The sparrow in Lily Brightbloom's cupped hands was still breathing, but the fox that had bitten it was still somewhere in the ferns. Lily flew low through Pinehollow, one wing brushing bark, the sparrow's blood warm against her palms. She needed a place to hide it. She had no place. She had never had a place. She was a palm-tall fairy with moth-pale wings, and for three seasons she had been trying to build a grove where hurt creatures could mend. Every nest she chose failed her. A hawk found the last one. A stoat found the one before. She kept starting over with smaller and smaller patients, and losing them anyway. The sparrow's chest fluttered and stopped fluttering so evenly. Lily set down on a stump and pressed her ear to its feathers. Still alive. Barely. She could hear the fox now, working through the bracken behind her. "You're bleeding on my path," a voice said. Lily spun. An old woman stood between two birches, no taller than a child, her eyes milk-white and fixed on nothing. Twigs clung to her hood. A small gray cat pressed against her ankle. Lily knew her by rumor only — the blind witch the village children were told to avoid. Morna Rootwhisper. People said she talked to trees. People said the trees answered. "I have a sparrow," Lily said. "A fox is coming." Morna tilted her head, listening past Lily to the bracken. "Yes. Follow." She walked without hesitating, one hand out, fingertips grazing trunks she could not see. Lily flew close to her shoulder. The cat led. They went deeper than Lily had ever gone, past a stream she didn't know, until the trees closed overhead and the light turned green. Morna stopped at a huge oak. Its trunk was split by a hollow the size of a doorway, ringed with moss and smaller knot-holes above. Roots humped the ground like sleeping animals. The fox-sounds were gone. Even the wind was gone. "Outsiders walk past this tree," Morna said. "They don't see it. I don't know why. I stopped asking." Lily slipped inside the hollow. It was dry. It smelled of old honey. There were ledges in the wood, natural shelves, enough for a dozen wounded things. She laid the sparrow on moss and pressed her thumb to the bite until the bleeding slowed. When she came back out, Morna was already turning away. "It's yours to keep or lose," the witch said. "The tree hides you from eyes. It won't hide you from teeth." A branch cracked, far off but not far enough. Lily looked toward the sound. Something silver moved between the trunks — low, long, watching her. A wolf. It did not come closer. It did not leave. It sat down at the edge of the clearing and put its ears forward, as if waiting to be told what she wanted.

By morning the sparrow was drinking water from a leaf. Lily Brightbloom watched its chest rise and fall on the moss ledge, then stepped outside the oak. The wolf was gone. The clearing was quiet in a way that made her uneasy. Somewhere past the stream, a rabbit was bleeding into the leaves, or a fawn was dragging a broken leg, and she had no way to tell any of them where to come. The hollow was hidden. That was the problem now. Outsiders walked past this tree without seeing it. Wounded creatures would do the same. She tried the obvious things first. She tied a strip of her sash to a low branch. The branch swallowed it. She scratched an arrow into the bark with a thorn. When she stepped back, the bark was smooth. The magic that hid the oak hid every mark she made on it. She sat on a root and pressed her palms to her eyes. Three seasons of failing. She would not fail this one by being clever in the wrong direction. A shadow crossed her knees. An owl landed on the root beside her, no taller than her forearm, wrapped in a green cloak stitched with faded gold. A brass disc hung at his throat. He folded his wings and looked at her with two hard yellow eyes. "You're the fairy who keeps burying things," he said. Lily flinched. "Who are you?" "Cornelius Nightfeather. I watch. I carry news." He tipped his head at the oak. "Morna said you'd need a voice. You can't be one. You're too small and you don't fly at night." "They can't find me," Lily said. "Even if I could shout." Cornelius reached under his cloak and drew out a glass bottle. Inside, a coil of green air turned slowly, threaded with tiny leaves. "Grove breeze," he said. "Uncork it near a hurt animal and it carries my scent and the smell of this hollow. They'll follow the wind back. I'll fly the woods and open one wherever I find blood." Lily took the bottle. It was warm. "Why help me?" "Because you didn't run from the wolf." He clicked his beak. "Give me the first one." She handed it back. Cornelius lifted into the branches and was gone. By dusk the wind changed. A limping hare pushed through the ferns and stopped at the base of the oak, nose working. It saw the hollow. It went inside. An hour later a jay with a torn wing dropped onto the moss beside it. Then a squirrel with a bloody flank. Lily counted four before full dark. She was still counting when she heard the fox. It sat at the edge of the clearing, red coat clean, ears forward, watching her patients arrive. It was not hunting. It was learning the way in.

