Marcus Steele counted the coins on the counter twice, because the second count was the one that decided whether he ate tonight or slept hungry in the hills. The shopkeeper watched him the way people watched a stray dog near a butcher's window. Marcus needed rope, salt, flint, and a week of hard bread to reach the ridge where his family's old stronghold sat empty under new banners. He had been planning the climb for six years, ever since his father died naming the place like a prayer. He was three streets from finishing when a pair of small winged girls dropped through the open shutter and landed on the sack of oats beside his elbow. One had gold hair, the other silver. They spoke together, low and quick, and told him a man with a scarred jaw was asking after him at the inn, showing a folded warrant with Marcus's name on it. The silver one said the man had already paid the stableboy. Marcus left the coins where they lay. He took the rope and the flint and nothing else, because a full pack would slow him and a bounty hunter with fresh horses would not. He went out the back through the grain yard and cut through a hedge that opened onto the cart track leading south, away from the ridge he needed. The two winged girls kept pace at his shoulder, arguing about which road the hunter would guess first. Marcus chose the wrong one on purpose and walked it for half a mile before doubling into the trees. By dusk he was moving north again, hungry, with no salt and no bread, and a name he now knew he could not use in any town between here and the stronghold. The fairies stayed with him. He did not ask why, and they did not offer.

By the second night in the trees, Marcus's hands shook when he tried to knot the rope around a low branch for a snare. He had walked a full day north on an empty stomach. The flint in his pocket was useless without something to cook. He had passed two streams and drunk from both, but water only sharpened the ache. He sat down against a trunk and pressed his palms into his eyes. The ridge was still three days off if he kept a steady pace, and he could feel his pace was no longer steady. The gold-haired one landed on his knee. The silver one hovered near his ear and said he would not last another morning at this rate. Marcus did not argue. He asked, because there was nothing left to lose, whether they knew the forest well enough to feed a man. They did. The silver one led him half a mile to a low patch of ground where pale mushrooms grew under a fallen log, and she named the two he could eat and the one he could not. The gold one flew ahead and came back twice, once to point him at a hollow full of hazelnuts the squirrels had missed, and once to warn him off a bog. By full dark he had eaten enough to stop shaking. He built a small fire with the flint and the rope's frayed end for tinder, and he slept with his back to the coals. In the morning the fairies were still there, sitting on a stone by his boots, waiting. Marcus understood then that he would reach the ridge, and that he would reach it owing a debt to two creatures whose price he did not yet know.