“No,” I said, wondering at her calm attitude. I was nearly frantic. “He started in like he was reciting a sonnet or something.” I pulled my pajama top tighter to my throat and hunched into myself. “Is he going to be all right?”

She sank to her knees beside him, her relief obvious as she ran a careful finger under her husband’s swollen eye. “He’s fine. If he was cursing or reciting poetry, he’s fine. If you told me he was singing, I’d be worried.” Her hands slowed their motion over him, and her eyes went distant. “The one time he came home singing, we nearly lost him.” Her eyes cleared. Pressing her lips together in a mirthless smile, she opened the bag her children had brought.

I felt a flush of guilt. “I’m really sorry about this, Mrs. Jenks,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for me, this never would have happened. If Jenks wants to break his contract, I’ll understand.”

“Break his contract!” Mrs. Jenks fixed her eyes on me with a frightening intensity. “Heavens, child. Not over a little bit of a thing like this.”

“But Jenks shouldn’t have to fight them,” I protested. “They could’ve killed him.”

“There were only three,” she said, spreading a white cloth next to Jenks like a surgical kit, laying bandages, salve, even what looked like artificial wing membrane on it. “And they knew better. They saw the warnings. Their deaths were legitimate.” She smiled, and I could see why Jenks had used his wish to keep her. She looked like an angel, even with the knife she held.

“But they weren’t after you,” I insisted. “They were after me.”

Her head shook to send the tips of her wispy hair waving. “Doesn’t matter,” she said in her lyrical voice. “They would have gotten the garden regardless. But I think they did it for the money.” She nearly spat the word. “It took a lot of I.S. money to convince them to try my Jenks’s strength.” She sighed, cutting out portions of the thin membrane to match the holes in Jenks’s wing with the coolness of someone mending a sock.

“Don’t fret,” she said. “They thought that because we had just taken possession, they could catch us off balance.” She turned a smug eye to me. “They found out wrong, didn’t they?”

I didn’t know what to say. The pixy/fairy animosity went far deeper than I had imagined. Being of the mind-set that no one could own the earth, pixies and fairies shunned the idea of property titles, relying upon the simple adage might makes right. And because they weren’t in competition with anyone but each other, the courts turned a blind eye to their affairs, allowing them to settle their own disagreements, up to and including killing each other, apparently. I wondered what had happened to whoever had the garden before Ivy rented the church.

“Jenks likes you,” the small woman said, rolling up the wing membrane and packing it away. “Calls you his friend. I’ll give you the same title out of respect for him.”