Your hand is slower than your idea, and the idea was already too fast.

The vine is living, cold, snagged. The hart’s skin flinches at the smell of you. White legs fold and unfold. It bolts—not toward you, away, a crash of fern that sounds like a library falling.

“Wait,” says a voice you should have waited with.

Thorn of the hollow is at your elbow, leaf-stained, as if the wood grew a person. “Hands are for bread and knots. Not for a wild neck. A stick is a longer, calmer hand.”

The Pale One pauses in a seam of cover, sides heaving, still in sight if you do not make yourself a monster.

Thorn holds a peeled branch like a tool, not a spear. “We can stand here until the fear drains. Then I lift the vine. No grabbing. Or you can crash after it toward the cart road, and teach it that people are weather that bites.”

Your palms sting with almost. Almost is a kind of bruise.

Mira, behind you, does not say I told you so, which is a gift.