Time coaxed the sprouts out of the dirt and silenced Gran's reservations about letting the girl linger outside. Her cavalier days of freedom grew in number and got longer, the only caveat being that she wear an oversized sun hat (the better to cover her "moonface"), even for trips to the washroom. By the time the girl had inched around to helping out in the front yard, not a protest was heard.

The tomatoes little more than a memory, the girl soon took pride in her thriving root vegetables.

Gran had even let her pick a few carrots this morning. She quickly washed one in a bucket then took a big chomp. Her taste buds sang--a carrot had never tasted so good. She went to hand the rest of the root to Mat who was busy shooing away an unusually unperturbed rabbit stalking the onion patch. He kicked the air above its ears and the rabbit finally hopped around to the back of the cottage, likely in search of an unguarded snack.

Mat took a bite of the carrot. "Mm. Good color. Nice size. I daresay you've done it!"

The girl thought he was being sarcastic but was too giddy to care.

"I think you might have a green thumb," he added with a knowing look.

A laugh punching up through her throat, she sputtered. They fell into giggles at the terrible joke.

The girl went in search of the rabbit when Gran uttered, "Matthew," something peculiar in her husky voice, and nodded for him to come her way. She rarely used his full name.

Sure enough, she found the rabbit in the back, nibbling on chards. At the sight of her, no doubt the horror of Mat's boot fresh in its mind, it bounded toward the edge of the garden. The girl squatted and, holding out another carrot, coaxed it toward her. It walked closer with caution, its little nose wiggling, but Mat quickly strode into view, and it bolted.

She glared up at him.

"Don't waste food," he said, snatching the carrots from her and dropping them in the dirt, that same peculiar something now in his voice.

Fear, she realized.

"Come." He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the Burnt Forest, then past the tree line. Once under the charred canopy, he looked back. The girl followed suit but saw and heard nothing, their own footsteps muffled by the soot that would forever blanket the Burnt Forest's floor.

"Where are we going?" she asked, stumbling as he tried to hurry her along.

"It's not far."

She dug her heels into the soot until he came to a stop.

"What about the wolves?"

"No wolves today," he said, even then looking around, as if she might have spoken them into existence. "Someone from town's at the cottage wanting to talk to Gran—"

It was then that he looked down at the sooty dirt pushing up through her toes.

"I told you to wear boots," he said in a burst of anger.

Her wearing all Mat's mother's hand-me-downs meant things rarely fit. Gran had finally started altering some of the clothes, but shoes weren't that simple. "They don't fit."

"Get on my back or your feet will turn bloody from the roots."

He kneeled and she climbed on, feeling silly but knowing the situation demanded compliance. Maybe she should have been more scared but she wore fear like a veil; it did not sink into her heart. Something about the Burnt Forest still felt like home.

As Mat waded deeper into the woods, the light dimmed and the trees began losing their misshapen edges.

Her eyes had begun to adjust to the dark when Mat kneeled before a massive tree that was--well, ugly, a monster among the monstrous. The girl slipped down. Mat brushed soot and dirt aside to reveal a latchstring. In awe that he'd known exactly where to find it, the girl watched as he pulled and up came a door in the forest floor, revealing earthen stairs and a tunnel that burrowed under the tree.

It was to this Mat motioned when he said: "In you go. It's OK," he added, when she dawdled.

She hunched over to peek inside. Unable to see the bottom, she began descending the steps with the shaky stoicism and silent loyalty only children know. Feeling along the wall as she went, fine roots brushed her cheeks and released dirt clumps atop her head.

Mat followed and closed the hatch behind him, snuffing out the remaining light. He barreled into her on the stairs, not realizing she had come to a stop.

"It's OK." She wondered if he said it as much for himself as for her. "It's just an empty cavern, a hideout. Watch your head on the roots."

Hands on her shoulders, he guided her down the steps, all worn in the middle from prolonged use.

Feeling chary, she milled about on the landing, forcing Mat to slip by her.

"Sorry 'bout all the fuss," he said, a dim ghost gliding about the black room. "The old woman doesn't think people from Myst will know how to react to you."

She had eavesdropped on them talking about this before: the violent reaction her peculiar pedigree might have on the masses. How it was safest to spare them. It was a song and dance her parents had known well, too.

"Small town, lots of gossip," he added, putting it mildly, she thought.

There was a familiar hiss, then the tiny glow of a lit sulfur-infused match. He lit a lantern. As the black suffused with light, she found him standing at a table littered with spent matches and a worn matchbook, a single rickety chair beside it—a humble set-up amidst a scene of horror.

