And Promise is willing to let him hug her leg. "Do you have a guess about how long the spell will last with all that blood? More or less than twelve hours?"

"I thiiiiiiiiiiink less. 'Cause it was supposed to be two seconds. An' it went up, but... not all the way up."

"Okay. If it lasts longer than about half an hour I'm going to want to go to the edges of my warm area outside the house and plant some things and get them started growing but I can stay with you until then."

Promise pats him on the head and goes out to do some gardening.

Ari does nothing particularly conspicuous while she gardens.

She comes back in when she has planted all the fruit in her bag. Some of it yielded edible bits in addition to its seeds; she has assembled these into a haphazard fruit salad in the rind of something pink. "Are you hungry?"

"A little! Are you hungry?"

"Also a little, but this is it until the plants start bearing, and even if I babysit them more or less constantly that will take hours and hours, so this is it for a while. I can feed you some of this and then go back out and help them along."

He considers. "You eat first! You're tiny, I'd eat the whole thing. Plus I haven't moved in hours! So I didn't... energy?"

"If you say so." She eats about half of the fruit salad, then picks up a chunk of something dark salmon colored and offers it to him.

It is consumed!

She feeds him the rest of what's in the rind.

"What's on your mind?"

"You said... my timing was bad. Does that mean there's good timing somewhere?"

"It's okay. Now you know to be more careful about spills?"

"Well, yeah, I'm never storing ingredients in a non-lidded cup again, but- sorry for being, uh, weird. And insistent. Happy Me is an ass."

"It's okay, I'm fine. You were obviously not yourself."

"Well, it's less that I wasn't myself and more that I- you know what, whatever. Ritual safety tip learned, it's done. I am very sorry and will do better cups and let's forget this. Did you plant the frostberries?"

"No, I wanted to ask you what sort of conditions work for them."

"That is a good thing to ask! They've got magical requirements and things. They can't grow if it's less than twenty degrees below freezing, and you have to plant them in deep snow or ice. But they grow in just about an hour or so, if you give them a bowl of blood. Oh, speaking of, they need blood pretty regularly, I'll take care of it, they usually trap pixies and drain them but I'll just give it some every morning. Back home you can find the husks all over the thicket, it's a great way to get pixie dust if you need it for something. Just be sure to wear gloves."

"...Can you by any chance tell whether it's the wrong temperature outside? Because I don't know your scale."