Lisbet turns away. The usual comfort she takes from the smell of her beeswax is tainted, made vicious by this grotesque purpose. Nausea wells in her gullet as the effigy is lifted on a pyre of crossed wood. It takes six men, three at each side, to lift it, and as it descends the cathedral steps wax drips a path behind. The crowd parts around it like a river around a boulder, rushing in to scrape the scattered wax from the ground with their fingernails. Lisbet is caught in the crush, Ulf barking his dismay, and she grips the fur at his scruff as they are turned about and after the paraded figure.

The dancers are reaching new heights of mania, shrieking and hopping as the effigy approaches. Some tear their clothes, exposing breasts, legs, backs. Lisbet sees guards prodding at the dancers with their hooks, and then sees more men with sticks beating the dancers into a line behind the effigy. Some fall and do not get up, are trodden on again and again.

Lisbet now fights her way backwards, hauling Ulf with her as the afflicted trip like a bewildered flock, snarling and crying.

Lisbet breaks free and looks back. The dancers are ranged behind the effigy, leaping and spinning, herded into a haphazard line that stretches like an awful snake, St Vitus at its head. The whole thing slithers past, hundreds of dancers chased by hundreds of citizens, all so wild-eyed and excitable it is difficult to tell one apart from the other. They will walk all the way to the shrine.

She stands there until the streets are nearly empty. Children comb the ground, where detritus is scattered like the leavings of a wreck. She sees pattens, strips of cloth, scarves: remnants of some enormous celebration, some enormous atrocity. At the base of the stage steps, something glints. She plucks it from the dust. A thin bracelet of gold, still warm from its wearer. Lisbet drops it, fights the urge, sudden and foolish, to weep.

•

She cannot go directly home, cannot take that awful reek to Ida’s children. She must wash the city from her. The forest has the same sense of abandonment as the market square: she passes leavings from fires and nestlike structures of filthy blankets, but no sign of the people who surrounded them at the river. At every turn she expects Plater or Daniel or some unknown assailant, but Ulf’s hackles do not rise, he does not bark, and she sees no one. Perhaps they are all following the procession, the dancers and the melting figure of the saint.

The smell of the river comes before its sound, a very green scent like scratching moss. She has always feared this smell, and after the encounter with Ida and Nethe and Plater, it is all she can do not to flee in the opposite direction.

Ulf runs ahead as Lisbet approaches the felled trunk.

Ida’s face, tipped back. The moan from her pale throat. The shriek as Plater’s hand wrapped tighter in her hair. Eren’s mouth, his fingers on the lute. Lisbet does not want to think on it, any of it, but the river is running her backwards, through her years, through her losses, to that: the first loss.