The frost is a page. The Pale One has written on it in cloven prints.

Not horseshoes. Not paws. Two half-moons side by side, deer-fashion, biting the white crust and showing dark leaf underneath. You crouch the way Thorn showed you: small, quiet, a person pretending to be a stump.

Mira whispers, “Unicorns are horses.”

“Unicorns are stories,” you whisper back, and then you feel a little mean, because the white animal was real enough to melt frost.

A snag of pale vine hangs at head height, torn. Dawn could have turned that twist into a spiral horn. You file the thought in the notebook of your skull.

The prints follow a strip of cover: stream-edge, fallen oak, a tunnel of bramble that is almost a hallway. To the left, a logged square opens like a missing tooth. No young trees there. The stumps are chewed as high as your chest.

You can go carefully along the animal’s own hallway.

You can offer an elf greeting from last summer—low, to the ferns, no shouting—and see whether Thorn is already watching.

A bird scolds once.