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“In your bed?” he asked with silken malice.

“I wasn’t using you! I wanted to tell you everything! I was going to tell you!”

His face was a shield, flat and unyielding. “Is that all?”

No, that’s not all: I love you.

My gaze drifted to one of the lanterns hanging, swaying, dangling from the wall. “When I was five, I’d been given a birthday gift,” I mumbled.

Why this came out, or where it came from, I didn’t know. It just did.

The neighboring children in the lower town had given me a gift that year. Although they’d finally stopped making fun of me, I still hadn’t had any friends back then, so my excitement was palpable. They’d crowded around me, at the back of the thatcher’s hut, and handed me a box.

I tore open the present. A toy? A barrette?

Inside, I found strings. Marionette strings.

My acorn heart had buckled. Most of the children had meant to be helpful, not knowing any better, thinking I could use the strings.

But what did I dwell on instead? The quirked mouth of another.

A girl who’d proposed the gift, knowing that I’d grasp what her peers hadn’t. It was a joke. In retrospect, she’d probably wanted to see if I could cry.

Call Autumn altruistic, but none of us were only one thing, or even two.

Eventually, the children caught on, chuckling reproaches at the girl’s antics, forgiving her nonetheless. She was their leader, after all.

Mother had comforted me as I’d wept in her lap. She made me feel better, safer, normal.

But what if that wasn’t the end?

Would I rather crush than be crushed?

That’s when I learned how effective and powerful intimidation could be. I made a choice. I saw no point in trying to be nice, in bending over backward. Instead of groveling for acceptance, I’d demand it. I’d yank on it like a root.

Over the years, I became the mean one. I jibbed other people, to keep them from jibbing me. I gossiped about other people before they could gossip about me. I pointed out the physical flaws of others, so they wouldn’t notice mine.

I did all of this well, my remarks cutting to the quick. Because of that, my coveted friendship had value—it had a price. I turned my approval into a novelty, just like my woodskin. How advantageous, to be friends with the timber girl.

Before the other children could call me disfigured, I stopped them. Before they could rebuff me, I stopped them. Before they could treat me like an outsider, I stopped them.

Yet the greater intolerance had to do with the mind, the inability to rationalize, to control one’s behavior. Mental afflictions, not bodily ones, incited far worse attitudes from the ignorant crowds.

Yes, Mista was the most benevolent of all Seasons. But it wasn’t perfect.

So not long ago, before they could mistreat my mother, I’d sworn to stop them. Before they could judge or shun her, before they could treat her like a madwoman or a simpleton, before they could treat her like a born fool—I’d meant to stop them. Before she lost her reputation and her livelihood, I’d stop them.

I would stop them.

That had been the plan.

At end of my monologue, I took a meager breath. Down here, there wasn’t a swatch of wind, nor a breeze. Was that the point? To suffocate?

Aire was silent, his features unchanged, although he’d stalked closer to the latticework. The grilles carved his face into sections, each one its own narrow shape of harsh.

“The problem, lady, wasn’t that you had woodskin,” he stated. “The problem was that you thought it needed fixing. The problem was that you sought to amend the wrong thing. The problem was that you valued your appearance more than your integrity. The problem was that you stole not only for your Mother, but for yourself.”

His stare cleaved me in half. “It’s ironic how many fronts you’ve erected, the artifice you’ve spun like yarn, fooling everyone in your past and present. They were not the recipient of your greatest falsehood. You were.”