Silverwood pressed his palm to the frost-tree and felt the cold turn wrong under his hand. He had guarded this grove alone for years, walking the perimeter, checking bark for cracks, listening. The best of the old guardians taught him what to listen for. Now the ice sang a cracked note, and he knew what it meant. Somewhere a dormant heart-tree slept. If it bloomed, its magic would thaw and wake every frozen grove in IcySkies. If Silverwood could not find it, the wrong cold would swallow his trees first. He had one lead. A rolled parchment map hung in the sky-market, showing every peak in the north. But when Silverwood traced the routes, the lines meant nothing to him. The mapmaker's marks were a language he could not read. The heart-tree's home lay hidden in a symbol he could not crack. He climbed to the Sky Merchant's Trading Post, where hanging platforms swayed on ropes and awnings snapped in the high wind. A frost pixie sorted crates near the door. Her pale wings caught the light like cut glass, and she moved fast, stacking without looking. "You want the mountain nobody draws," Pyra said. She did not stop working. "I sell to travelers. I hear things. The royal mapmaker keeps every map ever made. But mark her mountain, and she burns it. I've watched three sheets curl to ash on her hearth." "Then I need the one map she can't burn," Silverwood said. Pyra finally looked at him. She wiped her hands and reached under the counter. She lifted out a compass rimmed with frost, its needle pale blue. "Her mother left this behind. The needle doesn't point north. It points past the edge of every map, into the parts nobody's charted." She set it in his palm. "The mountain she erased sits out there. The compass remembers what she wanted forgotten." Silverwood held the compass still. The needle swung, steadied, and pointed away from every drawn road, toward blank sky. It did not waver. "Why give me this?" he asked. Pyra shrugged, but her small jaw was tight. "Because the cold's been wrong at market too. The willows near the fire pit stopped glowing. Whatever you're hunting, it's spreading. I'd rather you find it than me." Silverwood closed his fingers around the compass. He no longer needed a map he couldn't read. He had a needle that pointed straight to the erased mountain. But Pyra caught his sleeve before he turned. "One thing. She knows the compass is missing. And the king already sent a man to break her locks and take her private records." Her wings stilled. "She's looking for it. If you carry that toward her mountain, you won't be the only one on the trail." Silverwood looked at the needle, then at the empty sky it named. The way was open now. So was the door behind him, and someone would follow through it.

Silverwood held the compass at the edge of his grove. The needle pointed past every road, toward the erased mountain. But he could not go. He pressed his palm to the nearest trunk and felt the cold turn wrong beneath the bark. The corruption crept inward. If he left, it would spread through every tree while he was gone. The frost-trees would die untended. He had sworn to guard them. He could not save all the frozen groves by abandoning his own. He walked the perimeter and searched for a way to hold the cold in place. The largest tree stood at the grove's heart, its crystal branches shimmering, runes carved down its trunk. Its roots ran under every other tree. If he could anchor the sickness there, the rot might slow. But he did not know the old binding. His teacher had known it. His teacher was gone. A voice spoke behind him. "Your marks are wrong." A barefoot girl stood in the snow. She looked ten years old. Her coat was patched sail-cloth, her fingers black with ink. She did not shiver. Silverwood knew of her. She had drawn every map in the mapmaker's tower, twice, and once surveyed the mountain nobody else would chart. "You're the child from the tower," he said. "Hale Juniper." She crouched by the runed trunk and touched a carved line. "This one is broken. Someone recut it wrong. The bind leaks here." She pointed. "And here. Two breaks." "I can't read them," Silverwood said. "I read everything." She pulled a folded page from her coat. It was a survey, drawn in her own hand, of the grove's root-lines. "I mapped this a year ago. The roots feed the heart-tree. Fix the two breaks and the cold stays put." Silverwood knelt beside her. "Show me." She guided his knife. He cut the first rune deeper, matching her page stroke for stroke. The trunk hummed. He cut the second. The crystal branches brightened, and the wrong cold pulled back from the outer trees toward the center. It gathered in the heart-tree and went still. Silverwood pressed his palm to the bark. The cold no longer sang cracked. It held. The grove was bound. He could leave now, and the trees would stand. "It won't last," Hale said. She stood and brushed snow from her knees. "The heart-tree still wakes. The bind only slows it. Weeks. Maybe less." "Then I have until it breaks to reach the mountain." Silverwood folded her survey and held it out. "I owe you." She did not take the page. "Keep it. I want to see the mountain drawn right." She looked at the compass in his hand. "She's looking for that. The mapmaker. I helped her once. Now I've helped you." She turned toward the trees. "Walk fast, elf. The bind is counting down." Silverwood took the compass and left the grove behind him.

Silverwood followed the compass into a gorge of jagged ice and black stone. Frozen ridges climbed on both sides. The needle pointed straight ahead, deeper into the shadowed cut. He walked fast, as Hale had told him. But a doubt slowed his steps. He knew how to steady runes. He did not know how to wake a heart-tree. If he reached the mountain, he would stand before the great tree and have no way to bloom it. A blue light dropped from a ledge above. Pyra landed on a spur of ice, her frost-pixie wings still humming. She was the one who had given him the compass at the market. He had not expected to see her again. "You're going the right way," she said. "But you're missing half the tool." "Half?" Silverwood held up the frost-edged compass rose. "It points true." "It points. It doesn't teach." Pyra flew close and tapped the compass casing. "The needle finds the mountain. But there's a second face. My grandmother carried both. One got sold apart from the other." She frowned at him. "You'd reach the tree with a map and no words." Silverwood's chest went tight. She had named his exact fear. "Then I need the second face." Pyra reached into her apron and drew out a flat silver plate. Layered symbols covered it, fine lines circling a central star. "A cipher. It reads the marks a heart-tree wears. Steadying runes hold cold in place. Waking runes call the bloom up. Different cuts. Different order." She turned the plate. Dials clicked under her small fingers. "I traded three seasons of frost-work for it. I never learned to run it. But you carve runes. You just carve the wrong ones." "Show me," Silverwood said. Pyra set the cipher plate against the compass. The two faces locked with a soft snap. Symbols on the plate lined up with marks on the compass ring. "See how the star turns? Match the outer mark to the inner. That gives you the waking cut for each rune on the tree." She spun the dial once. A pattern lit under the frost. "You steadied your grove by holding the cold. To wake the heart-tree, you cut these instead. The order runs sunwise, not against it." Silverwood traced the lit pattern with his eyes. He saw it now. The same knife. A different hand. The knowledge his teacher took was here, printed in metal. "I can read this," he said. "Then carry it." Pyra pressed the joined tool into his palm. "Waking a tree thaws every grove near it. You know that. Be sure before you cut." Silverwood closed his hand around the compass and cipher. His fear was gone. He no longer feared reaching the mountain powerless. Now a new weight sat in his chest. He held the power to bloom the tree, and blooming it would thaw the world he had sworn to guard.