Lisbet’s mouth is parched, her body aching. She will meet Nethe and Ida at the river, walk off her strangeness, the feeling flooding her bones. If he can pretend it did not happen, so can she.

She moves through the forest, eyes adjusted to the dark, collecting her wandering thoughts, her heart, bundling them tight up inside her again, containing them. They rise against their restraints like gleaming fish in a net, and she pushes them back down.

As she nears the river, she sees small circles of light, hears murmurs, short laughs. There are people grouped at intervals through the trees, and she tries to pass unseen, remembering the hungry man with his rusted knife. Her pace slows: she becomes more careful with where she steps, her heartbeat quickening. But the groups seem to be of a different sort. The Twenty-One’s decrees have driven even families into the trees, and they are as cautious as she: she sees children’s faces illuminated by the firelight, piles of clothing upon which babies sleep with their small mouths pursed.

She hugs the shadows, choosing thicker undergrowth where the families have not ventured. Here the ground is once again boggy, and the bank riddled with washed-up branches. She is so set on her task of becoming invisible that she does not recognise the sounds for what they are, thinks them an owl calling, a fox barking far away. But as she reaches a bank Lisbet has used before for bathing, enclosed by bracken, sheltered and perfect for passing through unnoticed, what she sees is impossible, unmistakeable.

Ida is sitting on a large, rotted trunk, where Lisbet sometimes dries her clothes. She’d found a deer drowned and washed up here once, its small brown body soft and swollen. The sight of the deer comes to her now, in the obscene glint of Ida’s tongue between her teeth, the way her head lolls against her shoulder. Her pale limbs are parted, and she is open from arms to mouth, her face washed in an expression of such abandon Lisbet feels ashamed to witness it even before she sees Nethe on her knees before her, her golden head between Ida’s legs.

If Lisbet were in any doubt about what she sees, a moment later Ida moans again, a keening, animal sound, and reaches down to Nethe and grasps her by the back of the neck, yanks her forcefully up, bending down to meet her mouth with hers, and they are kissing then, Nethe’s knees in the mud, Ida’s legs wrapped around Nethe’s waist, pale switches binding the cloth of her skirts, her arms digging into her back.

Lisbet should tell them she is there. She should yell, or shout, beat them for their sin, for their foolishness. But she cannot speak, can’t do anything but stumble clumsily backwards into the shadows, her heart thumping. Then, suddenly, she sees something move behind the women.

Someone else is watching them. A crouched figure, its face swollen and monstrous, its fingers webbed and closed around a pitchfork. Beside it, a larger form looms from the dark. They could have stepped straight from the walls of the cathedral. The Devil and his accomplice, come for their souls.