When I was nine years old, Tommy Kettler from across the stream called my mother a whore, and my brother and I beat him into the dirt until all three of us had black earth ground into the scrapes on our elbows and knees. I didn't know what the word meant, but he said it with a spitting contempt so I knew it was something vile.

It took Tommy's father, the village blacksmith, to finally pull the three of us apart, and by then Tommy had blood dripping from his nose like a crimson river.

"You two stay away from our son," his mother said, wiping his blood with her apron. She eyed my brother with a crease between her eyebrows which deepened as she turned to me. "I might expect this from boys, but you, Laurel—young girls should not act so recklessly. Your mother should have taught you better."

"What can you expect from a couple of bastard children?" Mr. Kettler asked, though it wasn't much of a question.

"At least they haven't shown signs of anything unnatural… I say, living in the forest with that woman." Margaret Kettler shook her head gravely at us, pursing her lips as if to ward off any evil that we could be giving off into the air.

I winced as I rubbed a scratch where Tommy's fingernails had caught my cheek, and her expression gradually changed to one of pity. She started to say that something should be done about us, so we could be brought up properly, but before she got any further, Aspen held out his hand for mine.

"Let's go, Laurel."

I clapped my hand into his and we turned away, starting across the field toward the stream and the forest beyond. I was grateful for the escape. Though we were born mere moments apart, Aspen always seemed older to me. It wasn't anything physical. He was marginally taller, a little stronger, but that wasn't it. It was something much less definable. He always seemed to know the next step. While I was still taking things in, he was already walking away.

Across the stream, we let our hands drop to our sides as we entered the shade of the trees. I felt comfortable as the green leaves closed around us, like being folded into my favorite warm blanket in winter. Here we were safe. Here we were home.

I watched bright speckles dance across my arms from the sunlight filtering through the trees and smiled before glancing at my brother's stony face. He'd been angrier lately, at all the same whispers we'd been hearing for years. We used to shrug it off, but lately he grew quiet, hands balled into fists when we heard ourselves being talked about. This was the first time it was said to our faces.

"Aspen, why do people say those things about us and Mother?"

He glanced at me. "Because we don't have a Da."

"Why not?" I asked, but the question merely drifted in the air between us. We'd puzzled over it enough times before to know that there was no answer—at least none that we would arrive at on our own. It was something only our mother could answer, but it never seemed like the right thing to ask. She never mentioned him. She loved us. That was enough.

When we reached the cottage in the forest we called home, she was on her knees in the garden, pulling weeds from between vegetable patches. Her hair was red—red as the setting sun before it dips beneath the trees, and it fell in waves to her waist.

I loved her red hair. I liked to twist the ends of it around my fingers while she sat on the edge of my bed before I fell asleep at night.

"I wish my hair was red," I told her once.

She smiled and ran her fingers through my own brown hair. "Your hair is perfect as it is."

"It's not as pretty as yours. Or as long."

She smiled again in an odd sort of way, at the same time letting out a small sigh. "It's all for the best. My hair was longer than this once. Now it's shorter. I missed for a while, but I don't mind anymore."

I frowned in my bed. "Why'd it get shorter?" I asked, as the principle seemed to go against all reason. My hair grew. It didn't shrink.

"Someone cut it. Now no more questions tonight, love. Go to sleep." She kissed my forehead and blew the candle out, leaving Aspen and me in the dark. He was already asleep beside me, but I stayed awake imagining myself with bright red hair like a curtain down to my ankles.

As Mother saw us approaching the house, she stood up, dropping handfuls of green weeds to come meet us. I ran and threw myself into her arms, the sight of her reminding me why I hit Tommy until his nose bled—because she wasn't what he said she was. She was my mother, and I loved her.

"What happened to you?" she asked after a moment, pushing me gently away and bending to look at the scratch on my face and the bruises beginning to throb.

"It was Tommy Kettler," I said. "His parents don't want us to ever come back again. He was bleeding a lot when we left."

"Did you get in a fight with him?" she asked, frowning.

I nodded. "We won though." I didn't want to tell her the cause of the fight. It seemed shameful to repeat the things he said.

"He called you a whore," Aspen said, and I turned and glared at him. I didn't know why he wanted repeat that word that sounded so nasty.

Mother stood up then. Her face turned a little white as she walked to Aspen who had kept a distance between himself and her.

"He said that?"

Aspen nodded. "And his parents think you're a witch. Are you?"

He sounded angry, but Mother's face stayed calm.

"No," she said, "I'm not."

