Madeline pulls a quilt from the back of the chair and wraps it around her frail frame. She doesn’t say anything for another long minute. Instead, she gazes at the patterns of light on the ceiling until her eyes seem to mist over. I’m just starting to wonder if she’s, you know, all there when she looks down at me again. The fire sparkles in her eyes.

“Your face,” she says. “You have vitiligo?”

I feel my body give a little jerk. What does my vitiligo have to do with anything?

“Um, yes?”

“Why does that matter?” Fina asks, scowling.

“I wondered. Your story. Ivy slowly disappearing into the snow. It seemed too much of a coincidence. I assume it started to spread after your gram died?”

I nod slowly. Goose bumps creep up my arms. How does she know that?

“I think—I think I’ll tell you a story of my own now,” Madeline says. “Yes, I think it’s what she would want.”

“You mean Gram?”

Madeline ignores me. She keeps rocking backward and forward in her chair. Backward and forward. “I know what people say about me, you know. They call me odd. Strange. Crazy. When I was a girl, the names weren’t any nicer. I’ve never liked people, you see. Never understood them.

“I went to school, but only because my parents forced me. Every day there was torturous. The rest of the time, I stayed here, safe with my books and my garden. Until night fell. Then I would go for walks in the forest on my own. I liked the quiet. The company of the trees and the moon. How I wished I could be the moon, watching everything from the safety of the distant sky. How peaceful it would be.”

Her voice trails off in a kind of whisper, and she looks lost in her wish.

“I liked knowing I wouldn’t run into anyone,” she says after a moment. “Until one night I did.”

Backward and forward she rocks, all the time staring into the fire.

“She told me she was a fairy princess escaped from the house where she was being kept by an evil pair of goblins. They had locked her away from the world, and only at night, when they were deep asleep, could she be free from their tyranny. Every night, when the moon rose, she rose with it, and through the woods she ran, laughing into the wind.

“We became friends, the two of us, the fairy princess and the outcast child. Neither of us belonged to the day, so we lived our lives at night, and what wondrous lives they were. How the world transformed when the fairy princess looked at it. Streams became vast rivers; rocks became castles. The forest became a kingdom trapped under a curse of darkness.”