She wasn’t somebody any of them knew, at least not personally, by way of an affair or a mutual acquaintance. But long before, they’d made up a name to use when talking to one another, as men will, about a girl. They called her Ardour.

The story was ever the same. Resting alone in a clearing, burning a small flame for warmth, a peasant would sense at first just a breath within the dead trees’ shadows. Then he’d see the sky-gray of two eyes, watching. That was what she was always doing, the girl they called Ardour, and, calling out to her, they’d each compete to draw her closer than any of the others had done. Yet there was a certain distance that she’d always keep.

It was not, evidently, a matter of modesty: Over her bare skin she wore at most a coat of snow, often only a gloss of frost. Nor could she seriously be considered a flirt: Unlike young women in town who hid their flaws by making potential suitors notice only each other’s faults, Ardour had no perceptible imperfection. From behind their fire, they’d call to her, and it was as if she simply wasn’t sure how to respond.

Could she have known their ulterior motives? Each year echoed the one before. As she woke into the first snow, she recalled not what had happened the previous winter, but remembered only an urge that had yet gone unfulfilled.

It had begun as something she’d seen, who knew when, deep in the woods where she’d lived all eternity: A girl like her — breasts as steep as snow peaks beneath a blizzard of hair — came hand-in-hand with a man into an open meadow, where they embraced, and, it seemed, drew into a single skin. Then there were his words, her tears. A rupture, a quiver. They cradled, as if each were the other’s wound.

Had Ardour known the word, perhaps she’d have called it love. As likely, had she known hate, that term would have occurred to her as she watched the couple wrangle. She hadn’t had language to guide her. So she’d clutched her own numb flesh, and dreamed what it would be to—