Cappella found a spot away from the others. She needed to do something painful, something private. Something she’d put off for too long.

Shivering in the cold, she dug a shallow hole the length of her arm. It was hard going in the frozen soil. She used her hands, and when she was done, her fingertips burned and bled, but she welcomed the pain. It hurt less than everything else.

She took one last look at her pipe. Where Greta’s blood had touched it, the gold had dissolved, and she was left with something that looked like tattered lace. When she’d tried to play it, she found that it was useless.

Weeks passed. None of her repairs had worked. She needed to let it go, and at last, she felt ready.

She covered it with soil and crouched, arms wrapped around her knees. The pipe was a thing, not a living being. Nothing like Greta. Her loss was nothing like what Hans had suffered. And yet she grieved its loss. Deeply, and it shamed her.

Greta’s death had not just broken her pipe; it had broken something between her and Hans. This too was irreparable. She could not bring Greta back. She didn’t know how to help Hans.

She blew on her fingertips to warm them, but they stayed numb.

One evening while they were inside their tree, her mother had tried to help.

“What we saw,” Esme said, “was terrible. What was done to her should not have been done to any living thing. What she suffered should not have happened.”

“But it did.” Cappella took no care to keep the anger from her voice. “I hate Albrecht for doing this.”

“Hate is a strong word, my darling.”

Cappella fumed. Her mother had always cautioned her against hate. She wasn’t to hate eating mushrooms. She wasn’t to hate going to bed when she wasn’t tired. She wasn’t to hate the endless rain of spring. What was the use of having a word if it was too strong to use? When did hate apply, if not to someone who could do something so cruel?

She exploded in anger. “Look at Hans. Look at how sad he is. He’s alone in the world now. She was his last family.”

In the dim hollow, Cappella could see anguish in her mother’s face. Was it anguish over Greta? Or because Cappella had said the word hate? She didn’t care. Let her mother suffer too.

“I hate him. I don’t care that he is my family, that he is our family. I hate him.”

Her mother reached for her hand and held it. “Where will that hate get you?”

Cappella pulled away. “Why does it have to get me anywhere? Why can’t I just feel it?”

Her mother said nothing for a long, long time. “I hated my sister,” she said. “I hated her after what she did to me.”

The thought of her mother hating anyone struck Cappella as shocking. “What did she do to you?”

“I’ve let all of that go,” Esme said. “It doesn’t mean I have forgotten it, but I released it as something that can still make me suffer. I stewed about it for years. How it was unjust. How what she’d said about me, what she was willing to believe about me, was untrue. How nothing I could say to her would change her mind. How she’d made a choice. I hated her even as I missed her. All it did was make me lonely.”

“But what did she do and why won’t you tell me? How am I supposed to know anything if you keep the truth from me?” Cappella hurt all over. She’d cried so much her face felt raw, but she didn’t know how to stop.

“Don’t make me speak the words aloud, Cappella. Don’t make me feel that pain again.”

The anger that had felt like a bubble inside her burst. Her mother was lying to her even now. She hadn’t gotten over it. It still made her suffer. She’d just learned to live with it. Esme was lying to herself too, something that struck Cappella as impossibly sad. She’d thought that adulthood meant you could face the truth. She’d thought it was characterized by unflinching honesty. But it wasn’t. Not for everyone. Not for her mother.

“How long did it take you to feel better?”

Her mother put a finger on her lips and squinted. “I’ve never thought about it.” Then her lips curved into a gentle smile. “But I was angry until you came along, and then I had no time for anything else.”

Cappella snuffled and wiped her nose. “I hope you’re not suggesting I have a baby, because that would be disgusting.”

Her mother burst into a deep belly laugh that lasted a good long time. For a moment, Cappella’s grief subsided, but as soon as she became aware of its absence, it returned.

“I don’t know how to help Hans,” she said. “I don’t know what to say to him. I’m afraid to say the wrong thing.”

“Just be with him,” her mother said. “Play music for him.”

“I have to tell you something, Mama.” Cappella hadn’t called her that since she was little. “My pipe. My pipe was ruined.”

“The blood,” her mother said. “There was so much of it. That was always the problem with the gold.”

As soon as her mother mentioned gold, a piece of the puzzle fell into place. Her mother was the gold spinner. She’d seen her do it. How could she not have known this this? The queen had never been the one to make gold; it had been her mother all along. This had been the source of the rupture between them. Her mother must also have left the gold coins for Hans and Greta. That was another thing her gold spinning had done—sent her wolf to the kingdom.

“I can make you a new one, you know,” Esme said. “Exactly like the old one.”

And there it was. The truth. Cappella had figured it out, but she was relieved her mother had told her anyway. Cappella wanted a new pipe. She missed the weight of hers in her hand. Missed how it felt to breathe music into the world. She missed the way she could say things to people, make them feel things, even make them do things sometimes with her music. She’d helped heal Hans. She was certain of it. Whenever she played, people would come to her. She made substance from nothing more than breath. What was that but a binding sort of magic? It wasn’t like her mother’s, but it was magic all the same.

She refused her mother’s offer.

She didn’t want her mother to make anything else for her. She loved her, flaws and all. But she no longer wanted to depend on her. It was time for Cappella to find out who she was, apart from being Esme’s daughter. There was only one way to do that.

