She hears Eren’s cry of shock, and grasps at him, her fingers finding his belt, the hilt of his knife. Her vision is black smoke and bees, and red, red anger. She raises her hand, and as Plater’s fingers tighten and stars shoot across her vision, she brings it down with all her might.

There is a grunt, a gasp. Plater’s hands are suddenly loose as rotted rope. They break open, and she would lose her balance but for other hands on her again. Eren holds her up and through streaming eyes, she sees the knife, buried in Plater’s neck.

Pain twists and rips her apart. She looks down, expecting a knife in her own gut, but there are only Eren’s arms.

‘The Turk!’ shouts another voice. ‘It’s the Turk!’

She sees, suddenly, how it looks. Plater dead, with Eren’s knife in his neck.

She peels Eren’s hands from her. ‘Go,’ she gasps. ‘Go.’

The pain comes again, and Lisbet falls to her knees. She falls through the ground, away from the smoke, away from the skeps, away from Eren, and off the edge of the world.

•

It is only pain then, pain in her belly and her back and her heart and her head, pain beyond bearing, and Ulf is still running desperate rings around the yard, and the bees above are swarming thicker than smoke, and a small cool hand grasps hers, pulls her away and into the shelter of the trees, and as they close over her so does the dark, and all she can see is the black-gold flash of her agony.

•

More hands on her then, hands on her temples and raking through her hair, and most of all a fist opening and closing inside her. The Devil grips her between the legs and sucks, bites with teeth, and the ground splits and swallows her.

•

There are leaves beneath her, she knows them to be so, and she grasps great handfuls of them. She is not yet damned. She must hold tight. But somewhere there are snakes hissing, thousands of snakes twisting and striking out along the endless forest floor to meet her. Water is poured down her throat and she retches, and more comes. She drinks, sinks.

•

They have her on a rack. Her belly is splitting, she is certain. If she looks down she will see her guts, her workings neat like the purples and reds and blacks of the bees, the pure gold she saw when Eren entered her, her lids closed against the dance tree’s ribbons. Still there are too many hands on her, and she fights them, bites them back, and a root is placed between her teeth and fills her mouth with splinters.

•

She is floating now, and people are speaking a language she is sure she knows but has forgotten. She has no use for words, her tongue is caught under the strap of leather that replaced the stick, and there is a roof above her, a roof with notched beams she has counted a thousand times, the whorls in that wood as she lay awake and waited for motherhood or blood. It has her now, and there is no use fighting.