Elestar Ravencrest counted the empty cups on his study table and found eleven. Eleven cups meant eleven winters since the last apprentice had climbed his stairs. He was ninety-eight cups older than he should have been, and his hands shook when he lifted the kettle. He crossed the room to the tall stained glass window. Purple and green light fell across his white beard. Below him, the Darkwood pressed against the base of his tower in a black tangle of pine and thorn. No road cut through it. No lantern moved along its edge. He had built his home on this crag when he was young and proud, and now the same walls that kept him safe kept everyone else out. He had knowledge no book held. Spells for stopping fever. Spells for turning grief into sleep. If he died with them, they died with him. He gave himself one more spring. At the workbench he laid out silver wire, a tuning peg, and a single white feather from a bird he no longer remembered. He worked through the night. He bent the wire into the frame of a small harp. He fixed wings to its shoulders. He stitched a song into the strings, one he had learned from his own teacher, a song that woke the sleeping magic inside a person who carried any. At dawn he opened the highest window. The harp sat on his palm, cold and quiet. "Find them," he said. "Any child in the wood with the gift. Play until they follow." The wings snapped open. The harp lifted, struck one clean note, and flew out over the trees. He watched the silver speck until it vanished into the mist. He was still watching when something tugged his slipper. Elestar looked down. A flower stood on his floor. It had bright petals, a green stem for a body, and two small feet planted on his rug. One of his wool socks dangled from its hand. It grinned up at him. "Out," Elestar said. The flower skipped behind the workbench. He heard a drawer open. He heard a drawer close. He heard something being dragged. Elestar sighed and lowered himself into his chair. His knees hurt. His messenger was gone. His sock was gone. But somewhere in the Darkwood, a silver harp was playing his song over the treetops, and for the first time in eleven winters, someone might hear it and look up. He poured a twelfth cup and set it across the table from his own. Then he waited.

Elestar waited three days. The twelfth cup grew a skin of dust. Then, near dusk, a clean silver note rang against the tower window, and he pushed himself up from his chair. He opened the shutter. The winged harp glided in and settled on the desk, folding its wings over a stack of scrolls. Behind it, small boots scraped the stone stairs. A boy stopped in the doorway. He had leaves in his hair and a leather satchel across his chest. Bark dust smudged one cheek. He stared at the room, then at Elestar, then at the room again. "You must be the boy the harp found," Elestar said. "Rowan," the boy said. "The pines told me which way to walk. They said the old man on the crag was expecting company." Elestar looked at the room the way the boy was looking at it. Books leaned in crooked towers. Dried herbs hung from the rafters in gray clumps. Cold ash spilled from the hearth. A cot in the corner held only more books. There was nowhere for a child to sit, sleep, or eat. He saw Rowan's shoulders creep up toward his ears. "Don't run," Elestar said. "Give me one hour." He moved faster than he had in a year. He cleared the desk with one sweep of his arm, catching the scrolls in a basket. He dragged the cot from the corner and shook the books off it. He kicked open the small side chamber he had used for storage and hauled out crates until the floor showed through. Rowan set down his satchel and helped. He carried the herb bundles to a hook by the window. He stacked the loose pages the way Elestar pointed. He did not speak much, but he moved like someone who had worked all his life. Halfway through, Elestar reached for the wool blanket at the foot of the cot and found it gone. He looked under the cot. He looked behind the crates. He heard a soft giggle from beneath the desk. The flower creature skipped out with the blanket bundled in its arms. A striped sock hung from one petal. Another dangled from its wrist. It grinned at Rowan and offered him the sock like a gift. Rowan laughed. It was the first sound of laughter the tower had held in eleven winters. "That is not a pet," Elestar said. "That is a thief." "I like it," Rowan said. By nightfall the side chamber held a swept floor, a cot with clean linen, a lamp, and a small table. Elestar stood in the doorway and looked in. The room was plain. It was enough. "This is yours," he said. "We begin at first light." Rowan nodded. Somewhere behind the desk, a drawer slid open, and another sock went missing.

