They won't do.

The bandages. They're too—Caine sucks in his cheeks, runs his eyes critically over the starched linen—white.

He discards them in a tangled pile at the foot of a weeping willow. But before he turns away, he catches his gaze lingering. Catches it skim along the wet, trampled grass, unhurried, innocent, devoid of purpose. Until grass gives to linen and innocence springs to urgency and a question receives its answer.

No blood on the discarded bandages. Not even a drop. His breath releases slowly, leaving palls of smoke in the apprehensive night. Of course there is none. The healers informed him last evening, smiles lit aglow by the moonlight streaming through the curtains, that his wounds had healed. Beautifully, one had added, when she hadn't found in his expression enough... joy. Relief. Like the others. He'd obliged her, finally, with a closelipped smile.

He doesn't know why he searches for it, the blood; only that it has become something like a compulsion. Like picking at a scab until it gives.

Every morning at the Hospital, after he'd manage to swallow his breakfast (a bland mix of "nutritious oats" that ran from his spoon like pond water, but grey, and therefore worse) a healer would enter to change his bandages.

He would push his bowl away and watch them peel the layers off, one by one, white linen and white linen until—finally—a shock of red. Robin's breast red. They often mistook his stare for worry. They would smile (a Terrastellan custom) and assure him, gently, that it was perfectly normal. "The bandages take off the scarring, you see. For wounds as deep as yours, the scars take longer to set."

He'd shrug. They would nod, half their role fulfilled, and throw the bloody bandages into a bucket bursting of bloody bandages. Some of them would hum as they rewrapped his withers with fresh, crisp linen, and he'd smile and inquire after their day.

Somewhere past the Steppe his hooves make the decision to turn south, instead of north, and he hasn't the heart to correct them. He can stop and rest in the city, stock up on food and canteens of water for the trek through the desert. The journey will be harder this time, because it will be made on foot.

The smell of Denocte envelopes him like warm bathwater. He tilts his head back, and inhales deeply. Smoke, spice, flowers. Children—and cats—weave circles around his legs. There's the Bakery, the Inn, the Tavern. Their names bob in the backwaters of Caine's memory. He hadn't used them with the other spies, they'd moved too often for that. Every night, a different Tavern. Every morning, another Bakery. To attach names was to attach sentiment, and that was one of the many things a spy wasn't allowed. Top of the contract, article number three.

He remembers to adjust his shadow cloak fully over his shoulders before moving further into Denocte's beating heart. Spare Lady Night from the sight, he thinks, snorting lightly. Wouldn't make a very good welcome. He pauses to slip a coin onto the Florist's table, dodges her curious eyes (she, the sole exception to every other anonymous face in this city, would likely recognize him), and requests four blue asters. She will like them, I think. He tucks them carefully into the leather strap binding his dagger to his front leg, and adjusts his cloak once more. A compulsion. Like picking at a scab until it gives.

He moves into the river of the crowd, and whispers for it to sweep him away.

It obeys. The moon swims slowly through the stars, keeping time. It is halfway between the nose of Ursa Minor and the claw of Ursa Major when Caine surfaces besides a troupe of gypsy-coin-strewn dancers. A child as white as a star (as starched bandages) stands before them, too, swaying a little to the music's pull. He does not often notice children; it is an enforced sort of ignoring.

But he notices her, because of her silence. A tangible thing, it is, held close to her chest like a cooing dove. She rocks forwards onto the tips of her hooves, a bird taking flight. 

Two, no—he narrows his eyes—three shadows accompany her. Borne from the nebulous matter of her dreams. He feels his magic siphon from him; normally, he would stop it. But tonight, his curiosity is insatiable. Golden antlers sprout from her skull, and the ends of her spectral hair, half of it plaited, bleeds like the sun. His own hair is not plaited. It spills over his neck like oil, skims his knees and curtains his eyes until he pushes it back behind an ear.

He does not turn to the child, and the shadows stand protectively between him and her, but his voice carries like the timbre of a cello through the distance his body cannot: "Did you know? Some nights, the dancers throw gypsy coins into the crowd. Most are fake—painted copper." His silver eyes seek hers, then. Bright, secretive, hollow, yearning. 

