“So when you came after me—into the Winter Trial—you didn’t know what you were about to face.” Her expression twisted against an unseen pain. “You could have died!”

Did she think she was responsible for his choice? “As could you. I wasn’t willing to let that happen.” Somehow she had entered the category of Runt and Mother. Myrthe had become a person to protect.

“So all this time you could have brought countless people to the Well using your Talent. Have you ever done that?”

“My time snap only stops the Trials for those with Talents. Anyone without a Talent would still have to defeat them.” Or die in the attempt—like Father.

“Tell me about when you got your Talent.”

He used to love returning to this memory. Something inside him would swell with joy—with purpose. But now it hurt.

“I never actually drank of the water.”

Despite all the time—stopped and active—that had passed since then, the memory sat in his mind like yesterday.

“Dehaan drank and prayed and then drank some more. After almost two days of this, he demanded that I pray with him. For him. So I knelt by the Well and spoke to the water in my mind. I told it I’d really like to get home to take care of my mother, so could it please give Dehaan a Talent so we could leave? Then I felt it: a searing on my right hand. A voice in my blood. A Talent blooming inside me filled with mystery and purpose. It was the most amazing feeling of . . .” He wasn’t sure he could finish.

“Of what?”

He slowed. Sighed. “Of hope.”

“Did Dehaan ever get a Talent?”

“Not while I served him. He was furious that I did. Me, a commoner. He tried to beat it out of me a couple times. My mother helped me learn how to use it. We discovered I could stop time and anyone I touched while time was stopped would enter the Stillness with me. The main difference was they aged in the Stillness and I didn’t. I gathered Mother and the other women who’d been indentured to the merchant for measly pay, and we all left. Those are the women who work the fields at Windmill Cottage.”

Despite his misuse of his Talent, that act at least was some good he could be proud of.

“My mother was one of those women,” Myrthe said softly.

Bastiaan stopped walking. Her mother had lived at Windmill Cottage? Oh. “Ilse.”

“You knew?”

He shook his head. “I’m only now connecting the pieces. Ilse has been searching for her daughter for years. One time in the Stillness I returned to her old home to look for clues but found nothing except two graves—one marking her own name and the other her husband’s.”