There was much Cappella didn’t know. She didn’t even know who her father was. She’d never felt the absence before, but she felt it acutely now—not for a person, but for what it told her about herself, about who she might become. In the absence of the truth, she realized something. That her identity was her own to forge, with her own hands, her own heart, her own unquenchable desire.

I am a musician. It was a fact. It was a promise.

She had to make her pipe herself. And she would. But it would not be made of gold.

The next day, she found Hans sitting alone on the riverbank, looking out at the kingdom. She joined him. He didn’t acknowledge her, but he moved his hand closer to hers. She closed the gap, weaving her fingers through his. The air turned their breath white.

“Don’t you want to be close to the fire? With the others?”

Hans shook his head. “I don’t get cold.”

It wasn’t true. He might have been warmer in general because he was a were, but his fingers were icy. It didn’t matter, though. She knew what he was really saying—that he wanted solitude. She almost left him there. But he hadn’t let go of her hand, and she took that as a sign. A bit of hope.

“Is it all right if I stay?” she asked.

He nodded.

As they sat, their hands laced, they didn’t talk about Greta. They didn’t talk about Albrecht.

“You haven’t played any music in a long time,” Hans said finally. “I’ve missed it.”

“My pipe.” She chose her words carefully. “It was broken. I’ll need a new one.”

“How does a golden pipe break?” He leaned away from her, and she hated the cold that bloomed between them.

“It was an accident.” She didn’t want to tell him about all the blood.

“Can something be made from the old one?”

“I tried for weeks. I want a different sort of pipe this time around. I want one made of wood.”

“I’ve no idea where you’re going to find any of that,” he said.

“Hans—” she started. Then she looked at his face. He was joking. He’d made a joke. She wanted to weep from joy. To tell a joke in the midst of heartbreak was to hope. To hope was to believe in change. In better days.

“Will you help me?” she asked.

“What I know about making musical instruments could fit on the back of one of Ursula’s fleas.”

“I’m telling Ursula you said she has fleas.”

“You wouldn’t!” He grabbed her wrists as if to hold her in place. They were both laughing.

“Oh, I most definitely would. Unless you help me make a new pipe.”

“Then I don’t see that I have any choice in the matter.” He hung his head in mock shame, and she was so happy to see it that she flung her arms around his neck. His face was warm, and his skin smelled of woodsmoke.

“Pella,” he said. He was crying. “I could have saved her, and I didn’t, and Sabine won’t even tell me how she died, which means it was awful.”

She realized that he didn’t know that she’d seen Greta die too. She didn’t want to tell him what she’d witnessed. It was too terrible to know. But then it struck her that was exactly what her mother had done to her. Nothing good had come of concealing painful truths. It was not the kind of person she wanted to be. Cappella put her face on his shoulder, and he had his on hers, and she wept with him as she told him what had happened to his sister.

“It’s not your fault,” she said afterward. “You did everything you could.”

“I feel ashamed.”

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.

“I’m ashamed to be alive.”

“Don’t say that, Hans. Don’t say it.”

“But it’s true.”

“Her death is not your fault. Albrecht did this. No one else.”

“What right have I to be happy, though? We’d promised we’d always take care of each other. I failed her.” He pulled away.

She chose her words with care. She spoke slowly, teeth chattering. “It’s the right of every living thing to feel joy at being alive. We don’t feel this all the time, maybe. That’s not possible. Not when there are people like Albrecht in this world. But if we didn’t feel the good things, at least some of the time, then what is the point of living?”

He didn’t answer. She didn’t mind. She knew he was thinking.

“And the thing is, Hans—” She swallowed. It was so hard to speak her whole heart. “The thing is, I need you. I know I don’t have any right to you. I’m not your flesh and blood. I’m just your friend. But when you say you are ashamed to have survived, when you say you don’t want to feel happiness, it kills me.”

“Cappella.” He put his hands on her cheeks. “I’ve no parents. I’ve no sister. You are everything I have left.”

He brought his lips to hers and kissed her gently, briefly.

Cappella didn’t feel the cold anymore. She needed more of him.

“You’re everything I’ve ever wanted,” she said.

His gray eyes had never looked so dark, so intense. But she understood. He was as hungry for her as she was for him. He kissed her again, and it was not gentle. He kissed her with force, with desperation, and she found that she could not get enough of it. Could not get close enough to him. She needed him the way a flame needs wood and air. There was no fire without that. Kissing him like this, she felt consumed by the heat. But she was not becoming ash; she was being transformed. Made new. She’d never felt so profoundly alive.

“Well,” he said afterward.

She couldn’t find any words. Her lips felt tender, as though she’d need to learn all over again how to work them.

“Shall we make you a new pipe?” he asked.

She made the most serious face she could. “But where will we find the wood?”

He looked back at her and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

She was about to suggest they try to find a tree when something whizzed overhead.

She thought at first it was a bird, but only owls wintered in the woods.

“What was that?” she asked.

Hans’s expression was pure horror. His skin was gray, and she thought he might faint.

“Albrecht,” he said.

She didn’t know what he meant.

“That was a rat. One of his rats.”

“But—”

“The wings. That’s what we were working on. He’s done it. He’s made a rat fly.”

Cries came from the camp.

Hans grabbed her hand. They took off running.