Adam Grimmer had convinced three witches to meet him, and he had nowhere to put them. He stood at the edge of the pine woods with a shovel over his shoulder and counted the problem out loud. A coffee shop would scare them. A rented room would leave a paper trail. Every witch he had spoken to in the last month flinched at the idea of being seen. If he named a place and it felt exposed, they would not come, and he would be alone again with work too big for one person. He had learned that lesson four months ago, building a protection over someone he loved. The working had cracked open before he could close it. The person he was shielding walked away with a limp instead of a grave, and Adam still counted that as his fault. Solitary practice had failed him. He needed a circle. To get a circle, he needed a room no neighbor could see into. He walked deeper until the road noise died. In a hollow ringed by old pines, he found what he wanted: flat ground, a windbreak of trunks, no path leading in. He spent the afternoon dragging log stumps into a wide ring and digging a fire pit at the center. He carved small runes into each stump with a pocket knife, the marks he had taught himself alone. By dusk the ring looked like it had grown there. He lit a first fire and watched the shadows settle between the seats. Protection came next. He drew a yellow-green sigil on birch bark and nailed one to every fourth tree around the hollow, the open design facing outward so a passing hiker would read it as graffiti. Then he opened the iron box he had carried in his pack and let the small fire-veined drake out. It uncurled on his wrist, no bigger than a cat, and breathed a thin line of flame at the kindling. He told it to stay. It blinked once and climbed to the highest stump like it understood the job. Any human who wandered close would feel heat where there should be none and turn around without knowing why. The last piece was the invitation. From his coat he drew a stack of purple feathers, each one shimmering in a way only another witch would see. To anyone else they were trash on the sidewalk. He pocketed three for the women he had already marked: the barista who flinched at iron, the librarian who read weather in the ceiling stains, the night cashier who never met his eyes. When a witch picked one up, the feather would carry her here. He closed his fist around the first feather and started back toward town. The room existed now. Tomorrow he would find out if anyone was brave enough to walk into it.

Adam came back to the hollow at dawn to check the ring. The fire still burned low. The small drake watched him from the tallest stump. He counted the runes on each seat and found them clean. Then he saw the bootprints in the soft dirt by the north tree, leading in, not out. A woman sat on one of the stumps with a purple feather laid across her open palm. She was not the barista, the librarian, or the cashier. She wore a long coat and had a folding table set up at her knees, its top crowded with tarot cards in a wide spread. She looked up and said her name was Tasha. She said the feather had sung to her from a gutter three towns over, and she had followed it here because the cards told her to. Adam reached for the knife in his coat. Tasha did not move. She turned one card on the table and tapped it. Many would come to train under him, she said. The spread showed it plainly. Then she turned a second card and her finger stopped. Something dark was waking in the East. He had to keep the hollow secret until the cards said the time was right, or it would find him before he was ready. Adam lowered his hand. He asked how she had passed the drake and the sigils. Tasha said the cards had walked her through. He sat across from her and looked at the spread. The feather had been meant for three. It had pulled in a fourth he had not chosen, and she had brought a warning he could not yet act on. He told her she could stay. He told her she could not tell anyone what she had seen here, not the shape of the ring, not the road in, not his name. She gathered the cards into a neat stack and agreed. The coven had its first member. The secret it had to keep had just grown teeth.