Bastiaan must think Sven was lying. That made it worse. “What he said about me is . . . It’s true.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he responded immediately. Had he heard me correctly? He swept one hand through the mist. It was passable, so he held out his other hand toward me.

I didn’t take it. “How can you say it doesn’t matter?” Barefoot on the corpses of time-stopped fire oak, I felt as though the vines now burned my insides. “It doesn’t matter that I’ve killed someone?”

“Myrthe, your past matters. It’s the ink of your story. But it doesn’t write your future.”

“And that’s enough for you? You can . . . accept that about me?” I couldn’t keep back the skepticism.

He sighed. “Yes. Because it’s possible to make a mistake and not be seen only as that mistake.” I had a feeling he wasn’t talking about me anymore.

Wasn’t this what I wanted? To be seen beyond my mistake? So why did it feel wrong? “I don’t think you understand. I used a wish and it killed two boys.” He continued assessing the mist to the next Trial. I grabbed his shoulder. “Stop and listen! I’m a murderer!”

He spun on me. “No, you’re not! You regret it! You wish you could undo it, don’t you?”

“Of course I do!”

“That’s where the difference is. Sven is the grandson of a murderer. His grandfather never regretted it, and Sven regards those actions with pride. Look what it’s made him into.”

A monster, willing to murder for his own cause, like his grandfather.

“We all have murder in our pasts—whether by action or by heart. But all of us have the chance of life in our futures. You can’t use your mistake to define who you are. That will destroy who you could be.”

It would. It had been . . . slowly. Was it possible to release oneself of guilt?

“You’re already paying the price with your curse. Coralythe should be punished.”

“She was their mother,” I whispered.

“She serves the king now. She gave Runt his Bane. She’s the reason I’m trying to get to the Well. Like you, I wish to undo my actions. And more.”

Did I dare? “What mistakes are you trying to unwrite from your past?”

“Oh, Myrthe, if you knew . . .” He held out his hand. “Let me instead take in this moment of being with you in safety.”

I took his hand, savoring the warmth and trust in his touch but also sensing—again—his reluctance to open up. “Alright.”

He stepped into the orange mist, and for a moment, he was in the third Trial and I was still in the second. I looked back, briefly, to bid farewell to the Spring Trial, hopefully forever . . .

. . . and could have sworn I saw the mother bear blink.

Chapter 45
Bastiaan