She dresses simply, in plain dresses, made from linen or cotton, and often goes barefoot, or wears sandals. She prefers plain, unobtrusive colors, such as greens, browns, grays and blues. Her one luxury is a satin cloak, and this she wears all winter long.

Elwen is born in the midst of a thunderstorm. The rain beating down onto the roof muffles her mother’s cries, which are many, and long, and loud, for the labor is hard, and the babe will be her only. El at last arrives, sliding into the midwife’s waiting hands right in the middle of a thunder clap so loud, it shakes the house. The babe is small, and blue, and silent—and the umbilical cord lays, twined double, like a snake, at her throat.

The midwife cuts the cord, rubs the babe with a towel, strikes her back, breathes into her mouth, then finally, in desperation, she holds the infant upside down and gives her a sharp swat on her backside. The baby coughs, sucks in a breath, and begins to wail. Sagging with relief, the midwife swaddles the baby in a blanket and hands her to her mother.

Myrwen, El’s mother, a bastard daughter of a bastard daughter going back so many years the hold lost count—takes the babe obligingly, but as she gazes down into her infant’s face, she feels—nothing, and then, worse than nothing. She feels a sense of wrongness, as though the babe in her arms is not a child of flesh and blood, but something else entirely. A creature, not fully human, that has slipped in, and stolen away her child.

As the months wear on, Myr’s certainty grows. The babe she’s carried for seven months, the babe she’s birthed in agony and blood is not the dark eyed, solemn creature who blinks up at her each day from the bassinet. The babe—her babe—is gone.

First, there are the difficulties of feeding. The infant refuses to latch at first, and then, once she does, she barely begins to nurse before she falls asleep, only to wake, hours later, shrieking from hunger, and then the whole miserable ordeal begins again.

The shrieking drives Myr to distraction, as the babe has a high, thin cry, like that of a mewling cat. She finds the sound so disturbing, that she takes to swatting the babe’s legs and bottom whenever she cries, trying to make her stop. At first, the punishments just make the babe cry harder, but in time, she learns. Myr teaches the girl stillness the same way, for she is prone to thrashing about during diaper changes, making an already difficult task nigh impossible.

The punishments do not solve the feeding problem itself, though, and so Myr begins pinching the babe’s arm to keep her awake, stubbornly ignoring the jolt of guilt that goes through her every time the babe whimpers. It is her fault anyway, Myr tells herself, just as the crying, and the wriggling, are. If the child will just nurse properly, neither of them would be in this position in the first place.

Then, there is the staring. Elwen stares at everything and nothing. The ceiling. The walls. The sun as it moves across the heavens. The shadows that dance in the moonlight. Her mother’s face. The dust motes that float in the air. All are met with a fixed, unblinking regard, that makes Myr feel as if the child is peering into her soul. The babe’s face never changes, no matter what she looks at. While her eyes are sharp, the rest of her face remains so passive, Myr supposes at first the child is blind, til she waves a bright red ball before her, and notices, with relief, that the girl turns her head to follow its movements.

The eerie silence is almost as bad as the staring. Unless she is hungry—and she was rarely that, thanks both to Myr’s insistence on her eating and her own small appetite—the babe is silent—and even her cries from hunger soon fade. At first, Myr is relieved. The child has learned to quiet herself. But then it seems she’s perhaps learned too well, for she makes not a peep. She seems utterly unaware of her surroundings or her own person most of the time, and Myr finds herself having to consciously remind herself to tend to the child, as she simply will not cry, even when she has a badly soiled diaper.

And so, Elwen grows. And as she grows, she learns. She learns that sometimes, Mama calls her changeling. Sometimes, Mama says she is away with the faeries. Sometimes, Mama sings to her, and brushes her hair, and the water she bathes Elwen in is warm and smells of roses. Those are the good days. The days Mama smiles and twirls her and tickles her. The days El can come out of the back room, can run in the fields behind the house til the sun goes down if she wants. Those days are nice— but those days are few and far between, and by the time she is old enough for memories and knowing, they have faded away.

