Raina followed the god's path, and the god's path was dying. The blue woads on her cheeks marked her as the one meant to wake the sleeping forest god. But the forest ahead had turned black. Trees stood peeled and gray. Their sap ran dark and stank like old meat. Something was poisoning the land between her and the god, and she could not reach him through poison. She carried a sword shaped from living willow. Green leaves grew along its wooden blade. Her grandmother had cut it for this, saying it would clean what sickness touched. Raina pressed the flat of the blade against a rotted trunk. The leaves curled and browned. The blade drank the poison in, then went still. She had cleansed one tree. Behind it stood a thousand more. At the edge of the dead ground sat a small cottage. Red mushrooms clustered on its roof like fat berries. Raina knew that place. She had left it three days ago, when the god's call first pulled her north. The poison had not been here then. It was following her home. A wolf stepped from the doorway. It was lean and gray, and antlers branched from its skull like a stag's. Its yellow eyes fixed on her sword. It did not growl. It lifted its nose and drew a long breath, tasting the air the way a person reads a page. It smelled the magic in the willowblade. It smelled the poison. Then it turned and looked north, into the black trees, and back at her. Raina lowered the blade an inch. "You know what's doing this." The wolf trotted to a peeled trunk near the cottage wall. It scraped the bark with one paw, again and again, until the wood split. Black sap welled out. But underneath the sap, something moved. Pale threads. Roots that were not roots. They pulsed and reached toward the untouched ground beyond. Raina understood then. The poison was not spilled or thrown. It grew. It spread through the earth on living tendrils, and cleansing one tree meant nothing while the source pushed new threads out below. She had been cutting leaves off a weed and calling it dead. She knelt and drove the willowblade into the split trunk, down into the pale roots. The leaves along the wood flared bright green. The threads writhed, blackened, and crumbled to ash. The ground under her knees shuddered. All around the cottage, dead bark cracked as the tendrils died back into the soil. But the blade had shown her more than the cure. The threads all ran one way. They came from the north, from deep under the god's forest, thick as a man's arm and old. The source was not out here. The source was wrapped around the sleeping god himself. The wolf met her eyes and started north. Raina pulled her sword free and followed.

The antlered wolf led Raina north, and the land grew strange. Snow crusted the roots. The trees here were not black with poison, only bare and cold. She did not know this ground. Hunger pinched her belly, and the wolf's ribs showed through its gray fur. It needed food. She needed shelter. But the wolf did not hunt. It lifted its nose and drew a long breath, then turned off the path. It had caught the smell of magic on the wind, and it followed that instead. Raina trusted the wolf. It had shown her the truth of the poison. So she went where its nose pulled it. The trail bent toward a clearing. There a great mushroom tree stood alone, its trunk thick and green, its wide caps blotched purple over the snow. Small mushrooms crowded its roots. The wolf stopped at the tree's edge and stared past it. Someone was there. A bullman knelt in the snow, splitting deadwood with his bare hands. He was huge, horned, built for hauling. His fists glowed. Blue marks burned on his forearms, and the light spilled out of them without his asking. A log cracked apart and flew wide, and he flinched from his own power. When he saw Raina he stood. His eyes were the same gold as the wolf's. "You carry magic," he said. He nodded at her willow sword. "I smelled it. So did your wolf, I think." He held up his glowing hands. "This flares on its own. I can't hold it. I go door to door looking for a teacher. I offer my back and my hands. Take me on, and I'll carry what you can't." Raina studied him. She had a long road ahead and no food. "I'm not a teacher," she said. "I hunt the thing poisoning the god's forest. It runs from the north, under the sleeping god himself. That's where I go." The bullman went still. "Grimhorn," he said. "Taurus Grimhorn. I know that ground." He pointed north with one burning hand. "I was born past those hills. The land there died before the rest. The roots you chase — they come from a hollow beneath an old cairn. I've seen it breathe." Raina's grip tightened on the sword. He knew the source. He had seen it with his own eyes. "Show me," she said. "Guide me there, and I'll teach you to hold your power. That's the trade." He put out a broad hand. "Done." She took it. His magic sparked against her palm and did not burn her. The wolf sat, satisfied, its search over. Raina had come north for food and shelter and found neither. She had found a guide who knew the way to the god, and a debt she now owed. The path to the source had a witness. She would not walk it blind.

