Darkness shatters like I broke the surface of a lake. I gasp, chest screaming and arms aching, eyes flaring open in a wild panic.
“Shh, Fritzichen. Shh. You’ve been out for quite a while.”
A hand pats my cheek. My sight is blurry, and I will it to clear, wild terror making every rational thought scatter. I am instinct only—I need to see. I need to see where I am.
My eyes focus.
Dieter is in front of me, reaching above us. I realize, then, that my hands are overhead too.
An iron lock clicks, and he steps back to survey his work. My wrists are in manacles fixed to chains that hang from the thick wooden beam of the ceiling, dangling me in the air.
Barbed terror burrows into my chest, and I throw my eyes around the room, desperate to focus, to breathe.
A bedroom stretches around us, something opulent and ornate. A wide canopied bed towers in front of me, a roaring fireplace to my left, with a table to my right holding a steaming porcelain cup of tea and a tray of delicate springerle cookies by a window that shows buildings, houses, things I think I recognize—
He has not taken you far, says Holda. Fritzi, I’m so sorry. They’re coming to help you. I promise, they’re coming.
My head throbs, and I dip my chin to my chest, arms stretching painfully over me, the tips of my toes barely brushing the floor enough for me to keep weight off my wrists. I’m barefoot. Barefoot because I’d just been in the bathing pool with Otto.
A tear leaks down my cheek, and my eyes snap shut.
How long until they get here? I ask Holda.
She doesn’t respond.
“Tut-tut now, meine Schwester; no more sleeping.” Dieter pats my cheek again, harder. “We have things to do before tonight.”
I try to question him. To speak, in any way.
But I feel something in my mouth. Metallic, hard, like a bit on a horse’s bridle.
I prod it with my tongue only to feel that it encases my tongue, pulling it out grotesquely so I can’t speak, can only moan in a panicked rush as my gaze flies to my brother.
“I have to give credit where it is due—humans are ingenious when it comes to developing ways to stretch the body to its limits.” Dieter tugs on a bar that runs along my jaw, and I feel how the whole thing loops around my head, yanking my tongue out. “They developed this to keep a witch’s tongue from wagging during interrogations. Which seems pointless, doesn’t it? How can you confess your sins to their most holy of men if you are as good as muzzled? But it isn’t about confessing, we both know. All they want from witches is silence.”
He uses his finger hooked through the bar to lean in closer, tugging my face to his, the heat of his breath scorching and vile. “But with this, you won’t be able to cast any spells, will you? Go ahead and try. Mumble for your goddess.”
I do try. It comes out garbled, a desperate, choppy churn of noise.
Dieter beams and releases me, my body rocking in the air. He turns, grabs something from a chair by the table, and faces me again, holding it up triumphantly.
The bottle he’d brought to Birresborn. The bonding potion he’d wanted me to take, to connect my magic with his.
“This is your last chance,” he tells me sweetly. “If you agree to take this bonding potion, all this stops. Your mouth open like that, all distended—you can drink this potion easily. That’s all you need do, sister. Nod—will you take it?”
He waits. He has to. The magic will not work unless I take the potion willingly. It’s part of the spell—one person brews the potion, the other drinks it, and only then, with that level of trust, will the bonding spell work.
But if I become bonded to Dieter, he will drain magic from me, use me until I am nothing left but a shell of a person, refilling my body with power like his own personal store of magic.
Panic dizzies me so powerfully that I feel myself on the edge of passing out again, blurred vision palpitating, clouds of fog encroaching—
Friederike! Holda shouts, her voice ripping through my head. Please—I know I have misled you. But please, you have to sever from the Well. Accept wild magic. Now, please—save yourself!
How? I whimper. How? I can’t speak. I can’t do anything.
Tears burn my cheeks. I fight through them, fight for a squirming shred of strength, and glare at Dieter.
I shake my head.
His deranged hope falls. Crashes off his face in a tight glare. “Friederike. I do not think you understand what is at stake.”
