I cross my arms. “This goes both ways, though. If I’m going to help you, you have to help me too.”
He doesn’t respond, doesn’t seem to have heard me—his eyes have dropped low. I think at first he’s staring a bit too intently at my breasts, but his face hardens, and I realize his gaze is fixed on my wrist where it’s crossed over my chest.
I look at the angry red welts bleeding across the back of my hand.
I yank my arms down.
“You’re injured,” he says.
“Tends to happen when witches are around hexenjägers.”
He’s standing over me, the lantern flickering on the table beside me, and its unsteady light pulses the emotions on his face.
Regret.
Fury.
Pain.
I have no time for his self-flagellation—the Three damn these Catholics, really. “I’ll need supplies to—”
“Sit.”
“I—excuse me?”
“Sit,” he repeats and brushes past me, back to the bag he took off during our conversation. He rummages in it for a beat before he turns with a jar and a knot of bandages.
I can’t stop the surprise that flashes across my face. “I don’t need your pity. I’m fine.”
It’s a lie—my wrists burn terribly—but I’ll be damned if I accept that kind of help from him. I need to get Liesel and get out of Trier, not waste time tending to wounds he inflicted.
He crosses the room. I’m still standing when he stops in front of me.
His brows raise, and he eyes the chair against the back of my legs, the implied command heavy in his gaze.
My chest tugs, defiance sharp and biting. But he still says nothing, just stares at me in a long, weighted silence, and I know, in the clenched set of his jaw and the steadiness in his eyes, that he won’t break.
I thought I knew stubborn.
I thought I was stubborn.
This man makes it a religion.
I suck my teeth and drop back on the chair. When I reach for the jar and bandages, he bats my hand away and lowers to one knee.
My heart heaves against my ribs.
“I’m not tied up,” I tell him, hating the waver in my voice. “I can bandage my own wounds, thank you very much.”
That earns what must pass for a sardonic look. “I don’t doubt that you are very skilled at taking care of yourself.”
Is that an insult? It feels like an insult, but I let him take my wrist.
His fingers are…gentle.
So gentle that it renders me immobile, and every argument I’d planned drains out of my mind.
How can someone so large touch me like I’m an eggshell? This doesn’t feel like his natural state, tenderness, but he deftly rolls up my sleeve and gets to work smearing balm on my skin.
He stays quiet. He seems comfortable in silence, but I decidedly am not, and I shift on the chair, hating this closeness more each passing second, the way his dark eyes droop with sorrow when he finishes one wrist only to see wounds just as bad on the second.
There are flecks of green in his brown eyes. He has half his jaw-length dark hair pulled back, showing the way the tops of his rigid cheekbones redden slightly, and I realize I’m staring at him, and he knows it.
Schiesse, stop.
Focus on something else. Literally anything else.
I sniff the air—mint. Lavender. A few other herbs in that salve he’s using.
I smile. “We’ll make a witch out of you yet, jäger.”
He flashes those eyes up to me. “The healing balm?” he guesses, tipping the jar.
I nod.
“Then every hexenjäger is a witch, for we all carry this in our supplies.”
“Which is one of the many holes in your theology.”
“It isn’t my theology, need I remind you.”
“No, merely formed from the tenets of your religion, jäger.”
The kapitän sighs and finishes tying the last bandage to my wrist. “Otto.”
I pull my arms in, surveying his work, but I stiffen. “What?”
“My name. It’s Otto. Otto Ernst.”
“I know your name.” It cracks out of me like a whip.
He blinks.
There’s another of his pauses. But if he seeks to make me use his name, that’s one battle he will not win.
He seems to realize that, and he pushes to his feet. His shoulders tense—I hadn’t even realized they’d been relaxed.
“If you’re to take my sister’s place in the jail,” he starts—is his voice rough? I upset him. Good. “We need to start getting you to memorize the aqueduct layout—”
“Of course.” I stand and smooth my skirt. “We can go over that later tonight.”
He frowns at me. “And until then?”
“I need supplies. I’ll make potions before I go into the jail. If I’m going to be a prisoner again, I will not be defenseless.”
“You won’t be undefended. You’ll have me.”
He says it so simply, like he’s already guaranteed my safety.
I give him a look. “Reassuring. But undefended and defenseless aren’t the same thing. I’ll need more than a few healing spells for the prisoners who are too ill to move; and I’m not going into that prison without enough spells to protect not just myself, but the other prisoners, should your ironclad escape plan go awry.”
His plan is fairly ironclad, actually, but I say it with sarcasm anyway.
