Summer came and went, a rotating wheel of routine; they sparred, climbed trees, raced across the open field of golden grass tall enough to tickle the girl's armpits, worked in the gardens, and instigated the occasional food fight until Gran rushed outside with a head slap for Mat and a lecture for them both.

Mat improved at holding his own with a stick, but the girl still outmatched him almost every time.

He browned in the sun. She kept her alabaster hue.

In the evenings, they waited for the stars to drip into the sky by catching fireflies.

At summer's close, it was on one such evening of catching the stragglers that the girl spotted deer grazing on the hill. She tugged on Mat's sleeve and pointed. A doe, maybe, with two others that were smaller but had long shed their spots.

Mat was debating running to the shed for his bow when the girl said she had never seen a deer.

The fireflies forgotten, they leaned on the fence, watching the deer graze, their silhouettes greying with the setting sun.

The girl sharply inclined her head to the swath of sky beyond the cottage. A question died in his throat as a charge filled the air. The deer raised their heads at the buzzing, then bolted as the airship ascended above the Burnt Forest.

"How does it fly?" the girl asked in her fashion of asking peculiar questions.

"Solar energy?" he said, thinking he had heard that somewhere.

The girl sniffled as it passed overhead, wiping her nose more than once, leaving Mat to marvel at what he was starting to think was no coincidence.

"How do you feel when the airship passes over?"

"Like my head is full of bees."

Just as it crested the hill, something fell from the ship.

The girl stood up rigid.

It plummeted to the ground.

"What was that?" she asked, looking to Mat whose skin was starting to pimple, and it had nothing to do with the balmy night air.

He didn't know what to say.

Her disappointment evident, she turned away, grabbed the fence, catapulted herself over the top rung and took off toward the increasingly small wart on the darkling sky.

Dumbstruck, Mat stood there, watching the distance between them grow before he smartened and tore after her in pursuit.

"Wait. Stop!"

He knew from their summer games the girl was a quick sprinter, but his legs were longer. He grabbed her arm as she reached the hill and she yelped as they both went down.

"Something fell," she said, trying to pull away from him. "Something fell from the ship."

"It could be anything," he panted. "Debris. Trash. That's no reason to run after it."

He felt the reflexive urge to look away as she searched his face.

"Debris is no reason to run after me."

"You were about to run up the hill! Someone could see. We shouldn't have come this far."

"See me, you mean," she said testily.

"Yeah," he said, the duh in his tone.

"You said no one knows who's on that ship. It could be a clue. Aren't you curious?"

"No. Let's go. Gran's going to wring our necks—"

The girl proceeded to march up the hill.

"Hey." He grabbed her again. "You shouldn't look."

She ripped free of his grip. "Why not?"

Because maybe you'll find something that once looked as peculiar as you before gravity reduced it to a bloody pulp.

"Tell me why," she demanded, crossing her arms like a petulant child.

Another step from her toward the peak elicited an angry sigh from Mat. "Because it's not the first time they've dropped something."

She took a halting step toward him. Many a time he'd done the same to her; come close, as if the intimate proximity might squeeze the words out of her, and indeed, he felt the sudden urge to be honest.

"I'd gone into Myst, and there was talk of something just outside town. The airship—it had dropped something. Many had gone to look."

Her eyes bore straight through him to the back of his skull.

He swallowed a lump amassing in his throat. "After impact—it was hard to tell what it had been; it was all blood, guts and bones."

"Did you go look?"

He gave the faintest nod. She stood so close that her eyes had to dart back and forth to search his.

"Someone fell?"

"Maybe," he heard himself say. "Back at Mad Hare, the tavern," he clarified at her bemused look, "people were passing around a shimmery, metallic something found at the site where it happened. Circular, the size of a thumbnail. It was all beat up, but a few of us thought the word Episteme was on it. It's all speculation now, but some of the older patrons swore that during the war, the humans kept faeries imprisoned on the airships and put these metal doodads inside them to track them--"

"What does that mean, track them?"

"Keep tabs, so as not to lose them."

"How would those doodads help with that?"

He shrugged. "It doesn't even matter, who knows if it's true--point is, nothing good came from looking." He chewed on his lip, his throat closing over what he hadn't said.

"There's more," she guessed. "What is it?"

Mat kicked a mound of dirt with the toe of his boot. It was big. Human-sized, but there were so many feathers, black and silky ones like a raven's with bits of skin stuck to the shafts. A few blokes joked that whoever it was took out a swarm of birds on the way down, but....

"They wouldn't even bury it," he said. "They burned it, and that was that. No one talks about it."

He made her promise to never pursue anything that fell from the sky again, but he never got another chance to test her obedience. Nothing else fell.

Whenever the ground began to shake and the air took on that static charge and the buzzing made his brain rattle in his skull—he looked to her, standing still as a startled deer, sap leaking from her nose as the ship mounted the clouds like a pagan god from a bygone era. Only once it sunk into the horizon would she reach up to wipe her nose.

Then one uneventful afternoon in early autumn, it struck Mat that it hadn't flown over in some time—a niggling crumb-sized nugget of unimportant information that his brain swallowed and immediately forgot.

A tooth. While emptying pockets to ready clothes for the wash bucket, Mat had found a tooth—a molar to be exact—in the girl's trousers. Bemused, he had turned it over between his fingers, feeling the rough edges as his heart tied itself into a knot. How long had she had it? Could it be hers? Why carry around your own tooth? With a fingernail, he scraped at the black crusted on the edges. He sniffed at it and wriggled his nose, trying to decide if it really smelled like soot or if that's where his mind was determined to go. How—When would she have—

The night she was attacked by the wolf.

