The girl wedged a boot over her bandaged foot before Gran could see the green bleeding through and walked out and down the corridor of snow that now had walls as tall as she. Mat lost sight of her around the first bend as he absently played with the hem of his sticky shirt, already solidifying with her blood or sap or whatever had oozed out of her. That's what it smelled like: the sap that oozes out of a freshly cut stem.

Not purely cosmetic, then. It was the first time he thought Gran's superstitious misgivings about the girl might be apt.

"What's gotten into you?" Gran asked, startling him out of his thoughts.

He grunted a noise of inquiry and busied himself by using the rag he'd been white-knuckling a moment before to wipe his already clean hands.

"You care for her like she's your own blood."

"What's that famous quote of that Gone World prophet? Love thy neighbor—"

"Don't get cheeky with me, boy. She's not one of us, not even human—"

"Why don't you just tell me what it is that you're so afraid of?"

"They're all supposed to be gone," she said distantly, as if looking inward on a stained memory. "Sure, there are stories; maybe there are a few werelings still prowling around that dead forest surviving on nobody knows what, but all the faeries and their halfling demon spawns are supposed to be gone—"

"We know what faeries looked like; she doesn't—"

"A witch, then," she spat.

"You act as if she starts chanting in tongues when you come into a room. She's not brewing potions, concocting spells—"

"Not yet," she mumbled.

Mat laughed derisively.

The old woman clamped her mouth shut and her jaw worked like she was chewing her tongue into a bloody stump.

"No one knows who started the war—"

"What started the war was humans leaving a world they'd destroyed for one already occupied by an intelligent species unwilling to bend the knee—"

"—but what caused the tensions was interbreeding," Gran blazed on. "For every human child that died in the womb or was born dead, a mutt with magic was born."

"People had trouble reproducing long before they came to Helithica—"

"It went against the treaty, against nature—I'm telling you," she said, shoving a finger into Mat's face as he opened his mouth to refute, "she's a halfling."

"The faeries have been dead for more than eighty orbits! You sound crazy suspecting a girl who can't be more than 10 who has obviously experienced some sort of trauma."

Gran purpled and began to shake, then, all at once, the eye of the storm passed over her face. "Your mother did you a great disservice raising you in the company of those experimental creatures of hers."

With a cold grin, Mat grabbed his jacket and stormed outside.

It's called having compassion, you old crone.

Gran had always been prone to rants and, usually, Mat got away with deflecting, but the girl was a constant reminder that the old woman harbored a deep-seated fear. And unfortunately, it seemed she was right: the girl wasn't human. Maybe leaving Gran to speculate about fantastical possibilities was dangerous, but she had demonstrated that she couldn't handle the truth, whatever it was. Now, it was a matter of keeping the girl away from sharp corners. If any accidents were suffered in front of the old woman, heads would roll.

In the days that followed, Gran grumbled and sulked about like a dark storm determined to put everyone in a foul mood, but she didn't threaten the girl and didn't startle quite as easily whenever she came into a room. It helped that in the afternoon after the incident, it took only a single venomous request from Gran for the girl to give up her dirty cloak and crumpled dress to be washed in exchange for some musky articles of her daughter's old clothes. Mat swore he even saw the old woman bite back a smile when the girl came bumbling out of the bedroom, a sweater three sizes too big stuck on her head, arms waving as she toppled into a chair.

A similar change could be seen in the girl, who started acting less like a scared animal and more like a shy child. Mat would still pose her questions she wouldn't answer, yet it was starting to feel less like an interrogation and more like a game they played. In spite of her refusal to accept their aid, he often caught her standing on her tiptoes, looking out over the melting snow walls, as if planning her escape.

Each morning he woke expecting to find her gone, maybe a single snowy boot print on the stoop outside to persuade him he hadn't dreamt her up. But her boots were always neatly side-by-side on the mat beside the door, her red cloak hanging on the hook. He would walk by her door (the bedroom now hers; he had made a permanent move to the couch), open a crack to let the heat from the hearth in, to find a mess of white tendrils sprouting out from the furs on the bed, or her pretzeled on the floor, a book propped open in her lap.

She spent more time in front of that bookcase than anywhere else. Voracious readers were anomalies here. Most Mystians were farmhands and fishermen preoccupied with cultivating the land and keeping their bellies full--the national standard, the way he understood it. Before and after the Great War, human civilization starting over had really put a slug on literacy. It was the poets ("the good-for-nothing hallabaloos with muck for brains baking in a dim beam," the way Gran told it) that made preserving the Gone World's stories and the birth of Helithican ones a priority. Mat collected the books visitors—merchants from the cities mostly—left behind. Everything from novels to anatomical guides of native flora and fauna lined those shelves, though the girl favored the former.

