“You and your friends are extremely resourceful,” the hedgewitch said. “And wise beyond your years, and brave, and clever. All the things we ought to be.” Her voice sounded distant. There was almost, Eleanor thought, a hint of sadness in it.

“You mean the things the Stories are supposed to be, right?” Eleanor asked, turning a mug by its handle until it was arranged in just the right way. The way Aunt Jenny liked it, she thought with a small pang.

“It seems cruel, that I have come into myself fully only at the very end of my time as the hedgewitch,” the witch said. She stood looking out the kitchen window, but her eyes were unfocused. “It’s a wonder to be the hedgewitch. There’s all this knowledge, just there when you reach for it. But it’s not in your head. It doesn’t belong to you, not until you reach out and take it. If I’d known the end was coming, I would have claimed so much more.”

“Would have?” Eleanor asked. She didn’t really need to ask. She knew what the hedgewitch was saying, and what it meant. “You aren’t the hedgewitch anymore. It’s Otto now, isn’t it?” she asked.

The hedgewitch—or whoever she was, now—nodded. “It happened in the dungeon, when Melia stole my curiosity. You cannot be the hedgewitch without curiosity.”

Eleanor sucked in a breath and looked away. Otto was going to begin to lose his memory. He was going to start to change. But worse than that, for all that she’d stopped seeing her mother in the hedgewitch’s face, there had been some tiny part of her that still stubbornly believed that when she stopped being the hedgewitch, she would go back to just being Mom.

The woman standing in front of her was still a stranger. Her memories wouldn’t be coming back. She would never be Eleanor’s mother again.

“What are we supposed to call you, then?” Eleanor asked, voice harsh and unkind. “You really should have come up with a proper name.”

“You could call me Claire, I suppose,” she said, shrugging.

“No,” Eleanor said, more firmly than she’d intended. The hedgewitch raised an eyebrow.

“That’s fair. Something else, then.” She sighed. “It isn’t my fault, you know. What happened to your mother.”

“It’s the Story’s fault, and you’re the Story,” Eleanor replied stubbornly.

“The Story is the thing that changes us and makes us, but we’re merely one telling of it.”