A few of the forest folk guide Liesel and me to a staircase that twists up a tree with a trunk wider than the cottage I shared with Mama. The bark glints and gleams in errant rays that break through the high, high canopy, other light sources flickering around us: elaborate silver lanterns hanging from elegant looping hooks, flashes of candlelight from within rooms nestled in the very trees themselves.
I crane my neck around, seeking through the branches, but I can’t spot which one might be the Origin Tree. Surely it is deeper within, guarded fiercely, not holding buildings and homes.
The Well is a refuge. We were told stories of it from infancy, how we could come here for protection, kept safe among the witches chosen by the goddesses to protect our source of magic.
In the stories, I always imagined a village like Birresborn. A coven like mine. A tight community of witches depending on one another, scraping by.
But this is a city as sprawling as Trier, lifted into the treetops, and that gives it ancient importance.
The Well has been this society of resources and witches and power, abundance and wealth, while we were out in the world, clinging to whatever spell components and weapons we could scrounge up, fearing hexenjägers and prejudices.
How easily could the witches of the Well muster a force to not only resist the hexenjägers, but overpower them? This is no mere village. This is practically a kingdom.
Familiar anger rises up the back of my throat. The anger I felt talking with Perchta.
They’ve stayed here, in opulence and finery, while we’ve suffered.
Everywhere around me are witches rushing with baskets full of herbs, or arms full of protection totems, or hands lifted as they chant spells into the ether. Some of their arms, necks, and faces are splayed with a vast array of black tattoos in swirling symbols I recognize from my coven’s books and scrolls. Sigils for protection, strength, endurance, foresight, and more—I’ve never seen a witch able to tattoo our symbols onto their skin before. The idea is too baffling—what if hexenjägers see? What if someone notes the symbology and cries witchcraft? But here, witches are free to show off every element of our practice in a way that hollows me to my core. I had not even known the full extent of the limitations I lived under, for survival.
Everyone we pass at least occasionally glances into the forest, past the edges of these trees set with buildings, their faces bent in such focus that I feel their urgency in my gut.
Dieter is weakening the barrier. I knew his effect was dangerous, with the way magic was bucking like an angry horse in the outside world; but to see the strain on the faces here—how far has my brother used wild magic to breach these walls? How many people has he killed to feed the evil that grows and grows in him like a disease?
Is it too late?
We climb, lifting up to a village that stuns me speechless.
It’s built into the tree canopy.
Most of the buildings are carved into the trees that tower all around us, their branches curving to cradle structures and stairs like they were grown specifically to hold this village. The walls and windows match the trees in every way, from the sheen of gray to the twisting sway of the lines, so that everywhere is a forest caught in a gentle breeze, palpitating, dancing, a celebration of life.
Despite the fear and anger, I can’t help but be mesmerized by this place.
“Is this whole area the Well?” I ask.
Brigitta looks down at me from a higher step. “Yes. In a way—we are tied to the Black Forest. In this world, but set apart.”
That explains the massive size of these trees, the ethereal aura that permeates each glittering mote of dust we pass.
“Where is the Origin Tree?” My mouth is dry.
Brigitta looks off into the forest, toward the city-trees that race off farther than my eyes can see. “Deep within our borders. Well-guarded, don’t worry—I’ve been a captain of the Grenzwache for five years, and I’ve only seen it from the barest of distances. Dieter won’t get close enough to harm it.”
Grenzwache. Border guard.
Brigitta gives a reassuring smile that does nothing to soothe my fear and carries on, leading us up, up, up, to a bridge that stretches to another tree. As I take a first step onto it, my eyes dip down.
I shriek and stumble back into the soldier behind me. I hadn’t thought too strongly about the fact that we’re being watched, hemmed in on all sides by what are clearly guards in leather armor dyed green and decorated with arching motifs of still more trees, because all of this is so overwhelming, so much a story come to life, that I’m half-delirious with the need to laugh. But the sheer height we’re at up here, watching leaves drift lazily around us, down, down…
“It isn’t possible,” I whisper.
Liesel takes my hand. The way she grips it is insistent, and I manage to tear my petrified gaze from the bridge’s railing to look at her. Her eyes are wide, a bead of sweat on her hairline. She’s scared too.
I clutch her hand tighter. We’re in this together. To the end.
“We wouldn’t let you fall all the way,” says the man behind us.
