The girl’s heart steadied. Voice wavering, she tried again. “Please. Food?”

“Do you not speak the Lengua Classica?” said the woman’s voice, in the girl’s own language.

“No.” The girl blinked.

Her vision had been slow to clear, but she could see the monster woman now. She was beautiful, maybe the most beautiful creature the girl had ever seen, with delicate, chiseled features, hair that shone reddish brown, and eyes green as grass, shaped like a cat’s. How could the woman see with such eyes?

“You must drink first,” the woman said. “See how your belly handles it before introducing food.”

The mere mention of drink made the girl swallow hard. Her throat was parched and aching, and she suddenly wanted water more than anything in the whole world. The girl remembered her manners and said, “Yes, please, thank you, please, yes.”

A hand reached beneath the base of her head and tilted her up. A cup was set against her lips, and cold, perfect, beautiful water slid down her throat.

The cup was pulled away, and the girl tried to chase after it, lunging up from the poking straw mattress. Cool hands held her down.

“More soon,” the monster woman said. “Patience, sweet thing.”

The girl laid back and tried to have patience.

Something sparkled at the woman’s earlobes, something that clinked softly every time she moved—jewelry made of glass, almost like tiny sparkle stones. “I found you in a snowdrift, when I was fetching water,” the monster woman said. “You must be from one of the villages to the north. I think you fell off the cliff.”

The girl didn’t remember falling. Just running and hiding and more running and . . . flying? Or maybe that part had been a dream.

“Your ankle is broken, but I’ve splinted it, and I expect it to heal perfectly. The snowdrift may have saved your life.”

The girl said nothing. The monster woman seemed so kind, but the girl knew better. You couldn’t trust monsters. They said perfectly reasonable things and then burned your turnips.

In a trembling voice, the girl asked, “Do you have a sparkle stone? Are you going to burn me?”

The monster woman laughed, and her glass earrings tinkled. “Not all Inviernos are animagi,” she said. Her voice turned bitter. “If I were a sorcerer, I wouldn’t have to make my living here, in one of the godforsaken free villages.” She tipped the cup to the girl’s lips once again, and the girl drank greedily.

“So, no,” the woman continued. “I don’t have an anima-lapis, or a Godstone, as the Joyans sometimes call them.”

Relief flooded the girl. She turned her head toward the hearth. Glass figurines rested on the mantel, shiny and sparkling with firelight—a deer with elaborate antlers, a tiny rabbit, and one that made her gasp with its beauty: a heron lifting into flight, dripping glass water behind it.

Below, a lidded black pot hung from a rotating spit just outside the flames’ reach. The best smell she had ever smelled was coming from inside. A potpie, if she didn’t miss her guess, filled with bubbling dough and chunks of moist chicken meat.