Rosie Willowbrook had baked a cake for a prince she had never met. It sat cooling on her windowsill, three tiny layers with wild honey between them, and she had no idea where to deliver it. Everyone in the woods whispered about the lonely prince. No one would say where he lived. Rosie only knew what the old women said at the market: that he had never once been shown a kindness, and that his heart was locked tighter than any gate. She wanted to open it. She did not know how to find the door. She pressed her face to the round window of her mushroom cottage and watched the trees. The pink cap of her little home threw a soft shadow across the grass. Somewhere out there, the prince kept himself hidden. A whole forest stood between them, and Rosie had searched it for three days already. She had followed every path. Each one looped back home. "I'm doing something wrong," she told her chipmunk. The little creature sat on the table, red bow bright against her striped fur, nibbling a crumb from the cake. Her cheeks were round and pink. She stopped eating and looked at Rosie with sharp, clever eyes. Rosie slumped into her chair. "You know these woods better than I do. You dig everywhere." She said it as a joke. Then she stopped. The chipmunk did dig everywhere. She vanished down holes and came back with strange things, acorns from far groves, a button, once a silver coin. If anyone knew the hidden places of the forest, it was her. Rosie knelt down. "Can you find him? The prince. The sad one no one can reach." The chipmunk's tail flicked. She hopped to the door and scratched at the wood. Rosie opened it. The chipmunk darted onto the grass, then stopped and looked back, waiting. Rosie wrapped the cake in a cloth and followed. The chipmunk ran low and fast, nose to the ground. She did not take any of the paths Rosie knew. She cut straight through the ferns, under a fallen log, along a stream Rosie had never seen. The trees grew older and closer. The light turned green and quiet. They walked until Rosie's feet ached. Then the chipmunk froze. Ahead, past a wall of bramble, stood a stone tower choked with ivy. No path led to it. No smoke rose from it. One high window glowed with a single candle. Someone was inside, and that someone did not want to be found. Rosie's heart pounded. She had her answer at last. She knew where the prince kept himself. But the bramble wall rose higher than her head, thick with black thorns. The door at the tower's base was shut. And now that she stood before it, Rosie understood the harder truth. Finding the prince had been the easy part. Reaching him would be another thing entirely.