“Give me a moment,” Fritzi says, wheeling her horse around and heading back to the trees nearby. She has to stand up in her stirrups to reach the low-hanging mistletoe adorning the oaks, but she grabs several bunches and tosses them to me to hold before she dismounts.
“Good idea,” Cornelia says. “Let’s break here.”
Everyone gathers, hobbling the horses. Alois and I share some dried meat while Fritzi and Cornelia weave mistletoe crowns for us all. Cornelia recites a blessing as she crowns Brigitta, but Fritzi tucks the mistletoe on my head silently. She doesn’t need spells to tap into wild magic, and while none of the others know this, I do. She leans closer to me, standing on her tiptoes, and it must look like she’s chanting the poem into my ear, but her lips remain silent as she brushes the tip of her tongue along the shell of my ear, nearly undoing me right there among the trees in front of them all.
My body stiffens, and she huffs a little laugh at me, her breath warm and sweet and deliciously cascading over my skin, and I have to bite back a growl, bunch my fingers into fists so that I don’t grab her and carry her into the dark forest and do things I’m certain none of our gods would approve of.
Once everyone has the protection of mistletoe in their hair, we remount and head past the abandoned village and toward the hill beyond, the area Cornelia and Brigitta agree has to be where the ancient tribal people rebuked the Romans. We stop at a low round hill at the base of a ridgeline.
“There’s nothing here,” Fritzi says. “I thought…”
I nod, agreeing with her. I’d expected ruins. Living in Trier, I was surrounded by the mark of the Romans—the Porta Nigra and the basilica both were centuries old, built when Christianity was still new. Builders occasionally found stores of Roman coins in the earth—immediately donated to the church, of course, unless no one saw—and there were still a few Latin graffiti marks on stones that had been pilfered from the baths and reused to build new homes.
But this?
This is nothing. Just a hill.
A perfectly circular hill rising from the flat meadow before it.
I lean back on my horse, looking up at the enormous mound of dirt. There is a higher ridge behind the mound, but this hill is separate, too evenly shaped compared to the natural chaos of the nearby plateau. I dismount, digging my boot into the soil. Packed earth but not rocky.
“This is man-made,” I say, peering up at the hill. Even though it’s nearly noon, there doesn’t seem to be any warmth from the sun in the cloudless sky.
“It’s not man-made; it’s too big,” Brigitta starts, but Cornelia grabs her arm, staring at the hill.
“Itis,” she mutters. “It’s a barrow.”
“A grave?” Alois snorts. “That hill is big enough to build a house on. It’s huge. That’s not a grave, it’s—”
“It’s a grave,” Fritzi says, eyeing me and then looking back up the hill. “That’s all that remains of the ancient tribes. A grave. A huge barrow mound marking the deaths of the people who stood against all of the Roman Empire.”
“But…” Alois’s voice dies off.
Once we’ve said it, there’s no denying it. All around are softly rolling hills, but this one is too perfect, too tall, too round.
“Are we supposed to dig it up and hope we find the stone?” Alois grumbles.
Fritzi slips her hand in mine as I walk back to her. “Does Holda” I start.
She shakes her head. “This is Perchta’s stone to hide. And Perchta will not make this easy.”
Brigitta’s voice carries as she speaks with Cornelia. “I think past thismound—that was the city proper. Up on the ridge. The maps showed it expanding that way, using the plateau for defense.”
“And then this grave here, on the southern end.” Cornelia frowns at the hill. “Outside the city.”
“Protecting the city,” Fritzi mutters.
I cast an evaluating eye at the topography. Barrows are graves of important people, the earth mounded high over bodies and treasure. It is a mark of Perchta’s protection that this obvious mound has not been looted—much like the abandoned village to the west, I can only assume that grave robbers looking for treasure have beendissuadedfrom digging the earth up. And that certainly gives me hope that we’re in the right place.
If that plateau ahead was the location of the city, then this slope along the edge could be trace remains of what may have been an ancient road. And to reach it, we have to cross by the imposing barrow.
This isn’t just a settlement. There’s purpose here. This is a city, and it was designed to point us to this barrow.
“I think you’re right,” I tell Fritzi. “This barrow is not just a grave. The location has to mean something—a warning, perhaps, to invaders, or…”
Fritzi shivers, and I wrap my arm around her, still puzzling through the odd geography. If the ditches nearby really do indicate a road, is there such a clear route southeast from this city? Glauberg once took up the entire plateau, a massive city. And a road southeast would lead to…
The Black Forest.
