I stayed up talking with the girl for another hour, maybe more. She had, it turns out, lived a life of quiet misfortune, starting from the very day she had been birthed. Her mother had (for some incomprehensible reason) found it appropriate to saddle her with the most unfortunate name “Impossibilia”. Should there have been some underlying logic to this decision, it was lost to the world now; her mother had passed away from a fever just seven months ago at the beginning of spring.

Impossibilia had spent the summer living without a home. She had bounced haphazardly across four of the islands before washing ashore here and realizing that she would need to find a more stable residence before winter set in.

“But you said you have no money.” I asked, “How will you pay for your rooms?”

“Mister Davrin’s a kind man,” she said, “He took pity on me. Said he’d never get ‘nother renter this late in the year anyway.” She looked to the floor and frowned, then shivered. Even with the windows shut my rooms were still cold from the air that had been creeping in throughout the day.

She was superstitious; her mother had instilled in her a deep rooted fear of witches.

“Do ya’ think old lady Hurchur’s a witch?” She asked me in a whisper, and I couldn’t help but laugh.

“Why would you think that?” I asked, answering her whisper in kind, “Mrs. Hurchur definitely isn’t all there in the head, but she’s perfectly harmless.”

“I saw her in the garden on her knees where ya’ fell. All a’ the bees had died, their bodies scattered ’bout on the earth like splinters a’ shattered glass. I saw her pickin’ ’em up and puttin’ ’em in a jar. One by one by one…”

I shuddered, violently. In my mind I relived the moment where the man with impossible hair and jagged eyes had opened his mouth to speak, but his words had tumbled forth from his lips as a wave of insects, their chitinous bodies crashing to the ground and lying still. My stomach roiled and I felt as if I might vomit.

“The world is too rational a place for witches,” I lied. The girl did not look reassured. I wondered if maybe she could see it in my eyes that I didn’t believe the words I had spoken. I reflexively looked to the floor and shivered in the still-cold air.