Moth was small and quite mad, but the magician loved her. She had wandered to the door of his high castle by the sea during a storm at Midwinter. When she came, she had a broken wing. The magician took her in and nursed her, and though her wing healed, she never learned to fly again. She stayed in the castle.

There was not much for Moth to do in the castle. The magician spent his days folded in a drab patchwork robe in his library. Moth wandered the stone halls, singing. Once her wing had healed, she fluttered up to the ceiling in the great hall and made paintings of fish with wings. Moth had never seen a fish, and the ones she painted looked suspiciously like small Moths with gills.

Moth grew restless and the magician could not please her. He gave her stones and cards to play with, and conjured every food he’d ever read about for her to eat. Moth continued to gaze hungrily out the west window, where the forest lay beyond the castle wall. Her mouth was lonely for languages and fruits not of the magician’s making. He tried kissing her, but her lips hardened like wood chips and her tongue dried up.

Moth began to have fits. She threw them in Technicolor, they stained the tapestries and one fiery one consumed a whole shelf of books on the history of the I Ching. At Samhain, when the witches were abroad, she threw a fit so bright and hard it turned to steel, ricocheted off one of the many mirrors the magician had given her, and knocked her straight out the west window.

She could see the magician’s sad face in the shattered pane above. He watched her go, though his magic could have dragged her back. She fell until the world went black. When she awoke she was naked, lying in a wood she didn’t know, surrounded by landlocked pirates using a curvy old Chevy pickup for a ship. Out of the ship they had taken brightly colored silk tents, a giant cooking pot, and the hard ropes that bound Moth’s thin wrists. Their leader had skin the color of dust and wore a cloak made of stolen beards. The rest were dressed in the finery of ladies they had robbed on the road. They were singing loudly and drinking something foul from a clay jug as large as Moth’s head. When they saw that she was awake, they gathered round her.

“It’s awake!” Their swarthy leader cried. “You slept a long time pretty one. We were ready to throw you out with the offal.”

“Now we shall have to feed her,” a thin one whined. He was wearing a dirty red scarf round his dark curls and the remnants of Moth’s blue silk dress. He looked hungrily at Moth, as if he would rather eat her than feed her.

“Never mind that,” said the leader, waving a fire-blackened stick. “Can you do any tricks, pretty one?”

Moth shook her dumb head. She had lost her memory, and with it any magic she’d once had. The pirates growled their disappointment, and several drew their blades.

“She must be worth something,” the hungry one growled.

“Let’s dip her!” The leader cried authoritatively. “We can sell her when we reach a city!”

They moved toward Moth in a pack and lifted her on their shoulders, singing out of tune, “To the dip with the pretty one, We’re going to have some fun.”

Their filthy skin itched her, but she was too frightened to struggle. Sitting high in the pick-up bed was an ivory bathtub with curved feet shaped as dragon claws. Thick smoke wafted from its mouth. The land pirates all climbed into the truck bed and slowly lowered Moth toward the tub. The cold burned her skin. She could see huge chunks of dry ice lying below her in the porcelain bed and began to struggle. It was too late. They dropped her into the ice and she froze solid.

Moth took a year and a day to thaw. A battle woke her. She awoke lying supine in the tub, pirates grunting and screaming all around her. A severed face fell across her bed of ice but she made no move to show she lived. Hidden in the wagon she stayed silent till the noise was gone. Then she emerged, naked in the forest.

She had no name, no garments, no weapon. All she had was fear and so she began to scream. Her throat dried quickly, killing her voice, and she was left alone with fear. She sat up in her tub and examined her surroundings. She was alone in the wood. The pirate truck was gone, the only mark of its existence her frozen body, the bathtub, and the leader’s bloody cloak of beards. Shivering, Moth wrapped herself in the smelly coat. She smashed the bathtub with a fallen branch and made a set of knives, some small as her toes and some long as her arm. These she tied into the hair on her coat. Then she began to walk.

There was no trail through the dense wood, and Moth used one of the larger knives to blaze her way through the brush. At last she happened on a trail and followed it, not caring where it led. Her body was so cold that butterflies lighting on her shoulders froze and she ate them. Butterflies were not enough and she soon began to feel very hungry. Hearing voices, she hid herself in the arms of a tree. A circus passed by below her. Bears danced alongside the caravan of painted wooden wagons, and old women covered with sparkling shawls peered out as they passed. Moth waited, afraid. Some time passed and a young girl came along the trail. She was leading a bear, and they wore matching costumes of pink gauze tutus with silver sequins. The bear limped while the girl cried. Moth drew her most impressive medium-sized knife and leapt down before them, making a Very Scary Face. She growled like the monsters in the magician’s books, though she had forgotten the magician and his library and did not know where her growl came from.

