Cappella ran for the camp. She couldn’t feel her hands or her feet. She’d gone numb with fear. She would rather have been killed herself than tell everyone the children were gone. She stumbled when she arrived. She’d winded herself and couldn’t speak, and when someone came over to help her up with the gentlest of hands, Cappella burst into tears.

“The children,” she said. “He has the children. Albrecht does.”

People panicked. It was chaos: cries of grief, weres taking their animal form. Ursula loomed. “How did this happen?”

Cappella was so ashamed to tell her. She should have stopped them from getting onto the wagon. She knew it, even then. But she’d wanted to be with Hans, and she’d let that happen, and now he was gone, the children too.

She told Ursula everything. Ursula cursed and Cappella feared for a moment she’d be struck. Her mother stood between her and the angry were.

“This isn’t Cappella’s fault.”

Ursula stepped back. “I know. This is my brother’s doing. But—”

“We have to go get them,” Sabine said. “You and I can do it together.”

“This is my task,” Ursula said. “My brother is my responsibility. I cannot ask anyone else to do what needs to be done—to slay the king.”

Sabine’s mouth opened. “Are you certain?”

Ursula nodded. “You stay here, Sabine. Guard the camp.”

“I’m going with you,” Sabine said.

The music of the forest now was terrible, terrifying. She couldn’t remember a time it had been so loud or so dissonant for so long, and she understood what the trees were feeling and what they were saying. It was exactly what she felt and what she could not say, could never say, because there was too much shame. If she’d had a pipe, she would have played along with the forest. She knew that’s what the trees were asking of her. But she didn’t even have that, and she’d left the wood for her new pipe behind at the edge of the trees.

Then the forest went silent. The sudden absence of sound was eerie. There was a crunch of snow. Someone was coming. Many people. A soldier burst from the darkness, his sword high. A dozen more followed. Ursula and Sabine killed two before Cappella had a chance to scream. But they were outnumbered, and when a pair of men tied Sabine in ropes and held a knife to her throat, everybody froze.

The remaining weres were no match for Albrecht’s men. They brought out ropes, enough to tie up everyone.

“Line up!” the first soldier yelled.

“Don’t do it,” Ursula said. “Run, everyone!”

Then came something like the crack of a whip. Branches shot forward. The trees snared the men. It happened in the space of a blink. Albrecht’s men hung overhead, each one suspended in the bare branches. They writhed and cursed and reached for weapons.

As Ursula’s people watched from below, Albrecht’s men shriveled. Their screams ceased. Their corpses folded upon themselves like dry leaves. Their clothing and weapons dropped. Their flesh became dust.

No one watching said a word. Their horror was expressed in silence. In stillness.

The music started again, and the red branches glistened and crackled in the freezing night air.

Sabine spoke first. “Gather the weapons. The boots, the armor. We’ll need it all.”

Cappella helped, and soon all the supplies were heaped at the edge of the clearing. Ursula handed her mother a knife. Then she put a hand on Cappella’s shoulder. “If more of Albrecht’s men come, hide. The woods will take care of them.”

Cappella nodded. She knew why Ursula was telling her this. She wouldn’t be able to defend herself or anyone else. Hiding was her best way to survive. She was useless.

Worse than that. Her mother stood at her elbow, and Cappella felt a sudden burst of fresh rage. Part of the anger was at Albrecht, but part was for her mother, who’d kept her naive.

Her mother should have told her things. Everything. That way she could have made herself ready. Her mother had concealed things not to spare Cappella, but to spare herself the pain of truth.

Her rage made her want to hit Esme. To drive her elbow into the soft space below her ribs. Rather than do this thing she knew to be wrong, Cappella ran.

Her mother called behind her, but Cappella wouldn’t stop. She needed to take action. She couldn’t fight. She couldn’t help Hans or Sabine or Ursula. Couldn’t rescue any of the children or even protect the people who remained. She had one thing to do, one gift to give.

She needed to find the wood. Finish the pipe. Play the music. The forest wanted her to. It needed her to. It had given her the very piece of wood she required. She’d lost it, but she could find it again. She could finish the work. She had to.

Snow was falling when she reached the edge of the woods—landscape remade by fresh snow. Whiteness was everywhere she looked. Snow had gathered on their branches, changing their shapes, confusing her memories. Which ones had she stood beneath with Hans?

