I lead the caravan back to Trier. My horse is a pace ahead of the others, and I value the silence this affords me. I tune out the other men and the creaking of the prisoner cart, leaving me with only my own voice in my head.
And the echoes of my sister’s screams.
Nothing has gone to plan.
And now Hilde is…
I don’t think she’s dead. The witch, she calls herself Fritzi—she didn’t seem to think that Hilde is dead. Just missing.
“And safe,” she insisted. She clearly thinks Hilde ran away, but I know without a shadow of a doubt she did not. So where is she?
Damn the witch, I can almost see the events from her point of view. An innocent woman being arrested for witchcraft, with a sure sentence of death from either neglect or burning. This real witch overheard, acted to save her, and…
And now all my plans are shot to hell.
I factored in everything, measured the odds, weighed the chances. I considered every single possibility.
Except actual, real witches.
They’re not supposed to be real! That was the point!
Bertram kicks his horse, picking up his pace to ride abreast with me. The roads are wider the closer we get to the city. We’ve passed some merchants getting ready for the Christkindlmarkt, but everyone gets out of the black-cloaked hexenjägers’ way.
“It’s still a bit hard to fathom,” Bertram says to me in a low voice after a few moments.
He’s the closest to my age and the highest-ranked jäger beneath me, although he clawed his way to the top, a history riddled with arrests and pyres, signing up for the jägers when he was younger even than Johann. Perhaps he feels a bit of camaraderie toward me due to these facts, despite my lack of desire to chat.
“We’ve been doing this how many years?” he continues blithely.
Too many, I think.
“And despite all this time, I have yet to see an actual witch’s power,” Bertram continues. “Although,” he adds in a musing tone, “I met one of the first hexenjägers, and he swore magic was real.”
My eyes go wide at that. It’s no secret that the archbishop employs young men to be hunters. The excuse has always been that youths are stronger in body and more innocent in soul, both of which are needed to take down a witch. But it has only just occurred to me that while the trials have been ongoing for years, I have not interacted often with any of the original hexenjägers.
“He said, in the beginning, that the witches fought back with magic,” Bertram continued. “Said he saw it with his own eyes. Some of the men went mad; the archbishop retired them to a monastery. I reckoned he’d gone mad, too, to be spouting such nonsense about magic.” Bertram paused, glancing back at the cart. “Now I figure the first round of hexenjägers might have fought real witches, and the ones left must have gone into hiding or something like that.”
I still don’t speak. If given half a chance, I know Bertram would prattle on for hours. I’m used to ignoring him, but for once, I find what he’s saying to be worthwhile.
“But, well…” Bertram eyes me. It’s clear he’s testing the grounds, trying to see how much I will allow. Whether I will leap to the defense of the mission of the hexenjägers, whether I will chastise him for not showing blind obedience.
I say nothing. Just yesterday, I struck Johann in the face for blasphemy, but Bertram at least has the sense to speak in tones so low only I can hear.
“I’ve always sort of thought it was a bit of a scam,” he says in a lower voice. “I mean, I cannot help but notice that if a man wants a different wife, it’s easier to get her burned as a witch than to get the pope’s approval for divorce. If there are two bakers in a town, one will accuse the other of witchcraft so that there’s less competition.”
The accusations that fly around Trier are fed by greed and fear. If you stand to profit from a burning, you hold out the match. If you are different from the societal norms in any way—too loud, too quiet, too strong, too weak—you are sent up the pyre.
We all—every citizen of the diocese—are complicit. While the archbishop preaches about purging the city of sin, we all see the order of operations. First, he banned all Protestants, then all Jews from the city. Trier was to be Catholic—Jesuit—only.
But that wasn’t enough.
Witches came next. And they were not banned—they were murdered. Now that it’s too late, there are hints of rebellion seeping throughout the city. There are good people left in Trier, ones willing to fight. But their rebellion is a whisper now.
They need something louder than the roaring flames to spur them into revolt.
But for now, fear holds the resistance back. The archbishop was smart in that. Divide the people, make them feel alone. Make them know that if you do not conform, you are called a witch.
And you are burned for it.
I have seen the truth of it from the start, from the moment my mother was cast screaming into the flames.
But I had thought that perhaps others—even in the hexenjäger units—were merely swept up in the panic and ignorant of the truth. That is why, I had assumed, the units cast boys into the roles the men could not stomach. Easier to radicalize the young, easier to expect obedience.
Hilde understood this. And, bless her, she had pleaded with me in the cottage before her arrest not in an attempt to save herself, but to try to save the others. To make the hexenjägers see—not only was she innocent, they all were.
But Bertram clearly knows the truth. Despite being told of witchcraft, he never believed before.
And he lit the fires anyway.
“I wonder if she’ll burn differently from the others,” Bertram says idly, simply curious.
I glance at him from beneath my cloak’s hood. “If you knew all along that the witches burned were not truly witches, why do you still wear the cloak?”
Bertram shrugs, the black cloth over his shoulders rippling. “It’s a job,” he says.
Bile rises up my throat.
I have seen evil—Kommandant Kirch did not rise to the top of the units without knowing exactly what he does. The executioner flaunts the wealth he’s gained from working the witch trials; he knows what he does; he relishes the cruelty that profits him. The archbishop—he may be the most evil man I know, orchestrating it all.
I have seen evil.