She looks like a wight out of one of those books, he thought, squatting between snow hedges as he peered over the melting snow in search of her. Icy trenches were all that remained of the labyrinthian maze he'd dug out more than a moon ago. The widest walkways led to the washroom, stable, the cellar and tool shed. The rest he had shoveled out for fun.

A quick patter and crunch of boots, and Mat spotted the girl's ivory crown bob above a hedge as she shot past him. He shouted and she took off, making quick work of the sharp corners. His lankier legs were harder to maneuver. Nothing could be heard but quick breaths breaking on flushed cheeks, the crunching of ice, the swishing of rough fabric against fabric, and her cloak snapping in the biting wind. When the girl looked back—as those being chased inevitably do—she slipped, skidded across the ice, and tried to scramble away but Mat lunged and grabbed her ankle.

"You're it," he said, breathing labored. "Start counting."

They'd decided on thirty, but she was a quick counter. Too quick. He needed the full count. At the age of fourteen with a full head of golden locks, he stuck out against the white like a black widow in a saucer of milk.

Mat looked over his shoulder as he searched for the perfect place to hide and found a pair of golden eyes peeping at him over the snow. She dipped down when she saw she'd been had.

"No cheating!"

Mat's only real chance at this game after the counting commenced was to crawl. The effort made snowcaps of his knees, so he made quick work of a couple of corners, then hunkered down between two walls and waited. He got an idea, picked up a solid hunk of ice and chucked it in the other direction. A satisfactory crunch met his ears. He took a deep breath that went down ice cold and held it, listening for the crunch of her boots. Time slugged by, the cold nibbling his fingers, settling on the nape of his neck. It was when he grew impatient and peered over his wall that the girl raced around the corner and brushed his cheek with a gloved finger, startling him into an oath. A grin sharp enough to make him flush broke out across her face as she looked down at him, clutching his chest.

"You're quiet as a ghost." Mat heaved himself up and out of the trench, limbs heavy with cold. He brushed his arms and hands off above her head, dusting her with snow. "I'm cold. Let's go inside before I lose a finger."

She raced him to the porch. Inside, they slipped off their boots and threw down their gloves.

"Hot cocoa?" Mat didn't wait for a reply, for she'd never given one, but she'd never turned down hot cocoa either. The first time he asked, she had cocked her head, looking bemused. He sold her on it but hadn't thought to tell her to sip it—she cried out, sending a jolt straight through his chest.

"Bugger. Nearly burned a hole through her tongue!" Gran said.

At a loss, Mat said: "I thought the steam would have been a clue."

Since then, he hadn't taken her knowledge for granted. She didn't seem dimwitted so much as lacking a real familiarity with the mundane, as if she had been raised in a den by sophisticated wolves (a thought that reminded him of werelings, which he vehemently stowed away in the dark underbelly of his mind). It helped that she was naturally curious and a quick learner.

Take her musings outside the stable. Days after that spooked horse sent her running, he found her sitting hunched on the frozen ground, cloak wrapped tightly around her, in front of the opened doors.

"What are you doing?"

She glanced at him from the tail of her eye.

He felt a twinge of annoyance, not knowing why he always felt so compelled to ask her questions that he knew she wouldn't answer.

"Gran and I couldn't find you. It's rude to leave without a word..." he trailed off; head turned toward the stable, she gave no indication she was listening, "...could have at least tugged on my sleeve, pointed or something," he grumbled and stalked off back to the cottage.

Every day since then, she would leave for a span and he could always find her sitting, closer and closer each time, outside the stable.

Mat pushed a mug of hot cocoa across the table to the girl and gave one to Gran, sitting at the hearth. They indulged in silence until sludge dappled the bottoms of their mugs and their bellies were swollen with warmth.

The cold in his bones, Mat begged the girl to play an indoor game. She picked chess with a pointing finger. Pebbles were used in place of a few missing pawns. Mat lost twice before the girl got up and grabbed her cloak. He groaned, not needing to ask where she was off to. Snowflakes flitted in through the open door and swirled as she shut it behind her.

Mat wrapped his arms around himself at the burst of cold and thought about challenging Gran to a game of chess, until he heard her snoring.

He moved to his old room and picked up the book the girl had left behind on the floor: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

By the time the sun began to set, she had not returned.

"I'm not waiting," Gran said, sticking a strip of salmon jerky into her mouth at the dinner table.

Mat put his jacket on with a grumble and waded out into the night. He pulled his collar tight, eyeing the pink scar on the horizon as he moved toward the stable.

His stomach lurched when he turned around the last icy bend to find her usual spot vacant. Instead, he found her inside, a dim lantern in the dark. He proceeded with caution to her side, watching in awe as her small hands traced a horse's velvet nose and up the length of its long face. The beast that had leapt up in fright at the mere sight of her weeks ago now snorted with pleasure at her touch. To compensate for her short reach, the horse had leaned down as far as it was able. The others were silent in their stalls.

