He’s following us.
In all our stops along the river, I tried to scavenge what herbs I could; but winter bears down relentlessly, and I barely had enough for one protection potion that I used to ward our boat.
A lot of good it did.
As we trek through thin, sparse winter trees, I grab handfuls of mistletoe from low-hanging branches. I rush ahead and use the time until Liesel and Otto catch up to shift through the snow and dirt, but there is nothing, nothing this time of year. I always relied on my dried stores through winter and early spring, and I feel their luxury now, how very useless I am without proper supplies.
Still, I gather the mistletoe into my empty vials. It’s mostly for luck rather than protection, but it will have to do, and I whisper spells over the makeshift potions as we walk. I slip a vial into each of our pockets, and I stick sprigs of mistletoe in Liesel’s braids—I’d used icy river water to wash both of our hair as best I could yesterday, and she’d heated her hands to dry the chill. My blond curls bounce wildly beneath my nearly ruined wide-brimmed hat, but with clean braids and green bursts twisted across her head, Liesel looks festive, like any other innocent child prancing through a forest around Yule.
It won’t be enough, though. Dieter will laugh at these attempts to block him. He’ll possess the next person we come across—or maybe Otto? The Three help me. He cannot—my brother will not take him—how is he possessing people? Could he do such a thing to me? No. It has to be willpower, him affecting those who aren’t suspecting invasion. We’ll resist him. We have to—
I’m locked in worry, murmuring another spell over a bundle of mistletoe in my hand, when Otto touches my shoulder. “Fritzi. Look.”
I whirl, on alert instantly—
Before us, just down a slight decline, is a town hugged by the Black Forest.
It’s the largest we’ve seen since sailing through Koblenz, not quite as large as Trier, and far less orderly; the whole mess of streets and buildings tumbles out from the thick edge of the Forest’s blanket, rippling across this clearing, no walls to hem it in. A few bridges arch over swamp-like offshoots of rivers, and though it’s getting late and the setting sun should be chasing everyone inside, each bridge is alight with torches and good-natured cheers. From deep in the town, music plays, a few different overlapping songs fighting for dominance from a bonfire-drenched center square.
The light and levity combats the heavy density of the Forest beyond, both sensations pulling my attention equally: the vast darkness of the Black Forest, just there, finally, we’ve made it; and the buoyant joy of a town in celebration.
“Baden-Baden?” Liesel looks up at Otto.
He smiles at her. “Just in time for a party, it seems.”
Liesel brightens. Her cheeks are rosier, not quite fuller, but not as gaunt.
I have seen the way Otto slips her some of his rations. I have seen the way he always looks at her upon waking, making sure she’s here still and safe, before we trade watches.
And I have seen the way Liesel has the little animal he carved for her in her skirt’s pocket, the way she checks on it every once in a while.
Liesel starts down the hill, humming one of the songs we can hear playing. “Fritzi! I know that one—hm hmm hm, there are angels singing; hm hmm hm, the bells are ringing!”
“How do you know a Christian carol?” I call after her.
“I know things!” she snaps back, but she’s smiling, and she continues down the hill, singing to herself.
“Did you not have carols in Birresborn?” Otto asks as we follow her.
“Not your Christian ones. I have no idea where she learned it. Likely doing something she shouldn’t have—”
“What carols do you have?”
Otto’s question catches me, and I look up at him, the mistletoe still in my hands, the spell half finished.
“Oh.” I shrug. “We sing to our goddesses too. Mostly to Holda.”
“The Maiden, right?”
He remembered. I smile. “Yes. This is her time of year—winter and darkness.”
“You sing carols about winter and darkness? That hardly seems festive.”
“About the chance for rejuvenation Holda brings us. The rest, the moment to breathe before spring’s growth.”
Otto nods, his eyes lingering on my face. He’s done that more and more, like he’s soaking up the final remnants of my words, and usually I drop his gaze first. But now I stare back at him.
“What?” I prod.
He grins. “Nothing.”
Effervescence bubbles in my chest. The Three save me, it’s ripping me in two—that he and Liesel can act so…so…safe. They saw what happened in that cottage, not two hours ago. They know Dieter can still find us.
Yet Liesel is singing Christmas carols, and Otto is sniffing the air as we come up on the first buildings of Baden-Baden. “Ah, cinnamon!” he says.