The cavern wasn't empty.

What lined the circular, dirt wall rippled her skin and evoked memories she was both loathe and eager to recall.

Mat waved about the room by way of introduction. "These were here when I discovered the place."

What looked like broken and chipped, alabaster-white masks adorned the wall. Most looked feral, not wholly animal nor human but things in between. Monsters.

Her brother had kept many books. One had such facades in it, faces that he'd drawn from memory.

"Dad used to have an impressive collection in his study," Eli told her. "Our grandfather's trophies from the war. But they unnerved mom. She made him get rid of them."

He told her how the soldiers had cut and peeled them from the bodies, how they had boiled them to get rid of the excess.

"Grandfather said that from a distance, it was easy to forget faeries weren't men," he said with a facetious sneer, "but when their faces crawled—that's when they remembered humanity had crash landed in a hell disguised as paradise."

That duality had stuck with her. She dwelled on it orbits later when she finally met one. He had seeped out of the ashen tree line of the Burnt Forest like a ghost out of a haunted painting and into their yard where she'd been playing with twigs in the dirt. He wore his bone face, had wild hair the color of the backs of her eyelids on a sunny day and eyes the color of a burning star with a death wish. Too young to be scared, fear buzzed about her head like a swarm of bees. She watched, transfixed by his lithe movements as he came close, a big white wereling with the bluest eyes trailing behind him. Looking back, she never wondered whether it was a wolf; in the presence of a faery, it could only be a wereling. It whined when the man knelt before her, close enough to touch.

It was a hazy memory--one she never told Eliwood, for fear it'd get her in trouble. Even now, she could not recall what happened next, only that that night she had the most peculiar dream of a woman on her hands and knees, wolfing down flowers, and that godawful noise of nature climbing back up her throat—

She didn't recall leaving the last step, but when Mat spoke up, her hand was tilting up the bottom of a bone face on the wall.

"Do you?"

She hadn't heard the question and made a noise of absentminded inquiry. Looking up into the eyeless sockets, she struggled to grab hold of the fine hairs of her memory.

"Do you know what these are?"

"Faeries' second faces."

They had many names: ersatz exoskeletons, bone masks, devil's skin, chitinous guises, second faces—but they all belonged to the faeries.

She slid a finger along the cheekbone, wondering at its composition, then peered around the room. All had holes where the eyes and nostrils should be, while only some had slits for mouths. The one in her hand had teeth, like those of a grinning skull, the incisors too long to be human. All looked menacing in the flickering light, their sightless eye holes staring back.

"Hey—" a touch on her shoulder caused her to leap back into Mat. "Sorry," he said, hands raised. "Where is it you keep going?" She kept mum and he continued, irritably: "Anyway. I should have warned you, I know it's a bit morbid."

"Morbid?" she said, sounding it out.

"Uh—unpleasant, disturbing. Gave me a fright the first time I saw the place. I ran off after Gran and I had a spat; my boot knocked the latchstring on the door. Crazy luck, huh?"

"Why keep them?" The word trophies lingered like rot in her head.

He shrugged. "What else would I do with them?"

She scratched at the uneven underside of the mask, then studied the black residue under her fingernail.

Not boiled. I wonder what color they bled.

"Sometimes it's easy to forget faeries were once more than myth, but this—" He didn't finish. He didn't have to.

Mat shifted around uncomfortably before moving back to the table. He removed his cap, tossed it atop the table and ran a hand through his sweaty curls.

"Gran and I didn't hit it off straight away. This was my hideaway of sorts. Did you ever have a place like that?"

Yes. In my brother's trunk, under his bed. He'd lock her inside whenever their drunken father started to slur and bellow, right before his fists started to fly.

But didn't tell Mat that. Some words still came easier than others.

"You know, if anything ever happens to me and Gran.... If we ever get split up, you can hide here."

You mean, if those who came for my brother come for me?

"Why let me stay? I make things difficult for you, for Gran—"

"You let me worry about Gran."

The shadowed contours of his face made him look so much older.

"I thought you were leaving the night we couldn't find you," he said. "The night you went into the forest."

"You came after me."

"I heard your screams."

Her heart somersaulted. She wanted to look away but there were faces everywhere.

Moon faces. If someone put my face up there, how long would it take him to notice?

"Were you leaving?"

"I was looking for him," she said, surprised by the tremor in her voice. "To see if there was anything left." Now was her chance—she had him alone. Questions burned the back of her throat like vomit. "What did he look like?"

