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 ampain—
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 magicwithoutneeding 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.”
42
OTTO
I grew up with tales of the Wild Hunt. The Hunt, my stepmother told me as she tucked Hilde and me into bed, presaged war and death. An army of ferocious beings would storm across the land, chasing dragons, and if you saw the Hunters, you may be driven mad, or you may be forced to join their war and destruction, or they may simply kill you for the fun of it. The horses they rode were large and demonic, with red eyes and hooves sharp as swords. Hilde hated the story and would beg our mother to tell her that it was all false, but every time, before my sister fell asleep, I’d click my tongue to sound like horse hooves to rile her up. Our mother always warned me that if I continued to be naughty, the Wild Hunt would come for me.
I never thought it was real.