His lips twitch. “I thought you said we wouldn’t use your magic?”
“No—I said we wouldn’t use the type of magic you were asking about. But the potions I’ll make are perfectly acceptable to ask of the Well. I need to make them all tonight, though. I can’t exactly whip out a cauldron, pointy hat, and broom in the middle of a hexenjäger cell, now can I?”
His frown deepens. “You—you really need those things?”
“No.” I roll my eyes. “I just wanted to see if you thought I’d really need those things. Schiesse, jäger, what do you know about real witches?”
“Not enough,” he offers. His eyes go furrowed and considering. “I don’t understand your powers, but if I did—perhaps we could find a better potion or spell for the situation. Can you explain it to me?”
My brows vault up. “You want me to explain potion making to you.”
“Yes.”
“My entire life’s work. In one evening?”
His cheeks go a little red. The sight is more charming than it should be.
“Ah.” He clears his throat. “Then what about—are there any particularly powerful potions? One that we could focus on that would make the largest impact? Something that would make us both more powerful?”
I stare at him for a long moment.
He has no idea what powers he’s asking to meddle with. Potions and spells aren’t things that can be toyed with in a panic, frantically pieced together without forethought and planning.
And even if he is trying to undo the horrors the hexenjägers have wrought, I can’t forgive him entirely for what he represents, and I want to remind him of what I am, too, of the fact that he should be a little afraid of me.
“Oh, yes, jäger,” I say, sickly sweet. “There is one such potion. If we had time to brew it, that is—it uses a simple beer base, common enough. At the end of the brewing, you add a few more harmless herbs—but you also add belladonna and henbane, and then I’d speak the spell to complete it as it all bubbles and boils. You know what those ingredients are, don’t you, jäger? Even non-witches know poisons that drive the takers mad before killing them.”
The kapitän’s interest turns to hesitation. “The resulting potion is a poison, then?”
“Not if I do it correctly. My spell would turn it into what’s known as a bonding potion. It would allow someone like you to connect with a witch.”
Mentioning the bonding potion is a jab in my throat. A seizure of muscle. I fight down any flinch at memory, any whiff of thought, and focus only on terrorizing this jäger.
He blinks. “It would give me some of your powers?”
I nod. “I would act like a vessel, funneling my power into you. But if it goes poorly, it could sever my connection to the Well entirely. Or so I’ve heard. No one I know has ever used such a potion. Who would risk it? Besides.” I give a demonic smile. “It would first require you drinking the potion under your own will, trusting that I brewed it correctly. The risk is not only on my end with the magic—it is first on you, that the magic transformed the poison into potion at all.”
The kapitän’s narrow confusion goes to a slow building awareness that grows as I step closer to him. He can tell I’m playing a game, even if he might not yet see the reason, but to his credit, he doesn’t back down. His gaze holds on mine.
“Now tell me, jäger,” I whisper. “Do you trust me enough that you would take a potion like that? Do you trust that I wouldn’t try to kill you? It only works if you take it willingly. Could you?”
His jaw works. I watch that tension flutter down his neck as he swallows.
“Would you even let me take it,” he pushes back, the same whisper, what with how close I’ve let us stand, “knowing it would possibly link you to me?”
I smile. It bursts across my face so quickly that it surprises him, and he flinches, recovers, only to give a cautious, questioning grin in return.
“Then we’re at an impasse, it would seem,” I say. “Even if we had time to make this potion, which we don’t, neither of us would see it worth the risk. So maybe you should stop asking questions about things we also don’t have time to teach you, and just let me do what I do best? You have your escape plan. Let me have my potions.”
With a disgruntled sigh, the kapitän bats his hand in surrender. “So what ingredients do you need? Give me a list.”
“Ha! No. You think I’d trust you to be able to pick out the good myrrh from the bad? I doubt you could even tell the difference between nettle and nutmeg.”
His lips twitch again. “I know what nutmeg is.”
I step around him, aiming for the door, and I pat his shoulder as I go. “I don’t doubt that you are very skilled at identifying nutmeg.” My grin is feral. “But I’m going to the market.”
He seems to trip on my touch, or maybe my joke—either way, there’s a full beat before he flips a glare at me. “You are not going to the market. I told you, the city is flooded with hexenjägers looking for you. The kommandant himself wants you. If you get caught before we prepare, then a hundred people will die.”
As though he needs to remind me.
I have a chance to save people from the fate of my coven, so of course I’ll take it, and I have a chance to save Liesel too.
