As far as she could see, tramping back and forth like this, making herself wearier and wearier, was only likely to cause more accidents, more mistakes. If she hadn’t been so tired—so very, very tired—she wouldn’t have left her spoon behind in the first place.

No.

She couldn’t do her job properly without the instrument, but where she was going next, she had no plan to do her job at all.

Perhaps if she just allowed herself a little break, things would become clearer.

Yes.

And once the wedding was over, she would come back and retrieve her spoon.

It was the only responsible thing to do.

And so, throwing her hands in the air, the Dark One turned and, with a newly brightened step, began to make her way toward Zubinsk.

—

Slowly, slowly, as the heavy footsteps faded into the soft hush of the snow, Bluma lifted her head to peek out over the top of her gravestone.

The Dark Lady was nowhere to be seen.

She was alone.

But only now did she truly perceive the depth of the trouble in which she found herself.

If she had stopped to think about it along the way, Bluma would’ve quickly come to the conclusion that she had run much farther than the length of the tiny Tupik cemetery. And yet she had not come out the other side. And, more troublingly, there was no sign whatsoever of Tupik to be seen: no houses, no chimneys, no candlelit rooms.

But how could this be? She had lived beside the Tupik cemetery her whole life long, knew every plot and corner of its extent.

And yet, somehow, she had carried herself farther inside it than should’ve been possible.

Silver moonlight sifted down between the falling flakes of snow.

Gravestones.

Gravestones as far as the eye could see.

Where was she?

The snow continued to fall, soft and fine, almost clandestine, and by the time Bluma rose from her hiding spot, there was no sign of a single footprint behind her.

How could she say which way was home?

But Bluma was not foolish. The surest way not to make her way home was to stay where she was.

And so she rose and began to walk among the graves, looking for something familiar.

In the little cemetery back home in Tupik, the tombstones all shared a certain family resemblance: each stone in a generation had been carved by the same pair of hands, and that pair had been taught by the pair that came before it.

But in this cemetery there were very different sorts of memorials.