“Whole,” the hedgewitch said, a fragile note of hope in her voice. Eleanor’s heart thumped hard in her chest. The hedgewitch took Eleanor’s hand gently. “I do not want to feel this empty anymore, Eleanor. I don’t want to live my life knowing that so many of the best parts of me have been erased. If you can give her back to both of us, Elle, I think you have to try.”

Eleanor’s throat was tight. She couldn’t speak, only nod, as she drew the book of Claire Barton from her bag. She held it against her chest with one hand, and with the other, she touched two fingertips against the hedgewitch’s wrist.

It wasn’t like weaving the Stories into herself and Pip and Otto. The sense of her mother came to her almost reluctantly, pulled up from the pages of the book. There was none of that hunger and urgency. And there was no finding places to tuck it in, no holding it back from devouring the hedgewitch. In all of the hedgewitch’s empty places, Claire Barton fit. And the hedgewitch had been formed into a perfect match for Claire.

Emotion and memory sighed through her hands, flowing more easily now. There were beautiful things in those pages, love and joy, but also sorrow, and wretched fear, and Eleanor thought for a moment of stopping those pieces from lodging themselves inside the hedgewitch. But they were part of her mother, too. The good and the bad.

The lines of inked words flowed down from where Eleanor touched. They didn’t stay on the skin the way the Stories did—these words were where they belonged, now. They glowed faintly as they sank into the hedgewitch’s skin, vanishing.

And then it was done.

Eleanor let her hand drop. The hedgewitch’s eyes were closed, her breath quick and ragged. Eleanor wasn’t breathing at all. Had it worked?

The hedgewitch’s eyes opened.

And Eleanor’s mother broke into a wide, tearful smile. “Elle,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You found me.”

•   •   •

ELEANOR LOVED WORDS. She loved when you could find the one perfect, correct word, and when it took a thousand wonderful words to describe something. But she would never, no matter how long she lived and how many languages she learned, be able to put into words the feeling of having her mother back.

She would never be able to explain all the emotions that rushed through her in the moment her mother wrapped her up in an embrace—or, moments later, when Jack strode up, alarmed by the sound of weeping, and knew at a glance that Claire had been restored. Or when, finally, finally, her mother and her father held her in their arms, and were together.