I took a step back. “I met you a few hours ago.” Though it seemed like days. “You’re sick and hurt. When was I supposed to tell you about my father?”

She flapped a hand tiredly. “Oh, well, all right then. But I know a thing or two about what ails a body. Come back if you want to, for help.”

“And you can come get me if you need to,” I told Larkin. I gave him a long look and told him what he already knew. “Straight down the deer path to a better path and then straight down some more to a cabin with a woodshed. But don’t go near that. It’s full of puppies, and their mother is nervous.”

“Puppies?” Cate said in a somewhat stronger voice. “You didn’t tell me that either.”

“No,” I said, confused by how changeable she was, sending me away one minute and then wanting to know me the next. “But you haven’t told me anything much either.” I turned to Larkin. “And I know nothing at all about you.” Though I did.

The thought of not knowing him better, not knowing them better, felt like hunger.

Which was when, without warning, I felt as if I might start to cry.

I tried to say something else, but all that came out was a croak. More bird than frog, but animal regardless. A puny animal. One that was used to feeling small.

The two of them stared at me in the yellow lantern light. Captan stood up and watched me closely.

I put my jacket on over my shirt with its missing sleeves. Picked up my pack. Cleared my throat. “I hope you get better now, Miss Cate.” I looked at Larkin. “I hope we never have to do any of this ever again.” Though that wasn’t entirely true.

And I took myself and my unspilled tears out the door.

—

I didn’t get far.

The stars stopped me for a minute in the clearing outside Cate’s cabin.

There aren’t many hurts that a sky-meadow full of clean white blossoms can’t make at least a little better.

But as I watched them, as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, as the trees at the edge of the clearing slowly took shape, one from the next, I saw someone standing among them.

I felt my shoulders rise around my neck. My whole body went terribly hot.

It was a woman. Standing so still she might have been a tree herself. Except she wasn’t. Everything about her said something else.

It was dark and she was some distance away, but something awful reached across that clearing and touched me.

And I felt what the fisher cat must have felt when faced with a hungry dog five times its size.