Lucas Hartwell had not touched another living person in one year, and today the widow Talbot stood on his porch with a basket of bread. She meant to hand it to him. He stepped back into the doorway of the sunlit farmhouse and put both hands behind him. "Set it on the rail," he said. She frowned but obeyed. When his fingers brushed the basket, a thorn of black frost cracked across the wicker. The bread inside went gray and hard. Talbot dropped it and ran. Lucas watched her go and did not blame her. The curse worked through skin. He had learned that the night he embraced the woman he loved, and her arm blackened under his hand. She lived. She would not let him near her again. Since then his touch killed whatever it held. He knew only one way out. He needed a curse-scholar, someone who read old bindings the way farmers read weather. But no scholar would sit in a room with a man whose hand turned bread to rot. He had written to one anyway. A woman in the far hills studied thorn-curses. Four letters he had sent, carried by cart and stranger, and four times no reply came. Tonight he tried the last thing he owned that might reach her. He set the flower-carved black ring on the table, the one relic left from the curse-caster who ruined his family. He believed she would want to see it. He needed a messenger who feared no thorn. He went out to the hedge where the wild things nested. A sprite lived there, small and quick, her wings stitched with thorns like the curse itself. She had watched him for weeks, unafraid, because thorns could not harm what was already made of them. Lucas held out the ring on his cursed palm. "I can't carry this," he said. "Anything I touch, it dies. But you won't die." The sprite hovered close. She studied the ring, then studied his face. Her small hands closed around the black band and lifted it clean from his skin. It did not blacken. It did not crack. She turned it once in the fading light, testing its weight. "There's a scholar in the hills," Lucas said. "She won't answer letters. Show her this. Tell her a Hartwell sent it." The sprite tilted her head, as if weighing the trade. Then she darted upward, ring clutched tight, and vanished over the treeline. Three days later she returned. She dropped a folded paper on the porch rail and waited. Lucas opened it without touching her. The hand inside was sharp and certain. "I have seen this ring before," it read. "I will not come to you. Come to me, and touch nothing on the road. The one who made your curse is not dead." Lucas read it twice. The scholar would help him. But the maker of the curse still walked, and now she knew his name.