The rustle of leaves drew her attention to the left. Twin golden spots were there and then gone. They reappeared higher up the dark tree trunk, the creature they belonged to wrapping itself around and around as it climbed to safety. “Bloodsquirrel,” she muttered. Was this the critter who’d sprung all her traps the night before, or had it been an ordinary squirrel like Gruff thought? Regardless, it was good to know they were out here. With a bit of luck, one of her traps would capture one before the morning arrived.

But that wasn’t her mission on this night. She continued on, her eyes slowly adjusting to the gloom until she was able to move a bit faster, picking her way through the undergrowth, searching at the base of trees and around mossy logs for her quarry. As it turned out, finding ’shrooms wasn’t a problem at all—she must’ve found a hundred of them before she stopped, breathing heavily in frustration—but finding night ’shrooms was a different story entirely.

She turned in a complete circle, trying to spot anything that glowed. The others had said they would be glowing, right? Shouldn’t that make them easier to find? But everywhere she looked the forest was shrouded in cloaks stitched with threads of shadow and gloom.

She sighed, heading back the way she’d come, until she reached the clearing again. All was still and silent. She wasn’t giving up, just expanding her search grid. She marked the location she’d already entered the forest with a medium-sized white stone and then, as if the clearing were a wagon wheel, selected a different spoke, leaving another stone behind.

She continued for at least two hours, until weariness tugged at her eyelids and her feet felt like leaden weights attached to her ankles. Only then did she consider admitting defeat, but it wasn’t in her nature, and so she prepared to head back out, creating a new spoke to search, in between two of the paths she’d already inspected.

Something stopped her.

A sound.

It was familiar, and also annoying, that scritch-scritch-scratch coming from the off-limits hut shrouded in darkness. Unlike her last encounter, she didn’t sneak silently in the shadows toward the hut, but instead stalked right up to the front door and gave a firm triple rap on the frame with her knuckles.

“Whoever is in there, reveal yerself or I’m gunna kick down this godsdamn door!”

To her surprise, the door creaked open slowly. For some reason, maybe because everyone had made such a big deal about this particular structure, she’d thought it would be locked from the outside.

White eyes peered out at her, but that’s all she could make out of the person inside other than their vague shape. “Who are you?” a rough, whispered voice asked.

“None o’ yer busyiness,” Perfidy retorted. She couldn’t help it—she shrank back a step. Eyes levitating headlessly in the dark were more than a little creepy. “Why are ye always scratchin’ in ’ere if yer not a prisoner?”