“You and your warrior came here and dared to stand in the tomb of one of my greatest champions.” Perchta waves at the corpse beside her, wrapped in fine linen, laid out in this room of decadence and death. “You dare to think you would take this stone. You are entitled and selfish, as dangerous as Dieter, and I have let Holda have her experiments. I have let her, even when she failed us so horribly with your brother. But I willnot let you lay waste to our ways.”
The room darkens. Wind stirs from somewhere up the tunnel and fills the air with a scent like static, like the swell before a lightning strike. My mind is a whirl of terror and primal drive, and I yank at my hand again, again, trying to get away—
But then I hear her.
I hear what she said echo, echo.
Our ways.
Over and over again.
She is the goddess of tradition.
“But—” I lick my lips, mouth dry, and look up at her, fear pausing, like a held breath. “You broke our ways too.”
Perchta’s furious eyes burn at me. “What did you say?”
A crack forms. A sliver that lets in light, fresh air, and I heave a breath,feeling,suddenly, through the fog, and the fear lifts enough that I canthink.
“You broke our ways too,” I repeat. “This tomb—the layout is all wrong. There should be no upper level, no hall. The old teachings were for it to be one room. That’s it.”
Perchta’s jaw works. “You think you can—”
But I’m not done. Not by a long way. That crack widens until all my fear is bathed in righteous fury, anger that sparks from every moment I’ve been suppressing my true feelings from Philomena, Rochus, Perchta, even Dieter and the hexenjägers andeveryonewho has pointed at who and what I am and forced me to exert every last scrap of my energy trying to conform to their criticism. I have wasted so muchtime, so much precious, fleetingtimeon trying to be accepted by all these different forces that I haven’t spared so much as a thought toward how to embracewho I actually am.
It hits me in this moment, this breath before the scream, how muchI have lost in focusing on how to fit into the demands of others.
Imagine how great I could be, right now, if I had spent all these years not surviving, butliving.
Tears prick my eyes, and my look shocks another flinch from Perchta. It isn’t as satisfying as it should be.
“You hate me for breaking our traditions,” I say, voice as unyielding as the stone in our hands. “Yet you have broken more of our traditions than anyone. In this chamber, yes, but beyond too—you let so many perceived infractions slide.”
“I am the goddess of rules and traditions,” Perchta snaps. “I do not allow those rules to be broken, not by you, not by any who live under—”
“We no longer bury our dead this way. In these grand tombs—we stopped heralding the mighty fallen in this manner, but this was once a tradition, yes? So why did you let us stop doing this? Shouldn’t you be punishing us for burying our dead in simple graves now instead of enshrining their bodies like this?”
Perchta’s brows go up, a fraction of a pulse.
“Berate me all you want for the rules I have broken.” My voice drops until I’m snarling, practically bearing my teeth at her. “But I have done what I needed to do to survive in a world where everyone in positions of power creates arbitrary rules they implement at their leisure. You think you are different from the other forces at work? You think you are better than the hexenjägers, than the Catholic priests, than the Protestant princes? You are all the same. You take out your pathetic need for control on those less strong than you so you can pretend you are better than us when what you really are isweak.”
The room had paused with Perchta’s shock. Now it reawakens, the stirring wind, the growing darkness.
Perchta’s face goes red with rising anger. “You would speak this wayto agoddess?” She drags the last word out, a hiss.
“Yes. I would. Because you have made that title meannothing.” The tears heating my eyes finally fall, and when I let my face droop, anger shifts to grief.
I can feel another jolt of surprise go through Perchta. But that surprise hardens into distrust; she thinks I am playing a game.
I have no moves left to make, though. I am tired and strung thin and this is what I am now. This is what I have been since Birresborn, I think. Hollow and empty, a witch, a girl, who watched her world burn to ashes and stood in the rubble, not as some proud symbol of defiance, but because I didn’t even have the strength it would’ve taken to crumble.
All that lack of strength, all that absence, all thatgrief, I feel it now like tilled earth. But I hate the idea that anything good could grow in all this pain—if anything good comes from this, it is not because of what happened.
It is because I choose to create it.
“You have made that title mean nothing,” I repeat. I suck in a breath. “But it could mean something. It could mean somethingglorious, Perchta. All the rules and traditions you oversee—weneedthem. I’m not trying to take them away, I swear to you. I love our traditions. I love the way my mother loved them—”
My voice catches, and I feel her loss like a fresh knife.
