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.”
