Elisabeth’s breath caught. She had read stories about the moss folk, and had always hoped to see one, but Master Hargrove had assured her that the spirits of the forest were all long dead—if they had ever existed to begin with.

“Don’t let Silas frighten you,” Nathaniel put in. “As long as we take care not to disturb the land when we make camp, and stay out of the trees, they won’t bother us.”

He paused, looking down. Then he knelt and placed a hand on the ground. She saw his lips move in the dark, and felt a snap of magic in the air. The spell that followed wasn’t anything like what she expected. Emerald light unfolded around him into the shape of two tents, which swelled with bedrolls and unrolled lengths of fine green silk down their sides. Nathaniel stood to examine his handiwork. Afterward, he gestured toward the farthest tent. “That one’s yours.”

She stiffened in surprise. “You’re giving me my own tent?”

He looked around, eyebrows raised. A lock of silver-streaked hair had fallen over his forehead. “Why, would you prefer to share one? I wouldn’t have expected it of you, Scrivener, but I suppose some species do bite each other as a prelude to courtship.”

Heat flooded her cheeks. “That’s not what I meant.”

After a moment of studying her, his grin faded. “Yes, I’m giving you your own tent. Just remember what I told you about running. Silas will keep watch tonight, and I assure you, he’s a great deal harder to get past than a locked door.”

Why give her a tent if he only meant to kill her? This had to be a trick. She remained awake long after she crawled inside, alert and listening. She didn’t take off her boots. Hours passed, but a fire continued to crackle, and the murmured tones of Nathaniel and Silas’s conversation carried through the canvas walls. Though she couldn’t make out any words, the ebb and flow of their exchange reminded her more of two old friends than a master and servant. Occasionally Nathaniel would say something, and very softly, Silas would laugh.

Finally, the conversation ceased. She waited for an hour or so longer—long enough for the fire’s embers to fade to a dull red glow against the canvas. Then, unable to stand the tension any longer, she crawled out of her bedroll and poked her head through the tent’s flap. The air smelled of pine and wood smoke, and crickets sang a silvery chorus in the night. Silas was nowhere to be seen. Bent at the waist, she took a step outside. And stopped.

“Out for an evening stroll, Scrivener?”

Nathaniel was still awake. He sat on a fallen log near the edge of the forest, his chin resting on his clasped hands, facing the trees. The embers smoldering behind him cast his face into shadow. He didn’t turn, but she knew he would cast a spell the instant she tried to flee.

She had a choice. She could run from her fate, or she could face it head on. After a moment of stillness, she picked her way through the wildflowers, feeling strangely as though she were trapped in a dream.

“Do you not sleep?” she asked as she drew near.

“Very little,” he replied. “But that’s particular to me, not sorcerers in general.” As he spoke, he didn’t look away from the trees. She followed his gaze, and froze.

A shape moved within the ferns and pale thin birches, picked out by moonlight. A spirit of the wood. It was stooped over, collecting objects from the ground. A curtain of mossy hair hung from its head, and a pair of antlers crowned its brow. Its skin was chalk-white and cracked, like birch bark, and its long, crooked arms hung to its knees, ending in knotted, twiglike claws. A chill shivered up and down Elisabeth’s arms. Slowly, she stepped forward and sank down on the opposite end of the log.

Nathaniel spared her a glance. “You aren’t afraid of it,” he observed, almost a question.

She shook her head, unable to tear her gaze from the forest. “I’ve always wanted to see the moss folk. I knew they were real, even though everyone told me differently.”

The fire at Nathaniel’s back etched the lines of his jaw and cheekbones, but didn’t reach the hollows of his eyes. “Most people grow out of fairy stories,” he said. “Why did you carry on believing, when the rest of the world did not?”

She wasn’t sure how to answer. To her, his question made little sense—or if it did, it wasn’t a kind of sense she wished to understand. “What is the point of life if you don’t believe in anything?” she asked instead.

He gave her a long look, his half-hidden expression indecipherable. She wondered why he had been sitting here watching the moss spirit, alone, for so long.

Movement caught her eye. As they’d spoken, the spirit had raised something small—an acorn—to inspect it in the moonlight. That was what it had been collecting, and surely it had found many, but there seemed to be something special about this acorn in particular. Using its gnarled claws, it raked aside the covering of leaves on the ground and scooped out a hole from the loam. It buried the acorn and mounded the leaves back on top. A sigh stirred through the forest at that exact moment, a breeze that rushed forth from the heart of the wood and swept over Elisabeth, combing through her hair.

The stories claimed that the moss folk were stewards of the forest. They tended to its trees and creatures, watched over them from birth to death. They had a magic of their own.

“Why are there so few of them left?” she asked, pierced by a sorrow she couldn’t explain.

For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “Do you know of my ancestor, Baltasar Thorn?”

She nodded, hoping her goose bumps weren’t visible in the firelight. The embers popped and snapped.

“At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Blackwald covered half of Austermeer. This was a wild country. It was ruled as much by the forest as it was by men.”

But not any longer, she finished. “What did he do?”

“It was the necromantic ritual he performed during the War of Bones. To grant life, even a semblance of it, one must take life, trade it like currency. Unsurprisingly, raising thousands of soldiers from the grave took a great deal. The life came from the land itself. His magic left two-thirds of the Blackwald dead and dying in a single night. The moss folk are tied to the earth—those that survived were stricken like blighted trees.” Nathaniel paused. He added in a dry tone, “Baltasar, of course, received a title.”

Elisabeth’s fingernails dug into the wood of the log beneath her, soft and spongy with decay. Now that she looked more closely at the moss spirit she saw that one of its knees was swollen and disfigured, like a canker on the trunk of an oak.

“I suppose you must be proud,” she said. “It’s the reason why you’re a magister.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” He sounded amused. “Meditating fondly on my ancestor’s deeds?”

“I don’t know. I hope not. No one should take pleasure from such a thing.” Not even someone like you.

Perhaps his supply of mockery wasn’t as infinite as she assumed. He only gazed into the forest a moment longer, then stood. “It’s late.” He nodded at the spirit. “You’re lucky to have seen one. A hundred years from now, they’ll all be gone.”

He brought his fingers to his lips. Before she could stop him, a whistle broke the stillness.