Wren Kael cured the miller's boy at dawn and was gone before the mother stopped crying. She walked barefoot down the road, her staff taller than she was, her three-legged fox limping at her heel. Behind her lay another town with the sickness in it. Ahead lay the next. She had cured coughs that glowed, fevers that hummed, sleep that would not break. In every town it was the same rot, spreading, and she still did not know where it began. That was what she needed. Not thanks. A name. An elder old enough to remember the first sick person. The road brought her to the village crossroads. Stone paths met under a soft moonlit glow. Lamps stood on posts. A wide board held flyers and notices. Wren leaned her staff against it and studied the faces of the townsfolk gathered there. "I need to speak with your oldest neighbor," she said. "Someone who remembers when the sickness first came." No one answered. A woman looked at her feet. A man turned away. They knew her by now. She fixed their children, their goats, their wells. Then she left. They had learned not to owe her anything, because she never stayed to be paid. She was a stranger who took nothing, and that frightened them more than the sickness. Wren understood then. Her leaving was the wall. They would not trust a woman who would not stay long enough to be trusted. So she did the hardest thing she knew. She sat down on the cold stones. She unrolled her blanket. She lit no fire and made no speech. She simply stayed. The fox curled against her leg. Night passed. Lamps burned low. When morning came, Wren was still there, and the crossroads filled again. A woman in a stained yellow raincoat moved along the notice board. She pressed a hand-drawn flyer onto the wood, smoothing every corner. A girl's face stared out from the paper. The woman's eyes were sunken and dark, ringed from no sleep. Wren had seen her at dusk, in the same coat, pressing the same face. She had never stopped. "You're still here," the woman said. She sounded suspicious, not glad. "I'm Wren. I'm not leaving until someone helps me." The woman stared. "Kira Joss." She touched the flyer again. "My daughter went to the old woman who keeps bees past the far field. She never came home. The old woman remembers everything. Nobody else will send you, because nobody else came back." Wren stood. "Then take me to her." Kira shook her head. "I'll show you the path. I won't go past the gate." She looked at the flyer, then at Wren. "If you find my girl, you don't leave before you tell me. Swear it." "I swear," Wren said. For the first time in a hundred towns, she had promised to stay.

Wren left the crossroads at dawn, the path to the far field under her feet. Her fox limped ahead. Then a cough climbed out of her chest. It glowed. A faint light spilled from her mouth into the cold air. She stopped and pressed her hand to the staff. The same rot she had cured in a hundred children was now inside her. Her legs shook. If it worsened, she would fall before she ever reached the beekeeper. She forced ten more steps. The field blurred. Silvery ferns leaned along the path, their fronds catching the light, and she nearly walked into them before she saw them. Her knees buckled. She caught herself on the staff. The fox stopped and stared back at her. "Sit down before you break something." An old woman knelt beside a low bank of ferns, cutting fronds with a small knife. She wore a stained apron marked with a red cross on each sleeve. She did not stop cutting. "I've watched a lot of people die from that cough. You've got the shine in your breath. Early. That's the only good thing about you right now." Wren sank onto a stone. "You're a healer." "I was a nurse. Battlefields. Now I cut ferns." The woman finally looked up. Her eyes moved over Wren the way a nurse counts wounds. "Clara. I had this sickness three winters back. Everyone in my ward died of it. I didn't." "How?" Clara held up a cut frond. Silver dust clung to the underside. "These. Boiled, breathed in. It won't cure you. It slows the shine long enough to keep you walking." She crushed a leaf and held it under Wren's nose. "Breathe. Deep." Wren breathed. The dust burned, then cooled. Her chest loosened. The next cough came weaker, dimmer. "You're going past the field," Clara said. It was not a question. "To the bees." "I have to. She remembers where the sickness began." Clara pressed a bundle of ferns into Wren's hands. Then she reached into her apron and drew out a metal disc, tarnished, ringed with painted moons. "Take this too. The old woman marks her days by the moon. Show her you understand her, and she may talk instead of turning you away." Clara closed Wren's fingers over both gifts. "The ferns buy you two days. No more. Whatever you're going to learn, learn it fast." Wren stood. Her legs held now. The shine in her breath had faded to almost nothing. "Why help me? Everyone else stayed away." "Because you're still trying to reach her," Clara said. "The ones who didn't come back stopped trying." Wren gripped the staff and the moon chart and the ferns. The far field opened ahead of her. The cough was slowed, not cured. Two days. She started walking toward the beekeeper's gate.