I hold my glare on his eyes. Maybe it’s for the best that I can’t speak; at least this way, I can feign resolve.
Inside, I’m falling apart.
Dieter’s lips purse.
In a flash, he hurls the bonding potion into the fire. The bottle shatters, flames eating up the potion in a sudden gust of heat and intensity, and I flinch helplessly, manacles clanking.
Dieter straightens his tunic, smooths his blond hair back. “You chose this path, Fritzichen. Remember that. We did not have to do things this way. You chose this.” Then he grins.
He grins, and it pierces my stomach with cold.
“I have other ways of getting your magic,” he tells me. “The bonding potion was merely the least…messy. But.” He lunges toward me, hand clamping to my jaw, holding me close as he exhales down into my face. “We are fated, you and I. Did the voice not tell you? It told me. The great vision for us. You and I, champion and warrior, warrior and champion, bound together to change the world.”
I go slack. Holda? Is he—
I’m so sorry, Fritzi. I told him many things before I realized the lengths he would go to. This—this is not what I intended. I had dreams of the greatness the two of you could achieve, but he is—
You didn’t tell me. I’d be sobbing if I could. As it is, I choke down cries, tears dripping over Dieter’s fingers on my jaw, and I slam my eyes shut. You didn’t warn me!
There is silence. Heavy with guilt. I am so sorry, Fritzi—
“Oh, no, no, no, Fritzi! I told you—stay awake.” Dieter turns away, toward the fireplace. “We have things to do. More now that you have chosen the harder path. Don’t make me regret keeping you all to myself.”
He crouches by the fireplace, his back to me, and I use this moment to look up at the manacles. They’re locked tight, my hands white with strain, and I’m not hanging close enough to anything to try to kick at a weapon or break free.
Sweat beads along my skin, trickles down my spine, cold and hot all at once.
“My hexenjägers know it was you and the kapitän who made fools of them,” Dieter says casually. He twists something in the fireplace and sparks rear up. “They’d love nothing more than to exact revenge on you, my pretty sister. Oh, how they cheered when I told them you’d been captured!” He laughs, something high and grating. “They do not realize the twenty Baden-Baden citizens I had them burn are the reason you were captured, but then again, they have not realized the truth in any of this.”
He burned twenty people to get to me.
Betrayal gnaws in my gut, but I can’t wallow in it now. I have to act. I have so little on my side; I can’t afford to alienate Holda.
He didn’t need to burn anyone, I say to her. Did he? Wild magic doesn’t need sacrifices or evil to use it. That’s what you wanted him to see, what you want me to see.
One of the things, yes, she says. Please, Fritzi. You still can say the spell. You’re talking to me, aren’t you? Please. I cannot help you more than this. With wild magic, you will not need to adhere to the rules of the Well. You can fight back.
Metal clanks from the fireplace, and I go rigid, hating the weak whimper that slips out of my throat, the only noise I can make.
Dieter stands. “If I was at all certain that my men would not kill you in their drive for vengeance, you would be at their mercy right now. Morale and all—humans are so much easier to manipulate when they are high on bloodlust! So remember that, meine Schwester.” He turns that beaming grin at me over his shoulder. “Baden-Baden is positively crawling with hexenjägers. And this time, there are no aqueducts to sneak through, no honorable kapitäns to save you. I doubt very much you will be able to seduce any of my men now—I promised that they would get to hear you scream and shortly see you burn, and they are manic for it.”
He faces me and lifts the object in his hands.
I thrash against the manacles, tears leaking down my face, pathetic garbled moans cracking from my throat.
I need to say the spell to sever myself from the Well. I need wild magic.
But my mind is blank with terror as he closes the space between us and cups my cheek around the horrific gag, shushing my sobs, all the while holding a long iron bar out to the side.
At the top of it, glowing orange from the heat, is a brand. One I’ve seen before, singed into the chests of witches.
He twists it, bending it through the air like it isn’t scalding hot and dangerous, and I see the letter D, the size of his palm, the iron thick in artful curls.
