Peach Bloomshade had lost three days last week, and she meant to make the sorcerer pay for every hour. The curse ran in her blood, laid on her mother's line before Peach was born. It got worse each generation. Her hands went numb first. Now she blacked out for days, waking with her dead grandmother's cracked butterfly clip placed on her pillow, facing the door. She wanted the sorcerer who did this. She wanted to shatter his obsidian staff. But first she needed someone who had been close to the blight and lived. Everyone who reached its heart never came back. She found the shop by the smell of dried herbs. A moss-covered cottage sat in the trees, a swirl of magic drifting past its lanterns. Inside, jars and blades lined the walls. A big elf stood at the counter, sorting rope by feel. He was taller than any elf she'd met, built like a woodcutter, blond hair loose. Blue eyes tracked her when she came in. "You've been near it," she said. "The blight. I can smell the rot on your boots." He didn't flinch. "My grove. The sorcerer killed every tree. Now he's draining the roots." Peach's pulse jumped. "The one who reached the heart never came back. Three hunters. An old tracker warned you off." "Theron," the elf said. "He's not wrong. Three men went. None returned." He set the rope down. "I'm Timber. I mean to take the grove back anyway." There it was. The person she needed, standing across a counter, wanting the same thing she did. She almost didn't trust it. "You've been close to the heart and walked out," she said. "That makes you the only one who can tell me what's there." "Close. Not the center." He rolled his sleeve down. Purple veins spread up his forearm, like ink under the skin. "It marks you. It's been three weeks. It's getting worse." Peach pulled off one glove. Her fingers didn't feel the cold counter. "Mine started with the hands too." Timber looked at her fingers, then at her face. Something in him settled, like he'd been alone with this for a long time. "Same sorcerer," she said. "Same staff. He cursed my blood. He killed your grove." "Then we want the same thing." He didn't soften it. "Him, dead. His staff broken." She nodded. "The corruption spreads from one point. It grows every week. We can't march in and die like the others." "No," Timber agreed. "We need something to fight the rot first." Peach thought of a story her grandmother had written in cramped ink. Water that healed. A falls that shimmered with light. "There's a waterfall," she said. "The water restores what's rotted. If it's real, it's our way in." Timber grabbed a pack off the shelf. "Then we find it." For the first time in two years, Peach wasn't hunting alone.

The road to the healing falls was long, and Peach carried a fear she had not told Timber. She could lose days at any moment. If a blackout took her on the trail, she might wake far from him, deep in the trees, where the blight could reach her. So they stopped first at a grove of magical fruit trees, heavy with pink, purple, and rainbow-colored fruit. They needed food for the journey. But Peach needed something more. "We fill the packs here," Timber said. He pulled a ripe purple fruit from a low branch and tested its weight in his palm. He worked fast, sorting the good from the soft, the way he sorted rope by feel. Peach picked beside him, but her hands slowed. Her fingers had gone numb again. It always started this way, right before the days slipped. "It's coming," she said. "A blackout. I can feel it in my hands." She had kept him at arm's length for weeks, afraid of dragging him deeper. But out here, alone, the truth was simple. "If I go under on the road, I could wander off. I could wake somewhere the rot can find me." Timber set the fruit down. He did not soften it. "Then you don't wander off." He unwound a length of cord from his belt, the same rope from his shop. "When your hands go numb, you tell me. I tie a line from your wrist to mine. You can't walk off if you're tied to me." Peach stared at the cord. It was such a plain answer that she almost laughed. Her grandmother had spent a whole life chasing the curse and never thought of it. "You'd sleep tied to me? For days?" "My grandfather planted half our grove by hand," Timber said. "He told me elves who forget their roots stop being elves. You don't leave your own behind." He held out the rope. "You're my own now." She took it. She looped one end around her wrist and drew it tight. He tied the other to his own. That night they ate the sweet fruit under the stars, wrists bound between them, and they talked. He told her about the birches his grandfather planted. She told him about the butterfly clip her grandmother left facing the door. They both missed home. They both wanted the blight gone. The numbness climbed her arms as the fire burned low. Peach did not fight it. She felt the cord tug snug against her wrist and let the dark come. She woke to daylight. Two days gone. The fruit packs sat full beside her, and Timber sat awake at the fire, the rope still knotted to his wrist. She had not moved an inch. For the first time, a blackout had cost her nothing. The road to the falls was open, and she would not wake it alone.

They followed the footprints out of the fruit grove. Bare tracks pressed into the mud, small and slim, heading up the stream toward the falls. Peach knew the size before Timber said it. They matched her own foot. She had walked this path during a blackout she could not remember. The cord had held her still beside the fire for two days. But the tracks proved it: the cord kept her from walking away, not from acting. In a deeper blackout, her hands could still reach for Timber's throat while he slept. "The rope won't stop my hands," Peach said. "I could hurt you and never know it." Timber crouched by the water and filled a skin. "You won't." "You don't know that." "I do." He stood. "I'm harder to break than you think." Before she could argue, a low sound rolled down the stream. Not wind. Something huge, dragging itself through rot. An old elf stepped from the trees ahead, gray-bearded, a necklace of beast teeth across his chest. He held up one hand for silence. Timber knew him at once. "Theron," Timber said. "You're far from the grove." "So are you." Theron did not lower his hand. This was the hunter who cut notches to track the blight each week, the one who warned Timber to stay clear of the rise. Now he stared past them, up the stream. "There's a thing in these falls. Six legs. Eight hundred pounds. The blight made it. It killed a whole village and moved on. It's here now." The dragging sound grew louder. Water crashed somewhere above. Then the creature came around the bend, pale and swollen, roots trailing from its ribs. It fixed on Peach and charged. Timber shoved her behind him. Theron loosed an arrow into its eye. The beast screamed and swung a limb. Peach did not run. Her numb hands closed on a fallen branch. She drove the sharp end into the wound Theron had opened. The creature reared, and Timber buried his axe in its skull. It dropped into the shallows and did not rise. They stood panting in the healing water. The falls glowed behind the dead thing, the lagoon shimmering below. Peach's hands tingled where the water touched them. "You stayed," Theron said to her. "Most run." He pulled his arrow free and moved on up the stream without another word. That night they made camp beside the glowing pool. Peach watched Timber clean his axe. He had stepped in front of the beast without a pause. He had meant every word by the fire. He was harder to break than she thought. She reached across the space between them and took his hand. His fingers closed over hers, warm and steady. She did not pull away. "If my hands ever turn on you," she said, "promise you'll stop them." "I will," Timber said. "And they won't." For the first time, she believed him.