Valaeria Sunscale had eleven weeks of warm weather left, and no idea which seeds would live. She knelt in the dirt behind her stone farmhouse, sorting seed packets by the light coming through the doorway. The blight had killed most of the valley's crops last winter. Her neighbors were already thin. She meant to breed one strain tough enough to feed them all before the cold came back. But she was a farmer, not a scholar. She did not know which plants to cross. She held two packets in her clawed hands. Her golden-red scales caught the light. One seed line grew fast but rotted in frost. The other survived frost but barely grew at all. Cross them wrong and she'd waste a whole planting. There would be no second try this season. She had guessed twice already this month. Both rows had failed. A glow moved across the seed table. Valaeria looked up. A tiny figure hovered in the doorway, no taller than her hand. Its body shone like oil on water, green and violet and pink. Thin wings held it in the air. Two long antennae curled above its head. Valaeria had heard old stories of the field sprites, the small creatures said to feel a seedling's future in their bones. She had never believed them. The sprite drifted to the table. It touched the first packet with one slender finger. Then it shook its head and pulled its hand back fast. "You know which ones live," Valaeria said. Her voice came out rough. The sprite turned to the second packet. It pressed both hands flat against the paper. Its glow brightened. It nodded once. Valaeria's heart pounded. She did not fully trust it. But she had nothing better, and the season was burning down. She spread every seed line she owned across the table. The sprite moved down the row, touching each one. It rejected most. It lingered on two. Then it flew to the windowsill, where a small bunch of pale flowers sat in a cup of water. The petals gave off a soft, moonlit light, curved like a thin crescent. Valaeria had picked them for their color, nothing more. The sprite hovered over the blooms and pointed hard at their roots, then back at her two chosen seeds. She understood. Not one cross. A graft. The glowing flower's root, joined to the frost-hardy seed, fed by the fast-growing line. Valaeria worked past dark. She split stems, bound roots, and pressed the joined seedlings into fresh soil. By midnight, twelve pots sat in a row on her table. The sprite settled on the windowsill and watched. She finally knew what to plant. But grafts were fragile things. If even one seedling took root, she would have days, not weeks, to protect it from whatever had killed everything else in the valley. And she still did not know what that was.