D for dämon.
The letter that he branded Mama with.
He follows my gaze to it and back. “The bonding potion would have let me access your power far more easily—but, well, you did say no. But this! See, this is one of the things I’d hoped you’d come to realize. Sigils are not something holy, something the goddesses designed for us. We give them their power. Sigils can be anything, anything at all, that we choose to give power to. And this sigil? This one makes you mine.”
His?
It rocks through me. How could I have been shortsighted, so quick to believe he’d do something for the church instead of himself?
Not D for demon.
For Dieter.
For him.
He’s been swinging the brand the whole time. Swinging it, swinging it, each pass of the metal through the air making it flare from orange to red to yellow—
Without warning, he straightens the brand and shoves it against my stomach, straight over the thin bodice of my gown.
Pain is an explosion behind my eyelids, a brilliant, searing burst of lightning and ignition. The expanse of it is too inconceivable to be felt immediately, and it isn’t until he rips the brand away, tearing singed flesh, that I scream.
That noise is garbled, mutilated by the tongue gag, a shrill, careening wail.
“Shush now, Fritzichen. Mama didn’t cry when she got her mark.”
I look down, the need to retch sending sour bile up my throat. And I see the mangled flesh, burnt and blackened, bits of it now orange and glowing on its own, and I gag, hard.
Dieter lays his hand over the wound. “Shh, shh,” he coos, and a wave of magic pulses into me from his palm.
The pain vanishes. Immediately.
No balms or potions. Just my brother, muttering slightly under his breath.
He pulls his hand back, and my stomach is healed. My gown lies gaping and scorched, but the brand is gone.
The sheer might of wild magic stuns me, even here, even now. He healed such a wound himself. None of our laws used, none of our rules followed. Just him.
I gasp, tears streaming down my cheeks, and when my eyes find my brother’s face, he’s giddy.
“This didn’t work on little Liesel,” he says to my stomach. He strokes a finger down the healed flesh, and I shudder. “The brand, I mean. So resistant to fire, that one. But you and I will have some fun with this, won’t we? Some scars don’t ever heal. And these scars connect us, Fritzichen.”
He shoves the brand against my stomach again.
My scream this time is a crooning shriek, and I flail on the chains, trying to get away, trying to escape him. The heat and the pressure of the iron and the smell; I thought I had known every facet of how burning could smell, but this is a phantom of its own, a snarl of laughter that grabs me by the throat and sneers, You thought you knew suffering? This is where it is born.
He removes the brand, lays his hand over the spot, heals it again.
He was meant to be our village’s healer, he was meant to help us—
“I wanted you to listen to the voice too.” Dieter rests the length of the brand on his shoulder and props his other arm on a nearby chair so he can bend closer to me, catching my gaze through surges of tears. “I wanted you to sever from the Well and give into wild magic like I did so you would know how deep the lies run. Wild magic is not something to be feared, and the Origin Tree’s magic is not the most powerful. We have been lied to, forced to grab up scraps so we can stay in their control. Mama, the Elders, our coven, the Well—all of it is a festering hive of deception bent on keeping us in line, and I will break it open. Oh, don’t cry! You get to help me still. What was it you said to me? I don’t want to save you, not after everything you’ve done? Well, likewise, sweet Fritzi. I don’t want to save you anymore. But you are still very, very useful.”
He pitches the brand toward me, and I flinch and writhe.
Say the spell, Fritzi! Holda begs, and I beg myself too; I’m so deranged by pain and horror that all I can think is, Say it, say it, say it—but what are the words?
On this day, I start. That’s right. On this day—
“You have to know, Fritzi.” Dieter steps away to stick the brand into the fireplace. I think he’s done—he has to be done—but he holds it in the flames, eyes drifting to the ceiling, his head shaking in exasperation. “This is all the fault of Mama and the Elders, and those forest folk you met. They are the ones who kept the secret of wild magic from us, knowing just how powerful we could be! They are the ones who forced rules upon us! All the things I do—they force it. If they had given us the true strength of the Well from the start, none of this would be necessary.”
