That was an understatement. I’d had her face painted upon my memory with the watercolor of guilt. Since Oma told me Mutti was alive, the pain and longing had resurfaced—tugging me forward toward the Well. To banish my curse, to use a wish, to find her.

Yet here she was.

She had found me.

My flapping heart calmed. I couldn’t bring myself to think of Mutti as a threat. “You’ve been following me?”

“For days.”

I wanted to launch myself into her arms—return to the body of my twelve-year-old self and be embraced by my mother. But too many questions filled the space between us. I didn’t understand and I couldn’t let down my guard. Not yet.

“How do you know who I am?” Was she after me because I was the Wishtress?

“My first memory of you is you as a young girl—eleven or twelve. My husband, Koen, was dead on a cot beside me. I remembered him. I remembered his mother—Wilma—and her home. But I didn’t know you. Yet you called me Mutti.”

I wanted to explain, to beg forgiveness, but I bit my tongue.

“I was afraid. Lost. I fled the house but didn’t make it far. I was so weak. Wilma came after me and urged me to leave. She said she couldn’t take me back in. I had no choice since my husband was dead. I found a place of employment with a merchant. Many other women worked for him as well, and he took advantage of us—not paying us enough wages, charging us penalties for every mistake or miststep. We could never pay him back what we owed or make enough to get free of him.”

She placed the candle on the ice between us. The sky lightened a touch, signaling early morning. Enough that I could now see more of her face. She stared at mine with equal intensity. She looked the same to me, but I was five years older than when she last saw me.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you—how you’d called me your mother. It felt like I’d lost something—some part of my life. Some part of my heart was incomplete, and it kept bringing me back to you. Somehow, Myrthe, I started to know—deeper than logic or even memory—that you were my daughter. I knew I needed to find you.”

She coughed and it rattled in her chest, bringing back a shock of memories from when she had the pox. I passed her my water pouch. She took a long drink. When she returned it to me, I busied myself packing handfuls of snow into its mouth and then tucking the cold pouch against my body to warm it enough to melt the water.