The girl and her bear jumped back startled. “Feed me,” Moth growled. The girl simpered and held out her empty hand. “Please,” she said, “We have so little, and we have lost our circus. Let us pass.” “Feed me,” Moth repeated, but she was somewhat less ferocious now. Moth’s feelings were all frozen by the pirate’s ice, but the girl reminded her of herself and she didn’t want to hurt her. The girl extended her empty hand again, and this time Moth dropped the knife and took the girl’s fingers in her own.

“I have forgotten my name,” she said. “But I would like to know yours. I won’t hurt you.” The frightened girl tried to smile. “My name is Start,” she said. “This is my bear, Bear.” Start and Moth shook hands gently. Moth’s porcelain knife lay on the ground beneath them.

“I saw your circus go by some time ago,” Moth said. “There are no other roads around here. They’ll have had to make camp nearby.” Start smiled thinly.

“My bear is hurt, and we have no food. It would be good to find our home. Will you join us?”

Moth had never seen a circus. She fell in with Start and the injured bear, and together they caught up with the Circus of Lost Children.

Most of the performers were no longer children, but they had all wandered to the stage young and lost. They were very happy to see Start, and grateful to Moth for guiding her home. A tiny old woman emerged from the crowd. She wore a tall headdress made of colored rags, a pair of torn and filthy ballet shoes, and in between a silk bathrobe covered with embroidered scenes from the circus’ travels. Everyone stepped back with respect. She led Moth to a tent. Inside, she and Moth sat around crate covered in shabby purple velvet. A red lamp, stolen from a gravesite, hung on one wall. The tent was damp, and the old woman shivered at the cold. Frozen Moth said nothing. The woman’s thin, clawed fingers wrapped around Moth’s wrist, gently pushing open her palm. The tip of one nail traced the lines found there.

“You are beginning a long journey,” the woman said to Moth. “You have lost and forgotten many things and you are far from home.” The woman handed Moth a bright red berry. “Eat this,” she said. And Moth, who was starving, did. The berry tasted awful and stuck in her throat, where it grew warm and uncomfortable. She followed the old woman out of the tent. The excitement about Start’s return had thinned, and much of the camp had gone to bed. Light seeped under the flap of one of the large tents. Crawling under it, Moth saw Start and the bear rehearsing their act: the bear lifting Start up in her large paws, Start executing perfect turns like a dancing doll on the bear’s massive shoulders. Moth could tell they were adapting the routine to make up for Bear’s injury. At one point it looked as if the bear would eat Start, and though Moth knew it was an act, her breath caught. It moved the stuck berry, and as the bear lapped Start’s mock-terrified face and did a somersault, Moth began to laugh wildly. Her throat and voice grew warm and soft as they had been when she sat late at night talking with the magician. She remembered the fireside, and how she had laughed, though she did not know who she was.

Moth stayed some months with the circus, as they wove their way toward the sea. Before they came to the shore however, the trail turned, and so did the circus. Moth felt the tides pulling her and continued alone through the dense woods. It was hard for her to leave the Lost Children: they had taught her to be happy and lost at the same time. But Moth wished to find something, and so she went off alone.

The fire in the wood surprised Moth. She had been walking alone for three days when she heard its crackling laugh and followed. Mesmerized she watched shadows dance in and out of trees, slipping across the ground, bending to the furtive music of the flame. The moon rose higher and higher, until it found her sliding toward the fire, becoming another of its shadows. Moth’s frozen bones ached as the heat drew near them. She threw off the cloak of beards and melted into the shadows. As she moved nearer the flame, her gray skin warmed to pink and soon even her shivery blue blood began to thaw. Her frozen wings unfurled, their gossamer floated near her face. Moth was dancing. She slipped around the fire, hips over ankles swinging like feathers on a rattle. Her name came back to her then.

“Moth!” She cried out. The fire laughed back.