He turns back to me. The brand glows orange again.
“Just like this pain.” He nods at the brand. “It isn’t necessary. You chose this route. Because, no matter how powerful wild magic may be, it showed me that the only way I will be able to change our world is with your power enhancing mine. You’re special, Fritzichen. And this is the sacrifice you must make for freedom.”
I blubber and beg through the gag, but it’s all muffled, all nonsense, my world a swimming, flickering sea of pain, and I am rendered inconsequential but to experience this.
Dieter holds. The brand dips to the side as his head does, surveying me, his brows sharpening.
“Oh, pretty sister, you’re crying out for him, aren’t you? That traitorous kapitän of mine.” He clicks his tongue and shows me the brand. “But you see, you aren’t his anymore. You aren’t Mama’s. You’re mine. And when you burn tomorrow, these brands will make sure that every drop of the wild magic your death generates funnels straight into me. The barrier will fall”—he snaps his fingers—“just. Like. That.”
He shoves the brand high against my collarbone.
I pass out. Darkness yanks me down, down, and I see Holda there, see her screaming for me, but her voice is soundless, soundless like I am, her tongue in a gag—
Past her, I see the Origin Tree.
I see forest folk gathered around it, defensive lines, hands raised outward to face an enemy I can’t spot—they weave spells around the tree. Creating the barrier, the Well, this is the start of the Well—
A jolt of magic rushes through me, and I snap awake to Dieter pressing his hand against my chest, healing me again.
I shake my head; it’s all I can do: shake it and whimper when he lifts the brand, twists it between us.
His eyes roll over the wicked iron D before dropping to my healed skin, the holes in my gown.
He places it back against my stomach. Holds it. Holds it through my writhing, my screaming.
I pass out again.
The forest folk are around the Origin Tree.
This is what I wanted you to know, Fritzi. Holda’s voice is different here. Clearer, less restrained, and something in this liminal space of unconsciousness and pain must finally be breaking through her layers of magic-kept secrecy, where the other goddesses can’t see what she’s showing me.
The forest folk protect the Origin Tree, she says, but it was not always the source of magic. Magic used to be all wild. It used to run and flow freely.
She shows me the world, the wide world of witches casting spells and their warriors guarding them, and none of the spells they generate follow our rules.
But there has always been threats to our kind. The hexenjägers are the latest iteration. The ones before them, the Romans, all but wiped us out just the same. And so my sisters and I gathered as much wild magic as we could and trapped it in the Origin Tree.
I see the forest folk again, creating the barrier, guarding the tree.
We set up rules to access the Origin Tree’s magic and created the tale that wild magic is corrupting. We bestowed the responsibility of enforcing those rules on priestesses and Elders. We thought, if we made accessing magic more controlled, and convinced witches and normal people alike that the only evil magic was wild, that it would make good witches less feared. Less of a target.
We were wrong.
Wild magic is still in the world, though less of it, with what we took to fill the Origin Tree. My sisters do not agree with what I know to be true—that capping our witches’ powers was never the solution. Controlling magic was never going to be enough to convince the world not to fear us.
You must fight back now.
You must break your connection to the Well and open up to wild magic. It is the same power. It will not harm you.
I am so sorry, Fritzi.
Dieter rips me into consciousness again.
I come, gasping this time under both pain and realization.
Clarity is startling and vile and a relief.
There is too much she wants me to do. Too much beyond this moment, and my brain retracts to only this moment, because I am all body and flesh under my brother’s insanity.
Dieter didn’t get this far in Holda’s crusade, or he wouldn’t be doing—doing this. He doesn’t need to do this to me. He doesn’t need to do any of this—this brand may act as a focus for his intent, but he doesn’t realize how limitless his own power really is.
I try to tell him. If only to get him to stop.
I remember Liesel saying that. I just wanted to make him stop.