Liesel stops. She angles her head up, sniffing, and her face brightens. “Come on!”
She grabs my hand and off we go, and I let her take me, Otto in tow, the mistletoe falling out of my fingers.
Baden-Baden’s Christkindlmarkt is bursting. Booths hawk similar wares: warm spiced glühwein, crumbly springerle cookies in fanciful designs, a big vat of savory kartoffelsuppe. Everywhere are families buying treats and singing hymns. A man stands on a stage, telling a wintry tale with puppets on strings.
There are no hexenjägers. No town guards at all.
It’s such a stark contrast to the Christkindlmarkt of Trier that I stand in awe a moment, enthralled by the happiness.
Otto catches a passing reveler, and after a quick word, he turns back to us with a smile. “It’s Christmas Day. We nearly missed it.”
“Then Yule has passed.” Liesel’s happiness dips. She’s fighting memories too. She’s fighting the same sorrow I am, and I squeeze her hand in both of mine.
We would have had these similar foods and smells in Birresborn, only for Yule, not Christmas. The bittersweetness cuts me in two, how each scent and sight reminds me of a home that doesn’t exist anymore.
“It’s too late to venture into the Forest today,” I say. “We should find a place to make camp.”
Otto surveys the town square, the flurry of movement in the Christkindlmarkt. “I don’t have enough for a room at an inn, but—”
He points over the buildings, to a hill towering off to the left. The sun’s final rays hit it, casting it in gold—and illuminate the castle ruins woven in with the trees on top. Half of the structure looks decimated by some sort of fire, gray bricks singed to black, even at this distance.
“There could be others camping there too,” I say.
“But it would provide shelter from the wind. Here.” Otto digs into his coin purse and pulls out the last of his money. “This will be our final chance to get supplies before the Forest. What do you need?”
I snatch a coin from him. “Watch Liesel, will you? I’m going to find herbs in this market if it kills me.”
Liesel tugs Otto’s sleeve until he bends down to her. She whispers something in his ear.
His brows lift. “Well, then we have to, don’t we?”
Matching grins cut across their faces.
My eyes narrow. “What’s that about?” But I’m fighting my own smile.
“Oh, nothing,” Liesel sings. “Get your herbs. We’ll meet you back here. Otto and I have important business to attend to.”
She drags him off into the Christkindlmarkt. The parting glance he throws at me pins me to the cobblestones.
I will find protection herbs. Warding herbs. I’ll tear this town apart if I have to.
Liesel refuses to show me what supplies she and Otto bought until we reach the castle ruins. After a quick scouting of the remaining rooms, Otto declares us the only inhabitants, and Liesel settles on the floor of the main room we’ve claimed, one with the most intact walls and the least amount of lingering burnt smell.
I immediately start warding the space. I managed to find burdock root and dried angelica, as good as gold for my purposes, and I murmur the warding spell Mama taught me as I walk the perimeter of the room in widening spirals, sprinkling the herbs in my wake.
Liesel gathers a bundle of twigs and lights them. It’s a small fire, but it’s all we’ll need with her; one flick of her wrists, and we can feel the little blaze’s heat in every corner of this room, though the light is low enough that it won’t give us away.
And in this feeble construction of safety, my cousin dumps out the bag she carried up from Baden-Baden.
“Krapfen!” She declares proudly as she pulls a sugar-dusted pastry out of the bag. “One for each of us!”
“And bread, jerky, cheese, beer—but the krapfen seemed essential,” Otto adds. His eyes sparkle in the firelight when Liesel hands him one. She tears into hers, smearing white sugar across her cheeks and nose, and the whole area smells of sweetness and yeast and the bitter earthiness of my herbs.
I finish the ward and dust my hands on my skirt. As if my skirt is in any shape to clean something—it’s still crusted with grime from crawling out of Trier’s aqueducts. I’d be all too aware of that grime if not for the fact that we all look a mess, but my cousin is halfway through a pastry as big as her fist, and Otto is smiling at her in a soft way that absolutely upends any thoughts in my head.
I kneel down next to Liesel. She tries to hand me my pastry, but I shake my head. “This first.” And I take out the vial of potion I’d made with the rest of the angelica, a quick mix with melted snow. I dab some on my finger and trace a protective sigil on her forehead, a line through an oval with a few branching limbs.
The glossy outline holds on her skin for long enough that I see the tree in my dream. The branches reaching, bending, swaying with the voice.
