And then, there is a sound. A sigh, a sob. She feels a charge pass through her, like the thunderstorms her mother spoke of. She looks up at the branches, but they are still, and silent.

‘Mutti?’ she asks the air. ‘Mutti, are you there?’

The sound again, closer now. But it does not come from the air, or the tree, or the ribbons, or from her own fast-beating heart.

There, again. There, again. She waits. It minds her of the dancer in the city, the huff of air forced out as though from bellows, stoking the fire of her mania.

Fear, cold and griping, twists Lisbet’s stomach as the bramble bushes part. A woman weeping like her heart were rent, dragging her bare hands through the thorns so as to draw blood. Lisbet knows already the shaved head, the broad shoulders.

Agnethe stops abruptly. Her face is pinched and pale, with two spots of colour high in her cheeks. Her eyes are swollen, her nose running, and Lisbet remembers Henne’s description of a victim of a swarm: bloated and waxy-skinned, mottled.

‘Lisbet.’ Agnethe croaks her name. Seeming to come to herself, she snatches her hands away from the brambles, clamping them beneath her armpits. ‘What—’

Her gaze drifts up, her tear-streaked cheeks shining.

Lisbet’s heartbeat stoppers her throat. She knows what Agnethe will see – a squat, broad linden, fluttering with dried leaves and torn scraps of fabric, the platform as haphazard as a ruin – and it is so different from what Lisbet sees it feels a betrayal. She wishes she could grow herself large and engulfing as a fog, hide the dance tree from sight. It is hers, and her babies’, and she does not want to share, to explain.

Agnethe steps closer, head tilted back, eyes wide. The sight seems to have shocked her from her weeping. ‘What is this?’

Lisbet cannot swallow her heart. It is too high, too loud, as it always feels here, so close to the memories of her could-have-been-children. But Agnethe seems not to require an answer. She approaches softly, picking up her feet like a child eluding the cracks in the floor that will gobble them to Hell. She reaches one of Lisbet’s gifts, a pebble that sat pleasing in Lisbet’s palm and that she wrapped with thread in a pattern like lace, and squats beside it.

‘Don’t—’ starts Lisbet. She has a superstition, a horror of moving them once they are settled. But Agnethe makes no attempt to shift it. She only looks at it intently.

Lisbet can see the deep gouges on her hands, the blood bright against her pale skin. Agnethe rises so fast it makes Lisbet gasp, and her heart dislodges, her voice coming out clear. ‘You’re bleeding.’

‘What is this place?’

Lisbet shifts, her feet aching. ‘A tree.’

‘I see that,’ says Agnethe, a faint smile on her lips. Again, she is all Henne. ‘The ribbons, the tokens. It is like some pagan shrine.’

Lisbet trembles, her knees softening so she must reach out again to the trunk to steady herself. ‘It is no such thing.’