Nora Oakcroft had promised the whole village a harvest festival, and she had nowhere to put it. She stood in the old fairgrounds at dawn, clipboard pressed to her chest, counting the cracked flagstones. The field she'd used every autumn had flooded in spring. Now a brown pond sat where the dance floor should go. She needed room for three hundred people. She had a puddle. Her dog landed beside her, leathery wings folding against his sides. He'd flown ahead to scout, the way he always did. He dropped a chewed stick at her boots and looked up, ears twitching. "That's not a venue," Nora told him. She crossed off the fairgrounds. Four other sites had failed her this week. The miller's yard was too small. The orchard belonged to a man who hated noise. The riverbank sloped. The square held forty, not three hundred. She pulled a ribbon from her vest and tied it to a post, a habit when she was thinking. Every patch on her vest came from a festival she'd pulled off. A rained-out one. A sick year. She'd always found a way. She refused to be the year the festival died. Her dog darted off again, then circled back, barking at the treeline. He wouldn't settle. He flew a short loop toward the woods, landed, and looked back at her. "You want me to follow," she said. She followed. He led her past the flooded field, through a gap in the hedge she'd never walked. The brush thinned. Then it opened. A meadow spread out before her, wider than the fairgrounds and the square combined. Purple blossoms covered it, waist-high and swaying. The ground was flat and dry. A small creature sat in the grass at the center, a soft-furred thing with long ears and huge, gentle eyes, watching her with no fear at all. Nora's breath caught. She walked the edge, counting paces, the way she counted everything. Two hundred steps across. Flat enough for tables. Firm enough for dancing. Big enough for every soul in the village, with room left over. "This is it," she whispered. She pulled her last ribbon and tied it to a branch at the meadow's mouth. Her hands shook. For the first time all week, she wasn't crossing something off. She was claiming it. Her dog landed in the blossoms, scattering petals. The little creature hopped once toward him, unbothered. Nora wrote the date on her clipboard, underlined it twice, and smiled. Then she stopped. She didn't know who owned this land. No fence, no gate, no sign, but meadows this fine always belonged to someone. If she filled it with three hundred people and a stranger said no, she'd have no field and no time to find another. She needed the owner's name before she needed anything else.