"Once, I picked up one that was real."

Once there was a boy who picked up a real gypsy coin.

All the village's children knew that when the red-tented gypsy caravans passed through, and the sky was a starless indigo on a sickle moon night, and the apple blossoms had yet to wither and fruit, the very last caravan with the golden spokes would leave behind a golden coin trail.

But only the eldest of the village children knew that come dawn, all but one of the gypsies' coins could endure the heat of the autumn sun.

The boy knew at once that it would be his. 

He knew at once that the coin was made of real gold, solid straight through, because of how heavy it felt in his grasp. 

Not three days ago, he'd picked up a merchant wife's gold hair ornament in the streets. Before he could hand it back to her, she'd shrieked at a passing soldier that he'd stolen it, and he'd received ten lashings at the hand of the Warden.

"Twenty, if it had been real," the Warden had whispered to him between the fifth and sixth flick of his whip. 

So that was how the boy (with the tanned flank) knew that the gypsy coin reflecting moonlight into his eyes was real, solid gold. It was heavier - much heavier - than the merchant wife's painted barrette. 

Whistling, the boy slipped the gypsy coin into his breast pocket, scanned twice up and down the streets for vagrants who specialized in minding other people's business, and wove through the market stalls to show his mother. 

Come dawn, the coin endured the heat of the autumn sun.

Come noon, a fat crow dropped a loaf of steaming bread in front of his mother's booth as it dodged the baker's crow-killing rolling pin. (A local legend.)

Come evening, a Delumine trader with a funny hat mistook their fabric swathes for real silk (they were satin, and not even of the higher calibre) and departed with half their stock loaded on the back of his cart. Leaving behind a pouch of coins one silver too generous.

Days and weeks passed. 

The boy learned how to distinguish the taste of bruised apples from fresh ones. Oranges fell fat and dazed from the branches of their presumed-barren orange tree. (A local legend.) The winter turned out to be a mild one. 

His father returned home from the border war.

Once there was a boy who picked up a real gypsy coin, and the coin gifted him with kindness.

Or so the story goes.

----
"What did it do?" the girl made of starlight asks, and Caine wishes he can laugh and wink and tell her something clever and true. 

"Gambler's luck for seven nights." Or -
"The blinding smile of a ferociously beautiful gypsy girl." Or -
"To wake up and realize that everything, all of it, Agenor/the Prince/Raum/the King (but please not Seraphina, the holy one, the burning one) had been a nightmare."

Instead, he turns to her and says: "The gypsy who'd lost it appeared in a burst of silver mist before me and demanded it back. When I refused, he removed the scythe from his side and sliced off my wings in one swift stroke."

His eyes hold her golden ones captive, cold-silver and suddenly corvid. A wave of nausea rends through his body when he rustles his wings without thinking and even that slight action unbalances him.

The gypsy dancers twirl to their finale and clink their glittering bangles together in beats of twos and threes. 

The night grows pallid and malleable around them, the shadows bendable, and Caine wonders in his short breath of silence if he has scared her. 

(A part of him wonders if this child, who held silence to her heart like a dove, knew enough to know he wouldn't have given her an answer that was clever and true.)

He drops his gaze to the shadows twisting like scarves around her thin ankles. Clearing his throat, he smiles sheepishly and raises his night-black wings, to show her that he still has them. Normal, now. No longer an anomaly.

"Well, I'm afraid the real answer is far less exciting. A gypsy did approach me, but only to tell me that he'd dropped his coin by accident and if I would please hand it back, because he quite needed it to pay for his betrothed's dowry." He grins, then, and looks towards the breathless gypsy girls, now bowing like elegant swans as flowers and trinkets fall in a halo around their hooves. 

Softly, he murmurs, "There's not much difference between them and us, is there?"

Caine is careful to keep his gaze from wandering to the three shadows standing between them when he cranes his neck back towards the girl's too-knowing eyes, and awaits her answer.