I am humming spells I know by heart, their words tumbling from my lips, half song, half prayer. I am grinding herbs and packing them into little vials. I am covered in the smells of earth and life and magic. My belly is full, and though this house fort is still freezing, I’m protected from the worst of the chill.
For the first time in little less than a week, I am, if not happy, then content.
My mind shies away from any thoughts about why I am doing this, any ruminations over the coming day or memories of the past, and I lose myself in the repetition of these tasks, the familiarity so comforting that my chest stops aching.
The kapitän intersperses my work with explanations of the aqueducts. He draws a map on the floor and goes over the routes with me, over and over again, making me recite them back to him between potion spells.
Even just a few hours ago, I would have snapped at him and his insistence that I say it “again, just once more. And what if they go left instead of right? Which path? Again, Fritzi.”
But now, I can’t ignore the fear on his face. The tension in his shoulders, his hands. The way he points at his crude map and his finger shakes.
It’s fear mixed with eagerness mixed with hope, powerful, dangerous hope, and any retort I might have given falls flat in my throat.
It still amazes me that a hexenjäger is capable of pure emotion this strong. It’s…hypnotizing.
He really means to save everyone.
He really believes we won’t be found out, caught, and executed; he really believes we can show the people of Trier that they don’t have to live under the fear they’ve become all too used to.
I don’t know if I’m capable of the conviction he has. Every inch of him is saturated in belief of some kind—faith or hope or certainty—and here I am, mixing potions, humming to keep my mind off of all my failures and betrayals and—
You aren’t telling him everything, says the voice.
I channel my jolt of alarm into mixing another healing potion. There’s nothing to tell, I cut back. My past won’t affect this.
Won’t it? You’re a fool. Watch as you destroy his plan even further.
My jaw sets. No. No, that won’t happen—
There is a way still to avoid any mistakes at all. There is a way to avoid having to tell him everything. You know it. It will be here, waiting for you, when you are finally ready to give in.
“Fritzi?”
I shiver, blinking through my fog.
The kapitän leans forward. He’d taken the chair while I spread my potion-making supplies around the floor, the diagram of the aqueducts sketched in dust between remnants of herbs and mushrooms.
After a pause, he stands. “It’s getting late. We should sleep. We’ll need rest just as much as any potion.”
As if in response, I yawn, and there is my exhaustion, rearing high and strong. I’d been so distracted by getting to make potions again that I’d almost forgotten I haven’t really slept in days.
“You’ll take the bed,” he says.
I’m too tired to protest. I’ve finished what I can make, and the potions are all now tucked in little vials that I’ll carry in the leather pouches on my belt. I lay the bulging pocket on the table and stretch, my body aching at having spent the past few hours crouched over my work.
When I turn, I catch the kapitän’s eyes on my waist.
He looks away, his hand snapping up to rub the back of his neck.
Silence holds. I know he was looking at me; he knows I caught him looking, and it wasn’t even the first time. Yet I don’t yell at him, don’t draw a firm line.
Why?
I should.
But still, I say nothing, and I cross the room to descend the ladder to where he showed me a garderobe I can use to relieve myself. I clean as best I can with the fresh water pumped up from the aqueduct—it still isn’t a full bath, but it’s better than nothing—and by the time I come back up, the kapitän is seated on the floor in the corner opposite the cot, his hexenjäger robes strewn over him in lieu of the one blanket that I’d torn to make my protection satchels. The lantern next to him burns low.
Another cloak is already spread over the cot. The brown one he’d worn in the market.
I have my own cloak still, but I don’t point that out.
“I’ll wake us at dawn,” he says, his eyes shut. “You can spend all day tomorrow teaching the routes to the prisoners and healing any who need it. Then, the day of the burning, you’ll have a few hours before the Christkindlmarkt will be crowded enough to provide cover. The midmorning bells are when everyone will need to be in place for the explosion. And you—”
“Midmorning? I thought we were moving on the afternoon bells?”
The kapitän’s eyes flare open, and he gives me a look of such panic that I immediately feel bad for teasing him.
I splay my hands. “Kidding! Midmorning bells, I know. I know the aqueduct paths for the prisoners to take and where Liesel and I will meet you at an offshoot tunnel afterward. I do. I promise.”
He doesn’t settle, his body wound and stiff, even under the cloak. “This isn’t a joke, Fritzi.”
I sit on the cot and bend to take off my boots, my hair hanging over my shoulder, some of it heavy with water from where I’d tried to wash the dirtiest curls without drenching my whole head and risking a chill. “I’m well aware,” I grumble to the floor.