I look back. The guard has a brow slightly cocked, amusement playing in his eyes as he lets his words sink in. His copper hair hangs to his mid-back, pulled half atop his head with a woven leather braid that shows an insignia across his forehead: three moons. One waxing crescent, one full, and one waning crescent. A symbol of the goddesses.
“All the way?” I clarify.
He shrugs, arms behind his back. “It’s only the last few seconds that would kill you, isn’t it?”
It could come across as threatening, but that sparkle in his eyes intensifies, and he grins at Liesel.
He pulls one hand out from behind his back and holds something up for her to see:
A krapfen.
Liesel makes a startled gasp. “Where—where did you get that?”
Eyes flitting from her to me, he takes a huge bite. “Come on,” he says through a mouthful of pastry and sugar. “The bridge is really quite sound.”
He pushes around us and continues out onto it.
“We’re nearly there,” says Brigitta, who has realized we stopped. She looks back at us with the two other guards, the lot of them again not threatening. Just waiting.
Liesel tugs on my hand. “Fritzi. Your krapfen. He ate your krapfen. He got our offering!”
And while she sounds downright enchanted, and immediately darts out onto the bridge, I linger for a beat, watching the guard pop the rest of the krapfen into his mouth and give me a wink.
I manage a shaky breath.
Holda? I try. I’ve never reached out to the voice before. Never wanted to draw its focus. We need to talk.
I start across the bridge, doing my best to keep my eyes on Liesel’s shoes in front of me, the way the wood of the bridge is half natural growth from thick oak branches, half boards nailed into it.
“Watch your step,” the guard says, that tinge of amusement in his voice still, and this time, Brigitta swats his shoulder.
“Restrain yourself, Alois; she doesn’t need your cheek.”
“Oh, I beg to differ, Brigs.”
“Don’t—we’re on patrol.” She spins away with an eye roll. “Pretend you have decorum, the Three help me.”
“She loves me,” Alois whispers to Liesel, but his eyes flick to mine, too, and as Liesel giggles into her palm, I grip my jaw tight.
You can trust them, comes the voice.
I steady myself on the railing. It’s different knowing who the voice is now. What it is.
My lungs shudder. But do I trust you?
Brigitta leads us to a massive chamber so high in the trees that the landing before the door takes us above the canopy. The wind here is warm springtime, winter held at bay by the magic of this place, but the height is what takes my breath away; we are at the top of the Forest, the top of the world. The blue of the sky is endless and infinite and makes me feel so startlingly small that I’m grateful for it. I am inconsequential beneath it. I am dismissible.
I manage a stuttering inhale before Brigitta opens one of two ornately carved doors, the pair of them making another triple moon symbol in polished birch.
“You will meet with our council,” Brigitta says and ushers us inside. “They demanded to know the moment you arrived.”
“Well, nice that they knew we were coming,” I mumble, then hiss at myself. I can’t let my nerves get the better of me. I can’t make these people my enemy—at least until I decide what to do with all of…this.
Inside, the room is airy and light, the walls a soft lavender, with massive windows that show the top of the forest rippling out into the distance on all sides, green leaves stretching on into the swath of blue sky. The walls of the room are lined with shelves that hold books—dozens of books, actually, more than I’ve ever seen in one place—and scrolls, all manner of potion equipment, and magic relics of the sort we had in Birresborn: bones and twigs and satchels.
I’m so taken by the supplies here—more than my whole coven had at their fingertips, and the continued reminder of the Well’s luxury leaves a tang of anger in my mouth—that I almost miss the flurry in the center of the room.
Three people are facing the door. They look up from where they had all been crouched over a table set with such an array of spell components that I can’t guess what they’re casting. Angelica and burdock root—warding? Two tall wax candles with a thread between them—severing? There’s other things, but the eyes on me draw my focus.
Liesel and I stop just inside. I feel my travel-grime and river-dampness so heavily that my cheeks heat—these people are utterly spotless, their clothing so fine that I’d never hope to wear the like, their hair styled in either pin-straight sheets or done up in twisted knots with greenery set into the loops.
And here Liesel and I are, dirt-smeared and bloodied, hungry and thirsty and sore from sleeping on the ground.
Whatever flimsy upper hand I may have had shrivels and dies.
