Wyn baked something every night, even if it was something small, and it often was. A single cookie. A palm-sized pie. Miniature muffins or squares of fudge wrapped in colorful paper. Small was more than enough for the woodlings, and they were the only ones Wyn wanted to impress.

She put the finishing touches on a small, singular lemon square now, tracing sugar in lacy patterns. Wyn licked her fingers and looked at the clock high on the kitchen wall. Ticking onward. Ticking always. Ticking away the years. Eleven o'clock. It had been a long day at the shop and the night was still full of wakeful hours.

Removing her apron, she picked up the little lemon square and cracked open the door. Night noises wafted in on a warm breeze, the breathy croak of crickets, the grumble of frogs in the marsh water, the settling warbles of birds in the trees beyond. At the bottom of the hill and the bottom of the lane, the town of Wrenhill snuggled in its hollow, asleep for now, as most things were.

It was the for now that was important. Because for some things, it was time to wake up.

And other things had been awake too long.

Wyn set the lemon square on the front steps and quietly shifted back, mostly nudging the door closed as she waited. The woodlings didn't like to be watched, and she didn't blame them. A creature, when eating, showed a certain amount of vulnerability. In how eager it was, in how its focus narrowed, in the defenselessness of its posture.

A click on the stairs, a small bright sound of hoof on stone. Wyn held her breath as the woodlings arrived because it was just how things were done. They came in many forms: tiny unicorns with tufted tails, little owlets the size of a thumbnail, creatures that looked like mice but had wings like a dragonfly, and dragonflies that looked like miniscule humans with multi-faceted eyes. Wyn could just see a parade of darting shadows in the crack of the door.

She held her breath and they shared her offering. Little sounds of delight chirped into the night noise, adding a new verse. One of the unicorns, about the height of Wyn's index finger, nosed its way inside. It blinked up at her with full black eyes, iridescent coat trailing moonlight and sprites that danced like weightless spores in its wake.

Wyn crouched down and offered her hand, which the creature sniffed delicately. Snorting its approval, it looked up at her again, tail swishing once.

"Any news, little one?" Wyn asked, empty but wanting to fill up with hoping.

It touched its horn to her fingertip and pressed. A bead of blood welled out and then drew along the horn's spirals until it dripped off, dyeing the entire little creature red. The unicorn then proceeded to burst into flames, just a candle-flicker on her kitchen floor, before fluttering up into the air in sparks. They spun in front of her, excited and ready.

This is what you wanted, Wyn chided herself when she hesitated. But it was night in Wrenhill, and it wasn't safe. The Knighthart held court at these hours, and didn't take kindly to humanfolk wandering outside his sleeping spells. Wyn had never much gone in for sleeping spells or charms or any of that and they never much went in for her.

That only made things more dangerous. But Nedd was out there, and she would bring her brother home.

"Okay, little one," Wyn said. "I'll just grab my jacket." And a kitchen knife.

Secured as such, she opened the door wide, scattering tiny mushroom men and antlered cats no bigger than an acorn. A patch of them mewled and crawled into her boot. Wyn smiled at their tickling claws and let them nestle down before striding down the stairs.

The sparks in the air bounded ahead, curving around the house and dashing for the trees across the pond. Frogs went quiet as Wyn skirted around, holding her jacket collar high to her face and her knife low in her handbag. Marshy land sucked at her shoes, but she tromped on, leaning into the soft breeze as it cupped her chin and whispered in her ear. The wind had always been kindly in Wrenhill, and that had not changed with the Knighthart. Instead it thinned and dissipated with a forlorn cry as the trees came close and the crickets ratcheted up their gasps.

Him, Him, Him, they sawed, broken bows on rusty strings.

Wyn took a breath and followed the sparks beyond the trees. The crickets went quiet, the frogs silent, the birds in the branches rustled their feathers and shut their beaks. It was as if she'd crossed a veil, cold sweeping in, and the common familiarities of night out. Her ears rang loud and it was so dark, she feared tripping and falling and never finding her feet.

"Okay, Nedd," she said, very small, just to herself. "I'm coming for you."

The Knighthart could not keep him. The Knighthart could not have him. He did not much like people like Nedd, people like Wyn, who did not suffer his spells. But Wyn did not much like him, and she had to believe that would be enough.

In among the shadows, the sparks seemed dimmer, though they still zipped on, it was with more subdued bursts, keeping just ahead of her nose rather than barreling along. Wyn stepped on many things in the dark. Downed branches, pockets of stones, erupting roots, but none of it snapped, none of it rang out, nothing as loud as her ears ringing and ringing and ringing. Muffling everything else. Her heartbeat, her lungs. Her whispered words to Nedd that she was coming, she still was, she promised.

The nest of tiny antlered cats in her shoe went fussy all of a sudden and then just as sudden still. The sparks went out, becoming a unicorn again, cowering on her shoulder, horn tucked down.

Darkness moved. Shadows within shadows. Night like a cape. Skull like the moon. Glowing with pitted teeth, beaming light bright and hazardous and chilling. Antlers or petrified hands rising above its brow and the crickets screaming all in a bursting, vein-shattering crescendo HIM.

