Frost makes the mill roof look sugared. Your breath is a little cloud that does not mean anything scary.

Mira Lane, the miller’s kid, grabs your sleeve so hard the wool squeaks. “There. Don’t blink.”

At the treeline of Elderwood, something white moves between the ferns. It is the size of a small horse and the wrong shape for a goat. Dawn puts a spear of pale gold on its head—horn, you think, because every story you have ever been fed wants you to think horn.

It steps. The spear tips. Light breaks. It is gone, as if the forest swallowed a moon.

From the mill door, Master Cole makes a sound like a man who has been handed a number. “Peddler Voss pays in silver for a unicorn horn,” he says, not to you, to the debt on his table. “One horn. One year.”

You know two other things.

You know Thorn of the hollow will appear if you wait in the ferns without crashing about like a cart. Thorn says the wood is a set of promises: roots, beasts, people. Break one, and the others come untied. Elder Briar, the old elf who remembers when the mill road was a deer path, says the same more slowly.

You know Nan Reed’s stories, which disagree with each other on purpose.

The white shape does not come back. The tracks will. Slot prints in frost do not lie as easily as legends.