By dawn the hollow smelled wrong. The hare's leg had swollen tight. The jay's torn wing wept a yellow crust. The squirrel would not open its eyes. Lily had cleaned the surface cuts with water and moss, but the deeper wounds needed things she did not have and did not know how to make. She had watched creatures die alone in the woods for three winters. Now they would die in her arms instead. That was not the sanctuary she had promised. She left the sparrow watching the others and flew for help. She went to the badger first. Retired physician. Forty years of patients. Morna had once said his name like a debt she wouldn't pay. She found him in a sett dug into a hillside, sorting dried roots on a slab. Round glasses. Leather vest with a brass chain. He did not look up when she landed. "I have four wounded animals," Lily said. "Deep wounds. I don't know what to use." "Then you shouldn't have taken them," the badger said. "They came to me." He set down a root. "Fever?" "Two of them." "Yarrow for the bleeding. Willow bark for the fever. Boil the bark, don't steep it. Honey on the open wound, not sap. Sap will rot the flesh." He spoke without pause, as if reading. "Change the dressing twice a day. If the leg smells sweet, the leg comes off." Lily wrote nothing. She was memorizing his mouth. "I don't have yarrow or willow," she said. "Then you have three dead animals by tomorrow." He looked at her for the first time. His eyes were tired behind the glasses. "I don't travel anymore. I gave that up." "I'm not asking you to travel." "You're asking me to care." He turned back to his roots. "Fairy healing was better than any of this. Your kind forgot it. Ask the old wood what you lost." "What old wood?" "The one that remembers." She found the tree spirit at the edge of a stand of grandfather pines, half sunk into the ground like it had grown out of the roots and forgotten how to leave. Bark skin. Leaves at the shoulders. Two lit coals for eyes. It watched her without moving. "A badger sent me," Lily said. "He said your kind remembers fairy healing." "We remember," the spirit said. Its voice came from under the ground. "Your kind stopped asking. That is not the same as forgetting." "Three animals in my hollow will die tonight." "Then tonight you learn one thing. Not more. Come." It lifted a hand. In its palm lay a ring of pale petals, layered like a small crown, faintly warm. "Press this to the worst wound. Speak the animal's fear aloud. The petals take what the body cannot hold." Lily took the crown. It weighed almost nothing. "One wound," the spirit said. "Choose."

Lily flew back to the hollow with the petal crown cupped in both hands. She pressed it to the squirrel first, because the squirrel would not open its eyes. She spoke his fear aloud — that the dark would keep him — and the petals dimmed and crumbled into his fur. His breathing steadied. The hare and the jay still burned with fever. She had one wound healed and three animals left to lose. Then the sparrow started screaming from the oak's mouth. Lily went out. At the clearing's edge stood the fox. Not creeping. Standing. Ears forward, nose working the air, learning what the wind carried. He had followed her route here two nights ago and now he had come back to test the door. The hare could not run. The jay could not fly. If the fox slipped past the roots, they were meat. She could not fight him. She could not move the animals. She needed someone who spoke his language. She knew one name. Morna had mentioned her once as a fox-kin elder in the pine flats, a fairy who had lived among foxes long enough to think like one. Lily had never gone to her. She went now. She found Elara Moonwhisker crouched by a stream, feeding scraps to a vixen that ate from her palm without flinching. Fox ears above white hair. Fairy wings folded flat. She did not stand when Lily landed. "A fox has learned my sanctuary," Lily said. "There are wounded inside. He'll come tonight." Elara scratched the vixen's chin. "Killing him won't help. Another will find the trail he wore in." "I don't want to kill him." "Then you want to teach him the path costs more than it gives." Elara stood. She pulled a bundle of cut roots from a satchel — black thorns thick as fingers, twisted through knots of bark. "Blackthorn and briar. Weave a wall across his approach. Not around your clearing. Across his memory of it. He learned one route. Close that route. He won't dig a new one if the old one bit him." They worked until dusk. Elara showed her how to lash the thorns low, at fox-shoulder height, and how to rub the vixen's scent into the wood so the barrier read as another fox's claim. Lily's hands bled by the end. The lattice sat across the trail like a shut mouth. The fox came at moonrise. Lily watched from the canopy. He put his nose to the thorns, jerked back, circled, tried again. The scent held him longer than the thorns did. He turned and went. He did not come back that night. Lily climbed down. The barrier had worked. But she stood in the clearing and understood what she had built. A wall meant a border. A border meant the sanctuary had edges now, and the edges would need watching, every night, for whatever came next.

