Chapter 25: Wenna — Summary and Analysis
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
Summary
The chapter opens with Wenna waking in the hearth to find Charlie gone. The house is wrecked from the storm—snow and debris cover the floor, the ceiling bulges warped overhead. Eda and Nora wake, and the three sisters follow a trail of footprints through the snow: boot soles mingled with bare feet, suggesting Percy and Charlie walked together but kept their distance from one another.
They find Percy crouched alone at the bog's mouth, scarecrow-thin in his moss sheath. Nora embraces him, but then they see what he has found: a body. Wenna's first thought is that it's Charlie, then that Percy has somehow dredged up a bog wife. Percy says, simply, that it's their mother.
The mother is alive but horrifically altered—small, gnarled, leathery, her entire body except her face slicked with mire, her face pressed slightly inward as if crushed by the weight of nearly eleven years in the peat. Wenna feels a wrenching, clear grief, more solid than anything she's felt in a decade. The mother croaks for water, and they feed her melted ice from the bog's mouth. She coughs up ooze in heavy lumps, then thin strings, until her body loosens.
She asks if their father is there. Wenna tells her he's buried. The mother says the soil is bad and asks to be moved to the trees. They carry her like a burial performed backward, bearing her impossibly light body in their arms. At the tree line, Percy breaks the frozen ground with a rust-eaten spade, and the mother sinks her fingers into the soft soil beneath, her stiffness easing as she connects with the earth.
Nora gently clears the mother's eyes with snow-water. When she opens them, they are round and white in her tannin-darkened face—the only parts of her that seem fully alive. She recognizes Nora, then Wenna, then asks for Charles. Charlie is nowhere to be found.
She asks to see the bog's mouth. As they carry her across the meadow, she says mournfully,