Jack Timber set his axe against the first screaming pine and the wolves stepped out of the fog. He counted six. Their eyes were empty sockets, dark as knotholes. The pines behind him groaned like men drowning. Every autumn their roots crawled under the village fields and choked the crop, and every autumn Vetchhollow's harvest came up black. Jack had come to cut them down. The candle inside his hollow pumpkin skull guttered when the lead wolf snarled. He swung the axe. The blade bit bark. The tree shrieked, a sound that rattled his carved teeth. The wolves rushed him. Jack spun, caught one across the ribs with the flat of the axe, and it skittered off unhurt. Another lunged at his boot. He kicked it back and lost his grip on the haft. The pine still stood, barely scored. He could fell it or he could fight, not both. He backed against the trunk and did the math. Six wolves. One axe. Three trees to bring down before the frost. The candle in his skull wobbled. If it went out, so did he. Iron rang behind him on the path. Jack turned. The blacksmith came through the fog like a furnace on legs. Flint Grimshaw. Mismatched plates, amber rivets shaped like little grinning gourds, eyes lit from inside. Jack had bought his axe head from him last spring and paid in cordwood. They had not spoken since. Flint carried a long iron pike in one gauntlet and, behind him, a smaller figure in a fur-lined hood. "You're losing," Flint said. His voice sounded like a kettle boiling. "I noticed," Jack said. The hooded one pushed past. Gareth Thornwood. Jack knew the name from the tavern board. A hunter. Yellow eyes under the hood, brighter than they had any right to be. He looked at the wolves the way a butcher looks at hanging meat. "Cut your tree," Gareth said. "I'll keep them off you." "For what price?" Jack asked. "Later." A wolf broke first. Gareth met it in the air. He moved wrong for a man his size, too fast, too low. The wolf went down and did not get up. Flint stepped past Jack and planted the pike between him and the pack. Sparks jumped where iron struck fang. Jack picked up his axe. He swung. The pine screamed. He swung again. Chips flew past his jaw. Behind him he heard Gareth breathing hard, and then not breathing like a man at all. He did not turn to look. The tree cracked at the heart and came down across the clearing, and the wolves that were left broke into the fog. Jack leaned on the haft. One pine down. Two to go. Gareth stood over a dead wolf, wiping his mouth. His hood had slipped. Jack saw the teeth before Gareth pulled the cloth back up. "Tomorrow," Gareth said. "Same time." Jack nodded and did not ask.

Jack Timber walked out of the pines at dawn with a ruined axe. The blade looked like a dog had chewed it. The first cursed pine had eaten the edge and left chips the size of teeth. He set the haft on his shoulder and started down the cart track toward the village. Two trees still stood in the grove. He could not touch either of them with what he carried. The blacksmith's shop sat at the edge of Vetchhollow under a thatched roof gone black with soot. Bats hung from the eaves. Cobwebs bridged the lanterns. Small carved pumpkins grinned from the door beam. Jack had bought his axe head here last spring. He had not been back since he saw the builder's grave behind the woodpile. Flint Grimshaw stood at the anvil, hammering a horseshoe flat for no reason Jack could see. The amber light in his helm brightened when Jack stepped under the arch. Up close, the iron man smelled like a banked fire. "It's dead," Jack said. He laid the axe on the anvil. "Two trees left. I need it sharp by nightfall or the frost beats us." Flint picked up the head between two gauntlet fingers. He turned it. He set it down. "Grinding won't hold," he said. His voice rang inside the helm. "Second pine will chew it worse. You need the edge tempered in something the tree respects." "Meaning what." Flint reached under the bench and brought out a clay jar. Inside, on a bed of damp moss, lay a black flower. The petals had orange veins. The stem carried thorns. Jack had seen the plant only once, growing from the builder's grave. "Midnight bloom," Flint said. "Crushed into the quench water. The pines fear what grew from a dead man." "You kept one." "I kept three." Jack watched him work. Flint heated the axe head until it glowed the color of his eyes. He hammered the chips out, folded the edge, hammered again. He crushed the flower into a bucket of well water. The petals turned the water black. When he plunged the blade in, the bucket screamed. It was a small sound, thin, but Jack knew it. The same sound the first pine had made. Flint lifted the axe out. The edge was clean and dark. He tested it against his own gauntlet and cut a curl of iron off the knuckle. "That will bite," he said. He handed it over. "Only one problem." "Which is." "You used my last bloom that would take the heat. Two trees. One blade. If it chips again, I have nothing left to give you." Jack shouldered the axe. The candle in his skull steadied. He had his edge back. He had one swing at each remaining pine and no second chance. He turned toward the grove.