The voice hasn’t spoken to me in days. Not to try to sway me with Dieter’s magic. Not to torment me or help me.
I should be glad that it’s silent. Why do I feel like something’s changed, something else coming that I can’t see?
“Now, finish eating,” I start, “then we should all get as much sleep as we can.”
Liesel pouts. “But it’s Christmas.”
“We don’t celebrate Christmas.”
“But I missed Yule because I was on a tiny boat on the run from my evil cousin.”
Liesel deepens her pout, and I catch Otto’s bemused smirk, which he tries to hide behind a sip of beer that we got from the old mill woman. He makes a face at the taste, and I stifle a laugh.
I roll my eyes at Liesel. “You’re impossible,” I say, and she brightens. “Maybe the jäger would like to see one of our Yule traditions?”
Otto looks up, lowering the beer bottle from his lips. “Yes,” he says, eyes on mine.
“It’s only appropriate to leave an offering tonight, anyway, since we’ll be entering their domain tomorrow.”
“An offering to the forest folk?” Otto asks.
“And the goddesses.” I shrug, encompassing the whole of the pantheon. At home, it was a simple tradition with the offerings usually going to passing cats or swept up by parents after the children went to sleep. But here, will actual forest folk come to collect our offerings?
“In Birresborn,” Liesel starts, “we each leave offerings that are important to us, so the forest folk and goddesses know it’s meaningful.” She holds the last bite of her krapfen in her palms and sighs loudly. “Like this.”
I push the bite toward her and pick up my whole krapfen. “How about this one is from both of us? It reminds me of home. That’s a worthy sacrifice, don’t you think?”
Liesel eyes me, clearly seeing that I’m only trying to make sure she gets to eat her treat, but she grins. “If you insist.”
We both look expectantly at Otto.
He takes another sip of the beer and winces again. His eyes drop to the bottle, and an idea occurs to him; he rummages through his pack and comes up with one of the newer bottles, the ones he and Liesel just bought in town.
“This will be my offering,” he says. “Good beer. At least I hope it’s good. The girl I bought it from reminded me a lot of Hilde. She said that she brewed it using her mother’s recipe, and that’s what Hilde did, too.” He pauses, eyes searching mine. “Is that a good enough offering?”
I have to inhale twice, fighting to catch my breath. “It’s perfect.”
“Well, the forest folk will surely enjoy this more than the piss water we got from the mill woman.”
Liesel giggles, and Otto looks at me apologetically, but she’s heard and said far worse.
I take the bottle from him, and we traipse out onto a little courtyard, or what was once a courtyard, a small space dotted with fallen stones and snow, the whole of the Black Forest spread out beyond. The trees blend into the sky right now, one never-ending swath of darkness. We’d walked through forests to get here, but this Forest is a thing apart; the density and size of the trees is otherworldly, even in the growing black of night, the clear sky and waning moon. It emits a presence that can be felt viscerally, like eyes watching in the dark.
There is power here. Ancient power. It sends a shiver down my spine as Liesel points to a spot in the center of the stones. I swipe a mound of snow there to serve as a makeshift altar, but I have nothing to cleanse the space, no way to follow any of the proper methods Mama drilled into my heart and soul about presenting offerings. And I realize, the cold of the snow burning my fingers, just how often these past weeks I’ve failed to adhere to our traditions, our regimens, our rules. What will the goddesses think of me? I haven’t severed from the Origin Tree and its Well, but I’ve bastardized so many of our practices out of necessity and survival. Do the Maid, Mother, and Crone see? Do they understand?
I place our offerings in the snow, and when I kneel next to them, Liesel follows first, then Otto, eyeing us for direction.
Liesel takes both his hand and mine and bows her head.
“Abnoba, Holda, Perchta, accept these offerings,” she starts. Otto cuts a look at me over her head, the edges of his lips rising in a smile. “Folk of the forest—hey, be respectful! Close your eyes!”
Both Otto and I snap our eyes shut, and I bite my lips together. Liesel squeezes my hand.
“Folk of the forest,” she continues. There’s a pause; she’s fighting a yawn. “Grant us safe passage into your domain tomorrow. Please. We really need your protection. And goddesses—watch over Mama. She’s with you now. Let her know I’m okay.”
My heart seizes.
Liesel pulses her grip on my fingers. “Do you want to say anything?”
