The kitchen was narrow, warm, and smelled of woodsmoke.
A dry pine log crackled inside the brick hearth. It sent dancing orange sparks against the cast-iron fireback. On the central deal table sat two clay pot bowls, a heavy clay jug of fresh goat’s milk, a wooden crock of dark clover honey, and a tin fork.
Mira was standing at the iron stove, her back to the door.
She wore her faded indigo linen apron over her woolen work-dress, her brown hair pinned up in an untidy knot with two carved bone bodkins. In her left hand—her mortal, freckled left hand—she held a wooden paddle, stirring a bubbling pot of coarse barley porridge.
Her right arm hung by her side.
In the morning light that streamed through the south-facing pantry window, the arm was a marvel of natural stonework. From the curve of her shoulder blade down to the tips of her slender fingers, the skin, muscle, and bone had been permanently transmuted into flawless, many-sided smoky quartz. The stone was not solid. It possessed the deep, semi-clear clarity of dark river amber, shot through with tiny internal fractures that caught the hearth fire and threw tiny star-patterns of warm violet light across the whitewashed plaster wall.
