Nan’s chest is cedar and stubbornness.

The narwhal tusk goes in with a written card in Mira’s best letters:

SEA-HORN (narwhal tusk). Sold inland as unicorn. The whale kept the tooth. The forest kept the deer. Legends travel farther than animals. Ask how.

People come all week. They come for a miracle and leave with an ocean in their heads. Wonder moves without a hunt. A boy decides to be a sailor. A girl decides to be Nan. Cole does not get a year’s debt in one spiral, but he gets a mill full of listeners who still need bread and wool, and that is a kind of market.

Voss, on the road, will tell the true version or the false one. You cannot train a whole trade in a day. You can make this village harder to fool.

You touch the tusk once more. Cold, spiral, perfect, from a dark sea you have never seen. Elderwood ticks and drips and breathes around you, uncut.

Nan says, “Four stories in the pocket now. Don’t you dare sew it shut.”

THE END

What you learned: many “unicorn horns” in history were narwhal tusks—and other pieces of the collage were rhinos, antelope in profile, and rare white deer. Naming a fake kindly still leaves room for wonder. Legends travel; animals need you to let them stay home.