‘What about your mother?’

He tells her, about how she could read three written languages, and about his sister, who died when she was five from fever. She had a braid thick as a rope, eyes like his. His father who walked with a limp from a war he never talked about. She asks again about him, as a child, and he gives her more about his sisters who survived, more about his mother who sang, his father who played, how for a while they trained a bear cub to dance with him so they would raise more money, but the bear pined for its mother and died.

He tells her they travelled always, from town to city and village, how he travels still, with only the shirt on his back, his father’s lute and his mother’s kettle. How he has been as far as Copenhagen and Greece, how no two months hold the same qualities. How he learned to play music by watching his father’s fingers. How they could not afford another instrument so until he was ten he practised on a plank of wood that he scratched lines into and hummed so he could hear the music. Lisbet holds out the stick that splintered in her palm to him, and he takes it, laughing.

‘Like this,’ he says, and holds it as he had the lute on the stage before the dancers. He hums, the tune fast and playful, and she jiggles her knees and claps along.

When he is done he throws the stick and Ulf goes haring after it as Eren bows and Lisbet cheers. She fills giddy with the absurdity of the day, which is fast now dropping into night.

‘And you,’ he says, flopping down at her feet. ‘What of you?’

‘There is no story.’

‘There is always a story.’

Lisbet feels her joy leave her, feels the crush of everything press upon her. She wants to be rid of it, and perhaps this is the only way, this the only place, he the only person it is possible to share it with. A confession.

‘You think me prying,’ says Eren. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘There’s no need for apology,’ she says.

‘You don’t have to tell me anything.’

‘I do. I want . . . I need . . .’

He waits, and she tries to sort her thoughts, comb through them like wool carded.

‘You don’t have to—’

‘Please,’ she says. ‘Do not speak.’

She finds her place, the start of it all. The start of her.

‘My childhood was full of havocs. The night I was born, a comet fell in my father’s easterly field, burnt up a year’s corn and rendered the place barren ever after. I expect you have heard of the comet – it fell in Eninsheim.’

She sees his nod of recognition in her periphery, keeps her eyes set ahead, on a whorl in the dance tree’s trunk.

‘Geiler preached it was an omen. God damning us all. He seemed to damn my family especially. Aside from the lost field, there followed harvests felled by hail, or else storms. Rain that fell like tides or else not at all. Flood and drought, in endless cycle. As I grew, so did the misfortune. Revolts that took our best farmhands, almost took my brothers. Rebels hung like old sheets from every wall, failed flags of surrender. And when I turned twelve, my mother started to run mad.’ She swallows. She cannot tell him how intimately the two were linked, how her bloods began and Mutti’s mind disintegrated.