"You might need to eat more often if you can't eat much at once."

"I'm not hungry between meals either."

"Well, you're clearly small for your age and you clearly don't eat enough, so you might not be able to notice when you're hungry. Eat more than you feel like eating and see if you feel better."

She tries it. She reports feeling worse.

Mile makes a face at this. "Worse how?"

"...like I ate too much. Maybe you can tell everyone that I am very smart for my size instead of very small for my smartness."

"I can. It won't work if you don't grow."

"I will probably grow eventually!"

"Many people do and you've obviously made it through your first year, at any rate." Mile clicks her tongue. "Some people are made sick by certain foods. I wonder if you have that problem, maybe with everything you've tried yet so you'd have no way to tell 'sick' from 'full'."

"I don't think any of the things that seem like food to me are making me sick but I guess I wouldn't know. I could try not eating for a couple days and see what happens."

Mile looks heavenward and bites her lip. She sighs. "You could try it. Or you could try eating one thing at a time for a while, see if you feel different eating different things."

Shrug. "Okay."

This would be a relatively convenient time to try eating just apples and seeing if that feels any particular way.

She eats apples! She reports feeling totally fine. She goes through two or three of them a day, sometimes more if they're small ones or it's cloudy. She has as much energy as she usually does to draw in the dirt with a stick and make little pretend cities out of nut shells and rocks and leaves.

Her hair, which has been gradually turning from a nut brown to a paler shade, does so a bit faster, leaving her eerily blonde.

The hair is weird.

Hair changes color. Particularly in babies, which she isn't, and it starts coming in in a new color; it doesn't change all the way to the ends like that. Not without bleach, which she didn't use. She seems... very strange. Foundlings turning out to be the fair folk isn't a thing that Mile's ever verified a certain case of, but... well. Zizu is very strange. Mile wonders if she was planted here for the same reason humans would want a spy in Mile's home.

And she wonders if Zizu is actually a pawn in this scheme, or if Zizu is just lying.

She doesn't say so.

"If it doesn't feel any different I suppose you could try switching to something else and seeing if that does feel different, if you think it's wise," she says.

"Okay. I like spinach?"

"In my experience, people find that spinach settles their stomach but doesn't make them stop being hungry by itself. There are other creatures that live on greens alone, but - if I heard that someone was living on spinach and not getting hungry or weak, I'd think they might not be human."

"Is that not true of apples?"

Mile smiles warmly. "Less so than spinach. Has it been very silly of me not to simply ask if you're one of the fair folk?"

"I don't think I'd know! I can't remember!"

"Huh. Well, if it's true, is it something you'd want widely known?"

"Probably not, no."

"You don't eat a normal amount. Your hair's been getting increasingly oddly colored and the fact that it's been changing is odder still. Of course you already know at least some other odd things about you. But there might be more we haven't noticed yet."

"Well, I don't know all of what might be odd, I don't know what normal is. Either because I don't remember or because I never knew."

Mile nods. "You seem smart enough to figure things out quickly. There's no hiding it from this household but we'll keep you out here at our country estate until you're more acquainted with humans."