When he saw her, he winced and turned away in disgust, and something inside her died. She’d been hated her whole life, by everyone except her mother. But there was something particularly awful about being hated by someone just like her, another mule slave. Like maybe she had missed the point all along. Maybe she should be hating herself.

Mula also learned that her mistress, the monster woman, loved ale. At first, the girl merely smelled it on her breath. Later, the monster woman would return to the house with an unsteady gait and words that were too slippery to make sense. Mula realized that instead of working in her shed, she was drinking, drinking, drinking. The day the woman took off her own shoes and sent Mula to the market to trade them for eggs, she knew they were running out of money.

The girl began to consider escape.

She was scared by the prospect of fleeing through the forest in winter, all alone and hungry. But she was scared of the monster woman too. The forest might kill her, for true, but the monster woman might do it gleefully, with hatred in her eyes and drunkenness in her speech. Mula realized she had to choose between scary things, pick which kind of scared was the best kind of scared.

She picked the forest.

But first she had to heal her ankle. So one morning while chopping firewood, she sidled quietly into the woods and poked through the snow and underbrush for a long branch, which she dragged back to the chopping stump. With her ax, she cleared it of offshoots, sized it to her armpit, and used the hood of her mother’s cloak to create a cushion on top. There. Now she had her crutch.

That night, Mula held her breath when the monster woman walked in the door and saw what she had made. Would she let her keep it? Would she box Mula’s ears?

The woman shrugged, then crumpled onto her cot, already passed out.

Over the next few days, Mula hoarded food. Just tiny squirrel-sized bits of turnip and jerky, a very small pinch from a loaf of bread. She hid it all in the snow, beside the cottage foundation, where the cold temperature would keep it from turning black with mold.

But when she returned to her stash later to add a withered apple, she discovered that mice had found her food and eaten it all, leaving nothing but a tiny bit of shredded turnip.

Mula started over.

She tried hiding food in a little hole in the cottage foundation and covering the opening with stones, but the mice managed to tunnel through.

She buried food in the near-frozen ground, but squirrels dug it up.

She hid some food in a basket beside the hearth, but it rotted, giving off a sour smell that would definitely earn her a cuff if the monster woman noticed.

Finally her eye chanced upon a glass vase on the mantel, one of the few baubles the monster woman hadn’t yet sold. It had a wide base and a narrow neck—too narrow for even a tiny mouse—and a slight amber cast that made it sparkle like fire. She took the vase from the mantel, shoved some pine nuts down that narrow neck, and buried it outside in the snow near the outhouse. Gradually she added bread crumbs, bits of jerky, a twig for brushing her teeth.