This castle sits high on a gray granite outcropping that sticks out over the Black Forest. That is where my eyes go; not to the hexenjäger contingent approaching, but to the trees. I realize that this is my first time seeing them in daylight, and I would be shocked at the remnants of greenery still clinging to their branches if I had room to feel anything more than terror and drive. Impossibly green, densely dark trees ripple off into the distance, taller and taller until the horizon takes them, and I arch out over the wall of the courtyard to survey the drop. We’d break our necks trying to climb down into the Forest from here.
“We have to get down the road before they make it too far up,” Otto guesses the same plan forming in my mind. “There are more of them; they’ll move slower. We can—”
“Get to that first curve of the road,” I finish. “It leveled off just outside the castle’s old gate. It looked like it accessed the Forest last night, didn’t it? It was so dark—”
Otto is racing into the main room to gather our rations, still spread out from last night’s sad mimicry of a Yule celebration. I follow, dropping to my knees to frantically stuff our other belongings back into the sacks.
“Yes—I know where you’re talking about. Make for that. And we’ll run off the path as soon as we’re able. They’ll be hard pressed to chase us on horses through the trees.”
“And then we—” I stop cold when I see Liesel, still standing out in the courtyard, arms around her chest, eyes on the distant road, the black cloaks that move in and out of view through the winter-bare trees.
“Liesel.” My voice pinches. I’m failing terribly at restraining my fear, and I can feel it creeping up through me, rising and rising like water lapping at a crumbling shore.
Last night feels so very far away. Krapfen and Yule offerings and—and Otto, who meets my eyes where I kneel on the floor, and I can see the same tug of regret in him, that our joy was so brief.
It may have been brief, but we will get more. We will get more.
“We’ll get to the Well,” I tell him. “We’re so close.”
“Yes.” Liesel rushes back in, hands in fists at her sides. She stops in the center of the room, her eyes downcast for one beat, before she scrubs her face and pins me with a look. “Stay close to me. Both of you—especially you, hexenjäger. They won’t take kindly to you trying to get in on your own.”
We’ll get to the Well. We have to. We’ve come this far—surely the forest folk will sense at least Liesel, the one blessed by a goddess personally. Surely they’ll reach out to protect her. Maybe even Otto too. Why else would they have left a beer for him? His sister is there, with them. She’ll fight to help him.
Otto slings the bag with our rations over his back. He tries to take the bag I have, but I shove him off as I stand and loop it over my shoulders, relishing in his lightning fast look of Oh, really?
Liesel takes my hand. “Let’s go.”
There’s a determined set to her eyes, wise beyond her years, that strikes me dumb, and so I can only nod and let her drag me out of the castle, Otto on our heels.
The morning’s frost and ice mingle with the castle path’s uneven stones, either side of the road shielded by high walls that protect against steep drops down the rocky cliffside. The three of us sprint with all our might to break free of the castle grounds, risking the slip and unsteadiness of the ice in favor of desperate motion, the air fogging with our gasping breaths.
We follow the curving path, the crumbling walls, until, finally, the road widens and flattens out. There’s still a drop into the jagged rocks on one side, but the wall falls away on the left, showing a border of trees so thick I wonder how we’ll push into them at all. It isn’t just trunks and branches and errant frozen leaves—it’s an aura that pulses from the Forest itself, a darkness hiding in between these silent watchers that at once beckons and warns against.
“Here,” Otto calls and is the first to duck off the path, angling for the trees—
Up ahead, rounding the bend that leads toward us, comes a hexenjäger at a sharp gallop.
The three of us freeze, Otto at the edge of the road, Liesel and I in the center.
The rider reins in his mount about a dozen paces down the road, the speed making his horse nearly buck him off. But he rights himself, canters in a circle, and when he faces us again, I recognize him. Not my brother—one of the jägers that had been under Otto’s command. The scared one, the young one—
“Johann,” Otto breathes. He lifts one hand, the other on a knife I know he has tucked into his belt. I stay rigid with Liesel, who grabs onto my skirts and hides behind me, burying a whimper into my side.
Johann eyes us.
Looks over his shoulder, back down the road.
“He’s right behind me,” Johann says, giving Otto a severe look. “Get off the road. Now.”
“Johann—”
But he cuts off Otto. “They’re rioting in Trier.”
Our tension shifts from fear to wonder.
Johann gives a watery smile. “The people who escaped turned on the hexenjägers. You started something. And for the first time ever, that city feels like it has hope again.”
My heart lurches, imagining the people we freed, their gaunt, terrified faces in that cell. Jochen, the old man. They’re fighting back? They’re doing what Otto hoped they would do.
Johann’s horse dances in another circle, feeding the anxiety that palpitates off us, and he shakes his head. “But you need to go. I’ll cover for you, but he knows you’re here. Go, Kapitän!”
Otto gathers himself before I do. He bolts back toward us, hauls Liesel up in one arm, and cups my face. “Fritzi. Let’s go. Let’s go, come—”
Johann shoots off on his horse, galloping back the way he came.
We can hear the pounding of hooves now. The woods around us echo with the murderous clomping of dozens of horses pushed into gallops.
Otto and Liesel plummet into the tree line.
I follow.
