Bonbon Sweetwing held the seed up to the lamplight and saw the pink crystals had spread again. Yesterday they had only crowned the top. Now they climbed halfway down the sugary shell, hard and bright as cut quartz. Once the crystals reached the base, the seed would be stone. No wing could pollinate stone. She had carried this gumdrop seed for years, ever since an old fairy pressed it into her palm without explanation, and she had stopped asking why. What she could not stop was the clock inside it. She needed soil rich in sour-sugar mineral, a thing she had heard named only in rumor. She had asked at every market stall in the pink-towered castle at the heart of the kingdom. The bakers shrugged. The sugar-spinners laughed. A guard in a striped tunic and candy-bead belt finally stopped her at the gate and told her to try the cold country to the north, where the ground tasted wrong and nothing sweet would grow. He said his cousin had broken a tooth on a stone there. He said the stone had fizzed. Bonbon flew north for two days. The air thinned. Her candy wings stiffened in the cold, which was the first good news she'd had in a month, because stiff wings were not sticky wings. She passed frozen streams and fields of gray sugar-snow. Then she saw the arch. It rose alone from a field of broken rock, two curves of pale blue ice meeting in a jagged point. At its base, the gravel glittered with a sharper light than ice should give. Bonbon landed and licked one chip of stone. Her tongue went numb, then bright, then sour. She spat and laughed. This was the mineral. The arch was a marker, the way a tall tree marks a spring. She found the cave behind the arch within an hour. The walls were ice-blue and dim, veined with the same fizzing crystal. She scraped a handful of mineral grit into her satchel, then another. She did not pollinate the seed there. The cavern floor was solid stone, and the seed needed real soil to root in. She would carry the mineral home and mix it into a bed. Halfway back to the warmer country, her wings began to thaw. Sugar softened. The grit in her satchel pressed against the seam, and when she landed to rest, half of it had welded to the underside of her left wing in a sour, glittering crust. She tried to brush it off. It stuck harder. She turned her head and saw the seed in her pouch, crystals now three-quarters of the way down its shell, and understood she had maybe a day before it sealed. She had the mineral. She had no clean way to plant it. And she could not fly straight with one wing twice as heavy as the other.

Bonbon limped through the air with her heavy wing dragging her south. She could see the pink towers of the castle now, small in the distance, and past them the green edge of warmer country. She had the mineral. She had the seed. What she did not have was a place to put them. Soil alone was not enough. She needed a spot safe from feet and wind, where the seed could sit undisturbed for the hours it took roots to take. Every minute she spent searching was another crystal creeping down the shell. She checked the seed inside her pouch. The pink had climbed past the middle. She counted four fingers of clear sugar left at the base. Maybe less. She landed hard at the castle gate, one wing skidding in the gravel. Two guards stood at the doors in striped tunics, one blue and round, one white with rainbow stripes. She held up the seed. She held up the satchel of grit. She said she needed a garden bed, any bed, within the hour, or the seed would die. The blue guard frowned at her wing. The striped guard crouched to look at the seed. He said the royal gardens were closed for the frost. He said the public plots were half a day's walk. Then he pointed past her boot. A cat sat in the walkway, white with smears of pink and yellow and blue across its fur, tail curled around a cracked planter someone had dragged out and forgotten. The planter held dark soil and a dead rose stump. The cat blinked at Bonbon and did not move. Bonbon knelt by the planter. She scraped the dead stump out with her fingers. She poured the sour-sugar grit from her satchel into the soil and worked it in until the dirt fizzed against her knuckles. The cat watched. The guards watched. She set the seed in the center, pink side up, and pressed the soil around its base. Then came the hard part. She had to pollinate it. She stretched her good wing forward and brushed the tip against the clear sugar at the base of the shell. The candy went tacky at once. She dragged the sticky edge across the seed, coating it, and felt the seed shiver under her wing like something waking. A thin green thread pushed up from the soil beside her thumb. The pink crystals stopped climbing. They did not retreat, but they stopped. Bonbon sat back on her heels and breathed. The sprout was the width of a hair. The seed was still half stone. Her left wing was still welded stiff with sour grit, and now her right wing was glued to itself in a sticky curl. The cat stepped into the planter and sat down beside the sprout, as if it had decided the job was its now. One of the guards cleared his throat and asked what she planned to do next.