One day Luce woke to a dab of sunlight playing on her face and looked up to see a rip in the clouds and behind it a patch of sweet, pale, porcelain blue, utterly different from the murky dusk blue she’d lived in for months now. She stretched luxuriantly for a minute. For all her dread of the coming spring, that bolt of sunlight and clear sky sent exhilaration coursing through her body. She thought of swimming far out—far enough that there was no chance her father would hear her—and letting her pent-up song shimmer up to meet the pale sun. She was in her favorite little cove, its small beach tucked between two tongues of rock. Luce rolled onto her stomach and looked at the wet stones gleaming in the unexpected sunlight. The golden shine was interrupted by the shadows of a few birch trees high above her and by another lumpier shadow that Luce couldn’t identify. Possibly it was the shade thrown by a small boulder with a few ferns swaying on its crest, though now that she thought of it, she didn’t remember any boulders up there.

The shadow-shape tipped like something shifting its weight. Luce realized that what she’d taken for the shadow of ferns was cast instead by wind-stirred hair. And with the shadow’s movement came a sudden burst of breezy muttering.

Luce froze and forced herself not to look up right away. If she stared straight at him she was sure he’d bolt again. Instead she pushed herself up on her elbows and gazed into the clouds, slowly tilting her head until she could just see him out of the corner of her eye. He was crouching up on the rocky shelf to her left, no more than fifteen feet away, shapeless in his mass of furs. And he was watching her. Maybe, Luce realized with a rush of anxiety and longing, he’d been watching her for hours as she slept. Above her the whirlwind of voices gabbled and spun. Then another, stronger voice interrupted them.

“You know,” Andrew Korchak snapped irritably, “my Lucette wasn’t actually that pretty. Beautiful girl, okay, but not like that. And I don’t know where you got the idea she had a tail!”