At first light Elestar climbed the stairs with a book under his arm. He had spent an hour picking one from the shelf. Every spine on it glowed with a sigil meant for a trained hand. He chose the thinnest volume he owned and hoped thin meant simple. Rowan waited at the desk. The flower creature perched on the lamp and swung a stolen sock like a pendulum. Elestar set the book down and opened it to the first page. The letters swam. He held the page closer, then farther. The runes stayed blurred at the edges. He had written them himself, three centuries ago, in a hand he could no longer read without a glass. He did not have a glass. He had not needed one when he wrote them. "Read the top line," he said, to buy time. Rowan leaned in. His finger moved along the runes. He read four words, then stopped. "This one draws lightning into a bowl." "That is the third chapter," Elestar said. "The first says the same, smaller." Elestar stared at the boy. He had shown Rowan nothing. The book was keyed to a mage who already knew the base forms. There was no primer in it, no drills, no shape for a child's first day. He turned the page. The next spell folded space. The one after called wind through bone. He turned faster. Every page assumed a decade of study. He closed the book. He had nothing else. His whole shelf was written for the man he used to be. "Go outside," he said. "Walk to the tree line. I need an hour." Rowan took his satchel and went. Elestar sat with the shut book. He thought of the farmer who had taught him. No book. A stick in dirt. Fire wants to spread. Water wants to fall. He had forgotten how a lesson begins. He did not see Rowan slip back through the side door an hour later. He did not see the boy lift the thin volume from the desk while he dozed in the chair. He did not see Rowan carry it to the sill, open it in clean light, and read. At the tree line, a dryad watched from behind a trunk. She had followed the boy from the wood. She had meant to step out. She saw him settle with a stolen book and a hungry face, and she pressed her palm to the bark and stayed hidden. She had heard men speak kindly to trees and still take the axe. She would wait longer. By dusk Rowan had read forty pages. He had spoken three of them aloud under his breath and felt something answer in his chest. Elestar woke to a cold cup and an empty desk. The thin book was gone from where he had left it. He knew, before he turned his head, where it had gone. His problem had changed. The boy did not need a first lesson. The boy was already teaching himself the wrong ones.

For three days Elestar had watched Rowan and worried. The boy raced through spells no first lesson should touch. But something else pulled at the old wizard's mind. Twice he had seen the boy stop at the tree line and turn, as if answering a voice. Once a shape had slipped behind a trunk. Something followed his apprentice through the tower's edges. Until Elestar knew what watched the boy, he would teach him nothing. He set a snare of his own making. He carried the winged cat to the sill and let it drift out over the wood. Its leather wings caught the wind. Elestar spoke to it under his breath, and its green eyes became his eyes. He watched the ground through them. Rowan walked to the tall tree with the star-shaped leaves. He pressed his hand to the bark and spoke low. Elestar could not hear the words. Then, through the cat's eyes, he saw the watcher step out. She was small and made of the wood itself. Leaves grew in her hair. Vines wrapped her arms and legs. She moved toward Rowan with a limp, as if each step hurt her. A dryad. Elestar's chest tightened. He knew what these creatures cost a mortal. He had seen a student ruined by reaching for what the forest offered. "You talk to my tree," she said. Her voice was flat and plain. "I have listened a long time." Rowan did not startle. "You followed me." "Yes." She stopped an arm's length away. "I meant to sooner. Men speak kindly to trees and still bring axes." "I don't carry an axe." "I know that now." Elestar willed the cat lower. He would not let this happen unwatched. His old fear pushed him to act, to break it apart. He raised his hand to summon the boy home. Then he saw the dryad's feet. Where she had crossed the clearing, the grass had browned. Each step away from her tree cost her a piece of herself. She was spending her own life to stand near the boy. She was not a trap. She was giving. Rowan looked at the dead grass behind her. "That hurts you." "A little." She shrugged. "You are worth a little." Elestar let his hand fall. The threat he had feared was not a threat at all. It was love, and it was foolish, and it was real. He drew the cat back through the window and released the spell. His eyes were his own again. He knew now what watched his apprentice. A dryad, harmless to the boy's body, dangerous only to her own. The fear that had frozen his lessons was gone. But a new worry took its place. The boy pulled the forest to him without trying. Untrained, he drew a spirit from the wood as easily as he drew spells from a stolen book. Elestar could no longer wait. He had to teach the boy control, or the boy's raw gift would spend others as carelessly as it spent itself.

