It is a solemn ride to Bernkastel.
The witch hunts have been going on for half our lives. No hexenjäger—no person in the entire diocese—is untouched by the trials.
It started when I was ten years old. For years, we’d heard of the villages who purged evil from their squares by burning witches. The archbishop sanctioned the deaths, then formulated the hexenjäger units for more efficient trials and executions.
For a time, despite the terrors outside our town, there was peace. Joy, even. I went from a boy to a man under my stepmother’s guidance. She was the only mother I truly knew, and I loved her as such. She often tempered my father’s rages.
For a while, we were a family.
Then the trials swept through my town. An old woman was first to be suspected of witchcraft, her land desired by a cousin. My mother usually had a calming effect on my volatile father, but the trials enraged her. She ranted about heresy—but not the heresy of the accused witches. The heresy of the zealots who burned them.
That was not the first time my father hit my mother; it was not even the first time he’d broken her nose. Blood streamed down her lips, and she spat at him, calling him a man who knew only fear, not God.
Father went into a quiet fury at my stepmother’s rebuke. I still remember it. Hilde and I were in the upstairs loft, hiding, holding hands, trembling as Father turned on his heel and left our cottage.
He came back with hexenjägers.
He made us watch her burn.
“I will kill him,” I whispered to Hilde that night. “You wait.”
But in the end, I did not have a chance to follow through with that promise. Father developed a cough. First, he said, it was the smoke that had ruined his throat. But the wheezing and sputtering didn’t go away. Then he claimed that my mother had cursed him in her death, making a deal with the devil.
“Then pray,” I told him coldly. “Or is your god no match for a single, innocent woman?”
He tried to hit me, but his body racked with a fit of coughing. Blood splattered with mucus. “One day, boy,” he choked out, his voice raspy, “you will thank me. You will see how much this world needs purging.”
He was dead the next day.
And that, more than anything else I have ever seen in my life, proved to me that God was real.
Hilde and I survived on our own for a time. Mother had brewed beer to supplement the coins Father poured into the golden coffers of the cathedral, and she’d taught Hilde well. I dug out a garden behind the house. Hilde and I both hunted—mostly setting rabbit snares in the forest.
We survived.
But we didn’t forgive.
And we never forgot.
When I got a little older, when our money started to run out, when some of the folk in town started speculating on when Hilde would be married and to whom, I went to Trier.
I trained with Dieter. I moved up the ranks, my position handed to me thanks to my father’s reputation among the holy men.
I became Kapitän of the guard that killed my mother.
And now I’m coming home.
For my sister.
The cottage is just as I remember it. Despite moving to the city, I used to visit Hilde often. Later, it became necessary for distance and time to separate us.
Smoke puffs up from the chimney.
That first winter without Mother, Hilde never lit a fire. But there’s smoke now, and little wonder as it’s cold, and Hilde would need flames to brew her beer.
I slow my horse. The men behind me do the same. The cart rattles on the deeply rutted road. I imagine my sister riding in the cage built in the back, her thin arms and legs knocking against the rough wood as the cart lumbers back to Trier.
One of the men kicks his horse, pulling up beside me. Bertram, I trained with him.
“Sir, you can stay outside,” he says. “It is no easy thing to arrest a relative.” He meets my eyes, and I see sympathy there.
I shake my head. “No. I want her to know it was I who turned her in, I who condemned her. I cannot let evil exist in my own family.”
Bertram’s jaw is hard as he nods deeply, respectfully.
I dismount quickly. Best to be done with it.
I unlatch the brooch that fastens my cloak to my shoulders, letting the cloth drape over the saddle, careful to keep the dirt from staining it. My men follow suit—despite the cold air, the churning smoke from the chimney indicates that it will be sweltering inside.
Hilde learned from Mother well—keep the blaze going while brewing beer.
A pang hits me at this memory of home, and what that meant. Once.
Three short strides, and I’m at the door, my men behind me.
I feel the weapons hidden all over my body.
“God bless the righteous,” Bertram says as I reach for the door. His words make me pause, just a fraction, my fingers cold on the iron ring that opens the wooden door.
There’s a flicker by the window. Soft brown hair. White cotton kerchief. Hilde, inside. She’s singing to herself, the fire roaring—she has not noticed the loud horses and men who have arrived.
My eyes settle on the windowsill where a clay bowl sits with cream inside the house. Bertram has followed my gaze. He makes the sign of the cross. Bowls of cream like that are little offerings to the forest folk, the old ways.
The long-steeped habits of the Celts that have not yet been purged from society.
I throw the door open.
My sister spins around, eyes wide. For one fraction of a second, I am met with a look of love. My sister and I share blood only through our father, but we grew up together, happy children who truly loved each other.
But then her hazel eyes move past me.
To the men.
The horses.
The cage on the cart.
And when she turns back, I see only fierce rebellion in her gaze. She knows.
It’s time.
“What are you doing here?” she snarls.
“I have turned a blind eye to your practice for far too long.” I stand in the doorway. I can feel Bertram and the other men crowding behind me, trying to get inside, but I don’t let them. Not yet.
This is my sister.
This moment is ours.
“What evidence have you?” Hilde spits. Behind her, the firelight casts her in flickering shadow. Her defiance and the stifling heat do nothing to appease the hexenjägers gathered in her door tonight.
My gaze lingers on the cauldron at the fire. It’s copper, not iron. “A vessel for potions?” I ask, arching a brow.
“For beer, you damn fool, as well you know.”
I lift the tall, pointed black hat that sits on the little table by the door. It’s called a hennin—Mother wore one too, to stand out in the crowds when she sold beer in the town market.
Another sign of a witch.
“And a broom by the door!” Bertram says. He tries to press it into my hand, but I drop it. It lands softly on the earthen floor.
“You can condemn a woman for a pot, a hat, and a broom?” Hilde asks, hand on hip. “I make my living with beer. How else am I to brew and sell it?”
The broom is a sign all the women in the diocese use—putting one outside the door indicates that the brewer has surplus to sell. Most people can’t read, but the signal is common enough, an invitation to come up to the house and buy homemade goods.
I can feel the men behind me shifting uneasily. Every man with a mother has a home with a cauldron and broom inside it. Hennins are old and out of fashion, but common enough in the towns with markets.
At that exact moment, a ginger cat streaks across the floor.
“A familiar!” Bertram says, pointing.
Hilde growls in frustration. “I brew with hops! Mice love hops, but the cat loves mice.”
I shake my head. “Witches hide in plain sight,” I say. “But the little details add up. You seem to have an excuse for everything.”
“There is nothing to excuse.” Hilde’s voice is fierce. “My only crime is not yet marrying. I am a maid who dares to live by herself, and—”
“Do you?” I let the words drop easily from my mouth, as if they do not matter, but they still Hilde’s rant. “Or do you reside with the devil? Does your coven visit often?”
She cringes before me, finally aware that there’s nothing to make this—me—go away.
“Your mother burned as a witch,” I say without inflection or emotion. I speak as if she were not a mother to me too. “I had hoped, Hilde, that you would not follow in her cursed footsteps.”
“Bruder—” Hilde’s voice cracks with fear.
“I am no brother to you,” I say, glaring at my sister.
That is what breaks her. Her rash responses and spitfire curses die on her lips. She is reduced to the little girl who used to come to me after skinning her knee or burning her fingers. Her eyes plead with me, her whole body seems to shrink with the dawning realization that I will not save her.
Not this time.
“Hilde Ernst,” I announce, “I hereby arrest you for the heinous crime of witchcraft. You will stand trial in Trier, and then you will be condemned to die in fire here on Earth before God sends your soul to burn in hell.”