Morning came and the barrier still held. Inside the hollow, the hare shook under its own fur and the jay's beak hung open. Lily touched the hare's ear and felt the heat run through her fingers. The petal crown was gone. The badger physician would not travel. She had told herself she needed more magic, but no one was coming with any. She had to make her own medicine or watch two animals die by nightfall. She went out into the grove with an empty jar. She scraped resin from the pines where the bark had split. She cut yarrow from the shaded bank and pulled moss from the north side of the roots. She crushed it all together on a flat stone and warmed it in her palms until the sap turned soft and dark. It smelled sharp and green. It was not magic. It was only what the grove had. A shadow crossed her stone. Lily turned with the jar half-closed. A fairy stood at the clearing's edge, brown braid over one shoulder, a leather satchel heavy on her hip. She had followed the scent of pine and crushed leaf in. Not one of the grove's animals. A stranger. "You mixed that wrong," the stranger said. "Yarrow first. Then sap. Otherwise it burns." Lily closed her hand around the jar. "Who are you." "Clover Wingwhisper. I'm looking for my sister. I smelled the resin from the ridge." She did not step closer. "I've seen sick animals. I can help you or I can go." Lily thought of the hare's shaking. "Help." Clover knelt by the stone and started again. She scraped the salve back into the jar in the right order and pressed it flat. She worked without speaking. When Lily brought her to the hollow, Clover looked at the hare, then the jay, and did not flinch. "Wound first," Clover said. "Then throat." They rubbed the salve into the hare's raw flank. They pushed a thin smear down the jay's beak. The hare's shaking slowed within an hour. The jay drank water for the first time in two days. Neither was healed. Both would live through the night. Clover wiped her hands on the moss. "You'll need more than one jar. That stand of pines won't last a season of this." "I know." Clover reached into her satchel and drew out a slim wrapped sapling, willow, its leaves shivering with a pale light. "A healer near the fen gave me this. Said it grows medicine if you plant it near water. I don't have water where I'm going." She held it out. "You do." Lily took the sapling. Her hands were still dark with sap. "My sister," Clover said. "If a fairy comes through here with a moonpetal, you send word." "I will." Clover left before dusk. Lily planted the sapling by the spring root. The leaves caught the last light. The hare slept. The jay slept. She had bought them time, and she had bought herself a way to grow more.

The willow sapling had put out three new leaves by dawn. Lily was drawing salve from its bark when she heard the scream. It came from the outer roots, past the blackthorn line. A rabbit's cry, cut short. She dropped the jar and ran. She found the rabbit at the edge of the grove, a wire loop tight around its hind leg. The wire ran to a bent sapling staked in the dirt. Human work. Lily pried the loop open with her fingers and the rabbit bolted, dragging blood. She counted the stake. She counted the wire. She followed the trail with her eyes and saw a second glint further out, and a third past that. By midmorning she had found six snares and freed nothing but a squirrel too slow to run. The grove's wounded were coming toward her, and the trapper had strung a fence of wire between them and the hollow. She could not watch every root alone. She went for Hazel first. The squirrel was three ridges over, packing her satchel for a run of her own. Lily did not know her well. A forager, sharp-eyed, no wasted words. "Snares," Lily said. "Six so far. I need eyes above the ground." Hazel adjusted her glasses. "How many acres." "All of the outer roots." "One day. Then I go." "One day is enough." On the way back Lily cut through the bent-grass clearing where the doe stood. Daisy had not moved from that patch in days. Her fawn's shape was still pressed into the grass. "There are snares in the wood," Lily said. "If your fawn came this way—" "Show me." Daisy walked behind her without another word. Hazel took the canopy. She ran the pine limbs and called down numbers. "Two by the split root. One under the fern. One tied to the birch." Daisy walked the ground. Her ears turned at every creak of wire. She found three Hazel could not see, buried under leaf-fall. By dusk they had eleven snares piled at Lily's feet. The wire was stiff and cold. Lily followed the last trail back to its source and found the trapper's hut at the edge of the pines, roof caved, sign faded to the word RANGER. The door hung open. Inside, fresh boot prints in the dust. A coil of wire on the table. A ledger. He was not gone. He was working out of a post everyone had forgotten. Lily carried the eleven snares to the hollow tree by the spring, opened its small iron door, and locked the wire inside. Out of the woods. Out of his hands. Daisy stood at the clearing's edge. "He'll set more tomorrow." "I know." Hazel dropped from the pine. "Then you need more than me." She shouldered her satchel and left. Daisy did not.

