The air felt formal between us, even though I now knew her story. Maybe that was a result of my own heart hardening. Or maybe we were an awkward pair, separated for years, only just reuniting to piece together broken memories.

“Why the sleep herbs?”

“I’m cursed.” The words came so easily from my lips in her presence. Somehow I knew it wouldn’t bother her. I told her everything. Starting from now and moving my way back. Bastiaan, Sven, the map, Coralythe and her sons, Oma, the Wishtress journal, all the way back to her first memory of me. How those were my first tears—my first ever wishes. The fateful words I wished I could take back.

“I killed Pappje.”

Mutti shook her head. “That’s not how I see it.” She made a snowball in her lap, then sucked some water from it. I offered her my canteen, but she shook her head again. “You wished for our illnesses to end. You didn’t wish for us to die. What you did was stop the suffering—you sped up time. Koen’s end was death. He was not meant to recover. My end was healing.”

I’d never thought about it like that. Could it be true?

“Don’t carry that guilt, Myrthe.”

“But your memories . . . I erased them!” I thought of all the different stories we could have lived. If Mutti had stayed with Oma and me, she’d have taken care of me—she would have been a shield between Oma and me. Maybe even helped me decipher the ins and outs of being the Wishtress.

“It was an accident, Myrthe. But you can only carry that shame for so long; otherwise it will destroy you.”

“How do I release it?”

“You give it up. You give it to the Well water inside you. It created your Talent; it is helping write your story. Let it write healing into it.”

“So it wrote in my mistakes too?”

“No, you did. Living life with a Talent is sharing a pen with the Well. You both get to write your story, but the longer you live, the more you’ll learn to surrender your ink.”

I’d never heard the Well spoken of like that, except maybe by Bastiaan. As though it was more than water with magic. “Do you have a Talent?”

“No. I learned a lot from Bastiaan. He taught many of us about the Well. We may not have Talents, but that doesn’t mean we can’t understand its power.” She peered up at me over her slowly melting snowball. “Do you know how Bastiaan got his Talent?”

I shook my head.

She smiled. “You should ask him someday. I think you’ll find it enlightening.”

Bastiaan. Bastiaan had saved my mother and didn’t even know it. What I had broken, he had mended . . . and then fate brought us together. I wish I knew how he was, how Runt was.