Lyira Moonwhisper crouched behind a fallen birch and watched the thing that used to be her brother drink from the stream. His skin had gone the color of wet bark. His fingers ended in black claws. Six months ago they had all been elves together, sixty-three of them born the same spring, raised in the same hall. Now sixty-two were fey, and only Lyira still had her own face. She did not know why. She had come to the stream to find out if any part of her brother remembered her, because if he did, she could begin to bring him back. But she could not step out from the birch. The fey killed anything warm that came near them, and her brother had killed a deer that morning without slowing his walk. She pulled the small dwarven figure from her pocket and set it in the moss. Her friend from the spellvault had carved it for her last winter, before any of this began, and had pressed a listening charm into its chest so they could speak across distance. She did not need distance now. She needed a shield for her mind. She thumbed the rune on its back, closed her eyes, and reached out the way the old books said elves once could, silently, thought to thought. She pushed her brother's name across the water. For a long moment nothing answered. Then something answered. It was not words. It was a wet, hungry attention that swung toward her like a head turning in the dark, and under it, faint and buried, one clean note she knew, the tune he used to hum while fletching arrows. Lyira gasped. Across the stream, her brother dropped the water from his hands and stood up straight. His black eyes found the birch. He began to walk toward her, fast, and she could not tell which part of him was coming. She grabbed the figure and ran.

Lyira ran until the stream was three ridges behind her. She did not stop when her lungs burned. She did not stop when the small carved figure in her fist grew slick with sweat. She stopped only when she saw the pale stone arches of the forest library rising through the trees. Her brother had known her mind. He had come for her. If she wanted to pull him back from what he had become, she needed to know what had changed him. The answer, if it existed anywhere, was inside those walls. She pushed the door open and climbed the tiered shelves by memory. She had grown up on these ladders. She pulled every book she could remember that touched on fey change: bindings of green leather, scrolls tied with hair, a thin volume her old teacher had told her never to open. She stacked them on a reading table under a stained window and began to read. Most of it was useless. Rituals for warding cradles. Songs to keep milk from souring. Nothing about sixty-two children turned in a single season, and nothing about the one who was not. By the second lantern she was shaking. She had come here for an answer and the shelves did not have one. Then a voice spoke behind her, low and dry. "You're pulling the wrong books." A dwarf stood at the foot of the stairs, brown-bearded, green-eyed, a travel pack still on his shoulder. He said his name was Galvin storm rider, and that her friend from the spellvault had sent him when her listening charm went quiet at the stream. He set his pack on the table and drew out a book wrapped in oiled cloth. The cover was dark wood, bound in vine. He said a mage deep in the forest had written it. He said the hermit had turned fey back before. Lyira opened the book. The first pages were a list of signs: bark-colored skin, black nails, the loss of warmth. Her brother, line by line. Further in, the writing changed. It named a working done on a nursery of elf children long ago, and the one condition under which a single child would be spared. She read the condition twice. Her hands went cold. She closed the book before Galvin could see her face. She did not tell him what it said. She told him only that the hermit was the one they needed, and that the book named a place in the deep forest where the hermit could be found. Galvin nodded and began to pack. Lyira looked once at the shelves that had raised her and understood she would not sleep under them again. She had her lead. She had a road. She also had a sentence in a stranger's book that told her why she alone had been left with her own face, and she was not ready yet to know if it was true.