The ranger had grown up at the edges of the Feywild, in villages where the border was thin enough to hear the music some nights. She'd made a pact to protect the margin between worlds, and she needed armor that looked like it belonged in both. The dyer she found was as wild as the places the ranger walked. She lived in a tower surrounded by gardens no herbalist could identify, and she was working on a color that had been driving her mad for four years. When the ranger explained what she needed, the dyer went very still and then laughed, a sound like bells in a storm. They worked together for a month, the ranger gathering strange plants from the forest edges while the dyer tested and refined. On the last day, as the final bolt soaked in the vat, the dyer's tower went suddenly silent. The lights inside shifted colors like watching the sunset through stained glass. When the ranger finally retrieved the armor, the dyer was still, smiling, as if she'd finished a conversation that had been going on her entire life. The ranger wore it for twenty years without it fading once, and anyone who saw her in it understood that some pacts were older and deeper than kingdoms...