But he says it as if he’s reminding himself, as if he never gets a chance to say his truths out loud, and now that he’s told me everything, he can’t help but to say it again, and again, speaking the forbidden words into the air.
I can’t even fathom the weight he’s carried all these years. The people he’s watched die, the lies he’s had to tell, the walls he’s built around himself—
But he aided death too. He’s part of the dark wave that has choked this country and destroyed my people, and even if he’s tried not to be directly complicit, he’s still guilty.
Isn’t he? What if his words are true—what if he has, from the very beginning, worked against the murderers?
I turn away from him. I can’t look into his eyes with these thoughts banging around my head.
“Well,” I start, clear my throat, and stand up straighter. “If I don’t get supplies, I can’t guarantee the safety of all those prisoners, and I’m not going in that prison without my own guarantee.”
“Fine.” His agreement comes gruff. “But I’m coming with you.”
“Fine,” I relent. “I need you to pay, anyway. Unless you’re all right with me using my wits and wiles to obtain what I need.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. Is that a smile? The Three save me.
“No need to steal,” he says. “I’ll pay.”
I turn for the door, but his fingers on my shoulder stop me cold. It’s not just that he’s grabbing the bruise his elbow left there yesterday; it’s that his touch shocks through me, gentle now, such a stark contrast that my body can’t decide what to do with it.
“At least—can you conjure some sort of disguise?” His voice is thin.
I stare at him for a full breath.
He really has no fear of my magic. Our whole conversation about his plans and his truths, he hadn’t once flinched at any mention of magic, and he doesn’t now. He speaks of it as any other skill or tool.
I fight a smile. “That’s not how magic works. Besides, I don’t have any herbs here—I used what few you did have.” I press my finger to his shirt and swipe up a bit of the powder still coated on him.
His chest is just as firm as when he’d held me against him in the aqueducts.
He sighs and crosses the room. From under the cot, he pulls out a box I’d missed, a small trunk—from it, he draws out a thick cloak. “Wear this, then.”
It’s brown, not the black of his hexenjäger robes, but my body goes stiff. It’s his, and something about dressing in his clothes sends a shiver through me.
It isn’t a bad shiver.
Which is why I jerk back from him. “No.”
“It has a hood.” He nods at my head. “They’re looking for a witch with yellow hair.”
“I have a hat,” I say. I pull it off—the Three, it’s absolutely wrecked with grime now—and flip my head upside down to twist my matted, equally filthy hair up inside the hat. What I wouldn’t give for a bath.
The desire squeezes the breath from me, and when I straighten, I’m winded, shaken.
A bath.
Helping Mama fill our tub, laughing over some stupid joke.
Her fingers pulling the tangles out of my hair. Her voice, airy and light, singing—
I straighten my own cloak, holding it tighter to my chest, and stare at the closed shutters, hoping the hexenjäger doesn’t see the tears in my eyes.
If he does, he says nothing. Once he’s dressed in his own sort of disguise—that simple brown cloak, the hood pulled low over his face—he turns to the door.
“What if your magic doesn’t let you out?” he asks, and I can hear the hope in his voice—that I might have to stay here while he goes to the market alone.
“Then I’ll rip your house down to its foundation,” I spit, and I shove past him.
The magic does let me climb out, thank the Three, when I go slowly and don’t try to hurl myself into untold danger. The kapitän points out the safe footholds—a few boards and crates are broken—and I wait on the street as he locks the door and climbs down behind me. It gives me a moment to get my bearings—not that I’d know where in Trier I am—and I turn in a slow circle, surveying the neighborhood.
It’s abandoned.
Mostly.
The buildings are all quiet and dilapidated, held together by old boards or tattered sheets. There’s a…feeling that I can’t quite place, like this neighborhood is cloaked in some sort of protection spell.
Only it isn’t a spell at all. It’s grief, I realize with a jolt. This street, these buildings—whatever happened here left a stain of sadness in every stone and plank.
It knocks on the grief in my own heart. Like calling to like.
Aunt Catrin would have been able to communicate with whatever spirits are here. Birresborn felt like this before I left—like the dead were pressing up against the veil between our worlds, unable to move on just yet.
The kapitän starts walking, and I follow. “What happened here?”
He glances down at me. “It’s the Judengasse.”
The realization punches me in the gut. It’s been decades since that edict. I’d forgotten, and my body washes with disgust—at myself for forgetting, and the hexenjäger for being so cavalier about it. A whole people were forced out of this city.
The Church leaves a trail of displaced souls in its wake.