But until this moment with Bertram, I had not realized how often it wore the face of apathy.
The city of Trier rises to the west, spires of churches pointing into the midmorning sky, gleaming in a veneer of holiness behind the city walls.
The bridge over the Moselle leads straight to the city wall on the eastern side, and it’s where the heaviest flow of traffic into and out of the city is. There are buildings beyond the city wall, though, some made of crumbling stone from centuries before, others wooden structures that weren’t built to last.
And then there are the Roman ruins.
Rather than head toward the city gate by the bridge, I direct our caravan off the main road, winding toward the eastern side of Trier, outside the wall. The vast remains of ancient Roman baths, partially debris and rubble as people scavenged stone blocks from the structure, rise up to our left.
Our city is built on the bones of a fallen empire.
Giant stone blocks tower over the side of the road, creating an entrance I veer the caravan toward. I hear a thump and a curse from the prisoner’s cart as Fritzi is tossed around inside the rough wooden box.
I circle my horse back to the tail end of the caravan, waving off Johann, who’d been riding in the rear. The hexenjäger unit moves with practiced ease. We have, all of us, even the youngest, been a part of prisoner transports here.
The Romans killed the Celts for sport after enslaving them to build the amphitheater in the first place. There are mocking stories of how the gleaming, armed gladiators strode into the arena with polished metal weapons shining as they faced starved, abused Celts armed with nothing but sticks and rocks. Sometimes the Romans captured bears or worse, wild boar, and let nature kill the nature-worshipping tribal members.
Sport.
I wonder if those Celts would think their deaths better than the ones we offer to their witch descendants today.
I dismount, tossing my reins to one of the boys. I wave the others off as I approach the wooden prisoner cart. My boots thud as I mount the little step, using the iron bars in the only window as leverage so I can stand and peer into the box.
The witch—Fritzi, I remind myself—is backed into the farthest corner. Slants of light cast her in shadow, but even from the darkness I can see the fierce rage in her eyes. Recognition flashes across her face as she realizes which hexenjäger is peering down at her.
It is quickly replaced with hatred.
I had not been sure of what I would do until I see her now. I had the idea first when she snapped at me about not caring as long as I had a witch to imprison. She’s right—I do need a witch to imprison. But still, I debated it all this long morning. Witnessing her hate now gives me the resolution I need to act.
I joined the hexenjägers after they burned my stepmother. Not because I believed in them.
Because I wanted to destroy them from the inside out.
Over the years, I worked my way up, hiding the little rebellions—the cells that weren’t locked, the children who disappeared before they were arrested, the warnings to families to flee before they were accused. I had my father’s zealous legacy to give me credibility within the hexenjägers, but my stepmother’s loving heart to always ground me outside of them.
Nothing I did was ever enough, though.
Especially once I leveraged my father’s name and sat beside Herr Kommandant. It has always been evident that Kommandant Dieter Kirch is not simply following orders from the archbishop. He does not act with faith or any presumption of doing good.
He loves the murders. He relishes them. He actively works to make them more torturous, cramming the accused in inhumane prisons and branding them with the letter D for dämon before executing innocent people.
He never wants to see the witch burnings stopped. No amount of blood spilled on the streets of Trier will be enough for him.
I had thought, before, that the mania of the witch hunts would die down, and I hoped only to save as many as I could before the hexenjägers inevitably failed. But once I got close to Kommandant Kirch, once I saw the full depths of his depravity, I knew…
Nothing short of insurrection will stop the witch hunts.
So I hatched a plan with my sister.
Everything was in place. Months of preparation—pilfering keys to hidden doors in the tunnels, laying out routes for escape, sabotaging messages—all of it hinged upon the idea that I would arrest Hilde, and I would put her into the witch trials myself. She would organize the prisoners; I would set them free.
This mass burning the archbishop planned seemed the perfect tipping point. Release everyone right under his nose, at the height of the Advent season and Christkindlmarkt where everyone would see.
While I was on patrol in the south, I cemented the last of my plans, even going so far as to arrange a boat that would take Hilde and me from Trier to Koblenz, using the branching river to fully leave behind the last vestiges of this life. I would never be able to stay in the diocese once I broke into the basilica and freed a hundred or so accused witches, but I had to hope that such a large rebellious act would be enough to spur the public into rejecting the cycle of terror and evil the archbishop holds in his iron fist.
The plan had been to fight from within for as long as possible, save as many as possible, and then escape to some other principality or diocese, somewhere I could hide safely and start a new life with my sister.
But with Hilde gone, wherever the hexe sent her—I have lost my connection to the prisoners.
And I’ve lost my sister. I push the thought down, even though it causes a physical pain in my heart. The witch seemed certain Hilde was safe. I know Hilde would want me to focus on saving the innocents. But all I feel is broken and lost when I think of how she is…elsewhere.
Focus, I remind myself. I have worked for years to appear to be nothing but a ruthless hexenjäger. Above suspicion.
I will not fail now.
I glare at Fritzi. There’s not enough room for her to stand, but nor does she cower.
She’s my last hope.
I press my face against the bars. “Listen,” I say urgently, my voice low so that only she can hear. “Do what I say—exactly.”
“You can’t make me—”
“If you want to survive, listen to me. I can save you, if you obey me.”
I can save you all, I tell myself.
And I hope that it’s still true.