Aspen crossed his arms over his chest, as if to shut her out. "But it's true what they say—that we're bastard children. We don't have a Da. Where is he? What happened to him?" The words from his mouth sounded like something breaking. I wished they could go back inside like he'd never said them.

Mother was quiet for a moment. Then she said simply, "He left. And he never came back."

"Why? Because you're a witch?"

"No," she said, but as she said it her hair grew brighter and brighter, changing from a coppery red to a glowing orange. Lights flickered as they traveled up and down each tendril of hair, like home to a living fire.

I saw Aspen's jaw twitch as he took a step toward me.

"Prove it," he said.

She turned her head and her gleaming hair whipped over her shoulder, leaving a fiery trail behind it that faded into smoke. I was frightened now—I'd never seen anything like this. The hair I envied was a wave of flames around her head. If it touched me, I was sure it would sear my skin.

But I wasn't frightened the way Aspen was. His skin had gone pale as the petals of a spring daisy, and his jaw wasn't just twitching now—it was quivering. He stood with hands gripping opposite elbows, and I knew he wanted to challenge her even if he was terrified, but he was being foolish.

"Aspen, stop," I said. I grabbed his arm, shaking him out of his closed-off posture, forcing him to look at me. "Of course she's not a witch."

I wasn't quite as sure of this now, but as her eyes shifted to me, the glow in her hair faded, burning out to its regular color.

"Then why'd your hair do—that? And what happened to our Da? Why'd he leave? Didn't he want to be with us?" His voice was less angry now, just sad.

I slipped my hand into his. I wanted answers too.

Mother bent down on her knees in front of us, setting a hand on each of our shoulders. Her touch felt light and warm—but not burning. "Poor dears, he didn't know you were on the way. Maybe he would have stayed. Only—I don't think so." Her eyes strayed to the trees and her hands dropped from our shoulders. She ran one through her hair and looked at the red, uneven ends.

"It hasn't burnt like that in years," she said. "I thought it would stop after they cut it, when I came here. But it didn't. People were so afraid. I thought we'd be safe in the forest." She gave a sad smile and lifted her hand to my cheek, then Aspen's.

"Your Da was afraid too, I think. And when the tower burned, he must have thought the worst."

"What tower, Mother?" I asked, and then she told us a story in slow, halting words that seemed like they came from another world. It didn't seem possible that she had lived this life, secluded in a tower for as long as she could remember, because of her burning hair.

That was another reason she chose the forest, she said, because she was tired of walls. If she had to live in a house, it was going to be in the thick of things—the trees and birds and squirrels she'd missed out on for so long.

Aspen wanted to know everything when she spoke of our father, but she said very little. He was a prince—when she said that, I felt my heart flutter.

"That means I'm a princess," I said, and I felt I might glow like her hair.

"Not if the royal family doesn't recognize you, you're not," Aspen said, but I refused to believe in his logic.

"I am too. Aren't I, Mother?"

She smiled at me. "Of course you are, Laurel."

Our father was a prince, and he wasn't meant to be with Mother, but he found her tower one day and kept coming back. When the others found out, the ones who kept her there, they cut off her hair. They thought it would take away whatever power she had to bewitch their prince.

Instead her hair lit the tower on fire. When it finally burnt out, she was alone in the ashes. She waited for our father, the prince, for three days, but he never came. She knew she couldn't stay in that land, so she set out for a bridge she'd seen from her tower—a bridge that went everywhere and nowhere, paths stretching in every direction, shrouded in clouds. She picked one path, and it brought her here.

None of it seemed real to me. It was a story from another world, and Aspen and my eyes met in the spaces where her words stopped, when we knew she was leaving pieces out, things she didn't want us to hear.

We talked it over that night, tucked beneath our quilts, whispered through the details over and over. Why did her hair burn? Why did the prince never come to her after the tower burned? Where was he, this prince who was our father?

"I want to find that bridge," Aspen said. "I want to cross it."

"To find our father?" I asked.

"No. That's impossible. You heard her describe the bridge. We'd never find the right path. I just want to get away from here."

"Why?" I asked, a sudden panic throbbing in my stomach. Aspen was my brother, my twin, half my world.

"We'll never fit in here. Everyone knows about her. That's there's something strange, and we don't have a Da. I want to go somewhere no one will know."

I knew that would be his answer, but it didn't quell the uneasiness in my stomach. For the first time, he wanted something I didn't. People could be unpleasant, but I didn't want to leave. Our home was here, in the forest, with Mother.

"I'm leaving as soon as I'm old enough," he said after a moment, and I stayed silent.

It wasn't until he was asleep that I whispered, "I don't want you to go."