Mara Ash counted the tracks by lantern light and found three new sets since dusk. The prints ran along the north row of saplings, small and clean, each toe pad set down like a decision. She had guarded this grove for two winters. The trees were still no taller than her hip, and the settlement had paid her to keep them alive until they could hold their own bark against weather and teeth. She meant to raise them into a proper wood. More than that, she meant to raise the fox kit at her heels into the first true guardian this settlement had ever named — a beast trusted enough to walk the royal woodland one day without a human at all. The prowler at the saplings was in the way of both. The fox stood beside her boot, ears forward, torn ear twitching at every shift of wind. Mara pointed at the freshest print. The fox lowered its nose, took the scent, and moved. She followed at a jog, lantern shuttered to a slit. The trail bent past her cottage, past the porch where her scrap bucket sat, and into the brambles at the grove's edge. The fox stopped and held. Mara crouched. A pine marten sat between two saplings with a strip of green bark in its teeth, chewing at the base of the smallest tree. It saw her and did not run. It had learned the shape of her and judged her slow. She unshuttered the lantern full. The marten flinched. The fox launched before Mara could speak, closed the gap in three bounds, and drove the marten off the sapling and into the open dirt. The fight was short and loud. When it ended, the marten lay dead by the roots it had been chewing, and the fox stood over the body with its coat unbroken. Mara knelt at the sapling. The bark was stripped in a ring almost half around. A tree girdled that deep would not live the winter. She had stopped the prowler. She had not stopped the damage. She lifted the marten by the tail, set a hand on the fox's shoulder, and walked back toward the porch to think. In the morning she would have to send word to the settlement that one of the saplings needed cutting, and that her kit had made its first kill, and that the two facts were now tied together in a way she had not planned.