Willow Fenwick knelt in the black mud and pressed her palm to the tree's root. The bark should have warmed under her hand. It stayed cool. She had fed the Sleeping Grove Elder the same way for a thousand years, and this morning, for the first time, the tree did not answer. She looked young. She was not. The swamp knew the difference even if the few travelers who whispered about her did not. Her power came from this tree — the giant with the sleeping face carved into its trunk, the vines hanging like green hair, the veins of gold light that ran under its bark. Without it, she was a hippie girl in a mud-stained skirt with frog grease on her fingers. With it, she was the reason the swamp still breathed. She laid out her old ritual. Salt in a ring. Six candles in the wet moss. A bowl of rainwater with a curl of her hair. She sang the words her mother had taught her before language had a name. The candles guttered. The water did not stir. The carved face on the trunk kept sleeping, and its glow was thinner than last week. "That's not going to work, you know." The voice came from a stump behind her. A small frog person sat there in a denim jacket and boots, one leg crossed over the other. He picked mud from his boot heel with a twig. "Pippin," Willow said, without turning. "I didn't call you." "You didn't have to. He's dimming." Pippin tipped his big yellow eye toward the tree. "The old songs were built for a smaller hunger. He's grown. You haven't fed him grown-up food in a long time." Willow sat back on her heels. She had felt it for weeks and refused the word. Stalling. The tree was stalling. If its light thinned, the swamp thinned. If the swamp thinned, she thinned with it. "What food," she said. Pippin hopped down. "A living offering. Not a frog. Not a fish. Something with a story in it. Something that walked in on its own." Willow's jaw set. She had never taken a life to feed the tree. That was the line. She had kept it for a thousand years. A branch snapped, deeper in the trees. Small footsteps. Uneven breathing. Willow rose, slow, and turned toward the sound. A boy stumbled out of the ferns. Eight years old, maybe. Light brown hair stuck up in tufts. Rectangle glasses crooked on his nose. A scrape on one knee. He saw the giant tree first, then the witch, and stopped breathing. "I fell," he said. "There was a hole. In a tree. I fell through it." Behind Willow, the Sleeping Grove Elder's bark warmed. One vein of gold lit up under the sleeping face, brighter than anything she had drawn from it in a year. The tree had chosen its own answer. Willow had not.

The gold vein under the tree's bark pulsed once, then again. The boy did not move. Willow watched his shoulders shake inside his too-thin jacket and felt the swamp lean toward him the way a hungry dog leans toward meat. Then she heard it: a wet, slow sound in the ferns behind the grove. Something was dragging itself closer. "Pippin," she said. "What's in the reeds." The frog person hopped up onto the root beside her and squinted. His yellow eye went wide. "Oh. That's not good." The thing slid out between two cypress knees. It was a slug the size of a hog. Its body glowed a soft green, veins of light moving under its skin in the same rhythm as the tree's bark. Two long stalks lifted from its head. The eyes at the tips fixed on the boy. "It came for the light," Pippin said. "He lit up. It felt him." The boy backed against the tree. "What is it?" "Old," Willow said. "Older than the songs. It eats what the tree wakes." She had seen tracks like its trail once, a long time ago, and had hoped never to see the maker. The slug oozed forward. A ring of moss blackened under it. Willow's left hand was numb to the wrist this morning. She flexed her fingers and felt nothing. If the slug reached the boy, the tree lost its offering and she lost the last chance to wake it. If it reached the tree, worse. She stepped between them. "Stay against the trunk," she told the boy. "Hands flat on the bark. Don't let go." He obeyed. The gold vein brightened where his palms touched it. Willow crouched and scooped a handful of the salt still ringing her old ritual. She walked toward the slug, slow, and drew a line in the mud across its path. She did not sing. She spoke plainly. "You are not invited." The slug hit the salt line and hissed. Steam lifted off its skin. It reared back on its foot, stalks whipping, and its glow flared bright enough to throw her shadow long across the roots. Then the light in it guttered. The huge body sagged. It turned and dragged itself back into the ferns, leaving a slick trail that smoked where the salt had touched it. Willow's knees gave. Pippin caught her elbow with both small hands. "You held it off," he said. "You didn't kill it. It'll come back hungrier. And it won't come alone." She looked at the boy. His hands were still on the bark. Under his palms, a second gold vein had opened in the tree. The sleeping face's mouth had curved, just a little, into something closer to a smile. "We can't stay in the grove," Willow said. "Get up. Both of you. We're going to the cabin."