It was easy when I had my potions to distract me.
It was easy when we were in the Christkindlmarkt, and every turn brought a new, glittering distraction.
But here, now, in the silence of his house fort, knowing there will be nothing stretching between me and the rising sun of tomorrow…
I should have gotten ingredients to make a sleeping draught.
The cot creaks as I curl up on it, facing the room, my eyes level with his. I pull his brown cloak up to my chin, and that, along with my thick wool kirtle and the cloak I’m still wearing, almost offer warmth. It’ll still be a verdammt cold night.
The cloak smells like the Christkindlmarkt—spices and frying oil and holly—but something else. A musk that I recognize as him, just him.
My stomach tightens, and I nestle in deeper.
He reaches to extinguish the lantern, but he’s watching me still. The way he’s been looking at me these past hours is heaped in such intensity that I wonder how he has the energy for it, a focused scrutiny like he can unlock all my secrets just by observing the way I tuck hair behind my ear, the way I pull my bottom lip between my teeth.
But now, his look breaks with a sigh. “I don’t mean to be short-tempered. This is a delicate situation on its own, but without Hilde…” He rocks forward, his brow creasing. “I need you to meet me afterward. I need you to help me find her. I cannot—” His breath hitches. “I’m trusting you in that, Fritzi.”
“You think I’ll run off,” I say.
His lips thin.
I roll onto my back, gaze on the ceiling, the long beams of wood turned to ebony shadows in the fading light.
My eyes flutter shut. “I promised to help you find your sister, and I will. Liesel will be able to find her. I know you have no reason to trust me, but we will meet you in the tunnels.”
“It is a fair trade—you have no reason to trust me either.”
The edges of my lips curl in a smile. “True. Still, I shouldn’t have teased you. I don’t take this lightly, I swear. My mother used to say my cheek would be the death of her.”
Speaking of her is like swallowing a barb. Tears burn the backs of my eyes; my throat swells.
“There are certainly worse ways to die,” he says, then inhales sharply. “I didn’t mean—that came out wrong.”
My body tenses, my eyelids pinching shut tighter, and I hold there, in silence, letting the quiet swallow his words, the memory they stoke.
I will not think about her body tied to the stake.
I will not think about how agonizing a death that was for her.
The light is still pulsing beyond my eyelids. The kapitän hasn’t turned down the lantern yet.
“You need me to sing you a bedtime song?” I try to make it come out short, but it’s just as brittle as everything in me suddenly feels.
A huff comes in response, followed by the light fading, until all is darkness, even when I open my eyes. I gasp in it, shocked by the depth of this black, though I shouldn’t be—there are no windows in this part of the house fort, no slivers of moonlight pushing in—
“How many stars are in the sky?” the kapitän suddenly sings, a soft, pitchy croon.
My whole body goes tense, face contorting in an expression of amused horror that gets lost in the darkness. “What are you singing?”
“A lullaby.” A beat. “Do you not know that one? I thought it was rather popular.”
“I—I know it. But—”
“I assumed you asking me if I needed a bedtime song was a thinly veiled request for one. How many stars are in the sky?” he sings again.
I shove my hands over my mouth, but it does nothing to stifle my sudden fit of laughter. “What are you—”
“How many—don’t make me sing the same verse again. You said you knew this one. It’s a call and response.”
“I am not singing with you, jäger.”
“How are we to sleep?” he asks, voice hung with mock sincerity.
I flop onto my side, but I can’t see him in the dark. “You’re mad. Utterly.”
I swear I can feel his grin in the darkness. And the sensation of him smiling in this space of sightlessness but being unable to see it is unbearably intimate, shaking down through my core in a relentless quiver.
With a defeated sigh, I give in. “Count them all as we fly by.”
“How many clouds will come at dawn?” he sings back immediately.
“Count until we start to yawn. All right, I am sufficiently tired, I think. Gute Nacht, you crazed man.”
The kapitän chuckles. The low, deep rumble of his laughter palpitates the air, and I’m glad I ended this back and forth, because I’m not sure I can draw in enough breath to speak.
“Gute Nacht,” he whispers in return.
My fingers bleed.
I tear at the dirt wall of the cellar, rocks and knobs of mud raining down in my attempt, but no matter how I climb, I never get to the opening just above, just out of reach.
“Mama!” I scream. “Mama—”
She appears there. In the square of light.
“Friederike,” she says, and my heart swells to bursting at the love in her voice. I can barely see her face—the light behind her is too bright.
