Petra suspects Faramund of being a religious man. When he touches her, his hands are gentle and cautious, bereft of the potent spirit that lives in the hands of people like Siegfried. In his quiet company, she senses a certain permissiveness. Her resolve, great as it is, weakens evermore in this room bereft of judgement. She looks at her wounds, looks around her at this strange, sparse house and at the man cleaning her up, who in turn returns her gaze with a priest’s compassion.

It is only now that her body gives her permission to cry. Silently at first, but soon the sobs force their way out, seemingly of their own volition. Mother, she thinks, father, brother. She could not help them, nor anyone else. Not even herself. Soon she will die because she has destroyed the lord’s property. She will die for nothing, and after she dies and her family dies a little after her, the sky will move over this mean, dark earth slow and unchanged.

And worse than her imminent death or the unchanging sky is the inevitable passage of Siegfried beneath it every autumn, raping the landscape and the ravishing the purses of fathers, his feet treading everywhere she once stood, over and over. Petra’s tears sting her face. It is so sore she cannot bury it in her hands like she wants to. Yet she perseveres in shedding the tears.

Faramund puts a hand on her shoulder.