For a while they sit in companiable silence, watching Ulf chew on his stick, his lips pulled back from his gums.

‘He will miss you,’ says Lisbet, finally. I will miss you, she thinks.

‘I will miss him.’

‘Do you not get lonely, on your travels?’

‘Are you offering me Ulf?’

She wants to say, Myself, only. She shrugs. ‘Have you never wished to marry again?’

She asks it as though she cares nothing for the answer, but he sees through it. She can tell in the glance he gives her now. ‘This is no life for a woman.’

The scent of wild garlic reaches them, and Eren descends the tree to bring the kettle to her wrapped in a shirt. Together they blow upon it, and she pours it direct from the spout into her mouth. It is almost spicy with strength, the mushrooms tasting like meat. It fills her, warm and salty, the perfect counterpoint to her days of honey.

‘It is good,’ she says as he drinks.

‘You sound surprised,’ he says, wiping his mouth. ‘I am not only a musician.’

‘Who knows his letters,’ she teases.

He inclines his head in a mock-bow.

‘Will you play for me?’

They look at each other, then, and the whole world narrows to a point, to the channel of invisible energy from him to her and back again, the thread she longs to spool close and join them forever. It cannot be love she feels, she knows. Love is a lifetime’s work. But still it is a lifetime’s worth of something that passes now between them, an understanding. He feels it too, she knows it.

She knows, too, that he will not close the distance. But he does set aside the kettle and lie flat down and stretch out his arm for the lute, exposing the softly furred flesh of his lower belly. He sits up again and shuffles away from the railing, cross-legged, and brings the instrument gentle to his lap like a babe in arms, cradled close.

She turns awkwardly to sit opposite, as though they are about to play a clapping game. Still he looks at her, as his fingers find their place on the instrument’s strings, as he calls them into voice. He plays the tune he played the last time at the dance tree, an elegy, a parting song. And all the while he does not look away, does not close his eyes to hear the music as he did in the market square, as though by drinking her in he can play better.

She feels the music stretch and arch over their heads, becoming almost visible, golden and shining in the long dusk, the long farewell to day, the notes weaving into the branches, twining with her babies’ ribbons, shaking loose the memories of past music and bringing all the weight of loss and forgetting down on their heads. He plays them into darkness, into the stars coming strong through the leaves. He plays her into calm, the whole forest lulled by him. She is crying, she feels the tears hot on her cheeks, and his eyes shine too.