He reheats the brand, moves it to the spot on my collarbone.
Adds a new one, on my thigh, singeing through my skirt.
The air hangs heavy with the stench of burning flesh. I am screaming at a pitch I have never heard before, twisting against the chains, my wrists chafing, my toes scrambling against the floorboards slick from my sweat and tears, and I cannot escape this, cannot think—
On this day and from this hour. I need to say those words. I need to think them. I need, I need, I am all need, need to stop this pain, to get away—
Otto, Otto, help me—
Sever from the Well. Wild magic is the same as the Well’s power, all along. The goddesses thought they were keeping us safe. They lied. They lied, they lied—
Dieter steps back, his head cocked appraisingly.
“Beg me to heal you.” He says it so calmly, so straightforward, that I anchor to his words for their cold oddness. “Beg me, and I will consider it.”
I whine, throat bruised and blistered, sweat and tears drenching me, but when I look into his eyes, I glare at him, utter, rooted hatred.
Dieter shrugs. “I did try to be merciful, over and over. What will your kapitän whore think? You, all damaged like this.”
He reaches up above me. A click, and the loop holding the manacles releases, plummeting my body to the floor.
The resonant impact of the fall holds me captive, and I lie there, pliant and defeated, sweat-slicked and in such pain as I have never felt. I squirm to find a position that doesn’t hurt, but my arms twist in the manacles, concaving my chest over the two brands there, and my skirt pulls at the burn on my thigh, goring it deeper.
Dieter crosses to the door and uses the iron rod to beat on it. “She’s ready.”
The door opens. Two hexenjägers enter, already laughing; the moment they see me, their laughter hardens into something hungry.
“Chain her to the stake,” Dieter tells them. He folds himself into a seat at the table and lifts his tea, his face bathed in the fading evening light. “Spread word to find your stations after—the burning starts soon, and I do expect we’ll have some misguided attempts at rescue.”
The jägers approach me.
I will myself to pull away. To fight back. My mind screams to act, but I am nothing, I am pain—
One grabs the chain between my hands. The other swoops under my legs. The agony of shifting, of being yanked around—darkness throbs, beckons—
“Oh, do be gentle with her,” Dieter calls from the table. “She is, after all, my sister.”
One of the jägers chuckles. They haul me from the room, and I can’t even whimper anymore. I’m a shell, scraped raw, watching my brother in a perverted hypnosis as I’m carried out.
How are we expected to defeat someone like him? No magic is strong enough.
Fritzi, comes Holda’s voice, choked with tears. She says nothing else. Just my name. Just that plea.
My eyes pinch shut, my body swaying in the hands of the jägers. The agony palpitating out of each brand lives inside of me, building on each inhale only to build again, never ending, like the Forest, like those trees, like, like…
I want to cry out for Otto. I want to scream for him. The wanting and the missing wells up in my throat, but I am gagged and bleeding and ruined. He’s coming to save me, Holda said he is; but he’s too late.
What will he do when he finds me like this?
He’ll get himself killed. I can’t let him fight Dieter, not when I’m in pieces.
Delirium is taking me—I’m not sure whether any of this is real, or if I’ll wake back up in my room in Birresborn to Mama bent in work over the kitchen table.
“On this day and from this hour,” she sings. There is flour in the air. The sweet smell of baking pastries.
I sing along with her.
I feel the vibrations of the words throb through my body, past the pain, past the fear.
Once, I would have done this to prove the Well wrong, in a way that is so similar to Dieter’s intent. To stand up against the control they enact over us. To willingly, eagerly prove what Holda showed me, that we can access wild magic without needing the evil sacrifices they said we did. To show them that wild magic is more powerful.
But now, in this whittled moment, I do this to save the man I love, and Liesel, and all the witches and victims of the hexenjägers.
I do this to reclaim myself because I have been brutally unmade.
“I sever here the Well’s one power.
Soul thus rendered, alone I wait,
Only I will now hold my fate.”