“No,” Eleanor said firmly. “Thinking like that is how you get a bunch of people to agree to hand their kids over to get turned into keys. When you start caring about useful more than you care about people, bad things happen. I miss my mother. More than anything. But I won’t destroy you to bring her back. That’s not who I am. It’s not what she’d want.”

“But what if I let you?” the hedgewitch asked softly. She turned slowly. “Eleanor, when my power left me, it was like I was hollowed out. I was my abilities. Without them, I’m no one. I have no friends. No family. No ambitions or grand quests. I’m . . .”

“Empty?” Eleanor whispered.

“Not quite,” the hedgewitch said, her voice hoarse. “You thought that I didn’t care about you. I thought the same. But traveling with you . . . Not all of Claire vanished. And her love for you was the strongest part of her. It’s still here. Faint, but here. It’s the last real thing about me. You should have your mother back, Eleanor. You need her. You don’t need me.” The hedgewitch stretched out her hand, palm up. “Go ahead. Bring her back.”

It was what Eleanor had dreamed of since her mother disappeared. Having her back. Being together again. But Eleanor didn’t move. The hedgewitch wasn’t always kind, wasn’t always pleasant to be around—but she was a person.

“Don’t think of it as destroying me, then,” the hedgewitch said. “Think of it as resetting me. Roll back the clock, the way you’re going to do with Eden Eld. Make me the woman I used to be, before I changed.”

“Everyone changes,” Eleanor said. “We’re supposed to change. If I had to go back to being the girl I was last Halloween, I would lose so much. And some of it would be good to forget. But some of it, I wouldn’t trade for anything.” She hesitated. “You were part of my mother for a long time.”

The hedgewitch nodded. “From the time she was nineteen. She held me at bay for a while, but never completely.”

“Then maybe it’s wrong to think of you as different people,” Eleanor said. “I’m Eleanor, and I’m the world-walker. I made it part of me. It isn’t erasing me anymore. Why couldn’t it be the same for you? Why couldn’t you be you, and my mom? Part of each other. All the ways you’ve changed. All the things you’ve done. Everything you’ve learned. And everything you lost. You wouldn’t be erased. You’d be . . .”