“Give me your hand!” I slip a little, sliding down the cellar wall, and when I look, I can’t see the bottom, the floor long gone; maybe it was never there at all. “Help me! Please, Mama—”
“Help you?” She rocks back on her heels. “Why on earth would I help you? You let him in, Friederike. You did this.”
A shadow rises behind her, growing, growing through the light until her outline blends and bleeds into the silhouette of a massive tree, gnarled branches reaching into the endless white light. Her shoulders protrude from the tree, her elbows and knees, but my eyes cannot focus on where she ends and the tree begins.
“What? No!” Another slip down. I cling to the wall, thrusting my weight against it, fingers aching and legs trembling at trying to keep myself on these crumbling footholds. “That’s not what happened—please—”
“Oh, it’s far too late, Fritzichen,” says someone else.
I know that voice.
My body goes ice-cold, a thousand warring memories fighting to be felt.
I look up slowly, the stench of earth overpowering, mildew and decay and dying, breaking things.
And there, kneeling next to the tree, is Dieter.
Kommandant Kirch now.
Resplendent in his hexenjäger uniform.
Mama is gone. The tree remains, with Dieter over the hole, separate from it, seemingly unaware of it behind him.
“It’s too late,” Dieter says again. “You had your chance.”
Come to me, Fritzi, says the voice. Only the branches of the tree shift, those ancient limbs flicking and twitching like in a wind, but I know, I know, the tree is speaking, the tree is the voice I have been pushing against for so, so long. He lies. It is not too late. You can still stop him. Come to me. Say the spell.
My body wracks with a sob, tears relentless, choking.
Dieter reaches down into the hole. My heart tangles with hope and fear, and before I can decide whether to trust him, he grabs my hands, wrenches me off the wall, and drops me into the darkness.
“Auf Wiedersehen, Fritzichen,” he calls, and I scream as the nothingness swallows me—
But I’m not falling alone.
Next to me, the wind of the fall billowing her blond hair, is Liesel, little Liesel, her eyes gaunt and bloodshot, bruises on her cheekbones. Her thin fingers scramble to reach for my shoulders, clinging to me as we both fall into nothingness, down, down into darkness.
“He’ll break through,” Liesel gasps at me. “He’ll break through the barrier with me. Get me out, Fritzi, get me out—”
“I’m trying!” I grab onto her, but the darkness of the cellar is thicker and thicker the farther we fall, and when I look up, the square of the opening is a pinprick, and I can barely make out the silhouette of Dieter there, motionless, staring down at my unraveling as the tree looms larger and larger behind him.
Come to me. Say the spell. Come to me.
“Liesel!” I grope for her in the dark. “Mama!”
“Fritzi!”
A different voice in the dark. The bony arms of my cousin are broader now, heavy and solid, and hands grab at my shoulders, pat my cheeks.
“Wake up—Fritzi, wake up!”
The dream releases me with a ripping surge, and I careen into the present, gasping the frigid air of the night-drenched house fort. The lantern is relit on the floor next to the cot, and its unsteady orange light shows me the kapitän sitting next to me, his hands on my shoulders, his pinched face flickering in and out of shadows.
“Fritzi?” He prods my name, the barest echo of care, and I come apart.
Sobs send me rocking forward, and I cling to him, my forehead pressed against his chest. He goes stiff for only a moment, then his arms fold around me, cradling me against the wide set of his chest.
I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve his comfort, his help. I deserve to fall, I deserve the way Mama looked at me in my dream, like there was nothing left to save.
Schiesse, I sound like a Catholic. Self-deprecation and flagellation.
My sobs start to abate, but only because I’m shaking too hard. It’s absolutely frigid in this house fort—every part of my body is numb with cold, and I’m almost grateful for that discomfort to yank me out of my sorrow.
“Did you even manage to fall asleep on the floor?” I ask, teeth chattering.
The kapitän shrugs. The motion drags the rough linen of his shirt against my cheek. “I’ve slept in worse places.”
“Ever the soldier.” I turn my face, press it to his chest, and breathe, willing my heart to slow, willing my limbs to stop shaking. Maybe it isn’t just cold; maybe it’s grief, too, my body unable to hold onto this pain anymore.
His hand starts to rub my back, building heat with his rough strokes. “You called out for her,” he says, his voice low, careful. “Your mother.”
Slowly, my shaking calms. Slowly, I go from needing his support and warmth to thinking only how good it feels to have someone here, holding me.