He needn't ask who. "Ah." He wrung his hands. The chair creaked under his weight. "Shaggy, carrot-top hair. Bright green eyes—"

Her tongue felt thick, like an engorged slug. "Did he have a scar?"

He gave the faintest nod. "Here." He dragged a finger from the bridge of his nose to under his right eye.

Her mouth was sour, gummy. She tried to swallow the slug, but it stuck in her throat as the cavern tilted and she laid back against the wall.

It was him. But she had always known, hadn't she? The truth of it settled in her like black mold.

She bit her tongue until it bled, tasting nature green. "He got that from our father. From the broken edge of a bottle. My brother. Eliwood." His name sounded foreign to her ears. "I should have gone to see." See for myself. But I was too afraid to make it real.

She could feel Mat's eyes on her like a thing alive, scurrying over her skin.

"He told me it was time to leave. That we weren't coming back."

But at the time, she thought that wherever they were going, they were going together.

In her mind's eye, she was back in the living room on the last night she saw her brother alive, her grandfather's manifesto of his exploits in the Great War propped open in her lap, a candle melting wax onto the window seat beside her. Her stomach grumbled, hungry again. The rations were never enough and now it was winter, the gardens were dead, and she'd been alone so long she'd quit counting the days wondering when Eli would come back. The last time she'd seen him, he had dressed her in an oversized cloak and promised her an adventure.

"I'm taking you to meet someone. A captain of a ship in the sky."

They left the Burnt Forest behind--her first time--and trekked all day to a town with a name he didn't share. He dragged her through the streets in a vice-like grip, hurting her hand as her head spun with all the things she'd never seen before, new sounds and smells rolling over her like eager swells.

But at the sight of a man clad in all black, a man who did not belong, Eli shoved her into an alcove. Clutching both sides of her face, he said: "Go home. You know the way. He met the man without her. A good girl, she did as she was told.

Moon passed.

The night the manifesto sat heavy in her lap, Eli came back. He strode in--dressed in snow-encrusted clothes, the culprit battering the windows, whistling through the cracks.

There was no hello. "Grab your cloak. Put on your boots."

When she moved to go upstairs to change into something warmer, he grabbed her arm. "No time." Her cloak would do.

He threw open the door and didn't bother to close it behind them. Her legs were too short, she couldn't keep up. He carried her, picking up the pace as quick as the snowdrifts would allow when they broke from the tree line. It was sometime between then and him setting her down outside Gran's cottage that she saw over his shoulder a thin line of black, like an ink stain on all that white, trailing them.

Frostbite coloring his nose, again, Eli told her to leave him. Again, she obeyed.

How many times had she looked out that front window, waiting, her eyes scanning the very ice hedge that hid him?

All her life, he had been hers and she had been his little monster, as their mother had liked to say. He had been her shield against everything ugly, and when he had needed the protecting, she had stepped away.

"Why did he bring you here?"

She nibbled on the bloody nub that had formed on her lip. "I think he was running."

"From what?"

Whom. The word rang like a death knell in her head.

The room was getting stuffy, her chest tight.

"It wasn't natural. His death." He blinked at her, perhaps taken aback that this didn't seem to surprise her. It never occurred to her that it could have been natural, an accident. Not after all her parents' horror stories. Not after he dragged her out into the world and flung her at strangers.

Was he in pieces? Was his neck smiling or at an impossible angle? The words wouldn't come. The not knowing seemed like a subtle punishment for not rushing out to see.

"Do you know who killed him?"

She remembered the man in the city that Eli wouldn't let her meet, the captain in the sky she never got to see, but she didn't know who they were.

She shook her head.

There was another, a voice not quite hers whispered. That ink blot that followed you here. The girl pushed down the thought, killed it dead. No. She couldn't be sure that hadn't been the fantasy of a child in distress.

Mat's brow knitted, and she knew he was growing frustrated with her again.

"I'm sorry," he said, and she knew he meant it.

He was fidgeting again. "We had to get rid of the body—the ground was frozen, you know."

She touched the lump in her pocket under the guise of darkness.

"What about your parents, anyone else? Is there somewhere I can take you?"

Dead. "There is no one else."

A rap at the door startled them both. Mat pushed past her, putting himself between her and the stairs.

"Mat. It was Gerrard coming to tell me his magnolias are blooming early."

Mat took an audible breath. He snuffed out the light and they climbed the stairs.

"We're coming up," he warned.

Dirt dusted their heads as Gran flung back the door.

"Weren't mauled by wolves this time, eh?"

Mat gave an irritable sigh as the girl stiffened at his side. "No. No wolves today, Gran."