Lizabekt Jones was a woman full of regret and hope in equal measure.

The former, shr found, came in many forms. Just as a wise man had once told her that grief is just love with nowhere to go, so too was regret. For Lizabekt, regret was simply love with nowhere to go.

She carried it all with her in ways that she could manage, in ways that made the memory real, despite the lies. Like telling her lover that her brother had died of consumption, and claiming orphanage at age 12, and skill in handicraft from roadside cons, not churchgirl embroidery.

What she hadn’t expected was that Maple had stories of her own. Lies in some measure, or simply just lighter truths. Some were about herself: yes, I am sober. No, I have never been arrested. Yes, I still observe druidry. Others were, like Lizabekt’s, about others. Her sister. Her mother. Her stepmother.

Liz, however, had thought the past could never catch up to her. Not here. Not now.

She was wrong.

The first signs had come, thankfully, when Maple was away. She was close, too close, to discovering the truth, having been away with her party. Jemmett had already been killed. She did not remember him. He must have come after she had left.

It had been a busy night, the crew all spread across Etterdatch, at Lipkins, or on field patrol. Alice was out, attending to a particularly nasty riot on the south-side of the city, thank Kos, and Liz had been sent back to the house for supplies. The air was cooler here, quieter as she shut the door behind her, climbing the stairs to her room. She thought then, of Maple, and the nights they spent in the attic, Maple scaling the walls like a spider. When she rounded the corner into her side-room, the door was already half open. The shutters here were flimsy, she told herself. It must've been the wind.

As she shut the door behind her, cool air rushed in from the open window. The lit a lamp and began to sift through the piles of clutter everywhere. She'd always told herself she would clean up. That was before things got messy. She kicked aside a pile of old leaflets, trying to find her medical bag, old bandages left beside dried-up lip rouge and open bottles of perfume. A stale piece of bread sat on a plate covered in what used to be jam. It was now covered in a fine, greenish-white fur, as if hosting a small planet.

Maple would've loved this.

Lizabekt, however, did not.

She balanced the plate in her elbow carefully, arms bundled with scrap fabric for slings, and bandages, all cushioning the delicate jars of poultices and pain-killers that Maple had taught her to make. As she reached the last step, a smell hit her. It was acrid, and harsh, and horrifyingly recognisable. She dropped the fabric and ran to the kitchen sink, plate still in hand.

And there, in the basin, lay a smouldering garment, smoke rising off of it in lazy tendrils. Upon lay a small piece of card, gilded and thick, bearing the mark of the Kofanarch. The seventh shawl. The slovenly sister.

They had found her.

She did not sleep well that evening. Sound drummed into her skull like discordant organsong. She considered, very briefly, reaching for the blissfire she had confiscated from Maple weeks ago. She didn't -- at least she thinks she didn't -- she fell in and out of fitful sleep, envisioning her hand, her own hand, separated from herself, thin fingers crawling across the bedsheets like a pale spider, falling into the drawer at her bedside and re-emerging holding the vial on its back, liquid swirling in purple-pink waves. The bottle, laid on its side amongst the pillows uncorked, and the hand, with its bitten down nails, and calloused fingers, pushed her mouth into the stream of blissfire, pooling around her teeth like blood.

That was the kindest of the night-terrors.

She opened her eyes to a forest, dark and cold, where a horse whinnied behind her. She was in her robes, blue pinafore fitting her as if she was still in the body of a child. Her hand flew to her neck, where the cord sat, twisted and heavy against her collarbone. Then came Maple's face, then Alice, and Ellis, and Jules, all twisting into shapes, colours, sounds that she swore she had forgotten. She looked up, and there hanging was Jared, fourteen, with soft grey hair the colour of goosedown. Lizabekt tried to reach out, but her throat was smokestung, eyes watering. The rope creaked, and Jared looked up, at her, eyes pebble-dark and gleaming.

His voice was Clemmie's.

He--or she--may have tried to speak, but all sound was rushing blood in Lizabekt's ears. The rope creaked again, and Jared let out one last strangled sound, before being wound up the bough of the tree, like a needle on the end of a thread being wound up again.

"Agnes."

The branches twisted and curled, head emerging from the night-dark leaves, fingers emerging, wrapping up the rope Jared hung from in a neat little bow. A figure stepped out of the shadows, bathed in smoke that formed a singular hand. And as its acrid fingers cupped her face, she understood before the voice even came from the thing in front of her.

"Come home, our little light."

Her father had come back for her.