Raine Nightshade had three weeks before the first snow, and no walls of her own to stand behind. She crouched on the porch of a rented cabin at the edge of the woods, counting coins onto the boards. The cabin was warm and small, with strung lights along the eaves and a kettle still ticking inside. She had paid through the end of the month. After that, the owner wanted it back for his daughter. Raine was a gothic elf with cut-up hands and a plan no one else believed in: somewhere in this country sat an abandoned cathedral the diocese had let rot after a fire, and she meant to buy it, fix it, and live in it. She had been chasing the rumor for a year. She did not yet know where it was. She had lost a woman once by paying attention to the wrong things. After that she stopped expecting people to stay. A building, she had decided, would not leave. But a building you cannot find is no better than one that walks away. Inside, she spread her papers on the table. A folded map sat on top, bought from an old bookseller two towns back. The title across the scroll read Map to the Cathedral in faded ink. The roads were drawn in dashes, the villages in tiny painted roofs, and at the center stood a spired church with no name beside it. The bookseller had sworn the map was honest. He had not been able to tell her which forest the spire stood in. Raine had stared at it every night for a week. The dashed roads led nowhere she could match to a real town. A tap at the window made her look up. A small creature clung to the glass, purple wings folded, a long tail curled against the pane. It watched her with one bright eye, then dropped to the porch and walked to the doormat. Something lay there that had not been there an hour ago. Raine opened the door. On the boards sat a crystal the length of her hand, set in a carved stone base. The crystal glowed from inside, pale blue shifting to rose. The base was cut with runes she half knew. When she lifted it, the light inside the crystal pulled toward the north like a needle. She turned the stone in her hands. The light kept its direction. She brought it to the table and held it over the map. The glow steadied above a patch of forest the dashed roads skirted but never entered. Raine marked the spot in pencil. She folded the map, wrapped the crystal in a shirt, and began packing the cabin by lamplight. She did not know who had left the stone on her porch. She did not know what waited at the end of the line it drew. She knew she had a direction now, and less than three weeks to reach it before the snow.

Three days into the forest, Raine Nightshade stopped at a stream to refill her canteen and check her pack. The crystal still pulled north against her palm. The cabin she had left behind sat two days' walk south, its strung lights and warm kettle already a memory she could not afford to keep. She pulled out the small charm board she used to ration her food. Glowing tally marks tracked what she had eaten and what remained. Two strips of dried meat. A heel of bread. Half a bag of nuts. The board's bottom row blinked low. Four days of forest still lay between her and the spot on the map. She could walk the distance hungry, but not strong. Not before the snow. She sat on a fallen log and made herself think. She had grown up on a farm at the forest's edge. Her father had shown her how to set a snare once, when she was small. She spent the afternoon building one. She cut cord from the spare line in her pack and lashed it to two forked branches she drove into the ground. She bent a sapling for tension and tied a noose at the loop. For bait she crushed the last of her nuts into a wooden cup and hung it from the trigger. Her hands shook by the end. She had eaten nothing since morning. She stepped back, checked the line, and walked a wide circle to hide her scent in the stream. She waited through the night under an oilcloth. At dawn she heard hooves. She crept back through the wet fern and stopped behind a trunk. A deer stood at her trap. Its fur was bluish silver. Its antlers were wide and white, taller than her head. It sniffed the cup, then lifted its face and looked straight at her. Raine did not move. The deer stepped over the noose, picked up the cup in its teeth, and ate the nuts without tripping the line. Then it walked into the trees and was gone. Raine sat down in the wet moss. She laughed once, the kind of laugh that comes out instead of crying. She pulled the charm board from her pack. The bottom row blinked red now. She crossed off the nuts with her thumb and watched the mark go dark. She had no bait left and no food worth saving. She folded the snare cord and put it back in her pack. Then she stood, shouldered the pack, and started walking north again. She would not stop to set another trap. She would walk while she still had the strength to walk, and she would reach the cathedral before her legs gave out, or she would not reach it at all.