Most of the time, Mama calls her names. Stupid, and little brat, and halfwit. Most of the time, Mama scowls, and shouts, telling her to be quiet, and hold still. Most of the time, Mama yanks the brush through her hair, while El wiggles, and cries, and bites. Most of the time, Mama scolds and pinches, yanks arms and swats mouth, legs, bottom. Most of the time, Mama bathes her in water cold as ice. Most of the time, Mama says she’s a very bad girl. Always when she says that, afterwards, Mama paddles her bottom, first with a hand, then, when she is bigger, with a hairbrush. Most of the time, she isn’t allowed to stir from the back room at all.

Here is what Elwen knows: her name, though she struggles to say it. She knows the words Mamma, yes, no, stop it, bad girl, good girl, be quiet, eat, drink, more, hold still, and nothing more. The words make pictures in her head, and this is how she knows she understands them.

She knows that she lives in a small room, though she lacks the words to describe it. If she could, she would say it was made of wood, floor and walls and ceiling. She would say that the door leading into it is locked with a metal deadbolt, and a chain that runs into an additional bolt, then a padlock fastened beneath the chain. She would say that she does not have a bed, just a pile of blankets on the floor. She would say that the room has no windows, that the only light comes from a candle set high on a shelf—she would add that, most of the time, she is in the dark, because Mama has to light the candle, and often she forgets—or the flame has blown out.

*

Elwen is five years old the first time she sees her uncle. At the time, she does not know he is her uncle. All she knows is that a man has come into Mama’s house, and he does not look like the men who usually come into Mama’s house, and she is out of the back room, when she isn’t, usually—unless the old man is there, but this man is not him. She knows he isn’t, because he doesn’t look like him, and he hasn’t smiled, and he hasn’t given her candy, and he hasn’t tickled her and he hasn’t asked, How’s my favorite little wherlet, while she giggles.

Also, this man does not sound like the other men, the ones who just come to see Mama, either. He says, “For heaven’s sake, Myrwen, this is no fit home for an animal, let alone a child,” and, “Look at her! She’s a halfwit, and no wonder.”

Elwen is sitting under the table when he says this, and she has been since he got there. She is humming to herself, and twirling one of Mama’s ribbons in between the fingers of one hand. The fingers of her other hand she flicks before her eyes. Usually she does that in front of the candle, because she likes the way the light makes the insides of her fingers go from pink to orange the closer she gets to the flame, but Mama won’t let her have candles where she can reach them after she made her blankets on fire by getting one too close to it.

Thinking about that makes her tummy hurt. She remembers how mad Mama was—though she would not learn that word for a few more months yet—and how loudly she’d shouted, and how hard she’d spanked her after the fire was gone. El whimpers at the memory and puts her thumb in her mouth.

Mama makes a snorting sound. “Oh? And what would you have me do with her? I have to work, haven’t I? Unless you want us both to starve.”

“Surely there’s someone to look after her,” the man says. Elwen thinks he says something about, “honest work,” too, but he says it so softly, she isn’t sure.

“Oh, sure, I’ve had every cotholder for miles lined up outside my door, just begging me to let them mind her.” Mama snorts again. “They all know she ain’t right. Half of them think she’s a monster, and the rest think she’s some holdless brat I caught, and not my own flesh and blood.”

The table cloth raises, and the man pokes his head under to look at her. Elwen growls around her thumb and scoots backwards. He smells funny.

“What on earth?” the man says. “Myrwen, have you—you haven’t—these men of yours, they don’t—“ he says the word men like it tastes bad.

“Are you implying I’d sell my own daughter?” Mama is shouting now.

Elwen screeches and covers her ears, but the man’s voice is just as loud.

“I have heard of women in your line of work who do such a thing, yes, and the child seems terrified out of her mind, so yes, forgive me for drawing that outlandish conclusion.”

Mama says, “Well that may be, but I wouldn’t. There’s one old man, and he’s never laid a hand on her, not that way. He just brings her sweets and likes to tickle her, that’s all. And before you ask, no, I never leave them alone together, and no, he’s not a pervert. Says she reminds him of his granddaughter, that’s all.”

“I pity that child,” the man says. Then, “Be that as it may, I cannot, in good conscience, leave her here. “

He raises the tablecloth again, and then, he is reaching for her. She screams and kicks, but he is stronger. He grabs her by the ankle, hoists her over his shoulder and leaves the house.

Elwen is still screaming. “Mama! Mama!” This is one of the few words she knows. As she reaches for her mother, the ribbon falls from her fingers.

