Anne caught her breath. Then she lifted her head, looked around, and raised her voice.
“Everyone, I know you’re there! Don’t get the wrong idea. We didn’t come here to capture you. We came to guide you back!”
The fairies were silent, as if they were holding their breath.
“It’s just me and Challe. No one else is here. You can see that, right? We came most of the way here on a horse. We didn’t bring anyone with us.”
A single figure nimbly stepped out from the thicket in front of her. He had indigo-colored hair and even deeper indigo wings. It was Allele. He glared at them with wary crimson eyes.
“Allele, I didn’t come here to try to force you all to go back. Please believe me.”
“Tie him up,” Allele said.
Anne didn’t understand what he meant. She stared in befuddlement as Allele tossed her a rope.
“If you really don’t intend to force us back,” he said, “then tie this rope around Challe Fenn Challe’s wrists. Restrain him. Then we’ll believe you.”
Anne could see his point. With Challe’s keen fighting abilities, he could force dozens of fairies to yield in an instant and easily recapture their wings.
Anne slowly picked up the rope and looked at Challe.
He readily offered both wrists. “I don’t mind. Do it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If this is all it takes to set them at ease, then go ahead,” Challe whispered as Anne tied the rope, a smirk showing on his lips. He must be confident he could easily break out. But Anne disliked having to restrain him.
“I tied him up. Are you happy now? I just want to talk with you.”
She gently ran her hand over Challe’s wrists, which were bound with coarse, stiff rope, and turned back around to face Allele. The next moment, the other fairies emerged from behind tree trunks and thickets. They kept their distance as they surrounded Anne and Challe, wearing anxious expressions.
“Come with me. Humans could find us this close to the river.”
Allele jerked his chin and walked off, and Anne and Challe followed.
The other fairies surrounded them and began to move, too.
They climbed a gentle slope, then went down another easy incline, and suddenly, the forest opened up before their eyes.
They were in a hollow that had formed in the middle of the trees, with a small lake in the center. The water of the lake was clear, and the earth at the water’s edge was covered in damp grass. There was a cliff a short distance from the lake, and a cave in the rock face. Several fairies sat around its opening. A few blankets were hanging over the trunks of some trees jutting from the cliffside, warming in the sun.
The escapees must have slept there the previous night.
The fairies around the cave stood up when they noticed Anne and Challe.
At the others’ urging, Anne and Challe moved into the center of the clearing. Anne kept a hand on Challe’s bound wrists as she looked around at the fairies’ faces.
“You’re here to take us back, aren’t you?” one of the fairies asked nervously.
Anne shook her head. “It’s true that we came looking for you,” she said. “But we’re not planning to force you to come with us. We want you to return, but we only came to escort you.”
Allele laughed scornfully at her words. “She says she’s here to escort us,” he mocked.
Following his lead, the other fairies chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” Anne demanded.
After looking at each of his fellows’ faces in turn, Allele gave his answer with a smile. “Do you think we’re going with you? That we’ll waltz right back into bondage? Are you humans a bunch of fools?”
“I think you’ll come back once you understand the future we believe in. That’s why I’m here. I’m going to stay with you until we all go back together.”
“If you plan to stay with us, we can’t allow you to do anything rash. We’ll have to restrain you, too.”
Allele dug around in his back pocket and pulled out another length of rope. Then he approached Anne and grabbed her wrists. As he roughly tied her up, she scowled in pain.
Watching it happen, Challe asked with contempt, “So you tie us up, and then what? What comes after that?”
Allele must have picked up on Challe’s hostility; his expression turned sullen. “What was that?”
“I asked what you all are going to do next.”
“That goes without saying. We’ll run.”
“Run where?”
“We’ll decide that later.”
Challe smirked again. “Say you run off somewhere. What then?”
“Then, well…!”
Allele’s words failed him. He must not have known how to finish. As Allele groaned in frustration, Challe spoke coldly.
“I know a fairy, just like you, who took his wing back and gathered a group of supporters. He and his comrades were strong, and they tried to seize the future with violence. But he was defeated. He wasn’t able to create the world he wanted by rising up against the humans. So what will you all do? Will you fight? Will you run? Or will you find yet another path? Show me. I want to see what comes next for you.”
