Page 146 of Night of the Witch
I will shield your connection to wild magic from the Well,she continues,that you may show witches across this world what strength they have been denied. You will show the forest folk and my sisters that the rules by which we abide are stifling and false. You will reawaken our magic, Friederike Kirch, and save us all.
I only wanted to stop my brother. To get Liesel to safety. And now, to be with Otto—and I have those things.
But it isn’t over.
Holda chose me as her champion.
And I accepted. I’m so tired. Tired from the weight of what is still to come, the fight I know awaits me back at the Well from Rochus and Philomena—tired from the shake in my hands and the ache in my core and the tug that bids me to look into the crowd, to spot my brother once more before he’s gone.
I will never see him again.
But suddenly it feels as though I have not seen him in years, since he left Birresborn, since the version of him I loved faded more and more into a dream.
“We’re done here,” Otto tells Brigitta, Johann.
Gratitude is cooling and sweet. I keep my eyes shut as he lifts me, and my body goes limp in his arms. The bend of my stomach makes me whimper, that brand tugging, but I can heal it now, can’t I? Summon a healing plant. Use wild magic.
My fingers lift, stretch feebly.
“Hey, don’t move. Just rest. I have you, Fritzi,” Otto says into my hair, his lips brushing my forehead. “Cornelia! Can you help with—”
My focus fades out. Drifts into tempting darkness, something warm and velvet and consuming, because Otto has me in his arms, and I am, in spite of everything that looms, safe.
Hazy blue light speckles against my eyelids. Pulses of rose red. Swaths of orange.
I shift, blinking slowly, and a window comes into focus, stained glass pieced together in geometric patterns that catch rays of sunlight and twist them into rainbow riots.
For a beat, I lie staring at the window, trying to orient myself.
This is the room Liesel was given in the Well. The bed beneath me is soft and warm, blankets piled over me, a heavy layer of quilts.
I brace, expecting a swarm of pain in my consciousness—
But none comes.
Slowly, so slowly, I push up onto my elbows.
Someone stirs next to me, and then Liesel’s head pops up from within the blankets. “Fritzi!”
She starts to dive for me, thinks better of it, and sits back on her heels. “Move slowly—Cornelia had her best healers work on you, but you’re still…hurt.”
I look down, one hand coming up to rest on my collarbone, the spot where Dieter branded me highest.
The thin white shift I’m wearing rubs against a scar there, something knotted and wicked, but it doesn’t hurt. Much. An ache lingers, deep inside me, and I feel the same on my stomach, on my thigh.
“They did their best,” Liesel whispers. “Dieter…whatever he did. It was deep.”
I twist to look at her. Her eyes are watery, bloodshot, but she’s clean, and her cheeks are pink.
I open one arm to her.
She doesn’t hesitate. Her little body crashes into mine, and we go back against the bedding, her tears wetting my shoulder, her chest trembling.
I want to reassure her that it’s all right. That he’s gone, far off back to Trier to be tried and executed for the same crimes he forced on us. I want to promise that he’ll suffer for what he did, but as her weeping stills, I can barely speak around the lump in my throat.
“I’m so sorry, Liesel,” is all I manage. “I’m so sorry. For our coven. For our home. For—”
“I’m sorry too.”