“Hush,” the man says, and he swats the back of her leg.

This is another word Elwen knows, and so she does, shoving her fingers in her mouth and chewing on them, til the man’s walking lulls her to sleep.

*

She is ten the next time she sees her mother, and in between five and ten, she has learned a great many things. She knows her name, and first hundreds then thousands then millions more words. She knows her uncle’s name—Eldar—and that he breeds whers. She knows what that means. She knows about the whers, and she knows how to feed them, and she knows how to sit still and be quiet when Uncle is doing important business. She knows how to read—only enough to read the lists of instructions he leaves for her each day, and the lists of supplies they need when he sends her to market. She knows how to count and do simple math—so she isn’t cheated by the merchants. She knows how to write—mainly her name, but a few other words as well.

Mostly, she knows that she is odd, and strange, and bad. During mealtimes, she has to be coaxed into the chair, reminded to use silverware, to chew with her mouth closed, to sit still. When no one is looking, she will eat with her fingers, or slide off the chair to sit under the table, plate on the floor before her. She forgets to speak, forgets to come when she’s called, forgets to look at the person speaking to her. She will scratch, bite, or growl, if she is touched or even jostled, unexpectedly. She fights bath time, getting dressed, and having her hair brushed. She is, Uncle says, a little beast. Perhaps this is why she loves the whers so much.

Even as she grows, she squirms away from stockings, high collared dresses and coarse garments, turns her nose up at lumpy porridge and stews made from meat drippings and carrots cooked to mush, and refuses to touch dirty dishes, meal, flour or lard. She adores creamy porridge and equally smooth textured foods, soft garments of old cotton, or linen, and days old bread, hard as tanned leather. Foods in between those textures prove difficult for Elwen, and mealtimes are a struggle.

She loves found, castoff objects—rocks and leaves, sticks, dried flowers, buttons and ribbons. She keeps her treasures in a box beneath her bed, and will line the rocks, leaves and sticks up, twirl the ribbons around her fingers, and make geometric patterns with the buttons. If someone disturbs her treasures, she will scream and flail, biting and scratching, until she’s driven off the intruder, and then she will arrange and rearrange her treasures, until at last she’s satisfied they’re as they should be.

She acts blind on certain days and on other days she acts as if she can see better, if not perfectly. She gets confused by clutter and mess, but she is also messy. She loves bright colors, and has to hold objects close to her face to see them, or stand an inch or so away from people to see them. She will stare at candles and even the sun sometimes. She cannot see out to either side, or below her nose or above her eyebrows when looking straight ahead, without turning her head. Anything past her nose, while not blurry, is indistinct, so that she might be able to tell that a person is coming toward her, but cannot say who it is until they are almost upon her.

Her ears seem to work no better than her eyes do, and she frequently acts as if she is deaf. Though she can hear, there is a delay in understanding what she hears. When under stress, that delay is worse. This combined with her issues talking leads El to being mostly nonspeaking for much of her life.

She struggles to make conversation, and finds eye contact distressing. Body language, tone, facial expressions, all prove difficult for her. She struggles to understand the nonverbal communication of others, and she struggles to make her own nonverbal communication understood--or, more often, to avoid having every idle thought or feeling show plain as day on her face. That always makes her feel vulnerable, exposed, as though everyone knows the most private details about her, but she knows nothing about them. As a very young child, she supposes that everyone around her can read minds, as they seem to know what she is thinking before she even speaks. Only later, once she understands that people can speak to each other without words, does the mystery resolve itself--but the visceral feeling of being stripped bare whenever anyone accurately reads her face remains.

When excited, she squeaks and flaps her hands. To sooth herself, she rocks. When distressed, she flails and cries, sometimes biting or hitting herself. Uncle calls these episodes fits, and soon, El learns to turn her distress inward, becoming nearly immobile, and struggling to speak or respond. Though none of them know the words, El has gone from meltdowns to shutdowns. She also copes by losing herself in daydreams that are far more real than whatever was going on around her in the real world. Often, the daydreams combine with the shutdowns, and she will lose herself in both when the world around her becomes too overwhelming to bear.

Uncle says that all those things are very naughty of her, and it does not take long for El to learn that word—and its consequences. El likes many of the words that she has learned—but not that one. And yet, as she grows, as she learns, naughty seems to be all she’ll ever be.