Daisy was still at the clearing's edge at first light. Lily had slept two hours by the willow. She woke knowing the trapper would already be walking his line, and every wounded thing drawn to the hollow would cross it before she could reach them. She needed a voice out ahead of her. Something small enough to slip past a boot, fast enough to turn a limping fox before he found the wire. She went to the old chapel behind the spring. Roots had grown through the stone walls and closed the roof. Stained glass still held color in two windows, green and blue. Field mice had nested there for years. Lily crouched at the door and whistled once, low. A brown mouse came out onto the step, whiskers forward. He whistled back, three clean notes. "I need a scout," Lily said. "Someone to sit on the outer roots and turn animals off the wire trails. You know the ground." The mouse tipped his head. He whistled a question. She understood the shape of it if not the words. How many trails. "Four main ones. I'll show you every snare I've found." He washed his face once and stepped down off the stone. That was his yes. She took him along the outer roots and pointed. Bent sapling here. Loop under the fern. Fresh dirt by the birch. He climbed each stake and sniffed. He whistled from the top of one, sharp and rising, then dropping. A warning sound. Loud enough to carry across a clearing. She could hear it three roots away. By afternoon the mouse had picked his stations. He posted himself on a knot of root above the first trail and waited. Lily did not have to wait long to know if it worked. She was carrying salve back to the hollow when the whistle cut through the pines, sharp, sharp, dropping. She ran toward it and found a young badger halted mid-step, one paw raised. Six inches ahead of him, a wire loop lay half-buried in leaves. The mouse was on the root above, whistling until the badger backed away and turned north along the safe seam Lily had cleared. She stood in the trail and breathed. On her way back she found Hank Timber at the spring, filling a canteen. He had come down out of the Greywood with an axe head snapped at the collar. He straightened when he saw her. "Heard whistling," he said. "That's new." "A scout. He turns them off the wire." Hank nodded once. He looked past her, toward the ranger post. "Man sets eight a day. One mouse won't cover eight lines by week's end." "He'll cover today." "Today's good." Hank capped the canteen. "But he's setting a wider ring tomorrow. Saw the stakes cut. You'll need more than whistling by then." Lily looked back toward the chapel. The mouse whistled again from the outer roots. Something had turned away in time.

Hank's warning sat with Lily through the night. One mouse could not cover eight lines, and the trapper would widen his ring by dawn. She needed something that could run the whole perimeter ahead of the wounded and steer them off the wire before a whistle would even reach them. At first light she went down to the woodcutter's yard below the ridge. Grace Timberwood was splitting kindling by the shed, an axe in one hand and a braid over her shoulder. A brown and white hound sat at her boot, ears up, watching Lily land on the woodpile. "You're the fairy from the grove," Grace said. She did not stop splitting. "Father said you had a mouse problem." "I have a wire problem. The trapper doubled his line. I need something faster than a mouse." Grace set the axe down and looked at the hound. "She works sick trees with me. She'll work snares." "I can't pay." "I didn't ask." Grace pulled a pair of moss-covered boots from under the shed bench and handed them up. "Father's. He walked the ridge in these when the dying started. Trapper won't hear you coming." Lily took them. They were heavy in her hands but soft on the seam. They went up together. Grace walked the outer roots with the hound off leash, giving low commands, one word each. Lily flew ahead in the moss boots strapped to her back and marked every snare she could find with a bent twig. The hound learned the twigs in under an hour. She ran the line at a trot, nose down, and when she caught wire scent she sat and would not move until Grace came up to disarm it with a stone tied to a cord. The stone tripped the loop from six feet back. The wire snapped shut on air. By midday they had cleared four snares and turned three limping animals north onto the safe seam. A fox with a torn ear. A vole. A doe with a cut flank that watched the hound and did not run, because the hound sat down and looked away until the doe passed. Grace came back to the spring with pitch on her sleeve. "She'll run it again at dusk. And at dawn." "Every day?" "Until he stops." Grace wiped her hands. "He won't stop." Lily looked at the hound drinking from the spring. The mouse whistled once from the outer roots, a clean note, no warning in it. The ring was covered. Then Grace said the rest. "Father saw him this morning. He wasn't setting snares. He was cutting a path toward the spring. He knows something's here. He's coming to find it." Lily held the moss boots against her chest. The wounded would reach the hollow now. But the trapper would reach it too, and soon.