Before she’d closed her eyes and kissed him, she’d taken them in, knowing that she’d want to save the moment for her memories. Then she remembered. She ran to the spot and studied the ground. There. A lump in the snow. Her fingers closed around the branch. She sat on a snow-covered stone looking at this perfect stick. She had no knife. Ursula had given weapons to everyone she thought could use them well. She had not given one to Cappella.

“Cappella.” It was her mother. She’d followed her, found her. She was winded, her breath coming in puffs of mist.

“Leave me alone,” Cappella said.

“Come back with me.”

Cappella knew she’d have to, if only for a knife she could use to carve her pipe. But she didn’t want Esme to think she could just say something and have Cappella do it. Not anymore.

“I don’t want to.”

“Please,” Esme said.

“You should have told me the truth about who you are. About who I am. About this world we live in.”

“I’ve never lied to you,” Esme said.

There was a difference between the truth and the absence of a lie. Cappella knew this now. “Who’s my father, then?”

The question shocked Esme. She stood still, only her expression shifting, like water in a river. Her mother was thinking about what to say. About how much she could get away with not saying.

Cappella lashed out. “Even now, you’re thinking of ways to conceal the truth. You might not be planning to lie. But I can see from your face that you are trying to craft an answer that will satisfy me, even as it is empty.”

Esme exhaled. Her breath coated her hair with beads that were first silver and then stark white in the moonlight.

She spoke at last, her voice small, weary. “I don’t know. Cappella, I do not know. I—” She fell to her knees. “There is something I will tell you. Something I should have told you years ago, but I was afraid it would make you feel less than mine. I was afraid you would not want me as a mother. All my life, I have been rejected, cast aside, and I could not bear that from you.”

Then she told Cappella everything. About the lie her father told the Golden Lion. About the exchange she’d made with the woods. About the music that followed. About her sister and the king and what they’d accused her of doing. They’d said she’d wanted to steal Ursula and Albrecht because she had no womb. That part of it—that she was without one—was true, and it made everything else seem true as a result.

Her mother told her about her escape from the dungeon. How she’d tried to make a child and failed. And then about the day the woods had offered up Cappella, how that had felt like forgiveness, even redemption.

Cappella could feel the truth of it, the grief, the sorrow, the love that all truths contain. She dropped to the snow and embraced her mother. Her anger was melting, being transformed into something gentler even as it was complex. She ached for all her mother had suffered. She wished things had been different. The truth had given her answers and it had given her more questions. But one thing she was certain of. Esme was hers. Esme was her mother.

“A person doesn’t need a womb to be a mother,” Cappella said. “And a womb doesn’t make someone a woman. Anyone who’d make such a claim is not only cruel but foolish.”

And as for not having a father, well, perhaps Cappella had been fortunate there. Esme’s own father had betrayed her and her sister. The king had betrayed the queen and his children. The lies of one father, the betrayal of another: These wrongs had set in motion many sorrows. It didn’t mean that all fathers were like this. Hans’s father had been good; he’d told her so.

Fatherhood shouldn’t entitle a man to sacrifice his daughter for gold. Nothing entitled a man to reach for a woman who was not his wife. Nothing entitled a man to someone who did not want him. And nothing made it all right for the queen to sacrifice her sister rather than face the truth about her own life and its limits. Sisters should not betray each other for the sake of arrangements made by men for their own advantage.

There was something broken in the world between women and men, and perhaps that started with the idea of such distinctions in the first place. It was the same system that punished and caged weres like Hans. Why was it lesser to be a woman? Why was it a crime to be more than one thing? Why could people not be exactly who they chose to be in the world? Who was harmed when people lived their own truths?

Cappella wasn’t lesser for being fatherless. It was who she was: the daughter of a woman, the child of the woods.

Cappella knew she couldn’t fix the brokenness of the world. Not alone. But she could see it, and she could tell the truth about it. That was what the forest had done with its music. And that truth had been powerful. Combined with her mother’s love and her mother’s hunger, it had made her.

She picked up the piece of wood.

“I want to make a new pipe,” she said. “But I haven’t got a knife.”

“I do.”

“Mother,” Cappella said.

Esme gave her the knife.