‘Push, Frau Wiler.’

Please God, my baby.

‘Push, Frau Wiler.’

Please, God? My baby.

They pour acid down her throat. It stings like a thousand cuts, a thousand precise slices, and they follow it with honey so it is like she has swallowed the stem of a rose. She gags on the vinegar and honey both, but they bring her to the room. She is forced upright against the wall, the mattress beneath her sodden and her belly writhing like a sack of snakes. The pain knocks her sideways, and strangers hold her upright. She is pinned, screams like a fox in a trap. She will gnaw off her leg to be free.

Her body breaks with the sound of honeycomb: wet and splitting. Sweetness floods her mouth and all her fingertips buzz. She is a swarm, one and many, and she flies from the bed and over the forest, she is winged and enormous, and when she crashes back onto straw she weeps with all she saw.

‘Not long now.’

Nothing like her mother’s voice, no matter how she wills it.

‘Lisbet, push.’

Nethe.

Lisbet strives towards her voice like a mole seeking safe passage through the dark earth of her agony. Nethe speaks to her again, softly and with love. There is a wave of fire inside her now. It ripples, the whole world narrowing to her centre. Her legs are drawn back and her spine is split and her mouth is open but she cannot scream.

‘Push.’

She pushes.

•

There is a spoon, sweetened with honey. It is cool between her lips. There is a cloth on her forehead, and someone is crying but it is not her.

‘Henne’s son.’ Sophey, far away. ‘Henne’s boy.’

Lisbet’s eyes are shut, her arms heavy at her sides. Now something is laid across her, slick and shockingly warm, a boiled frog. But it moves beneath its swaddling. It is not one of her dead babies. It kicks and mewls.

‘Your boy.’ Nethe’s breath is sweet with honey too. She wraps Lisbet’s arms around the child, and though Lisbet is so tired she knows she could simply sink and leave and stop living, she grips tight and opens her eyes.

He is red and bloodied and beautiful. His eyelids flutter: she sees black pupils, the purest white of his eyes. Does he see her? Does he know her, as she knows him? Does he know that they are each other’s? That she has walked through fire and loss, so much loss, so that it would be him, all along?

All the chambers of Lisbet’s heart swell and flood. She smells blood and burning, hears the cord that bound them dissolving on the fire. Her son’s mouth finds her breast, and it is sharp and painful and right.

At last, Lisbet finds her arms are left full.

Twenty-Two

Those first days are milk and blood. The smoke has scoured Lisbet’s throat and dulled her thoughts, so it is only the ecstasy of holding her son that rouses her. Blessedly, Nethe is charged with her care while Sophey deals with the aftermath of the fire. For days the whole house stinks of honey and smoke, like a church. It is quiet as a church too, with Mathias and the children returned home after Plater’s death. His murder. She closes the doors of her mind to the memory. She killed him so she could survive. Not only her, but her son, too. It does not cleanse her conscience, but it salves it enough to allow herself the joy of her boy.