Page 28 of Night of the Witch
There is no response.
8
OTTO
I lead the caravan back to Trier. My horse is a pace ahead of the others, and I value the silence this affords me. I tune out the other men and the creaking of the prisoner cart, leaving me with only my own voice in my head.
And the echoes of my sister’s screams.
Nothing has gone to plan.
And now Hilde is…
I don’t think she’s dead. The witch, she calls herself Fritzi—she didn’t seem to think that Hilde is dead. Just missing.
“And safe,” she insisted. She clearly thinks Hilde ran away, but I know without a shadow of a doubt she did not.So where is she?
Damn the witch, I can almost see the events from her point of view. An innocent woman being arrested for witchcraft, with a sure sentence of death from either neglect or burning. This real witch overheard, acted to save her, and…
And now all my plans are shot to hell.
I factored in everything, measured the odds, weighed the chances. I considered every single possibility.
Exceptactual, realwitches.
They’re notsupposedto be real! That was thepoint!
Bertram kicks his horse, picking up his pace to ride abreast with me. The roads are wider the closer we get to the city. We’ve passed some merchants getting ready for the Christkindlmarkt, but everyone gets out of the black-cloaked hexenjägers’ way.
“It’s still a bit hard to fathom,” Bertram says to me in a low voice after a few moments.
He’s the closest to my age and the highest-ranked jäger beneath me, although he clawed his way to the top, a history riddled with arrests and pyres, signing up for the jägers when he was younger even than Johann. Perhaps he feels a bit of camaraderie toward me due to these facts, despite my lack of desire to chat.
“We’ve been doing this how many years?” he continues blithely.
Too many,I think.
“And despite all this time, I have yet to see anactualwitch’s power,” Bertram continues. “Although,” he adds in a musing tone, “I met one of the first hexenjägers, and he swore magic was real.”
My eyes go wide at that. It’s no secret that the archbishop employs young men to be hunters. The excuse has always been that youths are stronger in body and more innocent in soul, both of which are needed to take down a witch. But it has only just occurred to me that while the trials have been ongoing for years, I have not interacted often with any of the original hexenjägers.
“He said, in the beginning, that the witches fought back with magic,” Bertram continued. “Said he saw it with his own eyes. Some of the men went mad; the archbishop retired them to a monastery. I reckoned he’dgone mad, too, to be spouting such nonsense about magic.” Bertram paused, glancing back at the cart. “Now I figure the first round of hexenjägers might have fought real witches, and the ones left must have gone into hiding or something like that.”
I still don’t speak. If given half a chance, I know Bertram would prattle on for hours. I’m used to ignoring him, but for once, I find what he’s saying to be worthwhile.
“But, well…” Bertram eyes me. It’s clear he’s testing the grounds, trying to see how much I will allow. Whether I will leap to the defense of the mission of the hexenjägers, whether I will chastise him for not showing blind obedience.
I say nothing. Just yesterday, I struck Johann in the face for blasphemy, but Bertram at least has the sense to speak in tones so low only I can hear.
“I’ve always sort of thought it was a bit of a scam,” he says in a lower voice. “I mean, I cannot help but notice that if a man wants a different wife, it’s easier to get her burned as a witch than to get the pope’s approval for divorce. If there are two bakers in a town, one will accuse the other of witchcraft so that there’s less competition.”
The accusations that fly around Trier are fed by greed and fear. If you stand to profit from a burning, you hold out the match. If you are different from the societal norms in any way—too loud, too quiet, too strong, too weak—you are sent up the pyre.
We all—every citizen of the diocese—are complicit. While the archbishop preaches about purging the city of sin, we all see the order of operations. First, he banned all Protestants, then all Jews from the city. Trier was to be Catholic—Jesuit—only.
But that wasn’t enough.
Witches came next. And they were not banned—they weremurdered. Now that it’s too late, there are hints of rebellion seeping throughout the city. Therearegood people left in Trier, ones willing to fight. But their rebellion is a whisper now.
