Sophey does not know what she speaks of, when she says spectacle. She has never invited enough confidences to know about Lisbet’s mother, how when Lisbet started her bloods, Mutti lost her mind. Only Mutti and Lisbet drew the line between these two events, and so now she alone must shoulder the knowledge that her mother’s unmaking was tied to her becoming.

It began with the pits, Mutti digging great gouges from the ground with her hands, scrabbling in the fine stones that marred their land until her fingernails tore. When their father asked what she was doing, she said she was digging a grave. She would not say for who.

They kept it hidden as long as they could. But then she took to walking to market barefoot, arriving ragged and wide-eyed. An empiric was sought, and brought vinegar and witch hazel, poultices and blades. By turns he bled and salved and shaved her, until Lisbet came to believe no sickness could be worse than such cures.

Abandonments, Agnethe called them. It seemed less an abandon and more a staving in of her mother’s reason, an assault on all she was. How those people in the square can stand and jeer, gawp and laugh at the sight of someone wrenched from their sense – the cruelty of it stops Lisbet’s breath.

There were still good days with Mutti, and it is these Lisbet recalls as she walks to her dance tree. They were the days her father and brothers were out working, and Lisbet was left to cook or sweep. She would instead climb into her mother’s bed and take her swollen feet into her lap, and rub them while Mutti told her about her sister, Petta, and her life before the farm. About the dance tree they called a doom tree, sitting in judgement in the centre of their village. About the river she would swim in, the thunderstorms so strong it made her hair stand on end. And that was not easily done, those days, Mutti’d say ruefully, rubbing the bristles on her head, survivors of the empiric’s shears.

Lisbet reaches the brambles, pushes them carefully aside, and steps into the calm embrace of the clearing. Mutti would have loved it here. Her longing to find a dance tree one last time intensified in her final weeks until it was nearly all she spoke of. Most of all, she would tell Lisbet that to be a woman was a brutal, beautiful thing. Sometimes she would crush Lisbet hard to her chest when she said so, and those were the times Lisbet guessed the grave was for her, or Mutti, or maybe them both. That she wished to take her to the church of her childhood to absolve her of some sin not yet committed. That Mutti wanted to spare her the same sadness she clearly felt.

How many of you were daughters, Lisbet asks the ribbons, how many sons? She used to dream of girls, as many as Mutti had boys, that she could tell about her mother and so create a chain between them, woman to woman, and Mutti would not be lost. But she thinks that now an ignorant, indulgent thought: now she wants only for her child to have breath in its body.