He set it on the flattest, blackest rock he could find so as not to lose it, not wanting it in his own pocket, as he scrubbed and hung up the clothes.

The morning was blue, brittle and cold.

He wiped his runny nose on his sleeve and decided to put the tooth back where he had found it.

He walked back to the house, passed Gran rummaging around in the shed, and paused outside the girl's door. An anticipation to say something—anything burgeoned in his chest as he peeked in on her sat on the floor, hair hanging like a curtain, head bent to the book in her lap.

Instead, he moved back outside to the cellar and scooped up all the ingredients needed for pastry dough.

Mat wasn't one to eat his emotions, but he was one to bake them. And he did this well.

On his way back to the kitchen, he swung by the pantry for the flour, then laid out all the soldiers on the counter, ready to execute a recipe.

Mat kneaded the butter into the flour, sprinkled in salt, drizzled in cold water, and stirred it all together. With the heel of his hand, he pressed and smeared to distribute the fat, then pressed it into a thick circle, wrapped it in burlap, and placed it outside to chill. For the filling, he grinded cocoa beans into a fine powder, swept it into a pan, mixed in water, powdered milk, a bit of added sugar, and stirred it into a sauce atop glowing coals on the hearth.

Gran moseyed into the kitchen, complaining of the havoc the chill wrecked on her joints, before plopping down into a dining chair.

"What occasion warrants the last of our cocoa beans?"

"Pastries—well, a single monster pastry; flour's almost gone."

"Haven't made one o' those finicky things in awhile," she said and added under her breath: "It never hurts to impress."

Biting his tongue, he'd let her think what she liked.

Mat removed the pan from the heat, stirred the coals and coaxed a flame into a real cookfire. He grabbed the dough, rolled it thin, poured the chocolate on top, tucked the edges of the dough around the center, and shoved the bundle on top of the grate.

He joined Gran at the table.

Frowning, she pinched her belly. "I blame your devilish baking for my paunch."

Mat thought to smile but his face didn't comply. His thoughts turned to the only other he had ever baked for.

He had grown up cooking for his mother who knew how but was partial to what she called more "time-worthy tasks." That he learned his way around a kitchen was an understatement, but he never baked—Mother had always insisted they could not afford such trivialities—except once.

For his ninth birthday, he cracked open the house's only cookbook, a dusty, neglected thing he'd found under a bookcase, and baked his own lopsided cake, thickly iced with buttercream. He placed it proudly on the table and waited for her to return from her study but couldn't resist sticking in a finger and hooking a clump of the fluffy confection to plop on his tongue. He had never tasted anything so sweet. The air was still sugary when she came up the stairs, halted in the doorway.

She scowled. "What's this?"

His grin wobbled. "It's my birthday."

She came around the table so fast it gave him whiplash, snatched it up, threw open the door, catapulted it out into the dirt, and without breaking momentum, spun around and slapped him.

That was the last and only mention of it being his birthday.

Luckily, Gran had an appetite for sweets.

He wiped a finger along the bottom of the pan with the chocolate residue and stuck it in his mouth before offering the pan to Gran.

"Don't mind if I do." She licked her own finger and groaned with delight.

The girl struck her head out of her bedroom, maybe seeking out the sweet aromas.

Gran held out the pan. "Chocolate?"

The girl bridged the distance, slid three fingers across the bottom and licked them clean, one by one, leaving behind a single spec of chocolate in the corner of her mouth.

"You have something here." Mat gestured to the corner of his mouth.

They eagerly waited together, watching the pastry brown and flake. Mat could practically hear Gran salavating as he took the crispy, flower-shaped dessert off the fire to examine it with a fork. Determining it ready, he placed it on a small plate before the girl.

"Careful, it's hot," he warned her.

She looked from Mat to the old woman, neither with their own piping-hot pastries.

"It's a flaky bread, a dessert with chocolate in the middle," Gran offered. "And if you don't want it, I'd be happy to take it off your hands."

"Gran," Mat chided.

A vision of innocence, the old woman shrugged.

The girl peeled back a petal and quickly dropped it as steam escaped in a violent wisp, which only persuaded her to tear it apart all the quicker. Chocolate seeped from the center, pooling on the plate. She stood up, grabbed two more plates and graced each one with matching hunks of pastry.

"How sweet," Gran grinned wolfishly.

"You don't have to share."

But the old woman descended on her morsel quicker than a cat on a mouse. The girl looked expectantly at Mat, so he slumped in his chair but took a bite, only minutely disappointed as the warm morsel hit the back of his throat. Only then did she dig in.

Mat shoved the last plate atop the drying rack when he heard scuffling coming from the girl's room. The light outside the door gamboled with the frantic movement inside. He crept by without looking and darted outside to the clothesline to grab her trousers. When he returned, he pushed open the bedroom door and the girl came to an abrupt halt next to the bed, which she had skinned of all its furs.

"Looking for these?"

The girl eyed the trousers, walked reservedly forward and snatched them from him. Running a hand down the pant leg, she visibly relaxed when her fingers hovered over the pocket.

"It's still there."

That blank glare she had a habit of evoking when feeling threatened started to creep over her face but faltered as she balled up her hands, clutching the trousers.

"I just wanted to keep a piece of him," she said, voice small.

"I know."