Jade Woodhart had three weeks to write a ballad worth singing, and nothing worth writing about. She sat on a stump at the edge of Walnutsnarl with her lute across her knees and a blank page pinned under a rock. Every autumn the forest festival picked one headliner from a stack of submissions. Every autumn Jade sent a song, and every autumn a runner tacked her name to the bottom of the opener list. She had rhymed moss with loss four times already this morning. Her problem was not the rhymes. Her problem was that nothing had ever happened to her. She had grown up in the same cottage, walked the same paths, and lost nothing bigger than a boot to the creek. The other hopefuls sang about drowned brothers and burned villages. Jade sang about walking to town. A small pink shape crashed through the ferns and landed in her lap. It was a puppy, no bigger than a loaf, with silver wings folded crooked against a purple robe. One wing was bent the wrong way. The puppy looked up at her and whined. Jade had never seen anything like it, and she was certain no one else in Walnutsnarl had either. She set her lute aside and lifted the animal carefully. Its heart beat fast against her thumb. Somewhere behind the ferns, a branch snapped, then another, closer. Whatever had chased the puppy was still coming. Jade tucked the puppy under her jacket, grabbed her lute, and ran for the cottage path. She had her story now. She only had to survive it long enough to write it down.

Jade reached the cottage and bolted the door. She set the puppy on the kitchen table and lit a lamp. The little creature panted under its purple robe, silver wings twitching. She smoothed the bent wing back into place, and it flinched but did not bite. She fetched her notebook and wrote the first line she had: A pink thing fell from the sky. Then she stopped. She did not know what had chased it. She did not know where it had come from, or why it wore a robe cut for a child's doll. Without those answers, the ballad was just a strange animal falling into a lap. The judges would yawn. She needed a name, a pursuer, a reason. She needed the puppy to tell her. She pulled a stool close and spoke low. She asked where it came from. She asked what was behind it in the ferns. The puppy only stared, tongue out, one paw on the corner of her page. Jade tried a different way. She picked up her lute and played the four bars she had written that morning. The puppy's ears lifted. When she reached the empty part, the place where the song had no ending, the puppy whined and pawed at the robe's hem. Jade set the lute down and looked. Stitched inside the collar, in thread so fine she almost missed it, was a single word: Ammin. Below it, a small mark, a tower crossed by a wing. She did not know the word. She did not know the mark. But she knew now that the puppy had been sent from somewhere with towers and tailors, and that someone there had wanted it kept. She tore out the moss-and-loss page and started clean. At the top she wrote: The Ballad of Ammin. She had a name. She still did not have the pursuer, and outside the cottage, something heavy stepped onto the porch boards and stopped.