Ida leans into her gently. ‘You are quiet today.’

‘Thinking,’ murmurs Lisbet.

‘Careful,’ says Ida teasingly. ‘You’ll have a frown line deep as Pater Hansen’s.’

Lisbet tries to summon a laugh and cannot. She feels very heavy, as Ida said, and a little sad.

‘Come, Bet,’ says Ida. ‘What’s wrong?’

Lisbet knows Ida will not cease her questioning. She has a mother’s intuition, is used to coaxing troubles from sullen children. Lisbet sighs, and shrugs. ‘You are missing Henne?’

‘No,’ says Lisbet, so quickly it shames her. Ida arches her brow, steering the horse through the narrowing streets that skirt the city.

‘The bees are well?’

Lisbet does smile at that. Ida understands better than any her obsession. ‘Yes. For now. If our petition does not succeed—’

‘It will. What then?’ Ida shoots her another sharp look. ‘Do not keep the secret, it’ll age you faster than a sin.’

‘It’s Nethe,’ says Lisbet, and feels Ida draw away slightly.

‘You call her Nethe now?’

‘This is why I did not wish to say.’

‘What do you mean?’ says Ida, and though her voice is light there is a sting in it, a bee’s hook left in honeycomb. ‘What about her? Is she well?’

Lisbet hesitates. ‘The day we saw the dancer. I found her wandering in the woods. She was distressed.’

‘By the dancer?’

‘No. Something Sophey said.’

She looks at her friend. Ida’s profile is beautiful, Lisbet has always thought so, though Ida thinks her nose too big, her chin too soft. She wonders whether to share the whole truth. But how to explain about the dance tree here? It feels a blasphemy.

‘It must have been strange in the mountains. She was never going to come back the same.’

‘I suppose not,’ says Lisbet, but Ida seems distracted.

‘Here we are.’

Their arrival at the slums usually warrants a flurry of activity, of grasping hands and gratefulness that Lisbet cringes against. But as they stop outside Herr Lehmann’s house, they see the door tied closed with rope. Ida frowns and jumps lightly down from the cart, peering through the rotted wood.

‘No one?’ asks Lisbet.

Ida goes to the next hovel, and the next, but though there are hawkers milling about the cart, there is no sign of their usual greeters. Ida goes back to Herr Lehmann’s door and knocks. Lisbet climbs down and looks through the collapsing shutters.

‘Hello?’ A thin voice works its way through the door, and Lisbet recognises their eldest girl.

‘Hilde?’ says Ida. ‘We’re here with bread, and milk.’

‘I can’t open the door from this side.’

Lisbet tugs on the knot.

‘No,’ says Hilde, hearing what she is doing. ‘They said to leave it closed.’

‘Where are your parents?’ asks Lisbet.

‘The city,’ says Daniel, coming to join his sister. ‘Gone to see the dancers.’

‘The dancer is gone,’ says Ida. ‘Taken to the shrine.’

‘All of them?’ asks Hilde, and her little brother Gunne says something inaudible and excited.

‘There is only one,’ says Ida. ‘Lisbet saw her.’