Wyn ran. She threw herself into the trees, sliding among them like water in a drain. They welcomed her where their dense shadows moved sluggish at the Knighthart's approach. He was not of this land, he was because of it. A soul twisting bones and the buried into a shape that he wore like a coat on a hanger. A not-thing.

But though the forest was wary of him, it could not hold back his speed. He blinked in and out, ghosting among thorns and brambles, his cape ragged as a wing, multiple stick-thin arms pushing back obstacles and cobwebs, flinging him forward, faster, faster, right on Wyn's heels. Her pulse shouted in her ears, and her hand sweated around the handle of the knife in her bag.

Then she was falling. A bent root catching her toes and spinning her head over heels down a mossy hill clumped with old leaves. Wyn bumped and she thumped and skidded to a stop in a drift of brittle pine needles and popped mushroom caps. The antlered cats in her boot chirped tiny mews, quaking against her foot.

A shadow descended, looming over her, blocking out the moon, the sky, and Wyn felt, distantly, the oxygen bleeding from the air. Her brain rattled over options, over the knife, but mostly over the conjured memory of the woodlings' shadows as they ate the lemon square on her stairs. Vulnerable. And then she thought about what the Knighthart might eat and lay still, so very still, the knife slick in her fingers and only still for now.

The Knighthart leaned above her without breath, without eyes, only a sunken darkness in a skull half stag and half human. Bones jutted out of him in pointless, painful ways. Twisted ribs and snapped femurs, all jumbled together into a towering creature simmering with shadow and ancient, gnarled magic. He turned his face, like a bird, eyeing her from the side, peering close and patient and utterly deadly.

Wyn saw it then, a chipped tooth in his jaw. Nedd's tooth, broken when she pushed him down the front stairs at ten years old. The knife sweated from her grasp and she began to shake, tears brimming over.

"Nedd," she whispered into the night, into her empty heart, "Oh, Nedd."

The Knighthart cocked his head further, inhuman and ninety degrees. "You weep, little shield?" Wyn didn't know what he meant by that but she realized she was mistaken. He wasn't he or him at all. With the Knighthart so close she saw it was made up of both him and her and both and neither, animals and human, a voice like water underground and lightning in the sky. More of an impression, a humming, than language spoken in words.

"You've taken him. You killed my brother," Wyn said, throat seizing in gasps. "That's his teeth, his face, you monster." She fumbled for the knife again, but her bag seemed suddenly depthless.

The Knighthart put out a hand that wasn't a hand, a thin limb of darkness ending in a silver hoof, and placed it on her arm, freezing Wyn's movement. "We did not..." they cocked their head to the other side, "...kill. Nedd is here with us."

"You took him!" Wyn shouted now, lurching to take back her arm. "You didn't like that he was better than your spells and you kidnapped him and murdered him and, and...absorbed him."

Solemn silence coated the forest. The Knighthart drew back, tall and terrible, bones clicking quietly as they rearranged. "This spell is not ours. This spell is his and he has made us this."

Wyn's tears shook her vision, shook her lungs.

"We will take you—"

"No!" Wyn reared to her feet, slinging out her bag in an arc to keep the Knighthart back. She then clutched its felt flaps and straps to her and ran. The unicorn whinnied softly on her shoulder, popped into sparks, and vanished. The antlered cats in her shoe wrestled their way out and skittered off into the underbrush, abandoning her too.

That was okay, they should get out, be safe. It wasn't safe in Wrenhill in the woods at night. Not with monsters who stole children and took their bones. Tears marred her vision, and Wyn was not prepared or oriented when she ran straight into a pair of human arms.

She looked up startled, a scream halfway gone. A man: thick graying hair, crows' feet eyes, a mouth like anguish, and strong, strong hands that held her by the shoulders. "You shouldn't be out at night," he said. "Curfew is a terrible judge that sifts the ones who live from the ones who do not." The man then brought out a knife, a short sword really, which he then used instead of words to make his point for him.

In and out, between Wyn's ribs, and the soft expanse of the forest floor welcomed her with a plume of dirt and detritus, spores puffing in a cloud like a final breath.

"I'm sorry, Shielded One," the man said, so far away, from the canopy, from the sky, from the moonlight pooling down. "But my magic must have room to grow. Take heart and know the reapings of my work will be great." He smiled as if his sorrow were real and melted into the night.

Wyn didn't struggle, she couldn't. She breathed a few more times, trying to be comfortable, trying to finally accept her foolish mistakes, but one couldn't hope to accept so many things in only one life, and a life cut short at that.

The croaks of crickets and frogs returned, muted, a funerary chant. Clicks and clacks of bones preceded the Knighthart's appearance. They stood ominous but true in sorrow where the man had not. They came and loomed down with half of Nedd's skull, brushing gently at her sticky face with that silver hoof.

"Come home, Wyn," they said, cradling her wilting body in six arms of shadow, taking her blood, her bones, a promise made visceral by the souls it bound. "This sacred ground belongs to shields like us. We are born of it. We are born of your death. Our death. What he has done. We are born of vengeance and we shall have it."