Briar found the sapling at first light, planted three steps from her door. It had not been there the night before. The stem leaned toward her window. The leaves turned when she moved, the way a face turns to follow a voice. She knelt and touched the soil. It was cold in the wrong way, the cold she taught her apprentices to name. One of her own kind had crossed her yard in the dark and left a watcher behind. Briar was fifty-two, fae-born, with green skin and pointed ears she kept hidden under a scarf when humans came to learn from her. She had turned her back on her kind the day one of them killed a child in the Hollow for sport. Now she taught human apprentices to feel fae the way she felt them — cold in the wrong places, hair lifting on the neck. She wanted a full coven before she died. A girl of nine had already stopped a fetch at the border without flinching. Briar meant to train ten more like her. The sapling told her she was running out of quiet time. She went inside and took down the chime above her hearth. It hung silent in still air and rang only when an unwelcome fae crossed her threshold. She carried it to the porch and hung it from the eave above the door. Then she went to the ring of stones at the edge of her garden, the shallow moat she had cut and filled last spring. She broke the thin crust of leaves over the water. The runes on the stones brightened. Any fae who stepped across it would lose their glamour and their teeth. She waited on the porch with a paring knife and a bowl of beans. She did not have to wait long. The chime above her rang once, clean and sharp. A boy stepped out of the trees. Red hair. Twisted antlers. Goat eyes. He stopped at the edge of the moat and looked down at the water. He did not cross. "You planted a watcher in my yard," Briar said. "I did," Thistlewaite said. "Why." "They sent me to see if it was true. The teaching." "It is true." He looked at the chime, then at her face. "The girl who stopped the fetch. She's yours." "She is." He was quiet a moment. "I won't tell them tonight," he said. "I'll tell them tomorrow." He turned and walked back into the trees. Briar pulled the sapling out of the ground and burned it in the stove. The roots fought her hand. She washed the soil off her fingers and sat down at her table. She had until tomorrow to send word to the village. After that, her kind would know her students by name, and the cottage at the edge of the Hollow would stop being a secret.