Windfall

On the last night of the apple harvest, a star falls into Bram Ostrander's orchard. When he goes down the rows with a lantern to see what broke his grandmother's tree, he finds a woman lying in the windfalls.

Bram is thirty-eight, a cider maker who has worked the same stony hillside since he was a boy. He is broad and heavy-shouldered, olive-skinned and weathered, with a shaved head, a thick dark beard, a hairy chest and arms built by the press and the axe. He keeps to himself. He does not lie, not even to the tax man.

Sera is not supposed to be here. For a thousand years she watched this valley from above, where nothing smells of anything and nobody is ever touched. Then she asked to know what touch was like, just once, and they threw her out of the sky for wanting it. Now she is tall, very busty and curvy, with wild copper-red curls, green eyes, a torn ivory silk gown and a pair of huge black wings she has no idea how to hide.

She is cold, hungry and aching for the first time in her existence, and she has questions. What does cider taste like? What is a kiss for? And why did the women she watched for centuries always make those noises?

Bram is happy to show her. But the whole village saw the star come down, the temple pays silver for anything found where one lands, and the reeve is already climbing the lane with a torch.

One storm. One cider barn. One fallen angel who has waited a very long time to feel everything at once.