It’s all I can do to get my throat to hum a soft no.
If I think too long about how this offering is such a sad reenactment of what we would have done in Birresborn. If I linger on the stillness when the air should be full of singing and rejoicing and my mother’s clear voice leading us in prayers. If I speak, I’ll fall apart.
So I just squeeze her fingers back.
Liesel throws her arms around my neck, rocking me back where I’m kneeling. It breaks me as much as these memories do, and I hug her fiercely, absorbing the warmth of her little body, until she stifles another yawn.
“All right,” I say. “To bed now.”
She peels away. “Fine. Happy Yule, Fritzi.” She takes a step back into the castle, pauses, and looks down at Otto. “Happy Yule, Otto. I hope this didn’t make your god too angry.”
Otto’s lips purse, fighting a smile. “No, I don’t think it did.”
She trudges off, taking the flow of warmth back with her into the little room. I watch her shadow move against the small fire until she lies down within the warding circle, and it’s only then that I breathe, daring to let myself feel, for this moment, safe.
I turn to see Otto watching me.
We’re alone. For the first time since Trier, but there’s a tension in the air now, and it feels like truly the first time, something wildly new and terrifyingly expansive.
I pull the angelica potion out of my pocket. “I need to ward you. If it won’t make your god too angry.”
He grins. Schiesse, he’s smiling more and more, and each time it strikes me utterly dumb.
“You two have had a poor introduction to my God, I know; but I promise, He won’t rage over things like this.”
“No, he just sends floods to drown the world.”
“Fair, but He said He wouldn’t do that again.” Otto pauses. “Well, He said He wouldn’t send another flood. He could make it rain fire or something, I suppose.”
“Liesel would like that.”
Otto huffs a laugh and motions at his face. “Ward me, hexe.”
I stand, and he follows me up, crossing around the offering to plant himself before me. When he bends his head down for me, I immediately regret asking to do this, needing to do this, putting myself so close to him after Liesel has left. She’s been a buffer, keeping me in careful check of my internal chaos, and now that it’s just me and him, the moonlight casting us in wintry silver, I can feel the edges of my control fraying.
He was distressingly attractive already, but after seeing him work to earn Liesel’s trust, after everything he’s done to keep us safe, it’s impossible not to be captivated by this man.
I put a little of the angelica potion on my finger and touch his forehead. His breath catches, and I have to hold my own to focus on what I’m doing.
“Thank you,” I tell him. To keep from thinking about how close we are.
“For what?”
My finger glides down, from the edge of Otto’s hairline to the apex between his dark brows, and his eyelids flutter shut. He moans softly in his throat.
Schiesse.
“What?” he asks.
Oh, the Three save me, I said that out loud.
I swallow and gather more of the potion on my finger. “For…for everything you’ve done for us. I know you give Liesel your share of the food. I know you’d work yourself to near death to keep us safe—and that’s why I fight you, and will keep fighting you, because I won’t have that be your end. Dying for us. I’ll keep you safe as much as you’re keeping us safe, whether you like it or not.”
His face breaks into a wide smile, eyes still closed. “I have the sudden image of how it’d be to face your brother again. Both of us yelling at the other to run so we can take the danger.”
“And you would be the one to run, because he’s my brother, and it’s my responsibility.”
“No. You would run. He’s my kommandant. The responsibility is mine.”
“He’s a witch. You’re not. You’d run, and I would face him.”
“Fritzi—”
“Shush now. Hold still.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not. You keep”—Distracting me—“distracting me.” Schiesse, I really meant to say something else.
Otto frowns, and it creases his forehead, his eyes slitting open to look at me. He doesn’t say anything, though, just keeps his eyes on mine as I draw the oval, the branching limbs of the sigil.
“I was trying to give you a compliment though. To let you know I’m grateful for what you’re doing for us.” It comes out as a whisper. “You’re…exceptional, Otto Ernst.”
“Exceptional?” he asks, arching an eyebrow at me.
“Well, acceptable, at the very least.”
I try to laugh it off, but his eyes stay on mine, and I fight with every remaining shred of my pride not to look into them; then he speaks, and his voice sounds hoarse, roughened with restraint.
“You make it easy.”