“I don’t understand how anyone can believe in your church,” I whisper. “The corruption is so obvious, it’s blinding.”
The kapitän cringes. “Normalcy has a way of breeding acceptance—when darkness is all people know, they forget to ask for the light.”
“This isn’t seductive darkness though. How can people—”
“Seductive darkness?”
His question makes my words snap off. I hadn’t meant to say that. Not…like that.
I swallow, eyeing him, gauging how much he might press for clarification. “Your church speaks of the lure of the Devil. There is no lure in this kind of evil.” I wave at the Judengasse. “I can’t imagine seeing this kind of treatment and choosing to step into a church.”
His jaw flexes. “This is the Church’s doing, as you said,” he whispers, “not my God’s. And people recognize that. I have to believe so, anyway.”
I shiver, folding my arms tight. The rage that wells up when he speaks of his faith is equal parts disgusting and…familiar.
I remember someone who had unwavering faith in the Three.
Someone who believed our magic had no end.
Someone they disappointed.
“You can’t separate your god from the evils committed in his name.” It comes out harsher than I intended. It’s this place. This neighborhood. The evil that lingers from the cruelty of the atrocities that happened here.
There are faces peeking out of some of these windows. People hiding in these abandoned structures. People driven to desperation by the hexenjägers.
Two faces in a house just behind us are easiest to see. The rest duck down quickly when I look at them, but these two stay. Staring. Watching.
They’re children. Maybe seven, eight years old. I can see the dirt smudged on their faces even from here.
Fury rages up my throat, making me liable to scream at the hexenjäger, lay this blame on him, force him to see what’s happening in his own city.
But I think he already does.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
“I know.”
I glance up at the kapitän. He’s looking where I was, at the window with the two faces; he nods at them, smiles softly, and when his eyes drop to mine, my lips part.
“I know much of what has happened has been in His name,” he says. “Faith is…complicated.”
“The right thing isn’t.”
“I know that too. Which is why we’re going to save the innocents.”
“And then what?” The question knocks into my stomach. And then what?
After I get Liesel. After I get us out of this city. I take her, and we run to the Black Forest—and then what?
The threat is still here. Kommandant Kirch is still here. And I’m just going to hide away while he grows in power? What else can I do?
Stop him.
The voice is relentless now, and steady.
Stop him.
This neighborhood aches with that same goal. Everyone who had been here—every person killed or forced to live in exile for decades, centuries even—I can feel all of their desolate souls thrumming at the thought of the lead hexenjäger being brought to justice. Even if they weren’t persecuted by hexenjägers themselves, the evil is the same.
Stop him.
How? How can I stop him? Mama stayed in Birresborn far longer than we should have as she tried to figure out some way to reach him, too, some way to convince him to give up this crusade. But if there is no way to stop him—what do I do?
I’m hit with a sudden image, the memory of Mama tied to her stake.
Instead, though, I see the kommandant, bound in irons, burning alive.
“We don’t kill,” comes Mama’s reprimand from my memory, the lessons all elders taught us. “Witches never kill. It feeds wild magic—and we do not touch wild magic, Friederike!”
I brace, waiting for the voice to slither in, to push me over into temptation with wanting to see Kommandant Kirch dead.
But nothing comes.
Nothing but my own aching need, buried deep under my grief, and that is somehow worse, that the voice doesn’t even need to tempt me. The will is already there.
I wince, black spots across my vision, the street spiraling, shaking—
“Fritzi?” Fingers grab my upper arm. “Fritzi!”
I lurch forward and slam into the kapitän’s hard chest. He catches me, anchoring me as I gasp, shaking, sweat beading down my spine.
“I’m just—” I look up at him.
He’s holding me on the street.
His face is close, so close, pupils blown wide with earnest concern—schiesse, how is a hexenjäger kapitän so earnest?—with a tuft of his dark hair breaking free to swing across his forehead, the edge of his cloak’s hood dipping back, just slightly.
I sigh, for a moment letting him take my weight.
For a moment, just resting.
I waver again, eyes snapping shut.
“I’m just tired.” I push away from him.
I’ve been alone since Birresborn, that’s all.
I’m scared and grieving and alone, and he’s the first semi-friendly face I’ve seen since my world fell apart.
That’s all.
“Come on, then,” he says, and his voice is so kind, I hate him. “Let’s get to the market. Oh, schiesse—you have to be starving!”
I slit my eyes open. “Not terribly. I may have eaten your rations.”
He smiles. Full. Broad. It does something to my stomach.
“Good,” is all he says.
I don’t just hate him.
I hate myself too.