You shake on it like grown people who are still kids.

Dawn-watch: elves set the count. Downwind. No closer than the fallen oak. Coin into the mill box. Voss may buy wool and a look, not a horn. Cole can buy bread. The tax term loses a tooth.

The first visitors arrive at an indecent hour, whispering as if the frost were a library. You show them cloven prints, the browse line, a snag of vine that fooled the sun. You do not promise a horse. When the Pale One shows—white, one-antlered, real—the sound the visitors make is small and decent.

Thorn, in the ferns, nods: rules held.

Mira keeps the ledger of looks, which is a better ledger than horns.

You stand where you stood at the beginning of the world (this morning) and feel the mill roof sugared with frost again. This time the number Cole was handed is not a dead thing in a cloth. It is a living animal that can be seen twice.

THE END

What you learned: people will pay to see a rare animal if you sell the seeing, not the body. Downwind, counted, uncrowded watching is ecology and manners braided together. A mill can eat without turning a keystone into silver.