Luna Ashwood had two weeks until the trial that would name her a full witch, and a stranger was already writing down her friend's answers. She saw him from the market path: a thin man in gray, leaning against the carved shrine at the edge of the square, a wax slate propped on his forearm. Sage stood in front of him with a basket of dried nettle on her hip. The bone stylus in the man's hand moved every time Sage's mouth did. Luna knew what he was. The hidden circles sent quiet wardens when a candidate's name came up wrong, and her name had come up wrong the day a reading of hers put a girl in bed for a week. If the warden gathered enough, the trial would be canceled before she stepped into the ring. She cut across the square before Sage could say another sentence. "There you are," Luna said, taking Sage's elbow. She kept her voice light. "The tea's boiling over at home." She looked at the warden and gave him nothing. He tilted the slate against his chest, but she saw a column of short marks down one side. He had been counting something. Words, maybe. Hesitations. Sage let herself be walked two streets before she pulled her arm free. "He asked about your reading," she said. "I told him it went the way readings go." Her jaw was set. Luna could feel the worry under it, the same worry she had felt every time the trial came up between them for a month. Sage believed in her. Sage was also afraid of what the circles would do if Luna failed, and afraid, Luna suspected, of not being ready to stand next to her when it happened. In Sage's coat pocket, the shape of her grandmother's rock pressed against the wool. Still sleeping. Still just stone. "Don't answer him again," Luna said. "Not one word. If he comes back, walk away." Sage started to argue and stopped herself, the way she always did. "Fine," she said. Then, shorter: "I'm sorry." That night Luna went back to the square alone. The warden was gone, but past the shrine she found what she had missed: a small shed tucked into the hedges, its windows dark glass, ivy grown over the roof to hide the frame. A watching post. He had been here longer than a day. Luna stood in front of the dark glass until she was sure he could see her, and she let him see that she knew. Then she walked home to tell Sage the truth about how close the trial had already come to ending.