The house smelled of lavender and something else Lena couldn't name. Something deeper, older. Like wet stone on a summer day, when the sun draws the rain out of the granite.
She stood in the hallway, still holding the key in her hand. Margret had been dead for three weeks now. Three weeks in which Lena had sat in Copenhagen, surrounded by seminar papers and ceramic fragments from the Funnel Beaker culture, telling herself there was no reason to come right away. The funeral was over. The house wasn't going anywhere.
But the house had been waiting.
She could feel it in the way the air stood in the hallway—still, patient, as though someone had held their breath and never exhaled. The floorboards creaked beneath her shoes, and the sound was so familiar it hurt. Third floorboard from the left, the one with the crack. Margret had always said the house spoke through its floors.
Lena set down her bag and went into the kitchen.
Everything was tidy. Not the sterile order of an abandoned apartment, but Margret's order—every object in its place because it belonged there and nowhere else. The cups hung from their hooks, the blue ones on the left, the white ones on the right. The cutting board leaned against the window, its cut edge facing the wall. On the table lay a stack of mail that someone—the neighbor, presumably—had brought inside.
And beside it, half-hidden by an envelope from the municipal administration, lay the notebook.
It wasn't large. Maybe as wide as her hand, bound in dark brown leather that had lightened at the corners, worn smooth by decades—no, by more than decades. Lena picked it up. The leather was soft and warm, as though someone had been holding it only moments before.
She opened it.
The first page was in Margret's handwriting. Small, upright letters Lena knew as well as her own.
*For Lena. When you're ready.*
She turned the page. The next few pages were Margret's as well—notes, place names, dates. Karlsminde. Kahleby. Brodersby. Denghoog. Beside them were sketches: floor plans of stone chambers, cross sections of burial mounds, directions. Everything rendered in the precise, loving manner with which Margret had captured the world.
But then the handwriting changed.
Page after page, farther and farther back. Different hands, different inks. Some entries were written in a German Lena could barely decipher—old-fashioned, ornate, with letters that no longer existed. And before that, still deeper in the book, were pages in a script she didn't recognize. Runes, perhaps, or something even older.
Lena sat down.
Outside, the wind moved through the birches in the garden, and the leaves made the sound she had thought was whispering when she was a child. Margret had never contradicted her. *The trees are talking, Lena. You just have to be quiet enough.*
She had taken it for poetry. For the endearing eccentricity of an old woman who spent too much time alone in a house on the edge of Angeln.
Lena turned back to Margret's first page and read on.
*The places are dying, Lena. Not all at once, but one after another. The stone near Karlsminde—I can barely hear it anymore. The spring in Kahleby fell silent three years ago. I don't know whether it's because of me or because of the world. Maybe both.*
*You'll read this and think your grandmother was crazy. That's all right. I would have thought the same thing. But go to the places. Just once. Lay your hand on the stone near Karlsminde and be still. If you hear nothing, burn this book and live your life. If you hear something—*
The sentence ended there. No period, no comma. As though Margret had set down her pen and hadn't known how to continue.
Or as though she had known the rest couldn't be put into words.
Lena closed the book. Her hands weren't trembling, but something in her chest was—an almost imperceptible vibration, like a string someone had plucked before she entered the room.
She looked out the kitchen window. Beyond the birches, beyond the garden, beyond the fields lay the Schlei, gray and still beneath the July evening. And somewhere out there, half an hour away on foot, stood the long barrow at Karlsminde.
Lena put the notebook in her bag.
Not today. But soon.