Last week she saw her face in a pool of day-old rain and did not recognize it. That was all she needed to say. That face – the long, gaunt face that had once glowed as bright and as soft as starlight, the expression that was once described as windows with shutters thrown wide open and now – now – said the rest.

For a long time she had sustained herself on the desperate logic of a cornered animal. Find Raistlynn. Make him take her home. Finish the ceremony. It was simple enough, she’d told herself, cultivating that little kernel of hope through the long days, the long nights spent searching; in her little girl way, she believed it because she couldn’t imagine an alternative. She was the Wild God’s Bride. She was Vesperborn, Daughter of Seven Stars and Dearest Ever Dreamt. Bad endings did not exist for girls like her.

But the days passed and still nothing. Her hair fell from its coif, grew dirty and coarse from lack of comb, lack of care. Her coat lost its shine the same way her jewelry did, dulled by a patina of weather and a bone-deep sorrow that followed her like a second shadow, that she dragged behind her like ball and chain, leaving tunnels in the leaves and the loam as she pressed on. She slept fitfully, always, and woke with a start at the crack of dawn.

(The night before, she dreamt of a crocodile. Terrible. Gigantic. Its smile framed her like a prison. The night before that, a storm, and the smell of fire.)

It was the sound of the sea that dragged her forward again, out from behind the thick curtains she’d pulled shut, the mourning veil hiding her eyes – she saw the sand first, and scrabbled backwards thinking she’d come to the Flats again – and then the big evening-dark bar, drawn against the horizon. The hiss of surf. The swell of tide and the call of – “Birds,” she breathed, raspy with disuse. Birds she’d never seen before. Water she never knew.

They hadn’t even had stories about it.

And it was there that Ultima saw him, stumbling out of the sea, as wobbly as a child. 

She watched him for a long moment, making her way down a sand bank and nearly tumbling as she neared the foot, her hooves unsteady, wings flaring briefly for balance. Naïve and sheltered as she was, Ultima had little fear of strangers; the concept of being harmed by another of her kind was inconceivable, even as odd a man as this one seemed to be.

“I say,” she began, her voice cracking. She cleared her throat, and louder, steadier, “What are you doing?”

command me to be well.