Wishpuff counted her stores again and came up short. Two dried plums, a strip of root, a cracked acorn cup for catching rain. Yesterday there had been four plums. The night before, a whole handful of seed. Something was crawling into her burrow while she slept, and the meadow above was already poisoned, the grass yellow, the water sour, nothing left to forage between the sick stalks. She needed those scraps to last until she woke the guardian. The guardian slept somewhere under the roots, and only her wishes could rouse it, and her wishes only worked when she was strong enough to speak them clearly. A thief was starving her out of her own plan. Tonight she would not sleep. Tonight she would catch it. She wedged herself behind a fold of packed earth and waited with a stone in her hand. The burrow smelled of old moss. Hours passed. Then a shape dropped through the gap in the ceiling, quiet as a leaf, and folded pale lilac wings against a dark body. A bat. It hopped to her acorn cup and drank. Wishpuff raised the stone. The bat turned its head. One ear had a small notch cut clean through it, and Wishpuff knew that notch. Her grandmother had described it before she died, and her grandmother had been dead six seasons. Wishpuff lowered the stone. "You're hers," she whispered. The bat did not flinch. It stepped closer and pressed its notched ear to Wishpuff's palm, and a voice she had not heard since she was small spoke inside her head, thin as thread. Grandmother said the guardian's name. Then Grandmother said the bat would carry messages between them, but only if Wishpuff fed it first. The bat looked at the acorn cup. Wishpuff pushed a plum toward it. It ate. When it lifted its head again, her stores were gone and her only guide to the guardian was a creature she now had to feed from nothing.