We narrowly squirm around rough brown trunks and branches like black reaching fingers. The forest floor is thick with undergrowth, spotted barrenly with what snow managed to fight through the canopy, and the air is somehow even more frigid than it was on the road, each breath crystallizing across my tongue.
“The road’s clear!” we hear Johann call to the hexenjägers. “No sign of them leaving this way.”
There’s a long pause. I run with everything I have, darting behind Otto with Liesel, going, going—
“Fritzichen!” the shout rings up the road, snakes through the trees. “You’ve played with my toy long enough. It’s my turn now.”
Ahead, Liesel sobs and clings to Otto, and I barely make out the things she cries, half whimpers, half pleas. “Don’t let him get me—not again—”
“He won’t,” I promise her.
I don’t have magic anymore, no protective spells, nothing, and I’m so tired of not having supplies that can help us, that can do anything—but I can do something. If I don’t have magic to stop my brother, I can still stop him.
I dare to glance behind us. To gauge how far my brother has advanced.
We’ve only made it a few paces inside the Forest. Dieter is there now, on the road, his horse dancing as he surveys the edge. He must realize it’s fruitless to lead horses through these trees; he leaps down, snapping at someone to toss him a pistol.
Then he charges straight into the Forest.
A handful of hexenjägers follows him, pistols out, one already aiming.
I start to turn, to scream warning at Otto, but the moment Dieter vaults into the trees, his body goes airborne. He hovers there, suspended at the edge, and the same thing happens to each of the jägers who follow; an invisible force grabs them, yanks them aloft.
And, as one, they are tossed back onto the road, collapsing in unceremonious heaps of yelps and curses.
I whirl back around and race harder, each step putting more space between my brother and me. But his voice carries, rises with fury, a terrifying break from his normal collected control:
“You cannot hide, Friederike! They will not protect you!”
Otto starts to look back at me.
“Keep going!” I scream. Panic is welling higher and higher.
Otto redoubles, and he and Liesel pull ahead, speeding over fallen logs, around a hulking, thick tree—
I curve after them, and for a moment, I lose them, a dark blur in a world of dim shadows and massive rising trees.
“Fritzi! Here—there’s a river!”
Otto lumbers ahead, and Liesel peeks over his shoulder. I catch a stain of tears on her cheeks.
“The mist, Fritzi!” she calls to me. “Go into the mist!”
Otto looks at her in his arms. “What? What mist?”
But I see it. Can’t he? The river he mentioned appears, a narrow, gurgling snake of a thing compared to the Rhine. Wherever it comes from must be warm; mist rises off it in billowing clouds.
The steam blooms more and more, filling the air like an early morning fog.
I shake my head, trying to dislodge the blurry effect.
“Wait—Otto—” I trip on a root, catch myself, but when I look up, I can’t find them.
I stumble forward, the thickness of the mist growing, growing, whiteness seeping through the trees in billowing waves.
“Liesel! Otto!”
The mist rises. The trees vanish. All is white and fogged, smelling of rainwater and mildew and dampness.
“Fritzi!” Otto cries, muddled, distant.
“It’s all right!” Liesel shouts. “It’s all right, Fritzi!”
I’m coming, I try. I scream it, my fingers tearing at empty air, but the words are nothing, the same emptiness as the fog.
Movement at the edge of my vision makes me spin. I try to call for Otto, but any sound warbles into a stifled scream as a weathered face forms out of the mist and launches straight at me.
I dive, shoulder cracking into a tree, and the wail that bursts out of my lips gets swallowed in the permeating whiteness.
I will judge her, says the voice.
It’s been days since I heard it. And though I know I shouldn’t be glad for it, there’s a part of me that sighs in relief, in having something familiar in this sudden onslaught of uncertainty.
But as I stumble forward another step, the mist congeals into another face. Twisted and grotesque, hollow sockets for its eyes, missing teeth and gnarled hair, it writhes out of the steam and swipes at me, and I duck again, cowering, only to hit the cold, frozen ground with a jarring thud.
I will judge her! the voice declares again, shouting through me.
I push up, scrambling back to my feet, body drenched in a cold sweat. Shivers wrack me, teeth chattering.
Otto—Liesel—
You’ve had your chance with her, sister, says someone new. A dry, airy voice that ripples with agelessness.
Another face swells in the mist. Another. Screaming, mutilated faces, terror and fury and hollowness, death in all its twisted agony—no matter where I turn, no matter where I look, faces come, heaving and swaying. I was breathless from running before, but now, I am gasping for air in tightening lungs, fear choking the life from me.
She is mine, says the voice, the one I know, the one tied to wild magic, and I sob, but that sob is silenced. I want to rail against it—I have not given in, I do not belong to wild magic, I’m still a good witch, a good witch—
Who are these other voices? What do they want?
No, a final voice says. And this one sounds like a thousand voices in one, ringing, ringing, ringing with lifetimes of sight and wisdom and pain. I will test her worthiness.
All of the faces surging through the mist pivot, as one, focusing on me, just on me. My throat cracks with another soundless scream, and as the faces converge, plummeting through the air toward me, terror has me clawing backward until I trip again, and fall.
But when I drop, I don’t hit the ground.
I hit water, and in a great, arching splash, I plummet beneath the river’s surface.