Esme chose not to die in the dungeon. Placing her hands on the dirty stones, she summoned gold to make a key. She escaped through a forgotten tunnel that had once been a hallway in an older castle, long buried.

Then she was in the forest and alone, except for the trees. Only one other family lived there, a woodsman and his wife. She avoided them lest they recognize her. Isolated as she was, she had time to think. In her solitude, an idea struck.

Gold might not be the only thing she could summon. She could also, perhaps, draw out something she wanted far more. On her hands and knees, she put her lips to the soil and begged. Please. Please let me do this.

The forest breathed music back on her. Was it permission? A warning?

It didn’t matter; her desire would have drowned out either. She wanted a child. She had no womb. But the forest did. This was her only choice, her only chance.

At first, she summoned nothing more than gobbets covered in fur. She had to return them to the soil when they stopped quivering. Eventually she crafted something that felt perfect. Beautiful. Flesh as hairless and smooth as new bark. Beneath the lids were eyes as brown and beautiful as soil itself. Ten tiny fingers. Ten tiny toes. A soft, round belly she could not resist kissing.

This one, she knew, would work. With one hand over the child’s heart and the other deep in the earth, she opened herself to the flow and extracted magic to fill the child, to animate her spirit, to give strength and suppleness to her limbs and stars in the darkness of her eyes.

At first, it was pleasant. A trickle of water. Then it shook her bones as the power coursed through her. In the darkness, she saw red.

But then, like a flame blown out, it stopped.

The babe moved and cried, and Esme looked with hope upon the infant she’d wrought.

She went cold.

The child that had been so perfectly formed, so beautifully coated in flesh, was now a raw thing. Sinew and fat, veins and bones. Spilling organs. Slender ribs heaving with sobs. Whatever had animated her had also flayed her. Nothing protected the baby from the world all around, and it was eating her alive.

Esme did the only thing she could. She held the child. She sang to her. She promised that everything would be all right, that it wouldn’t always hurt like this.

It took the rest of the night for the baby’s spirit to depart. When the searing morning light came, the child breathed her last, and Esme returned her to the soil, deep and dark and safe. She crumpled to the earth and wept. The trees fell silent, made mute by grief. The shame Esme felt was infinite. Indelible. Worse than anything she’d ever experienced. She did not expect to live.

The forest had other ideas.

Day blended into night and became day again, and Esme never stopped punishing herself. She never stopped wishing for a child, though she would never again try to pull one from the earth, and every day, she whispered her apologies to the soil for trying.

One night, three years into her solitude, Esme followed a sound. A mewling cry, heartbreaking and beautiful. The forest had pushed something miraculous through its network of roots. A baby, wrapped in a blanket of lichen and moss, a black-eyed girl with skin the shade of summer-dry soil.

She brushed dirt from the baby’s cheeks and brow. The child stopped crying. Her tiny fingers wrapped around Esme’s, and the lonely young woman’s heart was lost forever.

She brought the baby to the hollow tree she’d turned into her home. She made a tiny bed. Strung acorns and flowers and other pretty objects on a golden thread and hung them overhead so the baby would have delightful things to look at. She gave her a name, Cappella, which meant “accompanied.” She meant it as a promise.

“You will never feel alone,” she whispered.

Esme tended Cappella gently through the stages of babyhood. Sitting. Standing. Walking. The music of the forest itself was an accompaniment to her as well. By the time Cappella was three, she was already playing music on a golden pipe Esme had made. The little girl loved to sit in a tree and play along with the forest.

She was smart and lively, with straight black hair streaked with a single patch of white, a remnant of the time she’d hit her head on a rock. The streak was a constant reminder of the day she’d bled and cried in Esme’s arms. Esme worried not just that her daughter would be injured again, but that she might someday go into the kingdom and never want to leave, that she might someday meet someone she loved more, that somehow Tyran and Gwyneth would discover Cappella and take her away—or worse.

Esme gave the girl two rules: She must never talk to another person, and she must never venture into the kingdom.

Cappella promised she wouldn’t.

This was why Cappella avoided the woodsman and his wife. Why she hid from their daughter, a golden-haired girl who sometimes sang along with Cappella’s music. Most of all, why she kept distance from their son, a quiet, shaggy-haired boy with soulful gray eyes.

Despite her mother’s promise that she’d never be lonely, Cappella yearned for a friend. One day, when she was five, she spied the flick of an ash-gray tail behind an old log rough with moss. She froze as a wolf cub popped up his head. He was the most precious thing Cappella had ever seen, with charcoal fur, gray eyes ringed in black, and a nose like a corner of night sky.

She put her pipe in her pocket, and they watched each other, the girl and the wolf. Finally Cappella approached and the cub put his paws on the log, letting his tongue roll out. Her hand met his nose, and he lowered his head and straightened his front legs.

Let’s play, the gesture said.

She darted behind a tree and he followed. The forest floor was soft beneath her bare feet. Cold, but her soles were used to it. They ran hard and fast, always stopping before either caught the other, because that was the point—to chase, not to catch. Despite the chill air, her face and hands were warm, and her body felt the satisfaction of having been properly used. Arms, legs, heart, lungs: spent.

After a while, the girl and her wolf collapsed in a pile of new-fallen leaves, breathing in air rich with the smells of dampness and new soil. The cub panted and it sounded almost like laughter.

Overhead, leaves wearing fall colors made a shushing sound as the wind played them like instruments. She listened. A sound rose from the roots. The trees themselves and the tiny living things in the soil doing the work of being alive. It was also music, this work. Extracting, exchanging, transforming. The making of something beautiful from nothing at all.

It was so quiet she might not have heard it had she not been trying. And yet she knew the song the way she knew her own name. She was alive. So was the wolf. They would not live forever, but they’d be bound for as long as their hearts beat. It was the song’s promise.

Cappella rolled to her side. The little wolf had already done the same. She scooted close and put her arm around him. He smelled of bracken and musk and was softer than anything she’d ever touched.

They breathed together.

Just as Cappella was about to drift off into a contented sleep, the wolf snapped to attention. His ears pricked up, hearing a call that she could not. And then he was sitting, and then he was running, running, running, and even though she shouted for him to stay, he didn’t.