Maria crouched beneath the junipers, barely breathing, not far from the place where she’d first been found. She knew the value of silence. Cadin was perched in the branch above her, equally quiet. Perhaps he had the sight as well, as familiars are said to do. He had not spent a single night away from Maria from the time he’d found her in the field, and Maria always wore the blackened silver hairpin the crow had brought her as a special gift. Sometimes she imagined the pin in a woman’s long red hair; perhaps it was a vision of the original owner. Whatever its history, the hairpin was her most valued possession, and would be all her life, even when she was half a world away from these woods.

“Bring me something wonderful,” she always whispered to Cadin when he set off on a flight, and she patted the feathers of her beloved thief. “Just don’t be caught.”

On the day of invisibility, he went off when they were finished hiding, winging across the field. It was very warm and the leaves on the willows were unfolding in a haze of soft yellow-green color. The ground was marshy all around them and ferns covered the heathland. On the way back to the cottage Hannah said, “You’re right.” She looked straight ahead as she spoke, but she had an open expression on her face, as if she were young again. She was remembering something she had done her best to forget.

Maria hurried to keep up with her. “Am I?”

Being told she was right was a rare treat, for Hannah believed that character was built when it was assumed that a child was most often wrong and still had much to learn.

“He was a man like any other, an earl’s servant who had seven years to work off his debt. That is what poor men must do, and I didn’t fault him for it. I was willing to wait, for a year is only as long as you let it be, but then I was arrested. They said I used my skill at writing to send letters to the devil and that I had a tail and that all men were in danger when I walked by, not because I was beautiful, I wasn’t, even I knew that, but because I could cause their blood to boil or go ice cold. I suppose they made it worth his while to turn against me, for after my trial was over, he was a free man with coins in his purse. He was the one who said I had a tail, and that he’d chopped it off himself so that I might appear to be a woman rather than a witch. He gave them the tail of a shrew and vowed it was mine, and if a fool is believed then those who believe him are even bigger fools.”

Maria thought over this new information. “So that is love?”