“Quit your yammering!”
Allele gave in to his anger. Once Anne’s wrists were tied, he turned to Challe and thrust Anne toward him by the shoulder. Anne staggered, and Challe caught her by the back.
“Tie these two to a tree over there. Then gather round. We’ll discuss what happens next.”
Allele squared his shoulders, turned, and walked off toward the cave.
As the other fairies followed Allele, their anxious gazes fell on Challe and Anne.
Keith was impressed as he watched Noah knead his silver sugar. Not even a year had passed since Noah first touched the stuff. And yet the way he handled it was smooth and nimble, without any wasted movement. It seemed like fairies intuitively grasped the texture changes in the sugar that Keith and other humans learned to spot through experience.
Across from Noah, Emere kneaded her silver sugar with uncertain hands. She had only started working with it several days earlier, but she was engaging with the work earnestly. However, she did not have as keen an intuition for the sugar as Noah did.
Noah abruptly looked up and glanced around, his hands still kneading. It seemed he was searching for something. When he did—
“Here, water.”
—Mithril deftly offered him some water that he’d ladled into a stone bowl.
“Thank you.” Noah took it with a smile and added the cold water to his silver sugar.
Mithril didn’t have the talent to become a candy crafter, but he did a good job as a crafters’ assistant.
“Mithril Lid Pod, you’re a wonderful helper.”
Keith spontaneously praised him, and Mithril rubbed the underside of his nose pompously.
“Did you only just notice, Keith? The great Mithril Lid Pod is the world’s number one crafters’ assistant! With me around, they’re one hundred times more productive!”
“It’s strange, you know. There aren’t many people so efficient they can practically hear the crafters’ voices before they speak. Not even those who know the candy crafting process well can do that.”
Unusually, Mithril pondered for a moment before answering:
“It’s not that I’m hearing the crafters’ voices, exactly. If I had to say, it’s more like the voice of the silver sugar. When I look at it, I can more or less tell what’s needed next and what to bring the crafter.”
Keith was astonished by the fairy’s answer.
The voice of the silver sugar?
Mithril had the ability to observe the state of the silver sugar and determine what was necessary. His intuition as a fairy made that possible.
Mithril was not inclined toward crafting silver sugar. However, it was possible he’d manifested an entirely different talent for making sugar candy.
Keith wondered if it might be possible that other fairies besides silver sugar fairies had abilities related to the various stages of creating sugar candy. If that was the case, then fairies could take on even more roles. Perhaps humans and fairies could work toward something better, with sugar candy at the heart of their endeavors.
I’d love to see what making sugar candy looks like with the help of the fairies’ unique talents. And I’d love to see the results, too.
He had thought the workshop Anne always spoke of, where fairies and humans worked together, was a distant dream that only someone with a tender, girlish nature like her could believe was feasible.
But maybe he was wrong. Maybe Anne had instinctively picked up on the fairies’ talents, and that was the root of her belief.
Her human and fairy workshop wasn’t a childish dream, but the place where sugar candy would one day reach new heights.
“Say, Mithril Lid Pod? You might be able to become a color fairy.”
Mithril tilted his head and stared blankly at Keith. “A color fairy… What’s that?”
“I heard about them from Lulu, the last silver sugar fairy. A long time ago, when many fairies made sugar candy, there were ones whose role was to give colored water to the sugar apple trees and color the silver sugar itself. They made red, blue, and yellow silver sugar. Apparently, they called those fairies ‘color fairies.’”
Observing the condition of the sugar apples, giving the trees colored water, and managing the plants—these required keen powers of observation and diligence, and Mithril seemed like a perfect fit for the job.
“Colored silver sugar?!” Noah asked excitedly. “Incredible! I never knew you could do that.”
“You can. Lulu told us about it, and in fact, we saw a portion of the royal family’s sugar apple trees being colored by that method.”
Mithril’s eyes twinkled with curiosity as he looked up at Keith. “That’s amazing, Keith! I want to try it.”
“I think you’d be good at it. I know—once this job is back on track, I’ll talk it over with Anne and the others.”
“Whoa! The great Mithril Lid Pod, a color fairy…”