“Our champions,” the center man says, his voice tight like he’s fighting to stay cordial, to not recoil at our appearance. He rises from his bent position and claps his hands, hair so blond it’s nearly white. “Abnoba has long prepared us for your arrival. Liesel—she is delighted by you.”
“She talks to you too?” Liesel steps forward, a smile in her voice.
The man beams at her. It transforms his face, a fatherly aura in his kind eyes. “Not as much as she speaks with you, I imagine. Your bond with her far surpasses what even we can achieve. We are the priest and priestesses of the Well. I am Rochus. This is Philomena.” He motions to the woman who stands straight and bows her head at us, her voluptuous curves hugged by a striking aqua gown that looks so like the one Perchta wore in my vision that I wonder if it’s the same. “And Cornelia.”
She looks around my age. With the same copper hair as Alois, she stays bent over the table, one finger tapping a rhythm on an unrolled scroll. I can’t figure out the way she’s looking at me, her eyes squinted, calculating.
“Dismiss your subordinates, Wächterin Brigitta,” Rochus says, a noticeable dip in his voice as his formality breaks.
Brigitta’s eyebrows lift. “I assumed we would remain and escort them to lodgings shortly. They have traveled far—”
“And will be put to use now, Wächterin. There will be time for resting afterward. Dismiss your subordinates. You may stay if you insist.”
Brigitta looks at us, and her unease puts me even more on edge.
She nods at Alois and the other guards and ducks off to the side as they leave, and Rochus takes a step toward us, his arms spread.
“We are in dire need of your assistance,” Rochus says, his smile tight. “You no doubt are well aware of the threat pressing at our borders. The goddesses have sent you to us at the proper time—”
“Because we are their champions?” I wave at myself, at Liesel, hoping he sees how absurd this is. Liesel is ten years old.
Her childhood has been cut short, and already Abnoba demands more of her.
Rochus sighs heavily. Behind him, Philomena has gone back to furiously grinding something in a mortar, her attention flitting from a scroll to us and back in simmering distaste.
“Her frustration is earned,” says Cornelia. She puts a finger on one of the two unlit candles, follows the string between them with the lightest touch. “I think they’re deserving of a full explanation, Rochus, before you jump right to using them.”
Philomena glares at Cornelia. “You have felt Dieter’s movements on us, and you wish to delay even more?”
Cornelia smiles icily. “Yes. I do. Because the goddesses chose them, didn’t they? And so our champions are worthy of respect.”
I don’t like how they’re talking about us. I don’t like the way Philomena dumps more herbs into her mortar and grinds harder, her nostrils flaring at me like I’m the one who argued with her. Not that I wouldn’t be arguing, if I knew what was going on.
“You want our help stopping Dieter,” I say. “That’s what we want, too.”
“It is far more than stopping Dieter, I am afraid,” Rochus says. “If he were to breach the Well and harm the Origin Tree, he could eradicate not just the magic witches draw from, but the very connection we have to the goddesses. And so”—he takes a breath—“for the protection of the Well, our goddesses, and magic’s very future, you have come to help us.”
“By running,” Cornelia says. She waves at the table before her. “By taking the coward’s way.”
My eyes go to the magic supplies again. I spot other things this time—belladonna. Henbane.
A rock lands in my gut, a heavy weight of dread. A bonding potion?
There are other things they might use those herbs for than a bonding potion, though. I try to breathe.
Philomena shakes the pestle at Cornelia. “You would have us fight? We are not warriors!”
“We used to be.” Cornelia’s voice is low and controlled, a purr of fury, and I drop down one of the steps into the central seating area.
“Warriors,” I echo. “They reacted to that word when”—I don’t want to mention Otto, not yet—“when it was used, after we arrived.”
“That was how we used to walk this world,” Cornelia says, her fuming gaze still fixed on Philomena. “Warriors and champions on the outside of the barrier; priests on the inside. The old ways have been forgotten for too long.”
“I knew this would turn into yet another fruitless argument with you!” Philomena cries. “Our decision has been made. Champions or no, we are not—”
“Warriors and witches,” Cornelia snaps her gaze to mine. I go cold, frozen beneath the intensity in her eyes. “Pairs selected for their prowess, for their heart. Sometimes a mortal and a witch, sometimes two with magic in their blood. They took the bonding potion to connect their power, to share magic, but it was beyond that. Souls mingled. The apex of our powers.”
