Lyrian Whisperleaf had the whole guild roster memorized and not one line of it belonged to him. He walked the wood path home with the names ticking in his head like coins he couldn't spend. That morning the guildmaster had looked past him again, straight over his white hair and soft face, and told a runner to give the boy some bread. Bread. Lyrian was seventy years old. He wanted his name sung beside Literia's heroes, and instead he got crust. He kicked a stone off the path and two small shapes startled up from the ferns. Fawns, no taller than his knee, with faint wings folded tight against their spotted flanks. They didn't run. They watched him, ears twitching, then trotted a few steps off the path and stopped again. Waiting. Lyrian knew a lure when he saw one. He followed anyway. They led him through a break in the brambles to a leaning old castle he had passed a hundred times without seeing. Cracked towers. Candles burning in windows nobody kept. The fawns slipped between two stones and were gone. At the foot of the wall sat a box, half-buried, its lid already tipped open. Inside, resting on dark velvet, was a crown lit with pale blue fire. He should have walked away. A crown in a wood was a story with teeth. But this was the point, wasn't it — a thing found alone, in a place others had decided held nothing. He lifted the crown. It weighed almost nothing. He set it on his head because there was no one there to laugh at him. The wood went quiet. Then a voice spoke inside his skull, patient and dry, like someone who had been waiting a long time to be heard. Go home, it said. I am on your windowsill. Lyrian ran. His mother's potted tree sat where it always sat, small and green, rain dripping from its leaves back into its own soil. He had watered it for forty years and thought it ordinary. Now it glowed faintly under the canopy, and the fruit on its branches burned like small orange lamps. Eat, the tree said. One is enough. You will see the road. Lyrian took a fruit down. It was warm. He thought of the wanderer under the market stall, the woman whose name nobody wrote until after she had done the impossible thing. He thought of the guildmaster's hand waving him toward the door. He bit. Heat moved down his throat and settled behind his eyes. The room sharpened. He could feel, somewhere south and east of the village, a road he had never noticed on any map — a thin certain pull, like a thread hooked behind his ribs. The tree said, Walk it alone. Come back with something they cannot ignore. Lyrian took the crown off his head and put it in his pack. He started packing before the fruit had cooled in his hand.

The fruit still warmed Lyrian's palm when the knock came at his door. He set the lamp-fruit on the sill beside the glowing tree and let his two friends in. He had not asked them to come. Someone in the village always knew when a scrawny elf was about to do something stupid. The cat came first, black and low, tail up, weaving between his ankles like she already owned the trip. She jumped to the table and sat on his folded shirts. The fairy came after, no taller than his hand, yellow hair bright against the dark rafters. She hovered over his open pack and frowned into it. "You'll die," the fairy said. "Three days out. Maybe four." "Thank you," Lyrian said. "Look at you." She landed on the rim of the pack and tapped his wrist. Her finger was smaller than his smallest bone. "You can carry food for a week. The road the tree showed you is longer than a week. You'll sit down under some pine and not get up." He knew she was right. He had weighed the pack twice already. Bread, hard cheese, a waterskin, the crown wrapped in a shirt, flint, a knife. Add another loaf and the straps cut his shoulders raw by noon. He was seventy years old and built like a boy of twelve. The wanderer in the book had walked alone. The book had not said what she ate. The cat put a paw on a small blue notebook at the corner of the table. She pushed it toward him. "That's mine," the fairy said. "Take it. Write down every spring, every farm, every hedge with berries. Mark the roof of anyone who feeds you. You come back that way." Lyrian picked up the notebook. The leather was soft with use. An orange label on the cover waited for a name he had not earned yet. He slid it into the pack's front pocket. "And us," the fairy said. "No." "Yes." The cat's yellow eyes did not blink. The fairy folded her arms. "She hunts. I scout. You eat. That's the trade. The tree said walk alone. It didn't say starve alone." Lyrian opened his mouth to argue and closed it. He thought of the guildmaster waving bread at him. He thought of collapsing in a ditch with a crown of blue fire in his pack and no one to carry it home. Pride was not a meal. "Scout ahead," he said to the fairy. "Hunt at dusk," he said to the cat. "I keep the notebook. I choose the road." The cat stood and stretched. The fairy shot up to the rafters and back, laughing. Lyrian buckled the pack. It was heavier now, and lighter. He shouldered it, blew out the lamp, and stepped through the door onto the pull behind his ribs.