Looking proud of what she'd accomplished, she smiled up at Mat who smiled back, unsure of what she'd done or how she'd managed it but tickled for her all the same.

As the snow melted down to their shins, Mat anticipated a revival of Gran's insistence that it was time for the girl to go. But she surprised him by keeping quiet about it. While she'd never say so, he had a sneaking suspicion the girl was growing on her.

"I wish she'd nod or at least turn toward me when I'm talking to her so I don't feel like such a doddering old fool," Gran whispered to Mat over dinner one night, the girl within obvious earshot.

She must have taken it under advisement, because the next time Gran spoke, the girl turned, latched her golden-saucer eyes onto the old woman and nodded like a puppet on a stick.

A visible chill wracked Gran. "Never mind. I take it back."

Mat laughed as the girl looked between them, a question in her eyes.

Still, what was it to them, if the girl finally decided to get where she was going? They didn't need another mouth to feed, especially one that didn't talk. Didn't need a source of contempt between him and Gran or any Mystian that remembered their distant neighbors come spring and thought to pay a visit. The girl posed a real threat and yet, if he were honest, Mat would feel put out to see her go. So, he nursed a selfish relief every day Gran didn't bring it up, every morning that he woke to find the girl's shoes beside the door. It soon seemed nothing was to change but the season. That is, until the first serious thaw when he discovered the body.

It was the corpse's left boot reaching for the sky that had given it away. Mat noticed it on his way back from the stable. Unsure what it was, he approached at leisure, but slowed at the bits of cloak forming an alpine ridge atop the slush. What brought him that knowing horror was the man's face, a long time dead. The right side was submerged and a single dull-green eye stared past the black-tipped nose to an indiscernible spot on the horizon. The sun was low in the sky, lending a glow to his fiery orange hair but the vivid color couldn't compare with all that blood, crystallized and gleaming red at his throat. Mat choked on a curse, bile rising rancid in his throat at the sweet smell of rot.

He bolted back to the cottage, stumbled in and slammed the door. Gran's head snapped up with a snarl from her task of chopping peaches for that evening's dessert.

"What ghost's slipped into your skin?" Gran asked.

Mat looked in on the girl, books strewn around her on the bedroom floor.

"Boy. I know you hear me."

He moved to stand beside her, so close that she grimaced and took a step back.

"Out in the yard," he whispered, his words brittle. The cold burned his cheeks while sweat beaded on his brow.

"Well? Spit it out."

"I think I found who she came here with."

Her wizened face slackened with understanding. She wiped her hands on her apron and followed him outside, her face paling until she looked as ill as Mat felt. She inhaled sharply through clenched when she spotted the man, then uttered a curse.

Her eyes roved over the body and snagged on his torn neck. "He's no one I know from town. What the ashes got a hold of 'im?"

Wereling? "Bear?"

"Maybe." Gran chewed on her chapped lip until it bled. "I haven't seen bears in these parts for orbits."

She knelt beside the body, her face a tortured portrait at the sudden proximity.

"I don't think it was an animal. For one, it left all the meat."

Mat came over to her line of sight and crouched down to examine his serrated neck, oddly torn, not cleanly cut like one might expect with a blade.

"He's been here all winter?" Her voice broke on another curse.

"She's a child. We thought it unlikely she came alone. There's nothing nearby. The next town is a many-days hike or boat ride away."

"Yes, but I thought maybe some bastard passing through left her on our doorstep." Her breath caught. "She had to have seen it happen."

"I know she's odd, but if she'd witnessed a murder, don't you think she'd be even weirder, that she would have shown us?"

"Not if it wasn't a loved one. She could have been kidnapped. That could explain her peculiar behavior—she's mute for foundling's sake."

Not wanting to marvel over whether the girl had known that they played over a dead body all winter, Mat kept quiet. He peered over his shoulder at the cottage's front window and swore he saw movement.

"You have to ask her."

"I have."

"Ask her again," Gran snarled.

"How?" he shot back. "We found a thawed, likely murdered man buried under the snow out in the yard we think you chose to not tell us about—what say you?"

"Sounds good to me."

"Gran."

"Then what! We don't tell her? Go on as we have like we didn't find her potential companion, neck sawed open?" Her face grew pensive. "How sure are you that when you went to shut up the stable before that storm that he wasn't already here?"

"Sure," he said, his voice not quite sounding like his own. "I would've noticed a body, wouldn't I?"

Mat stared at the back of the dead man's head.

"Maybe their being here is unrelated." He thought it stupid when he heard it aloud, not knowing what had prompted him to say it.

Gran snorted. "What are the chances?"

Not likely.