I’m almost to the door when I hear the kommandant’s voice calling for me. I pause, turning.
Inside me, panic boils like acid through my veins. I am harboring a witch, a real one, and I am plotting to break your empire of fear, I think. But nothing shows behind my eyes.
I hope.
“Otto, friend, walk with me,” Kommandant Kirch says.
I want to rush down the stairs and take the aqueducts to the house where I’ve hidden Fritzi. She’s no doubt confused and afraid. She deserves an explanation. And I deserve to know where she sent Hilde.
But it is not wise to go against any suggestion from the kommandant.
We head down to the ground floor of the Porta Nigra, a church used to praise Saint Simeon. It is empty now, save for some pilgrims and a priest praying. I can just hear the mutters of one of the pilgrims, begging God for blessings for his ill wife. I am glad that the hexenjägers share a building with a church; the pilgrims remind me that not all who claim to be Christian are evil.
We step out the front door onto the stone courtyard. The sun is high in the sky, but it casts neither warmth nor shadows.
This may be the ground floor of the Porta Nigra, but only because this is a repurposed ancient Roman building. With age, the city has sunk deeper and deeper into the ground. The courtyard can only be reached by a wide staircase that opens up before the street that leads to the main market.
Dieter moves around the building to face the river. It’s quiet here, colder, more private even than inside his office, where Bertram no doubt beats upon the door of the closet, pleading to be released.
“Tell me about the witch,” Dieter says, leaning against the wall and looking at the Moselle River. “The powerful one.”
He doesn’t know, I think, forcing myself to believe it. He doesn’t know Fritzi is safe in my hidden house; he doesn’t know what I plan to do. He does not.
“She is unlike any other we have arrested,” I say truthfully. “She chanted—something—and smoke filled the cottage. My sister…disappeared.”
Saying it out loud makes bile rise in my throat. Hilde is still missing. I have only the word of a witch that she’s safe now, but—
“What did the witch chant?” Dieter presses. “Can you remember the words?”
“Er…” I frown, struggling to recall the moment. I was fully engaged in the duplicity of arresting Hilde, of appearing to the men to be the hero hexenjäger who would sacrifice his own family. I was so focused on what I said that I had not really taken note of what Fritzi had said. “A spell of some sort.”
“Obviously,” Dieter replies dryly.
I’m lost in thought, visualizing the moment. “She had herbs too,” I add. “I could smell herbs in the smoke. Rosemary perhaps?”
“Herbs?” Dieter straightens, turning to face me fully. “Herbs, you say?”
I nod. “Is that important?”
“There are different types of witches, Otto. Some speak to animals. Some see visions in fires. Some use herbs to cast spells.”
“Huh.”
Dieter watches me closely. Fritzi—she means something to him.
“The other men have filled me in on descriptions of this witch,” Dieter adds, rattling off an approximate height and weight for Fritzi, as well as her hair and eye color. It’s mostly accurate, but also generic. “Can you tell me anything else about the girl?”
I pause. Silence and guilt go hand in hand. Before I can speak, though, Dieter adds, “A name, even? The men say that you spoke to the witch privately.”
Her name is Fritzi, I think.
I snort. “I spoke only to try to get the hexe to tell me the location of my half sister, so that I could find and arrest her too,” I say. “My threats fell on deaf ears. That witch had more spirit than any woman should, and no respect at all.”
For just a moment—a flash, barely there and gone again—Dieter seems to…smile. I narrow my eyes, and he, seeing my expression, quickly schools his face into a blank mask.
“The solstice burning shall be in two days,” Dieter says. “It will be a good purge. We have over a hundred.” He casts his pale, eerie eyes at me. “You shall have the honor, I think. To light the first flames.”
I duck my head, mutter my thanks.
“It has not escaped my attention that this honor has been denied you,” Dieter continues, turning his gaze to the sky. “I watched your training. You are an excellent fighter, a position that led you to patrolling the diocese more often than working directly in the city, and your literacy and intelligence have, of course, aided the archbishop’s decrees behind a desk.”
“I serve in any way God desires,” I say. I had not been aware that Dieter had watched me so closely. Has he realized that my patrols are always fruitless? Has he noticed the misfiled paperwork, the delays that have led to escapes? I had thought myself clever, my tracks covered, but…
“Your lineage aided your aspirations, but it is…wrong, don’t you think, that you not feel the heat of God’s love through a burning pyre?”
“It would be an honor,” I manage to say without choking on the words. “A hundred witches to burn at once.”
