Tonight, Wren had a plan. She had built a stakeout tent in the royal garden — three blankets, two sticks, and one very determined princess. Her orange cat, Marmalade, was already asleep on the pillow. That was fine. Marmalade was the lookout. Lookouts could nap.
Wren settled in with her lantern and her butterfly net. The net was for saying hello politely, she had decided. Not for trapping anyone. The lantern smelled of warm beeswax and made the tent glow like a little paper moon. Her brother Pip had lost a tooth today, and somewhere out there, a fairy was coming.
She waited. She watched. A cricket chirped near the rose bushes. An owl asked a question to no one. Marmalade's whiskers twitched in his sleep. Wren gripped her net and whispered to herself: small and sharp, stay awake.
Then — there. On the garden path, something glittered. Not stars. Not dew. A thin trail of silver dust, no wider than a bootlace, curling past the lavender and disappearing toward the old oak tree. Wren leaned out of the tent. Small and sharp, stay awake.
She grabbed her lantern. She crept out into the grass, which was cold and slightly damp between her bare toes. The silver trail wound past the sundial, past the sleeping roses, all the way to the mushroom circle under the oak. And there, in the middle of the mushrooms, was a fairy.
A very small fairy. A very flustered fairy. Her name, Wren would learn, was Clem.
Clem's satchel had snagged on a bramble and burst clean open. Every tooth she'd collected that night — seventeen of them — was scattered across the moss. So were seventeen tiny paper tags, each with a child's name written in ink the size of a crumb. Clem's wings were going so fast they hummed. "Oh, bother," she kept saying. "Oh, absolute bother."
Wren crouched down carefully, so as not to startle her. The lantern light pooled across the mushroom caps, gold and warm. "I'm good at reading small things," Wren said. "Would that help?"
Clem blinked. She had eyes like two drops of water. She looked at Wren, then at the lantern, then at the teeth. "Yes," she said finally. "Desperately, actually."
So Wren held the lantern low and read each tag aloud — Pip, Rosalind, Tobias, Mae — one by one, in her clearest voice. And Clem sorted each tooth into a new, un-burst bag, quick as a hummingbird, her fingers moving tap tap tap against the moss. They worked through all seventeen. It took exactly as long as it takes to eat a biscuit slowly.
Wren walked back through the garden. The grass was even colder now. The lantern flickered once. She crawled into the tent, tucked her legs up, and found Marmalade already pressed against her side, purring a low, rolling purr she could feel in her elbow.
She looked at the coin in her palm. She closed her fingers around it. And before she could think another single thought, she was asleep — which, she had just enough time to notice, was probably the most magical thing of all.
