The elder scribe's ink-stained fingers finally moved. He wrote Woga's name in the Grazing Scrolls. Then he set the pen down. "A name is not a claim," he said. "Prove the gilded warren is your bloodline's, or I strike this out." Woga had green patches and dead acres. He had no proof of family at all. He needed a record older than living memory. He went to the sealed stone library south of the rot-cleared routes. Shelves of books climbed high behind its iron door. Woga asked the keeper for warren deeds. A jackalope in a black suit and shades already stood at the records table. He tapped a cane on the stone floor. Woga had heard of him. Every jackalope had. He worked old claims deal by deal and never named who signed until the ink dried. "You're the one with the warren," Riddle me Zat said. He did not look up. "Dead ground. No proof." "How do you know that?" "I know every jackalope claim. Yours is new." He slid a folded paper across the table. "The original promise granted jackalopes land. Three territories. Your warren is listed. But the names of the gilded line were burned with the other copies." Woga's chest tightened. "Then I can't prove it." A silvery jackalope leaned against the far shelf. She had watched the whole exchange without a word. "You can," Kiira said. She stepped forward. "The scribe wants bloodline. Show him blood that answers the ground." "Meaning what?" Woga asked. "The glowing root map," she said. "The unicorn's reading. It shows which roots still live under the dead acres." She tapped Zat's paper. "Your warren's listing names a well. A living root runs from it. Only the true line's hand wakes that root. Foxes can't. Pretenders can't." She smiled, dry and sure. "I've seen the story. No one fakes it." Zat finally looked up. "She's right." He opened a book to a prism-colored chart of branching roots. "The well's root is here. Still alive. Bring the scribe to it. Touch it. If your blood is true, it answers." "And if it doesn't?" "Then you were never the line," Zat said flatly. "And I move to the next deal." Woga led the elder scribe to his dead warren the next morning. Kiira and Zat came behind. He knelt at the old well and pressed both paws to the cracked soil. He breathed, and he pushed down the fear. For a long moment nothing stirred. Then a single pale root rose through the dirt and curled around his wrist. Warmth ran up his arm. Green spread in a slow ring around the well. The scribe stared. He took out his pen. "The claim stands," he said. "The gilded warren is recorded to your bloodline." Woga's name would not be struck out. But Zat folded his paper and said, "The promise grants more than one warren. Someone else wants the same ground."

Woga's name was in the Grazing Scrolls now. But the Scrolls meant nothing if his warren stayed dead. Three-quarters of the dead acres held no roots at all. Root magic could not reach them. Strikers was too tired to help, and Gaia could only wake soil that still had dying roots beneath. Woga knelt in the gray dirt and found nothing to pull life through. He needed a method that did not depend on roots already in the ground. Kiira found him there at dusk. She was the silvery jackalope from the sealed library, the stage performer who called her craft performance, not barter. She stepped carefully over the dead soil in her polished boots. "You proved the claim," she said. "Now you're stuck with it." "There are no roots out here," Woga said. "Nothing to carry the magic across." "Then stop carrying it across." She crouched and pressed one paw flat to the dirt. "Bring something that grows down instead of out. A seed that makes its own roots as it climbs." She pulled a withered pod from her coat and set it in his paw. "I kept this from a fae act. Thought I'd use it on stage." Woga turned the pod over. "A beanstalk seed." "A living one. Plant it where your roots end. It drinks from the green you already woke, then drives new roots down through the dead ground on its own." She stood and brushed off her knees. "I don't give things away. You owe me a favor I'll name later." Woga carried the pod to the edge of his green patch. He dug a hole where living soil met gray. He set the seed in and pressed the warm earth over it. Then he waited. Nothing moved. He pushed his fear down the way he had at the well. He laid both paws on the mound and breathed. A green shoot broke the surface. It thickened. It climbed. Vines twisted around a rising stalk, and tiny lights sparked along its length as small winged shapes drifted up through the leaves. The beanstalk rose higher than the old well's reach. Then its roots went to work. Pale threads spread from the base and bored into the dead acres. Where they passed, gray dirt darkened and softened. Green crept outward in a slow tide across ground no root had touched in three hundred years. Woga watched the stalk anchor a full acre, then another. Not all of it. But the dead ground was no longer sealed against life. Kiira watched beside him, arms folded. "It won't fill the whole warren. One stalk only reaches so far." "Then I plant more." "You'll need more seeds," she said. "And the favor you owe me isn't small." She smiled, dry and sure. "Neither is the one you'll owe to whoever else claims this ground. They saw the green rise too."

Trenthem waited with his white eyes on Woga. "Gold," he said again. "The warren piece is gold. You give more gold, or it stays mine." He raked his coins and did not look away. Woga had no gold. His vines were graying at the edges. The gray hunter crept closer across the waste. He needed to offer Trenthem something worth more than gold, and he had nothing in his paws. Then a light came out of the gray. Two lights. One burned like morning sun. The other was a horn full of stars, black as the waste around it. Two unicorns stepped into the camp. Woga knew the sunlit one. Strudel had read the dead roots beneath his warren once, told him flat how far the life reached and where it stopped. She still carried the black eyes that were not her own, set wrong in her glowing face. "You crossed the poison," Strudel said. No greeting. "We followed your green." The star-horned unicorn stared past them both at the violet fire. "Honestly, I didn't mean to come here," she said. "My horn showed me gold. I followed it." She swayed on her legs. She looked like she had not slept in days. "Feef," she added, when Woga looked at her too long. Trenthem lurched toward Feef. Her horn caught his white eyes and held them. The galaxies inside it turned. Trenthem stopped. His ruined mouth hung open. He had never wanted anything but gold, and now he saw more gold than any coin pile, spinning inside that horn, endless. "That," Trenthem said. His voice shook. "I want that." Woga saw his chance. "Look into it," he told Trenthem. "Keep looking. It never ends." He turned to Feef. "Stand still. Just a moment." Feef shrugged and stood. She was used to being stared at by hungry things. Trenthem shuffled closer to the horn, coins forgotten, arms reaching. Strudel watched with her stolen black eyes and said nothing. "The warren piece," Woga said. "Hand it over, and the gold-light stays here where you can watch it." Trenthem's rotted hand went into his coin heap without looking. He drew out a small heavy thing wrapped in cloth and shoved it at Woga, eyes locked on the horn. Woga unwrapped it. A statue. A stone cherub, wings spread, holding out a single tulip. Gilt still clung to its base. A piece of his family's garden. "It's mine now," Woga said. He backed away fast, the statue tight to his chest. Feef blinked and broke the stare. "That's long enough." She turned her horn away, chasing some new image only she could see, and walked off into the gray. Trenthem howled as the gold-light left. He grabbed only coins again, raking, raking. Woga had the cherub. But his vines were nearly dead, the hunter was close, and now he stood two days deep in poison with no clear way back.