The wolf led them higher into the hills, and the cold pressed harder. Raina's legs shook. Every step she took, her willow blade pulled at her, tracing the poison's roots north toward the cairn. But the tracing drained her. Her magic thinned with each mile, like water running out of a cracked jar. She had no fire, no roof, no ground she trusted. Taurus carried her pack, but he could not carry her strength. "We need to stop," she said. "If I keep spending, I'll have nothing left for the source." Taurus pointed past a ridge. "Water below. Flowers around it. I remember this place." They climbed down to a broad lake, clear as glass, ringed with pale blooms even in the snow. Raina knelt at the edge and drank. The water warmed her throat. She felt a thread of magic return, faint but real. Then a shadow crossed the lake. Something large moved above the far trees, and the crystal light off its wings hurt her eyes. "Dragon," Taurus said. He set his feet. His forearms flared blue on their own. "Quartz-scaled. It hunts anything warm." The thing turned toward the water and the heat rising off Raina's body. She had no strength to run. Her blade felt like lead in her hand. Something dropped between them and the dragon. It was no bigger than a child, black-shelled, with four wings — two soft like a wolf's, two thin like a bat's. It landed hard and did not flinch. "Down. Both of you," it said. Short. Flat. "The bright one sees heat. Kill your fire, bullman." Taurus stared. "My hands don't listen." "Then cover them." The creature spread all four wings wide. Frost bloomed across the shell. The heat around Raina's body vanished, pulled into the small figure like breath into a cold lung. The dragon circled, lost the scent, and swept back over the trees. Silence returned to the lake. The creature folded its wings. One caught on a low branch and tore free with a rip. It cursed under its breath. "Roach," it said, before Raina could ask. "I pull heat. Store it. Keeps me hidden on jobs." It looked at Raina's thin, gray face, then at her blade. "You're burning out. I felt it from the ridge." "I trace the poison," Raina said. "It empties me." Roach crouched and pressed one clawed hand to the lakebed. Warmth flowed back into Raina, steady now, fed slow from Roach's own store. Her magic filled. Her hands stopped shaking. She could reach the cairn. "Why help us?" she asked. Roach stood. "Going north myself. Hunting the ones who built me. Took something of mine." A pause. "We share a road. That's all." It did not smile. Raina held its orange gaze and could not tell friend from foe. But she had shelter now, and strength, and a way to the god. She rose. "Then we walk together."

The wolf led them off the ridge before dawn. Roach's warmth still filled Raina, but it thinned by the hour. She felt it slipping like water through her fingers. Her willow blade dragged at her hand, always pulling north toward the poison's root. Each mile spent more than she had. "Roach can't feed me forever," she said. "I need my own well filled, or I stop before the cairn." The wolf's antlered head turned. It broke into a trot, and they followed. The trees changed. Dark bark, branches twisted like old rope. Purple and deep red leaves hung heavy over the snow. White blooms shaped like stars dotted every crown. As Raina watched, one bloom loosed and drifted down. It fell slow, glowing faint, then melted into the ground where it landed. She knelt and pressed her hand to the earth. Warmth answered her palm. Not Roach's borrowed heat. Something older. Her drained magic stirred and began to fill. "They fall like stars," Taurus said. He stood over her, pack still on his back. His forearms glowed blue and would not stop. "This forest is close to the god. I can feel it in my arms. They won't quiet here." He watched the blooms drop around them and did not reach for one. "You take what you need. I'll keep watch." Raina cupped her hands and caught a falling bloom before it struck the snow. It dissolved into her skin. Heat ran up her arms and filled the empty places the tracing had scraped bare. Her thinned magic grew whole. The gray left her face. She caught another, and another, drinking the forest's gift until her hands stopped shaking. Taurus crouched beside her. "Why keep walking?" he asked. "You could turn south. Cleanse trees. Live long." It was not a challenge. It was a trade question, laid bare. "The mark on my face is his," Raina said. She touched the blue woad on her cheek. "The god's. He sleeps, and the poison grows from under him. If I wake him, the root dies at its source." She looked at the star trees, at the wolf that had led her this far. "That's what keeps me north. Not the trees. Him." Taurus nodded once. "Then I keep my hands ready. You keep your promise. Teach me to hold them." He held out one glowing fist. Raina wrapped her fingers around it. The blue dimmed under her touch, just a little. He grunted, surprised. Her magic was full now, fuller than the lake had left her. She could reach the cairn and beyond it. She rose and gripped the willow blade. It pulled north, sharp and sure. But the wolf did not move toward the cairn. It faced deeper into the star forest, ears flat, a low growl in its chest. Something ahead had caught its notice. Raina followed its stare and saw the trees thicken into dark, and the falling blooms stop.