You’re even more pathetic than her, Dieter says inside my mind.
Images flit through my head. My fingers digging out my own eyes. My teeth biting off my own tongue. My dagger slicing out my own heart.
He’s weighing his options gleefully.
And then he settles on a choice.
My hands around her throat, squeezing until she dies.
10
Fritzi
There is a wall of cedar trees. Ancient, wild, with snarled, interlocking branches of green boughs that should be wool-fluffy, alive and vibrant—but they are dense. They are bent in jointed lines like fingers prying at one another, gripping to form a wall, a wall that stretches forever, forever—
Cedar is for protection, I think, woozy.What are they protecting me from?
The center of the wall erupts in a single spout of flame, so intense and sudden that I cry out and stagger back, dropping to the forest undergrowth. Pain flares through me—heat from the fire, but something else, burning along my spine and arms, stinging on my lip, my face, a cracking agony in my hand. It leaves me sitting there, limp and mangled, staring up at the fire that eats a hole in the cedar wall.
“Fritzichen,” comes Dieter’s voice. “Let me in.”
No.
No.
It’s not him. He’s dead. Gone. It isn’t—
The fire burns. Burns.Eats.
It is hungry.
And he’s there, through the gap it makes. Grinning. Manic in his victory.
My ravaged body screams to run, but I can’t even stand. I’m held on the ground by my pain and horror as Dieter walks through the cedar trees, their boughs crackling around him.
“No,” I manage, and drag myself back. “No.”
“Oh, sweet Fritzichen,” Dieter coos. “You can’t escape me. I told you. You’remine. Not his. Not Mama’s. Mine.” He touches his sternum. “Mine.” He touches his stomach. “Mine.” He touches his thigh.
All the places he branded me.
What did he do to me? How does he still have magic? How—
Nothismagic.
Mine.My magic.
He connected himself tomymagic. With the brands he left on me.
Somehow, perhaps unknowingly, he used wild magic to bond me to him with those brands.
People used to fear witches when wild magic was all we had, when our power was unchecked, before the goddesses capped it with the Origin Tree.
Now, I know why. Intimately.
He shouldn’t have been able to do that.
“And, sister...” He crouches in front of me. So close I can see the wrinkles at the edges of his eyes when he grins. “You will get me what I need. They have one of the stones there, in the Well. You will bring it to me.”
