Roswyn Brightwillow had one night left to find a paint that glowed, and none of the jars in her satchel would do it. She knelt on the flat stone at the edge of Moon Lake, red hair falling into her eyes, glasses sliding down her nose. Behind her, a long stretch of pale rock waited for the mural that was supposed to wake the fairy realm sleeping under the water. Her grandmother had sworn the sleepers would rise only for a picture painted in true moonlight. Roswyn had silver powder, crushed pearl, chalk, and thinned milk. She smeared each one on the stone. Each one dried gray. She sat back on her heels and pressed her palms to her eyes. The lake was still. The moon sat fat and white above it, close enough to touch and useless to her. She had traveled three weeks to reach this shore. She had one jar of binding oil, one clean brush, and until dawn. Something landed in her lap. Roswyn froze. A puppy blinked up at her, no bigger than a loaf of bread, white fur standing out in every direction. Its paws were pink and round as plums. Two butterfly wings folded and opened on its back, thin as soap film, catching the moon and throwing it back in soft bands of blue and rose. Where the light slid off the wings, it left a faint dust on her skirt. She touched the dust. It clung to her finger and shone. The puppy licked her wrist and shook itself. More dust drifted down onto the stone. It did not fade. It held the moon inside it, the way a jar holds water. Roswyn's hands started moving before her thinking caught up. She scraped the dust into her empty jar with the edge of a leaf. She poured in a thumb of binding oil. She stirred with the handle of her brush. The mixture went pale, then bright, then brighter, until the jar itself seemed to breathe light. She painted one stroke on the stone. A curve, a test. The line stayed lit after her hand moved away. It pulsed once, like something under it had noticed. Roswyn laughed, quick and shocked. The puppy wagged its short tail and beat its wings once, sending down another shower. "Stay," she whispered. "Please stay." It climbed off her lap and sat on the stone beside her jar, watching the water. Its wings kept moving in a slow, patient rhythm, shedding just enough to keep the paint alive. Roswyn dipped her brush. She had her pigment. She had until sunrise. And out on the black surface of the lake, small circles were beginning to form, as if something below had heard the first stroke and turned toward the sound.

Roswyn dipped her brush and stopped. The winged puppy sat beside the glowing jar, wings shedding slow dust onto the stone. The paint was ready. Her hand was not. She had a color now, but no picture. The stone stretched wide and empty in front of her. If she painted the wrong shape in true moonlight, her grandmother had warned, the sleepers would sink further, not rise. She did not know what the fairy realm looked like. She had only ever seen a coin glow and vanish when she was six. She set the brush down. The ripples on the lake had stilled again, waiting. She flipped through her notebooks by moon-glow. Dates. Temperatures. Which moonflowers bloomed and which stayed flat paint. The bloomed ones shared nothing she could name. No color. No hour. Only a feeling she could not log. Behind her, up the slope, her kiln stood cold under its stone hood. The worktable held her clay tools and rows of unfired cups. She had come here as a potter first. She knew how shapes were tested. You made a small one. You fired it. You broke it if it lied. Roswyn scooped a palm of wet clay from the bucket under the table. She carried it back to the stone. She pinched a coin from the clay, flat and round, the size of the one she had dropped as a child. She pressed her thumb into its center. Then she painted the coin, not the stone. One thin stroke of the glowing paint around its rim. The puppy leaned forward. Its wings beat once. Roswyn set the clay coin on the flat rock at the water's edge. She waited. The paint pulsed. The coin lifted a finger's width off the stone and hung there, humming. Light crawled off its rim and drew itself in the air above the water. Not letters. Not exactly. Curved marks, looping into each other, the way vines find a trellis. They held for three breaths. Then they faded, and the coin dropped back to the rock with a small clay click. Roswyn grabbed a notebook and copied every mark before her eyes forgot them. Her hand shook. She copied them twice more, from memory, to be sure. When she compared the three pages, they matched. The realm had answered a test question. It had shown her its own writing. She looked at the long blank stone. She looked at her jar. She had the symbols now. She had the paint. But the marks she had copied were only a greeting. She did not know the rest of the language, and the paint in the jar was already dimmer than a minute ago. The puppy yawned. Dust drifted, thinner than before. Roswyn closed the notebook. She needed more powder, and she needed someone who could read what she had just been shown.

The wind came off the lake in a hard push. Roswyn was mixing a fresh batch on the flat stone, tilting the puppy's shed dust into the little cup of binding oil. The dust never reached the oil. It lifted, spun, and blew sideways across the water in a thin silver streak. The puppy shivered and folded its wings tight. The half-mixed batch in the cup went dull and gritty. Roswyn cupped her hands around it and lost more dust between her fingers. She needed a windbreak, and she needed it before the puppy stopped shedding for the night. She looked up the slope. Her kiln stood under its stone hood, cold. The worktable held rows of unfired cups, a bucket of clay, her wheel, her tools. Shapes made to hold things. That was the answer. Not a wall. A vessel. She carried the puppy up to the worktable and set it on a folded cloth. She wedged a lump of clay fast, slapped it onto the wheel, and kicked. Her hands were shaking. She centered the clay anyway. She pulled the walls up tall and narrow, wide enough for the puppy to sit inside, with a lip that curved back over like a hood. A cup for a small animal. A shield against wind. She cut it off the wheel and carried it, still wet, to the kiln. She had no time for a real firing. She stuffed the kiln with dry kindling and lit it, and shoved the wet vessel in on the long paddle. Steam hissed. The clay would probably crack. She did not care if it lasted a week. She needed it to last one night. "That kiln is going to explode." Roswyn turned. A young man stood at the edge of her firelight in a pale coat, a dragonfly hovering at his shoulder. She had not heard him climb the slope. Behind him, further back on the path, a second figure waited with a wolf at his knee, watching but not coming closer. "I know," she said. "May I?" The prince did not wait. He crouched, pulled two flat stones from the kiln's base, and vented the side. The hiss dropped to a mutter. "Wet clay. Fast fire. You wanted a shell, not a pot." "I wanted a wind hood. For the puppy." He glanced at the butterfly-winged pup on the cloth. His face did something quiet. "Then we pull it now. Half-fired holds a night." They pulled it together. The little vessel came out dark and steaming and whole. Roswyn set it on the stone at the water's edge and lifted the puppy inside. The wind hit the curved lip and slid around it. Dust fell straight down into the oil cup. The paint caught, and glowed. The prince watched the light. "Those marks on your notebook," he said. "I can read some of that."