On a Wednesday night that smelled of pine needles and cold wind, a small fox named Zeb stepped out of his burrow, looked up at the sky, and noticed that a large section of it had gone completely dark.

Not cloudy-dark. Not stormy-dark. Just… empty. A wide, blank patch right in the middle of the sky where about forty stars ought to have been — and weren’t.

Zeb looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. The rabbits in the meadow were already asleep. The badger two hills over had her door shut. The birds in the ash tree had their heads tucked under their wings.

Nobody had noticed. Or if they had, nobody had done anything about it.

Zeb sat down in the dewy grass, tilted his head, and thought very hard. Then he went back inside and came out again holding his painting things: a long-handled brush with bristles soft as dandelion fluff, and a tin of paint that his grandmother had left him, labelled in her old handwriting: Starlight. Use generously.

Painting stars, Zeb quickly discovered, was harder than it looked.

The sky was very far away. He tried standing on his tiptoes. He tried climbing the hill. He tried climbing the tall ash tree, which annoyed the sleeping birds considerably. He got higher and higher but the empty patch of sky stayed just as far away as ever, the way important things often do.

He was about to give up — his brush arm aching, his tail drooping — when he heard a voice from above.

“You’ll need to jump,” said the voice.

Zeb looked up. Sitting on a small silver cloud directly above him was the oldest, most wrinkled star he had ever seen. She was no bigger than a plum, and she glowed with the dim, steady warmth of something that has been burning for a very long time.

“Jump?” Zeb said doubtfully. “I’m a fox. Foxes don’t fly.”

“All small things with brave hearts can reach the sky,” the old star said. She had the voice of someone who had watched ten thousand years of goodnights and wasn’t in any particular hurry. “You just have to stop worrying about whether it’s possible, and jump.”

Zeb looked at the empty patch of sky. He looked at his brush. He thought about all the sleeping animals in the meadow who would wake up to a broken sky in the morning. He thought about the rabbits, who always checked the stars before deciding it was safe to come out.

And then Zeb jumped.

He didn’t fly, exactly. It was more like the sky caught him — the way you catch something you’ve been waiting for. One paw, then two, then all four, and suddenly he was standing on nothing at all and everything at once, the whole dark sky under his feet and above his ears, the empty patch right in front of him like a blank page waiting to be written on.

He raised his brush. He dipped it in the tin of Starlight — Use Generously. And he painted.

When the tin was empty and every last drop of starlight had been used, Zeb stood back and looked at what he’d done. Forty-three new stars filled the patch where there had been nothing. They wobbled a little. They were uneven. Two were slightly too close together, and one was frankly more of an oval than a circle.

But they shone.

The old star on her silver cloud nodded slowly. “Not bad for a first try,” she said.

Zeb floated back down — gently, the sky lowering him like a very large and careful pair of hands — and landed in the dewy grass with a soft thump. He looked up at his stars. They looked back at him, blinking steadily, warm and new.

In the meadow, a rabbit twitched an ear in her sleep and smiled at something she couldn’t quite remember dreaming about. In the ash tree, a bird opened one eye, checked the sky, found it satisfactory, and went back to sleep.

Zeb tucked his empty tin under his arm, picked up his brush, and walked home through the cool dark — tired in all the best places, the way you are after doing something that needed doing.

Before he went inside, he looked up one last time. Forty-three stars — his stars — glowed steadily above the Hushwood Forest, and would go on glowing long after Zeb himself had fallen fast asleep.