Ellion Whisperleaf pressed his back to a mossy trunk and counted the tyrant's soldiers on the path below. Six of them. They had chained the forest gates last night. Now every trail out of the deep woods was sealed, and Ellion sat trapped on the wrong side. His kin waited a day's walk east, in the hollows where the elders still spoke freely. He carried the truth they needed to hear: proof the tyrant had murdered the old warden and stolen his seal. But truth was useless if Ellion could not reach a single ear. He had never been brave. His hands shook now, as they always did. A soft chirp broke the quiet. Ellion looked down. A small blue dragon, no bigger than a cat, nosed at his boot. Its wings were still soft and folded. It blinked up at him with wide eyes and made the chirp again. He should have shooed it away. Instead he cupped a hand over its snout to keep it silent. The soldiers were close. One of them stopped and lifted his torch toward the brush. "Search the ridge," the soldier said. "He can't have gone far." Ellion's heart slammed. He needed to move, but every open path led straight into their hands. The little dragon squirmed free and scrambled up the trunk. It clung to the bark and looked back at him. Then it climbed higher, into the branches, and vanished. Ellion followed its eyes upward. There, hidden among the thick canopy, sat a treehouse. Ropes and a wooden ladder hung down the far side of the trunk, screened by leaves. He had passed under it a hundred times and never seen it. He climbed. The ladder swayed. Below, boots crushed the ferns where he had crouched a moment before. Ellion pulled himself onto the platform and hauled the ladder up behind him. He lay flat and did not breathe. The torchlight swept the ground, found nothing, and moved on. The soldiers pushed deeper down the sealed path. Inside the treehouse, the blue dragon curled on a pile of old blankets beside a small gray shape. A wolf pup lifted its head and growled, low and wild. Ellion froze. Then the pup sniffed the dragon, decided he belonged, and settled again. Someone lived here. Someone who fed strays and hid from the same patrols. Ellion found a rolled map nailed to the wall. It marked a narrow deer trail that ran above the sealed gates, along the high ridge, straight toward the eastern hollows. The patrols had closed the ground. They had not closed the trees. Ellion traced the ridge path with one finger and stopped shaking. He could reach his kin after all. He rolled the map and tucked it into his coat. But the deer trail crossed open rock near the ridge crest, in full view of the watchtower he could see through the window, its beacon already lit and turning toward him.