crooked bank of a river

It isn't that he's never seen a girl before. He has. His aunt is, technically, a girl--just taller and prouder and with the same unbridled ferocity in her toothy grin as he could faintly remember from his jumbled recollection of his mother. Then there's the mouse of a girl who helps keep things tidy in their little corner of the woods, who brings him little bits of sweets and suet among the apples and pinches his cheek fondly when he puts the gathered wood into neat piles. And there are the girls who flit through their lives like so many fluttering birds, stopping for a while to consult with his aunt and leaving with long straight spines and a secret in their smiles.

It's more that he's rarely ever seen one so close to his own age.

That's what's fascinating. This girl doesn't stand a head above him the way most other girls do. She doesn't have the sway in her body of the girls who sweep through their lives (teenagers, although he hasn't quite learned that yet). She's small the way he is; less a miniature of what he's used to and more something that comes before.

He doesn't know what to do with it. He knows to slip in silent shadow past the visitors and to tug affectionately at the swish of the cleaning girl's skirt, but he doesn't know what to make of such a young visitor to the sanctuary of their little glen. Even without a touch of magic, she'd likely have felt the quiet blue eyes (like your father, poor thing, Anti Morgan always tsks) peering uncertainly from the shadow at the door. He's been told to run along and scout about in the woods while Anti holds lessons, but he can't quite make it past the frame.