You and Mira take over a mill plank and every scrap of charcoal.

Three pictures. A rhinoceros, nose-horn, copied as honestly as your hands allow. A narwhal, tusk like a spiral spear, sea around it instead of ferns. A white hart, one antler, Elderwood at its feet.

Caption, which you argue about and then do not:

Unicorns are how we remember to be careful.

You stop arguing for a day. It feels like putting down a heavy basket. Cole looks in, sees no silver, sees a map of how stories stitch, and does not send beaters. Voss, shown the plank, snorts, then copies the narwhal into his own book because even peddlers like being right in public.

Nan adds a fourth doodle in the corner: a cup of clean water. “For the pocket.”

The Pale One is still in the wood, unnamed as a trophy, named as a neighbor. You have not solved the tax term with magic. You have made it harder for magic to be an excuse.

Charcoal on your fingers. Mira bumping your shoulder like a friend, which is all.

THE END

What you learned: the one-horned horse is a collage—rhino, narwhal, antelope-in-profile, white deer—and people stitched it because wonder is portable. Drawing the pieces apart is not the death of magic. It is how you keep the living forest in the picture.