She lies a long time, curled around her stomach, and only when the baby forces her to the pisspot does she rise. If it were not for the baby, she would never rouse herself again. My boy. All she does now, is for him.

A long time ago, after the ninth baby was lost, she thought she should go to the empiric for something to keep her barren. She thought to let Henne leave her, and she join an order of nuns, or to go home and live as a spinster among her brothers, or else to run into the forest and see how long she could live among the trees and rebels. She dropped the thoughts soon enough, but they linger as words that cannot be unsaid, like a declaration of love or hate.

More than anything, she needs a child with an ache so base and animal she has never tried to understand it. She has passed through every phase of want. Through the hatred that comes with desire so strong you could blunt your teeth on it, the closest to true hunger she’s ever known. Times when she would pluck her heart from her chest and fill their tiny, limp bodies with its beat, a cavity for her love. She understands why pelicans peck their own breasts for blood, why cuckoos cast out eggs. She would do violence for this child. For any of her children. A mother so many times over she cannot count it on her fingers alone. This child must stay, she prays for it until her knees chafe and blister, just as she had prayed for her mother. And see how that ended.

Henne thinks it pathetic, but hasn’t he bred this need in her? Isn’t it his seed he plants but she cannot grow? What has become of you, Lisbet, he asked her once, as she lay with her legs open, begging him. But it is the wrong question. She has not yet become. And what wouldn’t she give?

It is a similar urgency she feels for the bees, the desire to understand them, to own something that can’t be owned. It is even – she allows herself to give full attention to the thought in this murky, indeterminate time – how she feels for Eren. And they all leave.

She will cleanse the house of any trace of him. She moves quietly, so as not to disturb Ida’s father, Ida’s children, and starts in the kitchen, rubbing the table with tallow and water and wax, and sweeping out the old, crinkled rushes the musicians stood upon, and covering over the scuff marks from the benches with new straw. She dusts up flour, setting the chair and benches into their usual places, dragging the table to the centre from where they’d allowed it to abut the wall. No more sliding past each other, no more not touching and wanting to touch.

She sweeps the corridor next. Outside the dogs are whining for their breakfast, but she cannot open the door, because while she does not he might still be outside. To open it and find him not there would be impossible.