But I am, she tells herself. Many times over. She loves each lost child though they are not here, though all she had of them was blood or else bloodless bodies – is that not enough? She knows Sophey has lost children, that most women do, that Ida is rare in her constant safe carryings. But if there are other mothers with empty arms, Lisbet has not met them, and so has not met anyone who understands what it is to carry the weight of so much absence.

Inside, the baby flickers. She used to think of them as fish, swimming through her depths, but now she wishes for trees, thick-rooted and strong. She rubs her ribs, and pushes herself upright.

She should go back to the house. She knows the route to her tree like her own palms, could do it blindfolded as well as in the dark, but the forests have grown more dangerous with such desperation in the city. Other tenants of the Twenty-One are not offered the chance to go to Heidelberg and argue their claims, and the evictions watched over by Plater and his ilk increase apace. Still, to give up the forest would be to give up her tree, and that is not worth contemplating. With the fierce sun diluted to a dapple on her shoulders, she pushes on.

Her path is invisible to all but her, and undesirable. The trees are thick and licked in thorns, the ground kept boggy by underground streams that swell to rivers in the rainy months. There are better areas for shelter near the city road, more easily sought, and this is why her sanctuary is so protected, enshrined.

She feels like a bee, sowing its maps into the air, a bird weaving its way home, stopping to listen now and again for approaching footsteps, for any sign at all she is not alone. For she must be, here. When her clogs sink into the familiar mossy ground she feels her heart lift. She pushes aside the brambles she places at the border to discourage animals, and enters the small clearing. It is quiet and shadowed as a church.

There at the centre is a thick-trunked linden with a stage built into its branches. A dance tree. The platform she mended sits in the highest branches, jutting like a land-wrecked boat. All around it are her babies’ ribbons, twelve lengths of cotton ripped from the first infant’s smock she ever sewed, dyed in the brightest colours she could muster from beetroot and beetle wings.

The bees brought her here. It is another thing to love them for. When Henne was in Colmar delivering wax, and she pregnant a third time, full of grief and hope, she’d mistaken a trail of them for their own. Believing them to be deserters of Henne’s hard-won hives, she followed them into the forest with a sack and a stick of burning rosemary, ready to bring them home again. She’d fought through the brambles and found them here, a wild colony living in a hollow branch that skewered the rotting platform.