Her fellow Vinelanders seldom hunted deer. They said it was because the fish and birds of the lake were meat enough, but Hester suspected it was because the deer’s pretty fur coats and big, dark eyes touched their soft hearts and spoiled their aim. Hester’s heart was not soft, and hunting was what she was best at. She enjoyed the stillness and solitude that she found in the morning woods, and sometimes she enjoyed being away from Wren.

Wistfully, Hester remembered the little laughing girl that Wren had once been, playing splish-splash on the lakeshore or snuggling on Hester’s lap while Hester sang to her. As Wren had looked lovingly up at her and run her chubby fingers over the old scar that split Hester’s face in half, Hester had thought that here at last was someone who could love her for what she was, and not care what she looked like. Because although Tom always said he didn’t care, Hester had never shaken off the faint fear that he must, deep down, want someone prettier than her.

But Wren had grown up, and there had come a day, when she was eight or nine, when she started to see Hester the same way everyone else did. She didn’t have to say anything; Hester knew that pitying, embarrassed look well enough, and she could sense Wren’s awkwardness when they were out together and met her friends. Her daughter was ashamed of her.

“It’s just a phase,” said Tom, when she complained of it to him. Tom adored Wren, and it seemed to Hester that he always took Wren’s side. “She’ll soon be over it. You know what children are like.”

But Hester didn’t know what children are like. Her own childhood had ended when she was very young, when her mother and the man she thought was her father had both been murdered by her real father, Thaddeus Valentine. She had no idea what it was like to be a normal girl. As Wren grew and became more willful, and her grandfather’s long, curved nose stuck out of her face like a knife pushed through a portrait, Hester found it harder and harder to be patient with her. Once or twice, guiltily, she had caught herself wishing that Wren had never been born and that it was just her and Tom again, the way it had been in the old days, on the bird roads.