Kristofer Blix has lived his life in a haze since summer’s end, never sober if he can help it. When he isn’t sitting in a pub or an inn, he has been staggering around the alleys. He wakes up wherever sleep last found him, in a doorway or next to a fence or in his own vomit in a corner of the Scorched Plot, and when he wakes and finds that no wagon wheel has crushed him in the half-light, it seems that the world itself is taunting him. For a few appalling moments each morning, hungover and between sleep and consciousness, he is back in his dank bedroom, facing another day when he will wash the shrinking man in his care and pour more wine down his throat, apply a tourniquet, cut away, carry off the remains to Magnus in his shed, sit shaking in a corner, and drink himself to sleep while the shadows descend on the haunted decay of the estate and the tawny owl howls from the forest. Even now, afterwards, aquavit is the only source of relief. He seeks the bottle whenever he can. His body wastes away but his core is still young and resilient. It still has power to resist the poisons he feeds it, long enough for him to meet the girl. Her name is Lovisa Ulrika, and she has asked him for help. She needs it and there is no one else. Kristofer Blix understands that this is a golden thread of mercy that has been extended to him in the darkness where he lives out his final days. Providence has given him the possibility to atone, a life for a life.
The girl lets him stay at the Scapegrace until morning. His shirt is dry and the fabric so clean that it feels as if the entire item of clothing has been replaced by something better. For the first time since his return to Stockholm, it is not brandy that he sets out to find. He needs it no longer. Instead he steers his course out towards the edge of the city, over Slaughterhouse Bridge, past the fish market, and north along the Rill and the Bog. He makes a circle around the Cat’s Rump Tollgate and seeks what he is looking for in the Great Shade by Lill-Jans. There, the tree trunks stand quietly, the forest is empty and cold, and the leaves are like flames glowing in red and gold. Soon they will fall. It is late in the season but he scans the earth around stumps and uprooted trees, all the kinds of places that Emanuel Hoffman once showed him.
He returns to her the following day with the promised herbs in his pocket. The girl, Lovisa, seems surprised and has trouble adjusting to the difference that has come over him. He declines both wine and spirits, but eats ravenously of the bread she gives him. He has bound the herbs into tiny bouquets for her to store hanging up in order to conserve their potency, and he asks her for a pot. He shows her each step and ensures that she has grasped what should be done.
“Allow the decoction to simmer until the water changes color. Strain it through a cloth and drink it when it is cool enough. Make a fresh batch each evening.”
“How will I get more herbs when these are gone?”
“I’ll gather them and bring them to you.”
Anna Stina takes her first sip, likely prepared for a taste at least as bitter as coffee or as sharp as brandy. Kristofer knows that the mixture doesn’t taste strong at all and he sees the relief on her face.
“How does it work?”
“The herbs awaken a thirst in your flesh, and it is the unborn child that is consumed until nothing remains. That was how my master put it when he explained it to me. But the process takes time. You will have to be patient. This method is the best and the safest.”
In the middle of October the news reaches him. In the Extra Post he reads that a dead man has been found and he knows it can’t be anyone else. A body has been rescued from Larder Lake, without arms and legs, without eyes and teeth and tongue. His handiwork. Kristofer shudders at the reminder but takes comfort in the fact that the suffering he helped to cause is now finally relieved. He says a prayer for the dead man and knows that he is walking another path now. Every day he visits the girl to assure himself of her health, and he waits another week before he tackles what he has long prepared for. One morning, freezing as he does so, he washes his stained clothes in the stream, lets them dry in the autumn sun, and makes his way to Nikolai Church to speak with the pastor. He waits until there is an appointment for him, presents himself, and explains why he has come.
“I intend to take a wife.”
Kristofer leaves his name and that of Lovisa Ulrika Tulip. The pastor congratulates him and asks him about his home parish. He answers that the Blix family has always belonged to Fredrik Church and the pastor promises to send a message as soon as he can so that the banns can be read there as well.
Kristofer can no longer put off the only matter that remains. He takes the hill down to the Scapegrace and waits until evening falls and the hour for his daily visit has come. As the girl is preparing her daily decoction, he stops her by placing his hand on hers. He picks out one of the leaves and holds it up before her.
“This is field horsetail. Master Hoffman told me it was good for the liver.”
He chooses a flower.
“This is Saint John’s wort. It is what makes the water red.”
He picks up more and explains their beneficial effects: angelica, sweet gale, cow parsley. One he saves until the end.
“And this is chamomile. I chose it for the taste. None of them have any power to harm your child.”
She doesn’t know what to say but Kristofer sees how the color rises in her cheeks.
“You are too far along now. There is no time. You can’t get rid of it anymore. The child will be born.”
He can’t pick out any words in her screams. She beats him with her open hands, in the face, on his chest, wherever she can reach. At first he stands still and accepts her blows without defending himself, then she comes closer to him and he opens his arms to fold her sobbing body in an embrace. The strength drains from her, she calms down, and into her ear he whispers that he is having their banns read, that the child shall bear his name. It will not arrive in the world a bastard, she will not birth it in sin.
Anna Stina Knapp no longer knows what to say or feel. She is carrying Löf’s piglet, a seed planted in evil and with violence. For a long time she has imagined the unborn as she saw his face in the glow of the pipe: a malignant phantom hovering in her own dark interior with a mocking smile on its lips. Even so her feelings have evolved as time has gone by, and it is with increasing hesitation that she takes the medicine she has been given. She can feel it, the life that grows inside her, still only faintly, like the brush of a moth’s wings. How could something so tiny, fruit of her own body, become like its father against her will? Now the choice has been made for her.
When she goes to Karl Tulip and tells him, he starts to cry and it takes her a while to realize that they are tears of joy. He embraces her, puts his ear to her belly, and tells her that he had a dream that he was to have a grandchild and how he woke up delirious with joy. He doesn’t ask who the father is. She tells him anyway. It is Kristofer Blix, the thin surgeon whose health has improved so much lately. He has proposed marriage to her. They will be wed as soon as some time can be found. Tulip flashes a knowing smile with a glint in his eye that lifts decades off his furrowed face.
“You know, I have seen the two of you together. I thought as much. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes and I’d have to be blind not to see that there’s something going on between the two of you.”
Something has shifted inside her. At night, Anna Stina doesn’t dream the same dream about the Red Rooster, that she is the blaze—filled with roaring hatred—that decimates Stockholm and leaves it in smoldering ruins. It is the child that is the fire now, but not one that ravages. Rather, one that forges and reshapes. She will bring life into these accursed times and the child—be it girl or boy—will be hers to raise. It will not become like the others. It will grow up, grow strong, and help make this world into something else, rid of injustice and malice. The child will bring children of its own into the world who will continue the struggle and the chain will endure. Such will be her vengeance on this hateful world. If it is a boy, he shall be named Karl Kristofer, after his father and grandfather. If it is a girl, she will be Anna Stina, named for someone who no longer exists but who will not be forgotten.