Page 116 of Night of the Witch
“Holda has been trying to get me to use wild magic,” I say. No pretense. No softening.
A pause grabs the room.
“Howdareyou!” Philomena barks. “Accusing agoddessof trying to access that which iscorrupting, which isforbidden! Do you even know what wild magic is, hm? It is the cast-off remnants created by performing evil deeds. And no goddess, not even one known to be unpredictable, would dare touch such a thing!”
But Cornelia looks back up at me. Her eyes narrow with intrigue. “She did?”
I nod.
“Wild magic is tempting,” Rochus intercedes. “It disguises. It manipulates. It swayed your brother, after all.”
“I’m starting to think it didn’t.” I glare at Rochus, who noticeably flinches. “I’m starting to think wild magic has nothing to do with good or evil. Why, if Dieter is weakening the barrier you keep around the Well’s magic, has that made our magic in the outside world evenmorepowerful? What is the barrier really keeping out—or in?”
Rochus’s face goes white. Philomena blubbers behind him, a stain of red rising in her face.
“I think Holda chose my brother as her champion and tried to get him to use wild magic for whatever reason, just like she’s done with me,” I keep going, “only before she could realize what she’d done, he’d used what she showed him to hurt a lot of people. I’m starting to wonder if wild magic really is as evil as you say—or if my brother was just wicked from the start.”
There. All the truths that have begun to sprout within me. All the horrors, all the fears. I rip them out of my soul and lay them at the feet of these strangers.
“I may be Holda’s champion, but that doesn’t mean I bow to you,” I snap. “And that doesn’t mean we’ll blindly obey your misguided plan.IfI ever did take a bonding potion”—the words ghost Dieter’s face across my mind, his prideful smile, the way he’d extended the bonding potion to me and I’d known, deep in my soul, that he’d bleed me dry—“it certainly won’t be with someone who is so eager to onlyuse me.”
“It’s a bastardization of one of our greatest honors,” Cornelia says, backing me up. “You have every right to refuse this misguided plan.”
Philomena darkens, scowling at me, ignoring Cornelia. “We have the components for the barrier and bonding spells almost completed,” she growls. “All we need is one of you to take the bonding potion. We did not bring you here to ask your permission,champions. We brought you here because you are necessary, and youwillhelp us save our magic, or you will regret ever setting foot in our home.”
36
OTTO
Hilde gives me a bottle of her best beer and sits down across from me. Although she has been here in the Black Forest since Fritzi first sent her, several weeks by now, she’s worked to make the cottage hers. There are little hints of home all around—a quilt in the same pattern as the one our mother made, the furniture arranged the same way Hilde had it. But the cauldron over the fire is newer, not the same one Mother brewed her beer in. There are no scratches on the table from when Hilde cut the bread directly on the surface. There’s no dent in the wall from when I played soldier with the fire poker as a mock sword when I was a child.
It’s like home, but it’s not.
Hilde smiles at me, guessing at my thoughts. “I couldn’t go back.”
“I should have,” I say. “I should have found a way to preserve your belongings…” With Hilde arrested as a witch, her home was seized by the church. I had been so concerned about where my sister had disappeared to that I had not considered the consequences for the place she was born and had spent her entire life making her own.
Hilde shakes her head. “They were only things.”
It breaks my heart, the way everyone has taken from Hilde but never given anything back. My father took her mother. My church took her home. I took her freedom—even if being arrested had been her idea.
“It’s nice here,” Hilde says. She leans forward. “They’ve told me I can stay, even if I have no magic of my own. I’m going to, Otto.”
“You do realize I had to fight a literal goddess to get here, right?” I ask her. “This is going to make visiting you a bit…difficult.”
Hilde shrugs. “Worth it, though.”
“Obviously,” I say dryly. “I mean, fighting a pantheon is part of an older brother’s obligations, no?”
“I simply don’t want you to get lazy.” Hilde sniffs imperiously. “Honestly, traveling across the entire Empire and then having a fistfight with a god is the least you can do for me.”
I throw a rag on the table at her, and she laughs, batting it away. I grin, but when she bends down to pick up the cloth, my smile dies. It hadn’t been a fight as she imagined, and the ordeal against Holda still has me reeling. I cannot imagine going through that again, particularly since I suspect the goddesses may find new and different ways to torture me each time.
My cheerful mask is firmly back in place by the time she tosses the rag on the table. I nod to the window. “You have a visitor,” I say.
Hilde goes to the door, swinging it open. “Are you here for gossip or beer?” she asks, her voice light.
“Why not both?” A boy with an impish smile strides into the room, long black hair streaming down his back. He’s younger than Hilde, I think, but not by many years. Silver threads pierce the tops of his ears, dangling down. There are a few tattoos along his arms, highlighting stringy biceps, but he’s not as decorated as the guards that took Fritzi and Liesel to the elder council.
