Three Days as the Fox Trots
“Three days as the fox trots,” Bramble said, and the fox, it turns out, trots like a rumor — quick, quiet, and mostly through places respectable roads refuse to go.
The deep Silverwood swallows you whole. By day you walk under leaves that light themselves; by night you sleep in root-hollows while Bramble tells outrageous stories of his adventuring days, at least one of which involves the Queen of the Cloud Court and cannot possibly be true. (Sera's face says two of them are true.)
On the second night, the moon-moths find you: moths the size of dinner plates, wings like panes of moonlight, who drink dreams the way ordinary moths drink nectar — and sometimes, if they like you, pour one back. One lands weightless on your knee and opens its wings, and in them you see a memory that is not yours:
A young unicorn, dusk-purple and lovely, standing alone on a hilltop at evening, guarding the sunset the way the Dawn Herd guards the sunrise. Alone. Every evening, always, alone. The wings close. The moth sails off into the dark.
“That,” says Sera quietly, into the silence, “looked like the Thorn Queen. Before the thorns.”