I slip the remaining potion into the pocket on my belt and lean forward to blow the sigil dry, and something about his posture changes as my breath rolls across his skin. Something in his shoulders, maybe, the tension there. But I watch the sheen of the sigil fade into his forehead, and I hold over him, lips parted, lingering so close that I can smell the beer he drank, hoppy and light, can feel the shuddering pulse of his exhale on my collarbone.
All of my insides quake, great building tremors that will shatter me inside out, and I start to sway, only catching myself by grabbing his shoulder, which just pulls me closer to him.
My lips brush his forehead. The dried sigil.
I go impossibly still.
His hands clutch onto my hips, all my senses drawn to the intimacy in those points of contact—my lips on his forehead, his fingers gripping my skirt, my hand on his shoulder.
The pause stretches, widens until it’s as vast and deep as the Forest, and I can’t take it anymore.
I whimper into him, the past days pummeling me, all my building desperation to be right here, to have him beneath my lips like this.
His fingers on my hips turn bruising, and his arms shake with a barely capped effort. “Friederike,” he rumbles into the disappearing air between us. “There are about a thousand things racing through my mind. You need to tell me what’s in your head. Now.”
That demanding tone.
That consuming presence.
That overwhelming wash of control that I’ve become enraptured by.
“I’m thinking,” I start, moving my lips down the side of his head, to his temple, to his cheek, until our noses align, and his mouth is so close I can taste the spice on him, “that I want you to throw me against the wall of this castle and make me see that god of yours.”
“Verdammt, Liebste, that mouth on you—”
And then he takes that mouth. Devours it, his lips as bruisingly brutal as his fingers, crashing into mine with such force that I rock backward, only saved from falling by his arm sweeping around and clasping me against him.
The building desire erupts through me in a wave of sensation, shooting out to the tips of my fingers, which wind in his hair, to the center of my core as his tongue delves in to curl with mine. The kiss is every argument we’ve had, fighting for the other to feel pleasure; he advances, I push back; feel this first, feel this most—
He takes my head and roughly tilts it to the side, exposing my neck to glide his mouth down in such expert work that I’m on the edge of falling apart just from this. My whimper liquifies into a moan, and I relent, going limp in his victory.
I let him win because I cannot fathom why he lets me touch him, much less that he wants to touch me. All I have upended in his life, all I have broken in my clumsy grief, and this man wraps me in his arms and presses his lips to my skin with the reverence of a liturgy, as if in this moment, he sees something holy in drawing a moan from my body.
I’m given over to the power of his size, helpless but to fall open for him now, ride the motion of his tongue on my skin. But I need to taste him again, I cannot get enough of that sweetness, and I grab his face and guide him back. This is my own sort of worship, too, driving against him, savoring the beat of blood in his neck, the way he stumbles when I suck his lip.
“Fritzi?” comes Liesel’s voice from the castle.
I stop, gasping into him, hand clenching into a fist in his hair. My skin is too tight, sensation everywhere all at once. He holds, too, just as breathless, one hand on the back of my neck, the other tangled up against the ridges of my spine.
“Fritzi,” Liesel calls again. “I don’t want to sleep alone.”
I clear my throat, knowing it will still sound gravelly. “I’m—I’m coming,” I shout to her.
“Liebste,” Otto whispers again and presses another kiss to my jaw. Sweetheart.
I am unworthy of him. But I am selfish. And he has carried the weight of his own grief every moment since we met, but he looks at me like the world has gone silent. If I can be that for him, bring an end to his internal war, then I will, I will, I—
“I’m not done with you,” I tell him, so wholly unwound that when he lowers me to my feet, I have to use my grip on the hair at the back of his head to hold myself right.
“We will find time,” he promises, and I nip his lip again, because I can, because this moment has unleashed a torrent and I am at its mercy as much as I’m at his.
I take one last breath against him, gathering myself, and then I push around him.
He grabs my wrist and yanks me back, cupping my face in his hand. In the moonlight, I see his eyes shift through mine, the initial crash of need ebbing in this brief respite, the way he glides his thumb across my cheekbone, cradles the shell of my ear.
I don’t expect him to say anything. There is an understanding in this look between us, a weight on both of our souls—unworthiness, guilt, shame. But somehow, we are here, undeserving of each other though we may be; and when he kisses me again, it is soft, his rough lips now like satin as they coax another whimper from the depths of me.
My hand doesn’t leave his as I pull him back into the castle, into the permeating warmth of this small haven we’ve carved out in our world of stalking danger and flames.