Page 57 of Night of the Witch
I pass the girl a coin. Fritzi takes another long draught of the spicy beer, and I hand over another pfennig.
“Come on,” I tell Fritzi before she can guzzle a third draw.
“That’s good beer!” she calls to the girl, who giggles at her.
“It’s hardly good beer,” I mutter when the girl can’t hear. Fritzi cocks an eyebrow at me. “My sister brews good beer.”
“Seasoned withnutmeg, I presume?” She gives me a little jab in my ribs.
“Yes,” I say, unable to keep the grumpiness from my voice. “Cooked in the copper cauldron our mother passed down to her.”
Fritzi eyes me but doesn’t comment. However, at the thought of Hilde, my thoughts turn dark again. “We need to find—” I start, but already Fritzi is gone, slipping from my grasp and perusing a stall of glass baubles. The rickety wooden table doesn’t seem sound enough to bear such delicate wares.
“I didn’t think you’d be the type to like trinkets,” I say.
Fritzi shoots me an affronted look. “I like pretty things.”
So do I, I think immediately, and praise Christ Almighty the words didn’t slip past my lips by accident.
“This one,” Fritzi says, pointing to a bit of glass swirled with blue flecks, strung up like a necklace on a leather thong. “When I was a little girl, one of my cousins broke an old blue bottle, and I cried and cried because it had been so pretty. My mama put a piece in a dish with some sand and water and told me that if I sloshed it around enough, it would become a jewel. I know it was glass, but…” She eyes me. “It was magical.”
I can’t help but grin at her secret play on words, and I can imagine little Fritzi smoothing the sharp edges of the glass until it became a bead. “I went to Venice when I was younger. My father was on a pilgrimage to Rome, and we made the extra journey. I saw the glassblowers.”
Fritzi’s eyes light up as I describe the way a glassblower stood in front of a blazing furnace, turning a long tube, then pinching the red-hot molten glass with metal shears. “And, just like that, he’d made a horse.”
“A horse?” Fritzi’s eyes are wide, charmed by my story.
“I studied in Venice,” the man behind the table says, drawing ourattention. “AVenetianbauble for your girl?” He jostles the table, and the glass tinkles.
I bow my head in mock respect. Any glassblower claiming Venetian skills would certainly merit a high price, but I can tell he thinks he can capture me in a sale to impress Fritzi. He probably thinks I was boasting when I mentioned the pilgrimage, but the Italian I speak is real. “Sai come fare il culo di un cavallo?”
“Ah,” the man says, eyes going wide. “Of course, sir, I, er. I met the man you speak of.” It’s obvious he has no idea what I said, even to Fritzi, whose laughter rings clearer than the glass on the table. “Oh, buy me some pretty Venetian glass, Liebste,” she says in an exaggerated flirtation. I know she’s mocking me by calling me “sweetheart,” but the man behind the table doesn’t. He grins sheepishly at me, still hoping for a sale.
“We have other things to purchase today,darling.”
Her face immediately falls, and she walks away. I shoot the man at the table a glance, and he smirks. “I may not know Italian, but at least I know how to talk to women.”
I race through the crowd to catch Fritzi. She shakes my hand away when I grab her elbow. “Iknow, all right,” she says. “I didn’t really want you to spend money on something frivolous. I know there are more important things to buy right now.”
I would have dumped all my coins on the table to make you smile, I think. She has had nothing but grief ever since she burst into my life, and for one brief moment, we swapped tales of joy and wonderment, and her smile was true. I’m asking her to risk her life for my plan, and that glass bauble is nothing compared to that.
“I wasn’t chiding you,” I tell her awkwardly.
She wraps her arms around her slender torso, not meeting my gaze. Ifeel as if our brief moment of camaraderie was as fragile as the glass, and I’ve already broken it.
We’ve somehow drifted behind a busy line of people waiting to buy Reibekuchen, the smell of frying potatoes weaving around us. Fritzi strides past them, but meets nothing but a dark wall on the edge of the market.
I’m careful not to corner her, but I wait until she meets my eyes before I say, “If things were different, I would have bought you a necklace.”
She snorts and rolls her eyes. I can already see the sarcastic comeback forming on her lips, but I speak before she can: “You deserve a bit of magic.”
That elicits the tiniest of smiles. “Come on,” she says gruffly, shouldering past me and back into the crowded market. “I still need to get my ingredients.”
I close my eyes and imagine a night of joy and merriment. I’d buy Fritzi a mug of glühwein. My mother used to say that beer was life, but hot spiced wine was the reason to live. We’d dance and drink and after…
But already, both the vision in my head and the girl in front of me are slipping away.
I shake myself and charge into the crowds after Fritzi. I lose sight of her a moment, but then I hear her shriek. I race forward, prepared to fight any hexenjäger who’s identified her, but instead her scream turns to laughter, along with all the people nearby. A man towers above her, tottering on wooden stilts. He makes a show of falling, the stilts clattering over the cobblestones, but even as the growing crowd around him gasps and screams, he regains his balance, laughing as he holds out his hat for coins.
