Eren catches her up. ‘Frau Wiler,’ he says again. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To the city.’

‘Now? On foot?’

She sees no reason to answer his questions, letting her pace be the reply. Her head spins like she is drunk, but it makes her feel light and swift, and she is covering ground easily. The trees start to thin and the sounds of the road reach them, drums and pipes and shouts. The night is alive with it, like a feast day, or the dances in her father’s fields.

Lisbet arrives blinking into a chaos of fire and people, so many people, walking and laughing and smoking and singing, the sparse part of the wood where it meets the road full as though it is a port or some other place of arrival, and she steps from the calm sea of the forest into this new crush of humanity.

She does not turn to check Eren is still with her: she knows he will be close at hand, and the thought emboldens her despite the sight’s strangeness, the smell of roasting meat and the dust thrown up everywhere from the sun-baked road, the people all around her.

She scans their faces as she makes for the city bounds, but there is no Ida, no Nethe, no Mathias or Plater – no one she knows. She is as much a stranger here as any. No one is watching her, no one even notices her, and she feels a thrill of anonymity rush through her. She is nothing to these travellers, drawn by the dancers.

‘Frau Wiler,’ says Eren, breaking her thoughts apart. ‘It is too loud, the hour too late—’

She is buffeted into earshot of a preacher, calling down damnation on all of their heads.

‘. . . and He shall bring such a reckoning as to turn your blood boiling in your veins, and arrow His vengeance to knock your soul rightly to Hell . . .’

The crowd he has amassed is jeering at his warnings, and though they are true, though they are all damned and God will not spare any of them and least of all her, Lisbet finds she cannot care right this moment. She needs to find Nethe and Ida, needs to drag them clear of this melee, this dark and ghoulish carnival. Eren reaches out again to her, and as though time has narrowed to a point, she sees his slim fingers, and his beseeching face, and then the globule of spit, thick and yellow as a bee, arrives firelit and shining and lands on his bearded cheek. A moment after follows a blow, ill-judged and glancing. She reels as though it is she who is struck, but Eren is so impassive it can only be from a lifetime of practice.

The assailant stumbles past, spewing obscenities, and his fellows laugh. Lisbet opens her mouth, but Eren shakes his head, and she contents herself with knocking hard against the man, sending him sprawling into the dust.