Eira was the kind of girl who could not walk past a trail of anything without following it, and on that gold-and-honey evening the trail was berries.

One ripe blue berry, then another, lay along the meadow grass like dropped buttons, leading toward the great old tree at the meadow's edge where the light pooled warmest.

She had wandered out after supper only meaning to watch the fireflies wake, but the berries pulled her on, one round clue at a time, until she knelt before a low arch of roots no taller than her knee.

Inside the arch glowed a string of tiny lanterns, each one no bigger than a thimble, and the smell that drifted out was warm bread and sweet jam and something like a held breath. Eira meant only to peek — but the arch breathed open around her, the hollow swelled wide and cozy, and somehow she fit just right, guest-sized and small as a teacup, standing inside a room dressed for a party. Yet the party was strangely quiet. Long tables wound through the hollow, half-laid with leaf-plates and acorn-cups beneath drooping garlands, and not one of the small round bears bustling in the corners would so much as look at the others.