‘If.’ The word is out before she can contain it.

‘You should not speak so.’

‘Alas I must,’ she says. ‘Cursed or no, it is a fact. It would not be the first time.’

Eren tilts his head back. His beard is still neatly trimmed, the line of his jaw strong as a furrow in earth, the apple of his throat appearing and disappearing as he swallows. She thinks how she should like to press her lips to his skin where it meets his beard, to feel the rough and soft of him.

‘You are very strong, Lisbet.’

She laughs, surprised. ‘The opposite, surely, to have failed to keep them.’

‘But to mark them, to keep carrying them, to love them.’ He nods, breaking his enchantment. ‘I love my wife and daughter still, though they died.’

‘In birth?’

‘Just after. There was some part that didn’t come. She died, and then the baby. I would have too, if not for Frederich. He took me along with him, and we have travelled ever since. I think he recognised a fellow lost soul.’

‘You parted with him though.’

‘I believe we will find each other again. And we will travel on.’

What must it be, to be a man and be able to leave your grief behind, or else to shrink it small enough to carry about in a pocket, and bear it enough to live a different life? Could she do such a thing? Would she even wish to?

Yes, is the answer, swift as a blink. Yes, of course.

‘But we mustn’t talk further on that,’ he says. ‘This baby will live, Lisbet.’

‘And will I?’

His thick eyebrows knit. ‘You must.’

‘I must,’ she agrees. ‘To be a mother. There is naught else, is there?’

‘You will still be Lisbet,’ he says. ‘You will still walk in the forest with Ulf, be a wife, tend the bees.’

‘Perhaps,’ she says.

‘You must fight for it.’ Eren leans towards her, his body close enough to touch. ‘I fought my mother, to be a musician. A musician who knows his letters is a waste, but still that is what I am.’

‘And I am a women who knows her bees,’ she smiles.

‘Precisely.’ He stretches out his legs. ‘Should you not return to them?’

‘Do you wish me to?’

He looks at her, full into her eyes and her breath catches. ‘Shall I light the fire?’

She nods, unable to speak even after his gaze moves from her face and becomes intent on his new task of coaxing the embers into flame. She watches his lips purse, his breath bringing the fire to life, and a prickle of heat traces the place he had sucked the splinter from her.

What would it be, to be Eren’s wife? This thought she allows in fully, sitting in the expanding dark, watching his face in the growing firelight. There would be many nights like this, spent under stars, following the constant shift and pull of work. There would be the lack of it, too, and no stability or control over where the work took them, but would she mind?