Page 56 of Night of the Witch
“I’m just tired.” I push away from him.
I’ve been alone since Birresborn, that’s all.
I’m scared and grieving andalone, and he’s the first semi-friendly face I’ve seen since my world fell apart.
That’sall.
“Come on, then,” he says, and his voice is sokind, I hate him. “Let’s get to the market. Oh, schiesse—you have to be starving!”
I slit my eyes open. “Not terribly. I may have eaten your rations.”
He smiles. Full. Broad. It does something to my stomach.
“Good,” is all he says.
I don’t just hate him.
I hate myself too.
16
OTTO
It’s not a far walk from the house fort to the market, but I keep an eye on the girl beside me, making sure she’s both protected from sight and isn’t going to pass out from hunger. Besides, I’m hungry too.
I steer Fritzi around the Christkindlmarkt. I know exactly where I want to take her—and soon enough, her nose tips up at smoke that smells of pine cones.
“Hallo,” I call to Hans, the man bent over the fire. Glowing edges of burning pine cones blaze inside a ring of stones, creating an outdoor firepit right on the cobblestones of the Hauptmarkt square.
Hans nods toward me without lifting his head. He turns a trio of wurst on a stick, sniffing the air as the fat sizzles.
“Two, please,” I tell him, and Hans nods. Fritzi watches, her brow furrowed in curiosity. “With brötchen,” I add, and Hans pats the ground at his side, finding a pile of bread rolls on a wooden platter beside him. He takes one, then turns his spit toward the bread, stuffing the sausage at the end of his stick into it. It looks ridiculous—a fat, round roll wrappedaround a long and skinny sausage, bits of ash and black char speckling the meat.
I take mine; then I nudge Fritzi to take hers from Hans, who holds his hand up, head still bent. As soon as she plucks it from his fingers, Hans turns his hand around, palm up. I press two coins into his hand and don’t step away until he feels it with his fingers and nods, slipping the money into a pouch.
“Danke,” I say as we turn. Hans nods again, adding a new wurst to his spit.
We walk a little into the heart of the market, where it’s crowded. I eat quickly, the meat still hot.
“He’s blind, isn’t he?” Fritzi asks, looking over her shoulder.
“Among other ailments, yes,” I say. Hans took up selling in the market a year ago, after his daughter—the only person who cared whether he lived or died—was burned as a witch. Her accuser was a man angry that she’d spurned his advances. He claimed on oath, in front of the archbishop, with his hand on the Bible, that she had cast a love spell on him to make him lust for her. He swore that Hans had lost his sight as a result of his daughter’s deals with the devil.
I think about that a lot. The way he swore before God something that was clearly a lie. The way he used a father’s misfortune and ill-health to condemn a daughter. The way it meant nothing to him. Nothing to the archbishop, either, who heard the truth from Hans. Hans pleaded for his daughter’s life, but he’d had no gold to back his testimony.
Fritzi takes a bite of the sausage and moans in delight. “I’ve never had a wurst like this before.”
“Hans is from Coburg,” I say by way of explanation. His method of cooking the wurst over a fire of pine cones, though, is catching on, the smoke adding a special flavor to the meat.
“Coburg?” Fritzi raises her eyebrows at me—Coburg is to the east, one of the cities where Martin Luther led the Protestant Reformation. Heretic to the Catholics, leader to the Protestants, his mark forever changed the principalities of the east. Coburg was the city where Luther translated the Bible from Latin into German, allowing any man—at least any man who could read—to have access to the Lord’s Word.
To the archbishop of Trier, such free access to God is a treachery. But then again, if every literate person could see the context behind the passages of scripture he weaponizes, perhaps the blade of vitriolic words he sharpens in the fires of the accused would dull.
Last year, the archbishop sent me to Mehring with a mission to root out and destroy the source of rising Protestant sympathies along the border. I found the priest who was converting the formerly faithful, but rather than murder him, I spoke to him. My hopes that here, perhaps, was a church more open than the archbishop’s reign of terror were squashed. The Bible may be free to be read, but already people within the Protestant religions are seeking to limit interpretations different from their own. The same old prejudices are rising up against the Jews, against women, against the other.
I may believe in God, but no church has earned my faith.
I look up from my dark thoughts to see Fritzi drinking a long pull of beer from a ladle. The girl with the bucket turns to me. “She said you would pay.” The girl’s flirting smile is far different from the smile of the other girl who offered me a drink earlier, the one who trembled when she saw my badge.
