She did not stay a hoe. Her long handle drew in and shortened, and her blade softened and curved and drew inward, and the light that she was made of gathered itself into a shape, small and upright, standing in the snow on two feet. When it settled, she was a person, or something close to one, no taller than THE Farmer's waist.
She was small and round-faced and unfathomably sweet to look at, and at the same time she looked very, very old, with the look of something that had existed since before anything else had a name.
Her skin shone blue and gold, smooth and faintly glowing, and across it ran thin rivers of molten white, branching and rejoining over her arms and her cheeks and down the back of her neck, tracing exactly where her nine pieces had once been joined.
