---

The yellow flower got away.

Lánxuě's little face tipped farther and farther back as it disappeared into the leaves, until eventually she could stretch her neck no more. Her ears drooped with a faint sort of disappointment. Gone. She had only just found it, too. Worse still, she had only just found the word for it—or what she thought was the word for it. Surui had been teaching her Common in tiny pieces, naming things again and again until sounds began to mean something, but there were still so many things in the world that Lánxuě simply did not have words for yet.

"How you know?"

Her attention fell back to the boy.

Lánxuě stared.

Her golden eyes blinked once. Then again.

Know... what?

The question was much too large for such a little mind. Her brow pinched as she worked terribly hard at it, gaze wandering from Hemlock to the place where the butterfly had vanished and then back again. Eventually one tiny paw lifted and pointed clumsily toward the canopy.

Fower... fly.

There. That was what she knew.

But then he gave her something else.

Hem-lock. His name.

Oh.

Her ears perked immediately.

Hem...lok, she repeated, softer than he had said it and rounded strangely by her little tongue. Her expression brightened with the quiet satisfaction of getting something right. She had not known him at all! But she did now. Hemlock. The little girl committed this newly acquired information to whatever strange place one-month-old children kept important things, alongside Mama, Bàba, milk, Surui, siblings, and apparently flying flowers.

"Who you?"

That one she knew.

Lánxuě's tiny chest puffed.

Lán!

Her own name came considerably easier than all this troublesome Common, spoken with the confidence of a child who had heard it cooed, whispered, fretted over and repeated around her since she had been given it. Her tail began its little thump-thump again before she leaned forward to sniff at him, nearly overbalancing herself in the process. One forepaw shot forward to catch her weight.

She remained like that for a moment—rump high, nose low, staring up at Hemlock from between oversized ears.

Then, because introductions apparently required additional explanation, she added very seriously,

Bàba... weddin'.

One tiny paw gestured vaguely back toward the distant celebration. As though this explained precisely who Lánxuě was.

---