“And you with the torch in your hand.” He looks at me with lips curved up, but that is no smile. “The bigger the fire, the more souls saved. One hundred.” He says the number as if it is something to relish, something to enjoy.
I do not think about that number.
Instead, I focus on the other one.
Two days for me to realign my entire plan, for me to save them all.
And, hopefully, disrupting the largest burning of witches that Trier has yet seen will be enough to rattle the rest of the citizens, for them to throw off the shackles of fear and say, as one, no more.
That is what I hope for. I do not deceive myself, though. I may not be able to spark the revolution I desire. I may not be able to save all hundred.
A hundred and one, I remind myself—one hundred falsely accused witches and one real one.
“Yes, it will be a good day,” Dieter says, noting the smile toying on my lips. Schiesse. I had not meant to show any emotion. “Better, of course, if we can add that other witch to the flames. I have sent more men out. There are places she could hide in this city. But not for long.”
My stomach churns. “Perhaps she’s left the city?” I suggest.
Dieter barks in humorless laughter. “No,” he says in full confidence. “She has not left Trier.”
How does he know?
While Dieter stares placidly at the river, panic surges through me. Black dots dance in my eyes. I’m so close to making my move, but if I fail now, more than a hundred lives hang in the balance.
Including my own.
I wait for Dieter to go back into the Porta Nigra before I leave, walking down the stairs toward the street slowly.
I take careful, measured steps. My back is straight. Even now, I may be watched. I cannot tip my hand. I cannot. Even if my heart thunders in my ears, I walk away from the hexenjäger base as if I bear neither sin nor worry.
I carry two maps in my head. One is of the aqueducts beneath me. The other is here, the real city of Trier, the paths that once started as organized Roman grids and have slowly evolved into chaos, with little alleys connecting one side street to another, wooden planks on roofs linking one building to another, hidden doors providing passage from one home to another.
That’s the difference between a village and a city. In a village, all the people are connected—my mother knew every single person who gathered around her pyre to watch her burn. She helped midwife some of the women’s babies; she sold beer to every family. But in a city, the people aren’t connected.
The buildings are.
I head from the Porta Nigra roughly south, toward the Hauptmarkt. There’s a noticeable shift in my reception as I near the market. Close to the church, men call out greetings, some salute me or bow before the black cloak. But it doesn’t take long for me to see a child skid to a stop and race off down an alleyway to avoid crossing my path. A woman crosses herself and mutters a prayer of protection when my cloak swishes past her door. An old man pretends to cough, but I see the smirk when his spittle hits my shoulder.
Not everyone loves hexenjägers.
And that gives me hope.
The main market of Trier sells a little bit of everything from sunup to sundown, but currently, with Advent already begun, it’s a Christkindlmarkt. While the staples are still available, every open space is now crammed with stalls selling something seasonal. Warm spices fill the air, scents flickering like candlelight. There are more people in the city now than there were a month ago; fall is a busy time for harvests, but there’s little to do in winter other than make a day’s journey into the city and imbibe in too many sweets and too much beer.
This, too, was part of the plan. I have spent the past few years finding small ways to undermine the hexenjägers, saving individuals, but it was never enough. This was to be the coup de grâce that would light a spark for a revolution instead of a pyre.
The prisoners in the basilica were to escape through the tunnels, the aqueducts providing the perfect route. Hilde was going to instruct the prisoners on the paths I’d been secretly teaching her in our private correspondence, telling them the best ways to disappear and splitting the groups up so that a handful went down one path, another cluster went a different way, and so on.
We were going to work with chaos, using the confusion of the breakout to mask the way groups of prisoners split up in different directions. I had carefully selected the routes, ensuring the aqueduct passages provided an outlet into abandoned homes or empty buildings. I had already stockpiled old clothing for disguises—from there, the plan was for the prisoners to disperse into the Christkindlmarkt, disappearing into the crowds as one more shopper, one more worshiper, one more random villager out for the day.
I’d factored in everything but Fritzi.
“Beer?” a pretty girl with braids says. She carries a yoke with buckets across her shoulder, a ladle in her hand. Her eyes drop to my cloak, the enameled brooch marking me as a hexenjäger. Her voice trembles when she adds, “Just one pfennig to wet your lips and warm your gut.” I glance down at the beer open in her bucket, and she dips the ladle into the liquid, holding the frothy brew out to me. Her hand trembles. “You can have it for free, jäger.”
