The Craftsman tends to the harvest, and Sanalessa. Dolce stands to the side, and this takes all of his attention. He moves with a careful economy of motion. One step, even if two would be more comfortable. Three steps, if one would risk his balance. Each piece of him moves in turn, bending at the waist while his raised leg hangs motionless, that not even a scrap of wool will catch on a hanging vine. He places no hoof without watching it fall. Demeter’s garden is a wild, thriving thing. He will neither harm nor impede it.

A dangerous line of questioning. And he had not recalled a thing until she asked. What snippets floated through his mind were so incomplete, he could hardly make sense of them. Pain worse than he’d ever known. A chef lying bleeding on a desert battlefield soaked with rain. Defying Demeter, and yet, the thought gave him no shame?

His hoof stops. Shifts a hair to the right. Comes down beside thorns.

“If I had, then I would have not been so brazen as to seek a harvest without the slightest of offerings. Only now I remember…something. I see fragments, but nothing around them. I see what must be me, but it is no me that I recognize.” He is troubled. He is suffering. He lets it show. “I am afraid something may be terribly wrong with me. This is, of course, no excuse for impoliteness. While I serve your adherents aboard this vessel, I will tend to a garden myself, and all of its fruits will be given unto them and unto you. Please accept this in recompense for my poor memory.”

“But I ask for no harvest myself. With form and contract, ink and blood, Sanalessa entrusted herself entirely to my care, and I swore I would act in her best interest until she was whole again. I did not lightly seek my friend’s help, for I know not whether she herself would wish to be treated by the same arts that carved a curse into her bones. But he is my friend. I trust that when I ask him to do no more than speed what growth is in her body, he will hold to it. I believe that, given the choice, she would prefer a swifter freedom. And most of all.” He bows his head. “Sanalessa is only under my care. She is not mine. She is her own. If she decides to leave me as soon as she awakes, I will respect that decision, and wish her well.”

“Though it is my voice that asks, whatever harvest you see fit to give is hers, and hers alone. I humbly entreat, Lady of Summer, She of the Eternal Garden, that she not suffer on my behalf.”