Jack stopped at the edge of the grove with the tempered axe across his shoulder. Two pines stood ahead. Both looked the same to him. Both had bark like scabbed skin and needles the color of old blood. He had one clean swing at each. Pick wrong, waste it on the stronger tree, and the blade would chip before he reached the weaker one. Then the wolves would come back at dusk and find him with nothing. He needed to know which pine to take first. He turned away from the grove and cut down through the fields toward the graveyard. He had heard the villagers speak of the ghost girl who lived there. They said she asked the dead things the living could not. The graveyard sat behind a low iron fence. Carved pumpkins burned on the paving stones. The trees inside had no leaves, only bare fingers. A small figure sat on a headstone, barefoot, her hair the color of pond ice. She was reading a book with a locked clasp. She did not look up when Jack's boots hit the gate. "You're loud for a man with a candle for a face," she said. "Seraphine Graves." "Jack Timber." She turned a page. Symbols on the paper moved when he tried to focus on them. "You want to know which tree dies easier." "Someone told you." "The builder told me." She nodded toward a grave at the back with black flowers on it. "He watches the grove. He says the north pine has a split root. Lightning, forty years ago. The heartwood on the east side is soft." "And the other one." "Sound as stone. Save it for last. Your axe won't survive it if you go the other way." Jack shifted the haft on his shoulder. "Why help me." She closed the book. Her eyes were too pale. "The roots choke the graves too. My dead are hungry. Cut the pines and they feed." He nodded once and turned to go. "Timber." He looked back. "Strike the north pine from the east. One swing. The wolves smell blood on the wind already." Jack ran the cart track back to the grove. The sun sat a hand above the ridge. He circled the north pine and found the split root under moss, exactly where she had said. He set his feet on the east side. The bark there gave under his thumb like bruised fruit. He swung. The axe went in to the eye. The pine screamed, a long thin note, and split down the trunk in a black seam. It came down away from him and shook the ground. The blade came out clean. No chips. No new teeth in the edge. One tree left. One swing left. Jack pulled the axe free and heard, from the ridge above the grove, the first wolf answer the pine's scream.

The first wolf's cry rolled down from the ridge. A second answered. Jack turned to the last pine. Its bark was smooth and unbroken. No split root. No soft spot under his thumb. Sound as stone, the ghost girl had said. He had one swing left in the axe. Somewhere on that trunk was a place it could go in. Anywhere else and the blade would chip, and the axe would be finished. A branch snapped behind him. Jack spun with the axe raised. A hooded figure stepped from the ferns, bow drawn, arrow pointed past Jack's shoulder at the ridge. Gareth Thornwood. The hunter who had bled for him at the first pine, whose teeth Jack had seen shift in his mouth when the wolves came. Amber eyes under the hood. No greeting. "Two on the ridge," Gareth said. "More coming. Cut the tree." "I can't read it. It's clean all the way around." Gareth lowered the bow a finger's width. He walked to the pine and set his palm flat on the bark. He closed his eyes. Then he moved, slow, around the trunk, palm dragging. He stopped on the north face and pressed harder. His knuckles whitened. Jack heard the wood groan under his hand. "Here," Gareth said. "The sap runs slower on this side. Cold pocket. The grain's tighter but shallower to the heart. Strike two hands above my palm. Angle down." "How do you know." Gareth showed his teeth. They were not a man's teeth. "I hear it breathing." A wolf broke from the tree line at the top of the slope. Gareth turned, drew, loosed. The arrow took it in the throat. It fell without a sound. Two more came behind it. "Now, Timber." Jack set his feet. He fixed his eyes on the spot two hands above where Gareth's palm had been. He swung down and across, the way Gareth had said, angling into the grain. The axe bit deep. The pine screamed, higher than the first, a note that made Jack's teeth ache inside his wooden head. The trunk shuddered. A crack ran up the bark. The tree leaned, slow, then faster, and came down through its own branches with a sound like a house collapsing. Jack pulled the blade free. He looked at the edge. A notch the size of his thumbnail was gone from the middle. The axe was chipped. Not ruined. Chipped. Gareth loosed another arrow. Another wolf dropped. But more shapes were moving on the ridge now, four, five, six, and they were not stopping at the tree line this time. "The grove's done," Gareth said. His voice had gone rough. "They know it. They're not guarding anymore." Jack looked at the two fallen pines. Then at the ridge. The wolves were coming for them.

The wolves came down the slope in a loose line. Six of them, eyes empty as knotholes. Gareth loosed his last arrow and dropped one. The others did not slow. Jack backed toward the fallen pines, the chipped axe in both hands. Gareth drew a short knife. His shoulders were shaking under the cloak, and his amber eyes had gone brighter than they should be. "Get to the graveyard," Gareth said. His voice was wrong now, thicker in the throat. "The ghost girl. Her ground is old. Wolves can't cross it." "You're coming." "No." Gareth showed his teeth again, and this time they kept coming, longer than a mouth should hold. "Run, Timber. Now." Jack ran. He heard something behind him tear out of a cloak and hit the ground on four legs. He heard a snarl that was not a wolf's snarl. He did not look back. The graveyard fence rose out of the mist at the bottom of the slope. Crooked headstones. Carved pumpkins burning low. Jack vaulted the iron rail and landed hard on the flagstones. Two wolves hit the fence behind him and stopped as if they had struck a wall. They paced along the iron, heads low, and would not step through. Seraphine was already waiting between the graves. Bare feet on cold stone. Pale hair moving in air that wasn't there. In her hands she held a heavy book, its cover green and gold, its lock hanging open. "You cut them all," she said. Not a question. "All three. The roots should die now." "They will." She looked past him at the wolves on the fence. "But the trees had a keeper. Something under the grove. It won't die because the trees did. It's climbing up through the roots now." Jack lowered the axe. "Tell me you know how to kill it." She opened the book. The pages turned by themselves, stopping on a spread of tight, crooked writing. Her finger hovered over a line. "The dead here remember it," she said. "They say its name was buried with a smith. The one who built the iron man. If we dig up that grave, the answer is in the box he was put in." A long howl rose from the ridge. Not a wolf. Something bigger. Jack thought of Gareth on the slope and did not let himself think further. Heavy footsteps came up the graveyard path. Flint Grimshaw stepped through the gate, amber eyes burning under his helm, a shovel in one gauntlet and a hammer in the other. Pumpkin rivets glowed along his plates. He had heard the trees fall from the forge. "Where," Flint said. Seraphine pointed to a sunken grave under a leaning marker. The name on the stone had been scratched out. "There," she said. "Your maker." Flint did not move for a long moment. Then he set the shovel in the dirt and pushed.