Page 31 of Night of the Witch
This could be you. This could happen to any of us.
Listen, and take heed.
And so I know exactly what hexenjägers do to us. Even to those who aren’t witches, who found Birresborn by accident, not knowing they’d stumbled into a coven—Mama let them in anyway, and we sent them off with supplies and full bellies. The stories were all the same.
Hexenjägers who came with irons and scowls.
Hexenjägers who didn’t wait for a trial, who killed or burned their victims on the spot.
Hexenjägers who slipped into houses with “early warnings” of an arrest and promises that they could make it go away if they were granted certain…favors.Give me one night, they said,and you’ll live.
Each story was more heart-wrenching than the last, painting a picture of a world beset by power-hungry men all high on their claims of righteousness and purity.
So I have no illusions about the kapitän’s threat. That’s what it is: a threat.
But what of the earnestness on his face? The fear in his eyes?
I dig my fingertips into my temples and rub in slow circles. I’m sleepless, that’s all. It happened so quickly; I misread his expression. Earnestness could easily be eagerness. Fear could easily be mania.
The door to the prison wagon bursts open. Bone-deep exhaustion has numbed me, and I come up to a crouch before the hexenjägers have to reach in for me.
Outside, I see we’re in ruins of some sort, long ago remains of the Romans who were the first colonizers of these lands. The first to look at my people and deem us little more than fodder. My eyes cast over the rocks and rubble, the wall of Trier running beyond the length of this space, and my numbness settles deeper.
The kapitän is sending the bulk of his men back up the road, leaving only himself and two others with me. One is the boy who even now won’t meet my eyes, Johann.
The other is Bertram.
He grabs the chain between my hands, his eyes all disgust as he sizes me up in the harsh, cold sunlight. “Let’s get her locked up. I need a pint.”
Johann moans his agreement. It’s the kapitän who hesitates, something gruesome and dark on his face, before he turns without a word.
I don’t know what I expected. For them to lead me straight into a prison? For there to be a set of stairs that would take us up and over the wall of Trier? But when Bertram pulls me toward a small arched entrance set directly in the sheared stone beneath the wall, I seize up.
A tunnel. A tunnel under the city.
Is this how they bring in all the witches, or have they planned something special for me?
My brain rattles with information—the old Roman aqueducts, just more verdammtruins—but panic has my heels dropping into the dirt, my arms trying and failing to rip back and out of the hexenjäger’s grasp.
Bertram growls at me. “Go ahead and try to flee,” he snaps as he yanks me forward. “I’ll take pleasure in running you through.”
He shifts his hip, drawing my attention to the sword strapped there, but my panic doesn’t calm, and we walk closer, closer, closer to that tunnel entrance. It’s all darkness, a small door of nothingness, and I can’t convince my lungs to draw breath.
I’m hit with the iron-tinged sensation that once I go into that tunnel, I’ll never come back out again, and of all the horrors I’ve endured the past days, this looms over me, swallowing me whole.
What do you fear in the dark, Fritzi? You know how to escape. You’ve known all along.
A cry bursts out of me. I’m desperate, on edge; this is the exact sort of situation where the voice could get to me, I know it could.
I could give in. So easily.
I could escape. Save Liesel. Save myself.
Just say the spell. Start the words. This can all be over.
Others in my coven knew the words too. We had a communalbuilding to store our most sacred texts, spells passed generation to generation on scrolls and rare bound books; but there were a few writings that Mama kept under lock and key in her room and forbade us from reading.
So of course we did.
