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all the paces to the gallows and waits patiently, acceptingly as an animal, while the noose is slipped around her neck, as two strong men pull on the rope and haul her slight form aloft so that she asphyxiates slowly rather than having her neck quickly, mercifully, broken. The soft flesh under my eyes is tender from weeping. “How is Flora?”
    “Flora is always well,” she answers and there’s a bitterness in her tone. “She still wishes to go to the old mill.”
    “Gods, she’s a fool,” I say mildly and Ina does not contradict me. “She must wait, a month at least, and if there’s any sense in that thick head of hers she—
you
—will find a new place. The forest, Ina, is wide and dark; it’s a cathedral in need of parishioners. Betake yourselves out and run there beneath moon and shadow. You can even hunt if that takes your liking. Go far from Edda’s Meadow, there’s enough distance between here and the next town for Flora to gallivant to her heart’s content. What about the other women?”
    “They’re not dimwits. They’ll not venture there unless I say, if ever. Flora’s spoilt, that’s the problem,” she says. “Her parents always gave her whatever she wanted and Karol does the same.”
    “Why do
you
put up with her?” I give the powder one last pounding and shake it into a small calico pouch. It’ll last a week.
    “I love her,” she says quite simply, and the truth comes through in that. She does love Flora, though the girl is an empty-headed egotist. Loves her as much, if not better, than Karol does. I’d puzzled about how close they might be, but had not divined the depths of their attachment. How painful for Ina. It makes me wonder all the more about the child she carried. Who put it there? Was she willing or otherwise?
    “Ah.”
    “Is there a way to get rid of such love?” she asks and her voice cracks. She points at the small blue bag in my hand. “Can you brew something to sunder this connection?”
    “I’m sorry, Ina. One of the oddities of my craft: I can make a love potion, perhaps even one that will last beyond the first bloom of lust, but the only cure I might have in a bottle also brings death.”
    She sobs. I sit beside her and place a hand over her long thin ones, feel the tremors of her weeping. “I thought . . . I thought I’d lost her that night, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I’ve loved her so long, and she’s loved me . . . but she’s self-seeking, Patience, I know this. She takes what she desires and gives only what she doesn’t want. So, so selfish. I would I could walk away from her.”
    “Oh, Ina.”
    “I would she would walk away from Karol.”
    I could tell her that it will never happen. That Flora likes her fine life just as it is: Karol’s money and protection, his hard cock when she allows, and Ina’s soft tongue and gentle touch in between. That Flora is the centre of Flora’s universe and all things must circle around her. That she lives on the sight of her own reflection in the eyes of others. That her love seems like the sun, but is really a shadow that creeps in and leaves no room for anything else.
    “I would Karol
were
dead,” she says with a vitriol I’d never thought to hear from her. All her mentions of her brother have been studiedly neutral. Her words hang there like a question, waiting in a silence that I may choose to fill.
    “Think carefully of what you wish, Ina. If the desire will not leave you some days hence, then return here. But trust me when I say that such an act undertaken in haste risks too much.”
    “But you could do it?” she says, eyes burning into me, hands pulling away from mine, gesturing at the mortar and pestle on the table, the jars of dried herbs on the shelves around the kitchen. “There’s what? Belladonna? Monkshood?”
    “When you are less heated by hatred, Ina,” I say, and stand to signal our meeting at an end. All the fire leaves her and she sags before rising and straightening her