Where did her old face go? Who is this staring up at her? Croi doesn’t like the look in the multicolored eyes of the girl in the river.

Croi looks away from her reflection, feeling sore on the inside. Dipping her flask into the water destroys the girl staring back at her and gains her a measure of peace. If she can’t see her face, she can pretend it isn’t hers.

A thought occurs to her and Croi pauses. How can she ask others to look at her when she can’t stand to look at herself?

She opens her pack and riffles through the scarves in there before selecting a black one with silver threads woven through. She wraps it around the lower half of her face, including her unfortunate nose. Then she finds some dark mud on the riverbank and applies it liberally to her forehead and whatever skin is showing above the scarf. If she’s going to be ugly, she may as well go all the way.

When she’s done, Croi washes her hands and stands up. The ground seems farther away now than it did yesterday. Croi lifts her leg and examines her knee. She looks as gangly as a colt. Heh. She makes her way back into the forest and doesn’t fall down once on her way downhill. As far as she’s concerned, this is a victory.

Her stomach growls, complaining about its current state of emptiness. She pats it comfortingly, asking it to endure. It’s not like she can conjure food out of nothing. Croi looks at the ground, noticing the pale strands of magick that rise from the surface of the earth. She follows these farther into the forest, choosing to go where the strands are more numerous and the magick thicker. She has been walking for an hour when a sweet fragrance assails her. Led by her nose, she squeezes her way through a dense thicket and comes out in a small meadow populated by long green grass tipped with feathery pink flowers.

The Hag has often told her to think before she acts, but hunger has its own set of rules. The berries she scrounged for in the morning are long gone. Before Croi realizes what she is doing, a stalk of a pink feathery flower is melting on her tongue. It is sweet but lightly so, invigorating her taste buds and filling her in the same way a full meal would. A sliver of rationality prevents Croi from eating another stalk of the candy grass. She makes herself wait a minute, figuring that this time is long enough for adverse effects, should there be any, to make themselves known. When nothing happens, Croi releases her inner glutton.

Half an hour later, she is finally satiated. The patch of candy grass has been all but decimated. Croi wipes her sticky fingers on her shabby dress and notices that the magick under the grass patch is particularly dense. She packs the remaining stalks of grass and places them in her bag and is about to continue deeper into the forest when the discordant squawks of gringits attract her attention.