My eyes go fully round. The rock of dread in my belly grows heavier. The ingredients on the table, this mention of the bonding potion—it can’t be coincidence.
What do they want us to do?
“Creating bonding potions and performing the ritual used to be an honored calling for us,” Cornelia says. She shoots a pointed, accusatory look at Philomena. “Bonded witches could save us more than any other plan. That combination of power could stand against Dieter.”
“We agree,” Philomena says, but it’s biting. “A bonded witch pair will save us.”
“Not as you intend,” Cornelia snaps. “You would have us hide here, behind our barrier!”
“What do you want us to do?” My question yanks silence over the room.
“We’re making the barrier around the Well impassable,” Cornelia says. Her bluntness earns a hiss of warning from Philomena and Rochus both, but I’m staring at only her, fixated with horror as her words sink in. “We’re blocking off the Well, the Origin Tree, all of it from the rest of the world. And the goddesses brought you two because one of us needs to be bonded with a champion to finalize a spell this large.”
“What?” I rock forward. “What would that do to magic in this world?”
“The Well’s magic will remain inside the barrier,” Rochus says. “Wild magic will remain outside.”
All the anger I’d been feeling drops alongside my dread, a toxic mix of fear and fury and concern and rage.
The Well and its witches have sat here, letting horrors unimagined pick us off in the real world, and now, when they have all these resources, when they could march out and stop Dieter, they would retreat even more. Permanently. As though we are not the same, as though we are not connected by the same magic, the same goddesses. As though this means nothing.
“Dieter would still have access to wild magic,” I say. “The witch hunts will continue. And those accused now won’t be witches at all—you’d leave innocents to suffer and die from prejudices started over us? You abandoned us already to die under the hexenjägers, so you’re just lighting the remaining pyres yourselves!”
Philomena rolls her eyes. “I should have known Holda’s champion would side with this prideful nonsense. Now is not the time to be haughty—it is the time to preserve what we have left. Your brother”—she cuts me a sharp, accusing look—“has managed to weaken our borders with wild magic. Our borders! If he is capable of that, what havoc will he wreak if he enters here?”
“Holda has been trying to get me to use wild magic,” I say. No pretense. No softening.
A pause grabs the room.
“How dare you!” Philomena barks. “Accusing a goddess of trying to access that which is corrupting, which is forbidden! Do you even know what wild magic is, hm? It is the cast-off remnants created by performing evil deeds. And no goddess, not even one known to be unpredictable, would dare touch such a thing!”
But Cornelia looks back up at me. Her eyes narrow with intrigue. “She did?”
I nod.
“Wild magic is tempting,” Rochus intercedes. “It disguises. It manipulates. It swayed your brother, after all.”
“I’m starting to think it didn’t.” I glare at Rochus, who noticeably flinches. “I’m starting to think wild magic has nothing to do with good or evil. Why, if Dieter is weakening the barrier you keep around the Well’s magic, has that made our magic in the outside world even more powerful? What is the barrier really keeping out—or in?”
Rochus’s face goes white. Philomena blubbers behind him, a stain of red rising in her face.
“I think Holda chose my brother as her champion and tried to get him to use wild magic for whatever reason, just like she’s done with me,” I keep going, “only before she could realize what she’d done, he’d used what she showed him to hurt a lot of people. I’m starting to wonder if wild magic really is as evil as you say—or if my brother was just wicked from the start.”
There. All the truths that have begun to sprout within me. All the horrors, all the fears. I rip them out of my soul and lay them at the feet of these strangers.
“I may be Holda’s champion, but that doesn’t mean I bow to you,” I snap. “And that doesn’t mean we’ll blindly obey your misguided plan. If I ever did take a bonding potion”—the words ghost Dieter’s face across my mind, his prideful smile, the way he’d extended the bonding potion to me and I’d known, deep in my soul, that he’d bleed me dry—“it certainly won’t be with someone who is so eager to only use me.”
“It’s a bastardization of one of our greatest honors,” Cornelia says, backing me up. “You have every right to refuse this misguided plan.”
Philomena darkens, scowling at me, ignoring Cornelia. “We have the components for the barrier and bonding spells almost completed,” she growls. “All we need is one of you to take the bonding potion. We did not bring you here to ask your permission, champions. We brought you here because you are necessary, and you will help us save our magic, or you will regret ever setting foot in our home.”