Leanna AppleBlossom went out before daylight and found the apple blossoms dead on the branch. Frost had come in the night. The petals she meant to weave into a fresh crown were curled black, and the buds she had counted yesterday were fused shut. She stood in the orchard and pressed one between her fingers. It crumbled like burnt paper. She needed those blossoms. Not for the crown, not really. She needed them for the grove she had been planning since winter — a clearing past the second stream where hurt things could come and rest. Squirrels with torn ears. The fox kit she had seen limping. Anything the woods had thrown out. A grove needed a first bloom to seed it, and every apple in the shire had frozen in one night. She pulled off her crown of dead petals and dropped it in the grass. Her older brother had told her once she would never learn the whole forest. She had never shown him the map she kept folded in her pocket, the one with a blank where the black pines began. She unfolded it now and looked at the marks nearer home. There was one place left that might help. She had passed the shop many times without going in. The magic supplies shop sat at the edge of the village with lanterns already lit against the gray morning. Jars glowed on the shelves inside the window — green, violet, a slow gold. Leanna pushed the door open. A bell rang somewhere she could not see. The shopkeeper was not at the counter. Something sneezed. She found it behind a tall shelf of curios, wedged between a cauldron and a stack of spellbooks. A small blue creature, no bigger than a cat, with feathery gills fanning at its neck and two soft horns. A tiny dragon, or something shaped like one. It looked up at her and sneezed again. A puff of cold air came out. Frost bloomed on the floorboards. Leanna knelt. The creature had been shivering under a shelf full of potions, and one paw was pressed to a cracked jar leaking pale light. It was hurt. It was also, she understood at once, the frost. Something small and lost had gotten inside and been breathing cold all night, and the cold had crawled out through the walls and into the orchard. She held out her hand. The creature climbed into it and tucked its head under her thumb. It weighed almost nothing. She left a copper coin on the counter for the broken jar. She carried the creature out into the gray morning and started walking, not toward home, but toward the second stream where she had planned the grove. The apple blossoms were gone. She had, instead, the first lost thing. Behind her, in the orchard, the frost was already beginning to lift.

By the time Leanna reached the second stream, the creature in her hands had gone quiet. Its gills fanned slow. The crystal points along its back looked dull, like glass left in a warm room. She stopped on the bank and knelt. The blue fur was damp where her palm had pressed. It was warming, and warming was killing it. She set it down on a flat stone in the shade. It did not stand. One paw twitched. She understood then that if it died, the frost that killed her blossoms died with it, and so did every question she had about how to undo the damage. No creature, no clue. No clue, no grove. She needed cold. Fast. The stream ran cold, but water would drown it. She scooped a handful of wet clay from the bank and packed it around the sprite's belly. It gave a small, grateful shiver. Not enough. The clay would warm within the hour. She pulled out her map and looked at the marks she trusted. A tinker sold odd things from a cart near the mushroom houses. She had passed him once and seen a small stove wrapped in blue crystal, humming cold instead of heat. She had thought it foolish then. She wrapped the sprite in the hem of her flower dress, tucked the bundle against her ribs where her skin was coolest, and ran. The tinker was folding his cloth when she arrived. She held out every copper she had. He looked at the shivering bundle, then at her coins, and pushed half of them back. He gave her the small stove and a folded packet of what he called sprite-salt. "Burns cold," he said. "Don't touch the coils." She carried it all back to the stream at a walk, afraid of jostling. She set the stove on the stone. The coils lit pale gold behind their frosted glass, and the air around them dropped. Frost webbed across the rock. She laid the sprite in front of the vents. It breathed in. The dull crystals along its spine brightened. Its gills flared. It lifted its head and looked at her with both eyes clear. Leanna sat back in the moss. She had saved it. She watched the stove work and saw the second problem arrive with the first breath of relief. The stove was small. The salt packet was thin. The sprite could not leave it, and she could not carry a stone and a stove and a living thing through the woods forever. It needed a house. A cold house, built where cold could stay. She unfolded her map again and marked a new spot upstream, where the bank held shade all day. The grove would have to wait one more turn. Before she could plant a first bloom for lost things, she had to build a roof for this one.