversation and the feelings and ideas it brought to the back of my mind, where me, and my instincts were at odds on what to do with them.

“There’s no way I’m going to bring you in on that, and I highly doubt Anna would either. You can understand her just fine, she doesn’t even want to go through with having a life dept.”

“Aye. I know. But I have no other way. My honour’s in question, I shant return to my people, not without her acceptance of my dept to her at the bare minimum,” She said, a weight to her voice, a ring of a whole and uncomfortable truth. “Your Anna is confused, Saphine, you might want to bring her in on the conversation.”

I turned back to Anna, the look of our conversation bringing obvious intrigue and a little annoyance, though that wasn’t pointed at me or Selly. I had to wonder if she was thinking about how annoying it was that she didn’t know what we were saying.

Maybe I should offer to teach her. If Selly’s going to be here, there needs to be a way for the two of them to speak, which means one of them will need to learn the other’s language. I won’t be here all the time, after all.

Maybe both will learn one, and Selly can be grouchy about it together with me.

“She was just telling me she can’t, or rather, won’t go home without you accepting the debt,” I told Anna, cutting out the portion that was a bit more sensitive. She had told me that, not Anna, and while she might tell her in time, I wasn’t going to spread everything she said like I was trying to get her in trouble. We had a little history. Even if it was a day of doing stuff together and not years of friendship, it had meant that she had told me and not Anna, it was too casual for how Selly had been communicating with Anna.

Anna, of course, picked up that something was amiss, but I just said, “The rest was just us bickering,” a simple truth.

She magnanimously let it go, not trying to pick her way into what we had talked about.

“That… Is a truly massive pain in my rear. Are you telling me that you would refuse to leave should I tell you to leave?” She asked, and recognizing that I had missed out an important part.

“Selly’s dishonoured herself. Forgot to mention that. It’s more like she won’t go back and wouldn’t be welcome back, either.” I told her, Anna taking it in and nodding in understanding while Selly made a gesture of agreement towards me, a gratefully universal simple gesture of acknowledgement.

Anna got a thoughtful look on her face as she began to use that wonderful mind of hers, letting it do it’s work, slowly whittling down option after option.

I didn’t know Anna well enough to tell what she was going to say, not word for word. But knowing Anna, it wasn’t going to be a no.

Anna was an angel, she really was. I didn’t think she had a bone in her body that would actively wish another person harm.

Her head just wasn’t on the right way around to think about it that way.

I hadn’t thought my head would have either, but if I was honest, I couldn’t deny that I absolutely could and had thought about it, as much as it disturbed me. I was a killer now, even if they were ‘fallen,’ whatever that meant.

I might be a killer… But I suppose it’s not about not killing another person, but only killing others when you have no other choice, and when I make that choice, there should be a reason for it.

I remembered the lack of feeling I had on killing the Gremlins. The lack of anything that had scared me upon killing the first living thing with more intelligence than a chicken, and I didn’t like it, and I didn’t know how to deal with that.

Selly was giving me a look, “My queen also sent me to help you, Saphine. She knows there is a dept she can’t repay, but she wants to make sure that you get your due, but we can wait on your [Druid] to make up her mind,” she told me, bringing me out of my thoughts.

“Yeh… Sure, yeh. She’s bound to answer you in a bit,” I told her.

“You sure?” She asked, “Because she looks like she’s having an aneurysm.”

I looked over to Anna, and sure enough, she looked like the thinking was going to make her head explode.

“Anna,” I asked her, reaching and arm around her to comfort her, brushing her droopy shoulder and realizing that she was tired. She was so tired. She was thinking through a haze of sleepiness, trying to think on it so hard she was breathing half as much as she should, her face reddening.

“Anna, you’re tired. You could always let her stay the night and decide tomorrow after a nice long rest. Or, you can have a cup of tea if you think you need it. The waters close to ready,” I told her in an attempt at kickstarting her head, trying to give her a route to fix the problem that was plaguing her now so she could fix the problem she was setting herself against.

After all, she would know what she needed the most.

Anna didn’t pick on me, she just leaned into me and let out a sigh.

“Selliban, I will be honest, I don’t understand just how important a life dept is for you. I don’t understand enough about you and your culture too. But, regardless, I accept that you have a life debt to me. I will accept you to rest here, in my home, as a guest, so long as you are willing to accept guest right, otherwise, I will ask you to return tomorrow for further talks,” Anna said, each parcel and piece she spoke intentional, and measured.

Selly agreed immediately, swearing to follow guest right on the name of hospitality, much like I had, though in her own way. “I swear to act as your guest, on the name of the kin of the hearthkeeper, and my kins honour and all that. Honestly… It’s like you don’t trust me. I’ve eaten at your table, and stood next to your funny eyed bedwarmer yesterday.”

Selly, as always, was unabashedly herself, and in the only way I could, I made sure to represent that with the whole honesty of her words, and let her dig her own grave.

Because Selly, was sometimes, too much Selly. And I wouldn’t let Anna get blindsided by her true feelings only after she decided how to use Selly’s dept.

Anna, however, angelic as always, just accepted it, and waved, “Feel free to eat, or drink. It’s not much, but you are small enough that even that egg could fill you twice over. Just be quick about it, because I’m tired, and bound to get cranky if you take too long,”

And just like that, there was a new guest in Anna’s home.