Macey crouched behind the mossy shed at the ring's edge and watched the trees. She had hidden here for weeks now, exiled from her own Fairy Ring, hungry to win back her crown of toadstools. Without it, the soil did not know her. Without it, she was a goddess in name only. A tall red mushroom with white dots had pushed up beside the shed door overnight. She pressed her palm to its cap. It leaned toward her like a dog greeting its keeper. The land still remembered. That was something. But remembering was not enough. She needed to know where the usurper kept her crown, and she could not step inside the ring to look. So she untied the small leather pouch from her belt and whistled. A glossy black raven dropped from the pines and took the pouch in its beak. "Circle the center," she whispered. "Find what he guards closest. Don't be seen." The raven blinked one yellow eye and lifted into the canopy. Macey waited through the long afternoon, chewing her thumb, sick with the risk of it. At dusk the raven returned. It dropped a single curled toadstool scale into her hand — a flake from her own crown. The bird croaked once and tipped its head toward the ring's heart. He kept it there, then. At the center. The very place she could not yet go.

Knowing the crown sat at the ring's heart was not enough. Macey needed to know how she had lost it in the first place. So at dawn she crept to the north edge, where an old stone well stood half-swallowed by moss. Her oldest promises lived in that soil. If anything would tell her the truth, it was here. She pressed her ear to the well's worn rope and listened. The water below murmured back in the voice of the spores she had once fed. It showed her the day she left — the dying elk, her hand on its flank, the ring unguarded for one slow hour. And it showed her something else. A dead branch just past the tree line, where an iron crown now hung dripping dark sap onto the grass. The usurper's mark. It had been creeping outward while she grieved. Macey staggered back. The well had answered plainly. She had not been overthrown by strength. She had been overthrown by absence, and the old spirit had been ready for years, waiting for one open hour. The iron crown on the branch proved it meant to spread further still. She spent the rest of the day dragging beams to the north edge and lashing a small covered bridge across the dry creek there. Inside it she laid out the scale, a sketch of the iron crown, and a jar of well-water. A workroom. A place to study him. She finally knew how she had fallen. Now she could begin to plan how he would.