The lessons began badly. Elestar sat Rowan on the tower steps and taught him to still his mind. But the boy's power leaked from him like heat from a fire. All morning, creatures crept from Darkwood toward the tower. A fox with silver eyes. A pair of moss-backed toads. Elestar spoke soft words to each and turned it home. The work drained him. For every creature he calmed, two more slipped from the trees. "Stop reaching," Elestar said. "You pull them without knowing." "I'm not reaching." Rowan's jaw was tight. "They just come." That was the trouble. The boy's gift ran on its own, past any leash. By midday a stag stood at the tree line with antlers of bone-white thorn. It pawed the ground and lowered its head. Elestar raised his hand to soothe it. He was too slow. The stag charged. Elestar shoved Rowan behind him and threw up a ward. The stag struck it and staggered back, then wheeled and crashed into the wood. The old wizard's arms shook. He could not keep this up. One creature would come that no ward would hold. So he chose a different path. "You called them," he told Rowan. "You will send them back. Together." He knelt behind the boy and set both hands on his shoulders. "Feel where the pull comes from. Then push instead. Like water finding low ground. Do not fight it. Turn it." Rowan closed his eyes. Elestar felt the boy's power rise, wild and huge. He guided it as his farmer teacher once guided him. Not against the current. With it. Rowan breathed out. The pull reversed. Every creature at the tree line turned at once and melted into Darkwood. The clearing went still. Rowan opened his eyes. "It worked." "For now." Elestar's relief lasted one breath. Hoofbeats came up the track. A nobleman rode into the clearing with three guards. His cloak was mud-splashed, his face grim. Behind him rode a greying knight in silver armor, a matching sword at his hip. "You keep this tower?" the nobleman asked. He did not wait for an answer. "Grain is gone from my villages. Cattle too. A family will starve this winter." The knight swung down. "We tracked the thief here." He set something on the ground. A tuft of coarse black fur, half fur and half scale. "No beast I know grows this." Elestar's stomach dropped. He had felt this shape before, three nights past. A pull deeper than the rest, gone before he named it. Not a stag. Something the boy had summoned and lost. He looked at Rowan. The boy stared at the black fur and said nothing. His silence was answer enough. "We will hunt it down," the knight said. "Every field until we do." Elestar had stopped the creatures at his door. But one had already slipped past him, into the world, wearing his apprentice's careless magic.

The next morning Elestar led Rowan down the track toward Harveststead Farm. He meant to prove the beast came from Darkwood, not his tower. If he found the creature first, he could send it back before the knight named the boy. Rowan walked in silence, jaw tight. The forest leaned close on both sides, and Elestar felt it watching them. They reached the farm at midday. A farmer named Thomas Barley stood in his trampled yard, staring at a broken fence. His cows huddled in one corner. "Third night," he said. "It took the wheat again. My children will go hungry." His plain grief cut worse than any threat. Then Elestar saw her. The dryad, Sylvara, stood at the tree line. She had followed Rowan again, though leaving her rowan tree drained her like blood from a wound. Her skin had gone grey and dry. Bark showed at her wrists. Sir Emberblade came around the barn with his sword already drawn. The greying knight moved without hurry, the way a man moves when he has hunted many things. His silver armor caught the sun. He saw the dryad's strange skin and the leaves in her hair. "There," he said. "The beast." "No," Elestar said. "She is not what took your grain." Emberblade did not lower the blade. "She came from the wood. She is not human. That is enough." He stepped toward Sylvara. She was too weak to run. Elestar reached for the words to soothe him, but Rowan moved first. The boy threw himself between the knight and the dryad. "Stop," Rowan said. "She's mine. The beast is mine too." The yard went still. Thomas Barley stared. Emberblade lowered the sword one inch. "Explain." "I summoned it," Rowan said. "By accident. I lost it. The stolen grain is my fault, not hers." He did not soften it. He said it flat, the way he closed any subject. Elestar's chest went cold. The boy had just handed the knight the very thread that tied him to the beast. Everything Elestar had walked here to hide, Rowan had spoken aloud to save the dryad. Emberblade studied the boy a long moment. Then he sheathed the sword. "An honest answer," he said. "That is rare." He turned to Elestar. "The creature is still out there. If the boy made it, the boy helps me end it. He rides with me at dawn, or I take him now." Elestar looked at Rowan, then at the failing dryad clinging to Rowan's arm. He had come to clear his apprentice's name. Instead the boy had confessed and bound himself to the hunt. "He goes with you," Elestar said. "And I go with him." The farm was safe for one more day. But Rowan's training was no longer a quiet thing behind tower walls. It rode out at dawn, toward the beast he had made.