Aria Snowstripe counted the ribs on the fox at her door and knew her promises had run out of time. The fox was the third creature this morning to climb the crystal steps of her palace, drawn by the rumor that the white-furred queen with teal stripes would feed the forest a dream. Aria knelt on the blue facets of the threshold, her tail low, and offered the fox a saucer of honey water. The fox drank, then looked past her into the shining halls as if searching for the banquet the rumor had promised. She had spent the wet years building this. She had taught the finches to sing in rounds. She had planned gardens of soft, sugar-bright ferns and a court of gentle beasts who would call her queen. A crown made of a starving fox was not the crown she wanted. But the sky had been white and dry for two months, and the streams were mud, and no dream she could describe would fill a belly tonight. Her ferret, black and white with spots down his back and a ringed tail, scrambled up her arm and chittered at the empty saucer. "I know," Aria said. "Honey isn't food." She set the fox on a cushion inside and walked the long gallery to the wardrobe her mother had left her, a tall mahogany thing wrapped in living ivy, its mirrored doors clouded with leaf-shadow. She had not opened it since the funeral. She pulled the handles. The ivy tore with a green, wet sound. Inside hung her mother's foraging coat, heavy with sewn pockets, and behind it, wedged against the back, three burlap sacks. Aria dragged one into the light. Acorns. The next, dried chestnuts. The third, seed cakes pressed hard as stone, the kind her mother made for winters that killed other queens' subjects. Aria sat on the floor with the sacks around her. Enough for a week. Maybe two if she stretched it. Not enough to keep every hungry thing in the forest alive until the rains came back. The ferret climbed into the open sack and pulled out an acorn. Aria took it from him and turned it in her fingers. She could hoard the food and choose her favorites. She could split it evenly and watch everyone weaken together. Or she could do the thing a queen was supposed to do and go find more. She stood. She shrugged on her mother's coat. It fit. "Tell the fox to wait," she said to the ferret. She loaded one sack over her shoulder and left the other two locked in the wardrobe. At the palace steps she broke a seed cake into quarters and set the pieces on the crystal. The fox came out. Two crows landed. A thin doe stepped from the trees. By nightfall the sack was empty, and the forest knew where to come.

By the third dawn, the line at the palace steps stretched past the tree line. Aria handed out the last of the seed cakes and turned back toward the crystal doors. A squirrel followed her. Then a marten. Then two crows that hopped from step to step, watching her tail. She stopped on the top stair. They stopped too. Word had spread, and now the forest wanted to see where the food came from. Aria's ferret climbed to her shoulder and hissed at the crows. Aria did the math on the walk back through the blue and purple halls. Two sacks left in the wardrobe. Maybe ten days. If one of these hungry followers slipped past her and found the mahogany doors, the stores would be gone by morning, and the line at the steps would turn on her by noon. She needed a guard. She knew only one animal who could keep a secret and outthink a crow. She found him where she always found him, asleep under the stained glass windows in the south gallery, colored flowers thrown across his purple fur. Jasper Quicktail. Fox. Skinny. The only friend from her running years who had followed her here and stayed. "Get up," Aria said. "I need you to steal something for me." Jasper opened one red eye. "You have a palace. What's left to steal?" "Time." She crouched beside him. "They're following me home. If they find the wardrobe, we're done in a night." He sat up slow. He looked at the ferret on her shoulder, then at the doors behind her. He did not ask what wardrobe. He had known her mother. "You want me on the door," he said. "I want you between the door and every nose in the forest." Jasper stretched. His grin came up sideways. "I charge in seed cakes." "You charge in loyalty. I'll feed you anyway." They moved the sacks that afternoon. Jasper picked the spot, not Aria: a narrow storeroom behind a false panel in the wardrobe's back wall, a trick her mother had built and never mentioned. He found it in six minutes. Aria watched him work and understood why she had kept him close for years. That night she walked the gallery alone while Jasper sat by the false panel with a stick across his knees. The ferret curled in her mother's coat pocket. Two floors below, something scratched at the outer door. Aria did not go down. She listened until the scratching stopped. In the morning she counted the sacks. Both there. Both full. Jasper was asleep against the panel, one ear up. She had bought herself the stores. She had not bought herself more food. The line at the steps would be longer today, and the followers would come again, and now two mouths inside the palace ate from the same shrinking pile.

Aria left Jasper at the false panel and took her mother's coat into the deep woods. The pockets held scraps of paper in her mother's hand: a sketch of a hazel thicket, a note about a spring, a chestnut grove circled twice. She found the hazel by noon and stripped it in an hour. The spring gave her watercress enough for one meal. By the third day she understood the truth. Her mother had known ten places. Aria would empty all ten before the week was out. She walked farther than the notes went. The ground got older under her paws. The trees leaned in. She smelled fruit where no fruit should be. The greenhouse sat in a clearing behind a curtain of vines. Its stained glass was cracked in every panel, green and red and violet, and the frames leaned like a drunk. Twisted trees grew inside and through it, branches shoving out the broken panes. Aria pushed the door. It gave. Inside, a peach tree held pale fruit and pink blooms at the same time. A row of lettuce heads turned toward her, and each head had a small face. Berries in a corner shimmered blue and purple like they had swallowed a sky. A squirrel watched her from a branch, its outline smoking at the edges. "Touch nothing," said a voice behind her. Aria turned. An old opossum stood in the doorway in a patched purple robe, pouches hanging from her belt. White hair stuck out under a bent hat. Her yellow eyes did not blink. "Who are you?" Aria said. "Grizzle. Who's asking?" "Aria Snowstripe. The forest is starving. I need food." Grizzle looked at the coat. She looked at the stripes on Aria's arms. She stepped past her and plucked a peach. She held it out. "Eat it and you'll see your dead," Grizzle said. "Eat the lettuce and you'll speak truth for a day. The berries show you the year to come. None of it kills you. All of it changes you." "Cursed," Aria said. "Fed by cursed ground. Same thing." Aria looked at the peaches. Enough fruit here to feed the palace steps for a month. "Can it be lifted?" Grizzle's mouth twitched. "My grandmother thought so. She died trying. There's a mushroom that fruits one week a year in the old grove. Moonpetal. Grind it into the soil at the roots. Might break the ground. Might not." "When does it fruit?" "Soon. Not yet." Aria took the peach. She put it in her mother's pocket. "I'll take what I can carry now. I'll come back for the mushroom." "You'll come back alone," Grizzle said. "And you'll tell them what they're eating." "No," Aria said. "I won't." She filled the coat with peaches and berries and walked out. The forest would eat tonight. Tomorrow, the forest would start to change.