I stepped toward the couch, preparing to lift it, but with a wave of Tove’s hand, the couch slid back to the stairs, the coffee table toward the fireplace, and the chairs went back toward the dining room. He tossed a throw pillow down in the middle of the wool floor rug, and I lay down on my back.

As he positioned the ice pack under the back of my neck and laid the washcloth across my forehead, I looked past him and asked Sunniva, “If it was a memory, can you recover it?”

“I can recover the memory of a dream.” She got a stepladder from the closet under the stairs and set it up at my feet. “But you already seem to remember it pretty well, so it doesn’t seem like the best use of our limited time. Your body can’t handle doing this for too long.”

“You’re right.” I sighed. “Could it have been a lysa?”

“I have no idea. Lysas have nothing to do with aural healing.” She was on the top step of the stepladder and she pushed up the sleeves of her green blouse. “Now, are you ready?”

“Yeah, of course.” I closed my eyes and lay still.

“I need you to try to remember what you want me to recover,” she commanded.

Since she’d asked me this last time, I had come prepared and already decided on the moment I most wanted to remember. The memory that surfaced when Elof took me to the Ögonen neighborhood to see their secret sorgblomma garden, but pain stopped me from being able to see it all the way through.

I squeezed my eyes shut and lay perfectly still—

—and I was back in Lemak the häxdoktor’s office. The bed with restraints was behind me, and I sat shackle-free at an old wooden desk. My wrists still bore the red, blistered reminders that my freedom was only temporary.

It was only me and Lemak. And all of his dying flowers. Glass beakers lined the apothecary table with wilting yellow sorgblomma littering dry petals everywhere.

“These are what he wants you to work on today,” Lemak said, handing me a narrow tube of paper.

Slowly I unrolled it, and I saw the jagged Tryllic lettering.

Tryllic was a runic bastardization of Russian Cyrillic with a Finnish influence. The Trylle had invented it centuries ago, after the Vittra intercepted royal correspondence and laid siege on the kingdom. Because of that, the Trylle wanted to create a language that the other tribes wouldn’t be able to decipher, and so they kept the Rosetta stone secret for many, many years.