I shake my head, and she shrugs, turning to offer the brew to another man, one who pays a penny to drink from the communal ladle. I ignore them, striding through the market, shoving past the men drunk on beer and the children drunk on honey. I whip my black cloak off, shoving it under my arm and hiding the brooch that marks me as a hexenjäger. I turn away from the main crowd, down a shrouded street blocked off with a plastered-brick stone archway. There’s no sign affixed atop the archway, but everyone in Trier knows—this is the Judengasse.
The Jewish Quarters in Trier were originally robust and vibrant. The Jews lived close together, not by law, but because their temple was nearby. Eventually, the Judengasse became an eruv, allowing activities in that area that would otherwise be forbidden on the Sabbath.
But with every plague, every drought, every flood, the Jews were blamed, over and over again. They were banned more than once, exiled from the city if not the entire diocese. Perhaps banishment years ago was safer than if they had stayed. Perhaps I only tell myself that to assuage the guilt of my people against theirs.
There are many abandoned areas inside the city walls. But none more empty than the Judengasse.
I learned long ago, however, that there is rarely a truly empty place. Orphans—there are quite a few these days—and the homeless scavenge scraps and live in the shells of homes. While many buildings were seized and sold for profit—I mean, of course, for the benefit of the Church—the archbishop turns a blind eye here, preferring to pretend the entire Judengasse does not exist rather than deal with the starving homeless lurking in its shadows.
A pebble bounces off my shoulder.
I turn and see a pair of wide eyes looking at me from the doorway of a house with broken glass windows. I reach into my pocket, pulling out a coin and tossing it to the little girl waiting for me. She snatches it from the air and disappears. Little Mia keeps both my secrets and my pennies ever since I first saved her and her brother.
Turning my back to her doorway, I look up at the building across the street from her.
Several house forts dot the city of Trier. They’re old—not as old as the Roman buildings, but older than the city wall, and several centuries have passed since they were first built with the wealth of Crusaders and the jewels of Jerusalem.
This one—the only one in the Judengasse—is a bit worse for wear. The white plaster facade is cracked; the colorful arches over the windows have faded and chipped away. But I don’t care about appearances.
What makes a house fort special is the fact it has no way in.
At least not on the ground level.
There is no door, no window, no access point within reach at all. Inconvenient, yes—the only way into the building, by its own design, is by a ladder to the second-floor front door. But it served its purpose at the time. If Trier were under attack, the inhabitants merely had to lift the ladder, and no one could come inside and pillage the wealth behind the walls.
Now, though, this abandoned building serves as a natural defense for me alone. No one bothers trying to scramble up the decrepit crates I carefully piled under the door, and even if they did, they’d have a hard time getting inside without me knowing, thanks to a few strategically rotten boards and a shaky foundation. Plus the shutters over the only door are bolted with a heavy iron padlock.
I have an apartment in the city, near the Porta Nigra. It is filled with the signs of wealth I’ve accumulated being a hexenjäger, the paraphernalia I cannot sell off to fund my rebellion.
I hate it.
I spend most nights here.
It feels safer, somehow, knowing that the only way inside this building is through a second-story door or by the cramped, unlit aqueduct that opens in the basement.
My apartment is for Kapitän Otto Ernst, second-in-command of the hexenjäger units of Trier.
But this building is for me.
Knowing that only little Mia and her brother can see me on this shadowed, abandoned street, I hop atop the first crate, scrambling for a foothold, scaling part of the wall. A bit of plaster breaks off, skittering down. The sound is lost in the overpowering noise from the nearby market, but I cannot help but wonder if the witch inside has heard me approaching.
I left her in the cellar—there’s a chance she’s still down there. I had to rush, and she was safe there, at least. But somehow, I think she’s found a way through the house. I glance up—my padlock is still in place.
She’s got to be mad, though. Furious. I left her cold, alone, scared, and—schiesse. I didn’t have time to take off her manacles. Those heavy iron bands on her wrist must be chafing and hurting her.
For a moment, I imagine Fritzi, eyes on fire, with a skillet raised to brain me the moment I step through the door.
I freeze, one hand on the ledge of the door, one wiping over my traitorous mouth.
What in the hell am I thinking, smiling at the thought of that uncouth witch plotting my murder? But her rage is so… It’s like a storm at night, full of lightning, beautiful in its fury.
No. No. Where did that thought come from?
I shake my head and heave my body up to the door, fitting the key in the lock, listening for the witch and whatever trap she surely has laid for me.