The far field ended at a wall of gray stone. Wren reached the beekeeper's gate before noon. She raised her fist to knock, then stopped. A heavy chain bound the gate shut. A wooden sign hung crooked: NO OUTSIDERS. She pressed the moon chart against the bars and called out. No one answered. She counted her ferns. Two days, Clara had said. She had walked one of them to get here. Wren coughed. The light spilled from her mouth again, brighter now. She sank against the gate. Bees droned somewhere past the wall. She would die here, chained out, with the beekeeper's answer six feet away. "Don't waste your breath." A girl crouched in the tall grass by the wall's corner. Flowers stuck out of her tangled hair. She held a beetle in her cupped hands, its shell lit with glowing orange seams. She watched it crawl across her palm. "She sealed the gate after the last one came. She stopped talking to anyone after Mama got sick." "You live here," Wren said. "I'm Meadow. She's my grandmother." The girl looked up. Her eyes moved to the shine on Wren's lips. "You've got it too. The cough with the light." "I need to ask her where the sickness started. She's the only one who remembers." Meadow said nothing. She looked lonely enough to talk to a beetle for company. Wren held out the moon chart. "Do you know what this means?" Meadow took it. Her thumb traced the painted moons. "Grandmother marks her days by these. She'd trust anyone who brought one." She glanced back at the dark house. "But she won't unlock the gate. Not even for the chart. Not anymore." Wren coughed again and could not stop. Blood-colored light dripped from her lips. Meadow set the beetle down and grabbed her sleeve. "There's a gap," Meadow whispered. "Behind the hives. Where the wall fell. I use it to get out. She doesn't know." "Take me through." Meadow bit her lip. "If she catches me, she'll seal that too. I'll have no way out." "Then you'd be trapped like me," Wren said. "Please. I'm running out of days." Meadow looked at the shine, then at the moon chart in her hand. She stood. "Come on. Stay low." She led Wren along the wall to a pile of fallen stones. Beehives hummed on the far side. Meadow slipped through first, then reached back. Wren crawled after her, staff scraping the gap. They came up in a garden gone wild. A hunched shape sat on the porch, wrapped in shawls, watching the moon rise in daylight. The beekeeper. Meadow froze. The old woman turned. Her eyes found the chart in Meadow's hand, then Wren behind her. She did not shout. She did not chain the gate. "You brought an outsider into my house," she said to Meadow. "Then she'd better sit. And you'd better hope I still remember what she came to hear."

Wren sat where the beekeeper pointed. Meadow crouched beside her, the girl with flowers stuck in her tangled hair. The old woman pulled her shawls tight and stared at the moon rising in the pale sky. "Ask," she said. "But I warn you. My memory is a broken jar. It leaks." "Where did the sickness start?" Wren asked. "The cough with the light." The beekeeper's eyes went cloudy. "A wet year. The bees died first. Then a child." She stopped. Her hand drifted. "No. The child came before. Or after. I can't hold it straight." Wren coughed. Red light spilled from her lips onto her knees. Her ferns were nearly spent. She had part of a day left, and the old woman's memory kept slipping through her fingers. "Grandmother needs a shape to hang it on," Meadow whispered. "She marks everything by the moon. Show her the nights." Wren remembered the scroll Clara had pressed into her hands. Clara, the old nurse, had survived this sickness herself. She had given Wren the ferns and a map of stars, saying the beekeeper trusted the sky. Wren dug the frayed celestial scroll from her pack and spread it on the porch boards. The beekeeper leaned close. Her fingers found a cluster of painted stars. Something cleared in her face. "This one. The hooked star. It was low when the first hive fell." She traced a slow arc across the scroll. "The sickness came with the water. Not the rain. The stream. It runs down from the high field where nothing grazes." "The Mystery Meadow," Meadow breathed. "Past the top wall. She never let Mama play there." "The grass grows wrong up there," the beekeeper said. "Vines that shine at night. The bees drank the water and shook and died. Then the children who waded in it. Then anyone who touched them." Her finger stopped on the scroll. "It starts in that field. It always starts there." Wren's heart pounded. A source. A real place. "How do you stop it?" The cloud came back into the beekeeper's eyes. "I don't know. I only know where. I never learned the cure." She sagged into her shawls, spent. "That's all I have. That's all that's left." It was not the cure. But it was more than any town had given her. Wren rolled the scroll and stood. Her legs shook. The high field. The wrong grass. She had a direction now. Meadow gripped her sleeve. "You'll die before you reach it. Look at you." Wren looked at the shine on her own hands. Meadow was right. She had the source, but not the time. She turned to the girl. "Then I need someone faster than me to carry the truth down. To Kira. To Clara." She pressed the scroll into Meadow's palm. "Will you come out from behind the wall?" Meadow looked at the sealed gate, then at the dying woman who knew the way. She nodded.