The fog comes in low and patient, curling around the field like it has all the time in the world and nowhere better to be, settling into the hollows and dips of the land.

  People say the Witte Wieven live here—women made of mist, white wives, wise women, depending on who’s telling the story. They say the Witte Wieven lure the lost astray, coaxing them off paths and into water, into ground that doesn’t give you back once it has you.

  They never mention how gentle they are about it.

  I tell myself I’m just walking, that I’m not lost, that this narrow path through the field is one I’ve taken a hundred times before, back when my mother was still alive and I still trusted the land to behave itself. The fog beads on my eyelashes and dampens my hair, cold and close, smelling of wet grass and iron and something deeper beneath it, like stones that have spent far too long underwater learning the taste of bones.

  I should turn back. The thought arrives sensible and intact, carrying all the reasonable arguments with it, but it doesn’t stick, sliding off my mind the way everything else seems to slide off tonight.

  My name is Mara. I am thirty-two years old, and my mother drowned when I was nine.

  They called it an accident back then, the sort that fits neatly into paperwork and village gossip alike: slipped on the canal bank, fog too thick to see the edge, unfortunate but not suspicious. The canal took her the way canals always do—quietly, efficiently, without witnesses—and for a long time I believed that explanation because believing it was easier than asking what else might be true.

  The path narrows as I walk, the packed earth giving way to mud that sucks greedily at my boots, making obscene little sounds every time I pull a foot free. The fog thickens until the world feels muffled, padded, as though someone has wrapped everything in wool to keep it from making a fuss.

  “Mara,” a voice says, calm and female, close enough that it makes my shoulders tighten.

  I stop so abruptly that my next breath catches halfway in. Every muscle locks at once, my body choosing stillness as if that might make me harder to see. I answer before I can stop myself, because reflex is faster than fear. “Yes?”

  The fog ahead of me stirs, reshaping itself, and women step out of it one by one until there are six of them standing where the path should be, pale figures in pale dresses whose skirts brush the grass without ever quite touching it. Their hair is loose or braided or pinned in styles my grandmother would have recognized, and their faces are the worst kind of ordinary. No hollow eyes, no twisted smiles, just calm expressions and eyes the color of deep, patient water.

  “You shouldn’t be here alone,” one of them says gently, her voice warm with concern.

  “I’m fine,” I say, because stubbornness has always been my first line of defense. “I live nearby.”

  “That’s what your mother said,” another replies, and the words hit me low and hard, knocking the breath from my chest before I can brace for it.

  I don’t ask how they know that. Some answers only make things worse.

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  The fog shifts behind them and suddenly the canal is there, cutting across the path in a way it shouldn’t, its dark surface perfectly still, reflecting nothing, not the women, not the sky, just darkness like an unblinking eye. Cold radiates from it, not the kind of cold that lives in the air but the kind that sinks straight into bone and settles there.

  “I don’t want to go near the water,” I say, and hear the thinness in my own voice.

  “Of course you do,” the nearest woman says kindly. “You came all this way.”

  “I came to think,” I snap, already hating how small and defensive I sound.

  “That too,” another agrees. “Thinking hurts less near water. Everything does.”

  The fog presses in behind me, and when I turn, the path I came from is gone—not hidden or blocked, but simply erased, as though it had never existed at all. The space where it should be is filled with fog and grass and nothing else, and my pulse stutters, hard and erratic, beating in my throat and wrists and behind my eyes. “Don’t,” I say, the word tearing out of me. “Please.”

  They move closer, not touching, not grabbing, just leaning in enough that standing still begins to feel unbearably wrong. “You remember her,” one says softly, and my chest tightens until it aches.

  “I remember my mother,” I say, because it feels important to say it out loud.

  “She remembers you,” another replies, and the fog thickens, dampening sound until my own breathing feels too loud, too fast.

  Then I hear it—a small splash, like someone slowly wading into the water.

  “Mara,” my mother’s voice says, perfect and precise, exactly as it sounded the last night I heard it, low and tired and trying not to frighten me. “I’m here. Come on. The water’s not that cold.”

  My knees go weak, the ground seeming to tilt beneath me, and I shake my head violently even as something small and exhausted inside me reaches for the sound. “That’s not real,” I whisper.

  “Of course it is,” one of the women says. “It remembers her shape. Her sound. The way she said your name when she wanted you to come closer.”

  The water ripples, and a figure stands in it now, waist-deep, coat floating around her like a dark flower, hair slicked back from a face I know too well. My mother lifts her hand and smiles, and the expression is so perfect it nearly breaks me.

  “You always hated being alone,” she says. “I know you’re tired.”

  The women don’t push me. They don’t need to. The fog does the work for them, pressing gently at my back as I take a step forward, the mud at the canal’s edge slick and treacherous beneath my boots.

  “Careful,” someone murmurs. “The edge is easy to miss.”

  My foot slips, and I windmill my arms, heart lurching—but I catch myself, panting, cold already seeping through my soles. I try to step back, but the fog tightens, just enough, and my foot slides again.

  This time I don’t catch myself. The bank gives way under my weight, wet earth smearing uselessly between my fingers as I pitch forward into the canal, the cold slamming into me so hard it feels like being struck. The water surges up my legs, then my waist, my coat dragging me down instantly, heavy and traitorous, pulling at my shoulders like hands.

  I scream, but the sound vanishes into the fog, torn away before it can reach anyone that might care.

  I thrash, trying to stand, but the bottom slopes sharply and the mud slides under my boots like it’s alive, pulling me deeper with every frantic movement. The water climbs higher, chest and shoulders swallowed in seconds, my breath coming in short, panicked gasps that already feel too small.

  “Mara,” my mother’s voice says, closer now, right in front of me. “Stop fighting. You’re making it worse.”

  I look up and see her standing impossibly steady in the water, eyes dark and patient, mouth smiling not with love but with hunger, and when I try to back away, the current tangles my legs and yanks them out from under me. I go under with a choking gasp, cold water slamming into my face, my mouth, my nose, burning and metallic as it floods in faster than I can spit it out.

  I kick wildly, hands scraping along the canal wall, finding nothing but slime-slick stone and mud that refuses to hold. My nails tear but I barely register the pain. I break the surface long enough to cough and gag, dragging in another lungful of water instead of air, and through blurred vision I see the women standing on the bank, skirts immaculate, watching with the calm attention of people waiting for something inevitable.

  “Please,” I choke, and one of them tilts her head. “You’re already with us,” she says gently. “You just haven’t finished yet.”

  The water surges again, something wrapping around my ankle yanking me sideways as my head strikes stone and stars explode behind my eyes. Panic becomes pain becomes something vast and roaring as my lungs burn and convulse, desperate for air that isn’t there, every reflex betraying me by pulling more water in.

  Above me, blurred through the surface, pale shapes lean closer, and my mother’s face appears distorted by the water, her mouth moving as she says, “You did so well.” her voice stretched thin and wrong now, like something wearing her sound.

  My vision tunnels. The cold is everywhere, inside me, crushing, and as the canal forces its way deeper and deeper, my body finally understands that there will be no more air.