“Did you see your mother burn?” I ask against him.
His hand on my back stops. “Yes.”
I don’t want him to pull away. I don’t want to be alone.
I twist my fingers into his sleeves, holding my forehead to his chest, keeping him here with me, however selfish. I don’t have room for anything but self-preservation right now.
“How did you breathe again?” I choke out.
He adjusts his grip on me, tighter, and something in me releases, more tears slipping free.
The smell that was in the cloak is stronger now. The musk, a richness, deep and heady.
His chest rises, and I realize he’s taking a fortifying breath, holding my body against himself as he fills his lungs and exhales just as gently.
“One breath at a time,” he whispers. “Until you can trick yourself into thinking you’ve gone a few moments without thinking about her.”
I give a brittle laugh. It isn’t in the least funny, but I feel the deep rumble of his bitter laugh, too.
Is his hand in my hair, stroking it? What parts of me had calmed wind tense again, and he notices in the way he goes absolutely still.
“It’s not yet dawn,” he says, his words stunted. “We should steal a few more hours of sleep.”
I hum my agreement. I don’t want to sleep. I don’t want time to pass at all.
In a few hours, I’ll be a prisoner of the hexenjägers again. I’ll save Liesel and countless others, but my mother will still be dead, and I’ll still be buried under the crushing weight of all the things I’ve done wrong.
So when the kapitän stands, I tighten my grip on his sleeves and move my fingers to lock around his wrists. The tendons there strain against my fingers.
“Stay,” I beg. “Please.”
He holds, half on his feet, crouched over the cot. The look on his face is one of utter shock, and I can see the war that pulses in his eyes.
“You don’t get under my skirts that easily, jäger,” I say with a forced smirk. The tears on my face cut through any humor I might try. “It’s just…cold. And I don’t want—”
I shudder and press the back of my other hand to my lips.
The Three save me, how broken am I if I can so easily ask this stranger to keep my nightmares away?
But Otto sits again. “Of course,” he says, a gruffness in his voice that he counters with a soft smile.
I lie back down before I can think better of this. Otto turns out the lantern, casting us into pitch blackness, and the narrow cot groans as he arranges his cloak over the both of us. He stretches out beside me, and I feel the puff of his breath—he’s facing me where I’m curled toward him.
I asked him to stay, didn’t I? So what more shame do I have left, really?
There’s hardly any space between us, but I close it, nestling my head under his chin, draping my arm around his hips. Warmth floods me, and I think I moan—which wouldn’t that just be perfect, after everything—but if I do, if Otto hears, he stays firm in his silence.
A beat passes, then his arm folds over me, pulling me to him, encasing me in that smell, musk and heat, the steady rush and lull of his breath funneling in and out.
I suddenly regret telling him that this was all I wanted, nothing more.
We need to sleep.
But I need to not think, to not feel, to just not in every way. I’m still in pieces from my nightmare, still driven to mania in the cold, and so my body starts shaking again, and Otto pulls me closer.
I arch into the motion, head rising, and in the darkness, I can feel his face level with mine now. Can taste the way his exhale re-forms the air, the spark and spice of his breath coming in a quaking gust that sizzles across my tongue. I can’t tell exactly how far away he is from me, but I can feel the space, or lack of space.
I shift closer.
The darkness is consuming again. It is delirious and hypnotic and dangerous, spinning a web of perceived absence, a dreamlike void, as though nothing that happens here really exists.
So the way our lips suddenly rest against each other.
The way we both hold there, kissing but not, bodies entwined.
It is a figment.
It isn’t real.
His head tips, mouth sliding against mine, rough edges and soft, pillowy bottom lip. I think I feel the flick of his tongue, for a second, the quickest, tentative prodding at my mouth.
Heat flames to life in my belly, soothing the tremors, launching out to the tips of my fingers and the arches of my feet. It’s that heat that melts through the frozen part of my brain, the numbed echoes of me, and I yank down, curving into his chest, holding my head into the space between our bodies.
Oh, schiesse, what did I do?
What did he do?
My hand fists in the back of his shirt. I’d move away if there was room, if it wasn’t still freezing. I should ask him to go back to the corner. I should tell him to leave.
“Get some sleep,” I whisper into the hollow against his chest.
I can feel his heartbeat thundering. It matches the pulse I feel in my throat. Rapid, clawing thuds.
“You too,” Otto whispers, and save me, it’s hoarse, so hoarse I can hear the restrained thoughts whirling through his head too.
I tuck my chin to my chest and force myself to lie as still as possible.