Three weeks before the songcraft trials, Megatron flew to the meadow to practice and found it silent. The frost had come in the night. Ice sheathed every branch. The songbirds who taught him his melodies were gone, hiding from the cold. Megatron gripped a frozen twig with both small hands and listened. Nothing. He had no song of his own. He only knew how to borrow theirs. That mattered because the trials crowned the realm's greatest voice, and Megatron meant to win. Every fairy his age had a signature song. Megatron learned his notes fresh each spring from the birds. Without them, he would stand before the judges with an empty throat. He whistled a test note into the cold air. It cracked and died. He flew for hours, searching branch after branch. Every nest sat empty. By dusk his wings ached and panic sat in his chest. Then he heard water, and something else beneath it. A voice, low and strange, rose from a pond at the meadow's edge. Megatron dropped to a reed and looked down. A mermaid floated there, her blue hair spread across the black water. Pink coral flowers sat behind one ear. She was small, no bigger than he was, and she sang without words. The melody was nothing like a bird's. It rose and fell like tides. "You stopped," Megatron said. "Please don't stop." She looked up, unafraid. "You were listening a long time. I felt you shivering up there." She tilted her head. "You have no song, land-flyer. I heard your cracked whistle." Heat climbed Megatron's face. "The birds left. I learn from the birds. The frost took them." He gripped the reed harder. "The trials start in three weeks and I have nothing." The mermaid studied him. "I am new to this sea. Your birds sing the same short songs every year. I know a song no one here has heard." She sank until only her eyes showed above the water. "I could teach it. But my kind never gives a song for free." "I have no coin," Megatron said. "I don't want coin." She rose again. "I want to hear the surface. The wind songs, the ones you flyers know. Teach me yours, and I teach you mine. Trade for trade." Megatron's heart lifted, then caught. He knew no wind songs. He only knew stolen bird notes. If he admitted that, she would sink and leave him with silence again. He looked at the frozen meadow, then at her waiting face. "Yes," he said. "I'll teach you." The mermaid smiled and dipped below the surface to fetch her first lesson. Megatron sat on the reed, cold to the bone. He had traded away a song he did not have. Now he owed her one before she would teach him his.