*

“Elwen,” Uncle drops a hand to her shoulder. “Say hello to your mother.”

Elwen swallows. She wants to—and even if she didn’t, she knows what will happen if she disobeys her uncle. But she hasn’t seen the woman in five years, and the house looks smaller, and nothing is familiar, nor even the stranger staring at her with a smile half on and half off her face.

“Elwen,” her uncle repeats, and now his fingers are digging into her shoulder. “Say hello.”

The words are stuck, the words are stuck, the words are stuck. The words are stuck, and yet if she does not say them, Uncle will pull out the chair, and make her lay across it, and he will raise her skirt, and pull down her knickers, and whip her with his belt—never mind that Mama is watching—just as he did that morning, just as he’s done every morning, and every afternoon and every evening, and every day, since she first came to live with him. He will—and he will not stop til Elwen is silent and still, and he is satisfied that she has learnt her lesson.

That morning, he whipped her because she would not eat her breakfast. Most of the time, Elwen can force down the thick porridge, with its traitorous, hidden lumps that press on her tongue and wedge in her throat, til she’s nearly sick from the feel of them, but that morning was not like other mornings, and so she could not.

Elwen opens her mouth—to explain, to beg, to apologize —and instesd, “Hello, mother,” comes out. Uncle pats her shoulder, and the woman smiles so big, Elwen thinks her face will break. For an awful moment, Elwen thinks too that the woman might hug her. She does not want her to—and yet, she does, too. The woman doesn’t hug her though. She just stands there, looking as if she’s about to cry, and then Uncle is sending Elwen into the next room, with a dress to mend and stern instructions not to listen at doors.

Elwen tries not to, she does, but her Uncle’s voice is loud, and so is her mother’s.

“You’ve done wonders with her,” the woman says.

“She just needed a bit of discipline and someone to actually care enough to teach her properly,” Uncle says.

“Is she still—“ the woman doesn’t finish her sentence.

“Yes,” Uncle says, and he sounds as if he’s making a face. “Some habits are harder to break.”

They begin talking softer now, and Elwen turns her attention to her mending. Before long, her uncle returns, and they say goodbye.


*

Elwen is fifteen the next time she sees her mother, and this time is the last. Uncle pays for the burial, speaks at the service—and, later, when they are home, he whips Elwin’s hands til she screams, because, at the graveside, no matter how hard he gripped her hands, they would not stop flapping. Some habits, indeed, are hard to break.

Elwen is eighteen, and she has made a friend. One of the whers Uncle breeds has laid a clutch, and she is allowed to choose a wherlet from the leftovers. She chooses a small, runty green, pale ans the underside of a leaf, annd near abandoned by her mother in the egg. Elwen names the wherlet Moss, but changes it to Elsk a few days later. The wher understands her, she knows it does. Uncle does not believe her—and he boxes her ears for speaking nonsense,—but he is wrong. Elwen knows this, to her bones. He is wrong, and Elsk understands her, and one day they will do glorious things. This, too, she knows—but this, she keeps from her uncle. He has reason enough to still take his belt to her back—as he’s done since her monthly blood came, and, he said, she was too big to be spanked, but not too big to no longer need them—and some things, she has learned, are better kept to herself.

Elsk is soft and clever and soon, she is Elwen’s best friend in the entire world. They go everywhere together, and El begins to find that social situations are less confusing, crowds less overwhelming, and the sights and sounds and smells that surround her are less dreadful when Elsk is there. True, she does sometimes sneak the wher bites of her dinner, or leave her bed to fetch them both snacks long after they’re meant to be sleeping—but usually, Uncle doesn’t know about that, and she never feels guilty for very long. When she starts to, suddenly, she would much rather play fetch with Elsk instead, and so usually, she does.

A few months after she turns eighteen, her uncle finds her work as a drudge. He is getting on in years, and he says she needs something to occupy her time--and someone else to help him look after her. Though she works all over the Hold, she can most often be found in the kitchen. Though she has yet to cook anything, she knows how to do all the necessary tasks associated with meal prep and clean up, and is usually among the first ones up, coming into the kitchens early to light the fires, and staying late to finish washing the dishes. She knows how to cook--her uncle taught her--but most assume she's unable to, and too disabled to be trusted to do more than light the stoves in the mornings.