“You can go back if you want.” I waited as she struggled to her feet, clapping the dirt off her hands.

“Just go on.” She was a little short of breath. Her hair had come loose and hung from her cap in soft, fair loops.

I stepped to one side so she could go first. “Give me that sack,” I said, handing her the lantern. “And go on ahead. I’ll be right behind you. When we get to the steep part, don’t let go of one tree until you’ve got a grip on another.”

“How, when I have to hold the lantern, too?”

Which made me impatient, that she would ask me such a thing when the only answer was to manage it, difficult or not. But I said, “I’ll help you.” And when it came to that, I did.

When we arrived at the cabin, Cate wasn’t there.

“Where is she, boy?” I asked Captan when I opened the door and found her bed empty. But he stayed out in the yard and didn’t answer.

Esther crept in behind me, swatting at a fly come to taste her lips. “What an awful place,” she whispered, and I saw it fresh through her eyes.

The narrow bed, one hard chair, a table, the shelves with jars full of oddments and potions and worms. The nubs of spent candles squatting like toadstools all over the place.

But then I swung the lantern so she could see the fistful of snowdrops in a mug next to her bed, which meant Larkin. The tiny fawn and the mouse and the squirrel. And those tools, which were in their own way beautiful. But it was only when I held the lantern high to cast light on the shelves full of books, the hanging garden, that I saw her face change.

“Oh,” she said.

I laid the little doll on the bed.

There was a stain on the blanket.

“I wonder if her wound opened up.” I bent to sniff the blanket for pus or honey, pulled back at the idea of what that would look like to Esther, then leaned closer, inhaling the scent of Cate’s wound.

It was chilly in the cabin, and a wind had kicked up to push the cabin door wide and follow us inside.

“Maybe she fell,” I said.

I ducked past Esther and into the yard, pausing at the sight of Cate’s clean wash hung to dry, waving and dancing at the edge of the yard.

Larkin. He had done her wash and left water for her bath.

And I wondered if she had decided not to wait for my help.

“This way,” I said, following Captan around the side of the cabin toward the shed behind it.

—

We found her lying outside the shed, wrapped in a blanket that was red where it covered her leg.