By morning it had burned out. Moth lay drowsy beside the embers, her skin warm and dust brown. Her silver wings fell over her like curtains. A woodsman found her there. He carried her home in a satchel on his back, wrapped in her cloak of beards. She wake on a straw mat in his cottage. He handed her a thick mug of root tea and a dry biscuit. Her new thawed tongue relished the rough food.

The woodcutter could not speak Moth’s language, nor she his, but he was kind and stayed. She helped him at his work, so her body gerw strong and brown. The cloak of beards that had been her only garment lay discarded in a corner, her porcelain knives forgotten in its folds. At night, Moth and the woodsman sat by his modest fire, drinking the dark root tea he liked and trying to share language. Through the winter he kept her warm and fed, and Moth was almost happy.

Then the woodcutter taught her his word for home. Searching for its parallel in her tongue, Moth pried open a memory of stone corridors, orange silk drapes, and a soft voice calling to her. “I had a home once,” she said slowly in the language the woodsman had been teaching her.

The memory of the castle grew to haunt her. It filled her dreams, making her thrash like a storm beside the woodcutter’s still bulk. One night near the spring thaw, she woke to a roomful of moonlight, wrapped herself in her cloak and daggers, and slipped out in search of her home.

She followed little signs: familiar trees, omens spelled out in fields of red poppies. These things weren’t remembered exactly. If she had passed this way at all it was unconscious in the pirate’s pick-up. Yet they smelled right to her, and she followed them closely, unsure where they would lead her. She found a road she thought sure would lead her home, but after she had followed it a week the summer monsoons came and tore the road away. It rained. Moth was wet and unhappy. She sat in a mud puddle and howled from dawn to dusk, but the road did not return and the rain didn’t stop. Instead, a flood came down from the mountains and carried her through the forest and out the other side. Dropping her like silt on a riverbank.

Moth coughed up fistfuls of murky gray water. Then out came the tea the woodcutter had been feeding her, a ball of ash from the flame, and finally the red berry the gypsy woman had fed her long ago in the circus. After all that battering and coughing, Moth felt hollowed out inside. She wanted to be filled again, and tried to eat the tea and the ash and the berry. Her body would not take them back. Surrounded by the things she’d rejected, Moth’s tummy shook with desire. She felt lonely and cold.

Then Moth remembered the Magician.

At last Moth remembered the magician. She held out her arms to the trees as if he might emerge, but he did not. Moth had never cried. When her raised arms came down empty, tears flooded her face. They slid over her breasts to the ground where they became a pile of small white stones at her feet. She threw them, one by one, and where they landed they cleared a trail through the wood. The castle lay at its end. She walked slowly toward it. But the walls did not open. She threw her last white tear through the broken window she had fallen from. The magician came to the ledge and looked down, but she was still wearing the vagabond’s skin and he did not recognize her. She raised her arms to him, but he did not respond. She lowered them again, still empty. She cried out:

“It is me, your beloved. I have traveled the uncharted lands around this castle and returned. I have encountered women who hold my laughter in berries, and flames which taught me to dance. I was kidnapped and frozen in ice for a year, and when I awoke I had no name, no home, no love. I have won back my name from the fire. I have learned to live in my own skin. I have made this wild world my home and I can stay here. But I remember you. And I want to come back in.”

And she laid the cloak of beards on the ground. The magician saw her changed face, grown thin and dirty with travel. He recognized her at last and opened the castle wall. Their new faces met for the first time.

“I too have traveled,” the magician said. “Through my books I have journeyed back in time and found a new life. I do not know where your bed has gone, if it is even still here.”

“Perhaps it is not,” Moth said. “Perhaps there is only a chair by the fire for me now. It may be I no longer live here. Or it may be that I do. I could come in and try to find out, if you would invite me.” She held out her naked hand.

The magician took her fingers cautiously and led her in.

They did not live happily ever after. Moth found the castle small and damp after her roamings. Sometimes she would sit up all night and watch the sunrise, dreaming of the world she had touched. She wrote a great deal of poetry those nights, and in the morning, she would fold it into airplanes and send it out the window she had fallen from, which could never be repaired. Sometimes, the world wrote back. She treasured these letters in a box the magician never opened. Sometimes the magician would look up from his studies and find her pacing like a caged bird – her bright colors looked alien against the stone walls and he was tempted to throw her back out where she belonged. But she did not leave, and he did not throw her. They sat up many nights together by the fireplace, their backs cold and their stomachs warmed by teas. They had little to say to one another, but like pieces of a puzzle they fit quietly together.