A little whimper escaped her lips. Her stomach turned over hard, and she couldn’t tell if she wanted to feast or vomit.
Hunger won out.
“Please,” she whispered, almost like a prayer.
A flurry of syllables greeted her, and she almost screamed. It was the monster’s language. They had found her.
But a cool hand pressed gently against her forehead. More words followed—soft, kind, feminine.
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.
“Before I give you food,” the monster woman said, “you must tell me something.”
Saliva filled her mouth. “What?”
“What village are you from? Where are your parents?”
The girl knew better than to tell the monster woman anything, but there was a potpie. “Mamá is dead,” she said.
The words dislodged something inside her, something that roiled around in her belly for a moment and then came exploding out of her body in a wracking sob. Mamá is dead. Mamá is dead.
“There, there, sweet thing, I’m so sorry to hear. And your village?”
The village she and Mamá had lived outside of had a name, but she couldn’t remember it. And she didn’t care to. No one there wanted her anyway. She said, through gulping tears, “No village. I’m from nowhere.”
“Oh, good,” the woman muttered. “That’s good.”
The girl didn’t understand what was good about that, but she could hardly think beyond the potpie scent. It had actual salt in it, she was certain. And oregano.
“You’re a pretty thing,” the monster woman said. Her soft hand came up to caress the girl’s cheek. The girl couldn’t help herself; she leaned into this feeling of kindness as tears continued to pour down her cheeks. The woman said, her voice as satiny and exquisite as butterfly wings, “You’re not really an Invierno, are you? I couldn’t tell at first; you’re so pale and skinny. But I see it now. You’re a half-breed. A mula.”
The girl didn’t know what a mula was, but it sounded nice, and she was hungry, so she nodded. Yes, she would be a mula.
The monster woman’s smile changed, and the girl thought of beautiful, bright summer clouds right before they burst with deadly hail.
“We must tattoo your feet,” the monster-woman said.
The little girl, whose name was now Mula, had done nothing but sleep and eat for three days. But now the monster woman wanted her to start contributing.
“What’s a tattoo?” Mula asked.
“A special mark,” the woman said. “It’s very pretty. Bright blue like the sky.”
Mula liked the color blue. It was her second-favorite color, after red. “Like jewelry?” Mula asked.
“Yes, like jewelry. For your feet. You won’t be able to walk for a few days while the color sets, but you can’t walk on that ankle anyway. I’ll find simple tasks for you at first. Can you peel turnips? Mend? Scrub dishes?”
Mula nodded. She was a big girl, and big girls knew how to do all those things.
“Good. That’s good.”
Mula beamed. She was happy to please the monster woman.
“If you turn out to have clever fingers, I’ll teach you about glassmaking. That’s what I do, you see. Blow glass and sell it. Mobiles, figurines, ornaments, wind chimes. Do you want to learn how to make glass, Mula?”
“Yes.”
“You must address me as ‘my lady.’ Say ‘Yes, my lady.’”
“Yes, my lady.”
“Good girl.”
The next day, a man came to the hut. The girl called Mula noticed his hands—calloused and cracked, with fingers stained bright blue. He carried a leather satchel, and inside were packets of things, all wrapped in parchment or dried leaves, along with several long pointy tools that looked like writing quills, except so, so much sharper.
The monster woman helped Mula hobble to the table and sit, while the blue-fingered man poured some dark berries from a packet into a gray stone mortar and used a pestle to crush them, adding a bit of liquid that smelled like mead gone sour.
The monster woman instructed Mula to sit with her feet up on the table. It was awkward, and it hurt her healing ankle, but she knew better than to complain.