Page 87 of Night of the Witch
Liesel shakes her head. “It’s hard to follow one person,” she says. “There are riots.” She looks up at Fritzi, her pupils incandescent. “The people are rebelling.”
My whole body sags in relief.
“What about Otto’s sister?” Fritzi asks. The wires around my heart ease a bit. I did not want to push the child, but I’m grateful Fritzi asked about Hilde on my behalf.
Liesel frowns.
“Please.” The word is raw from my lips.
The little girl heaves a sigh, then turns back to the small fire. There’s an intensity in her gaze—not on the flames, butthroughthem. She sees something none of us can.
When Liesel speaks, her voice is different somehow, calmer but with more authority. “Hilde Ernst is in the Well.”
27
FRITZI
Otto stares at Liesel, expecting more. But when she leans away from the fire at her feet definitively, he looks at me in question.
“The Well is a place?” Otto frowns in confusion. I’d told him about the Well, but in the abstract—not as a place where his sister could go.
But Hildecan’tbe there. I didn’t send her there.
Did I?
The lapping of the river a few paces behind us is almost deafening as I stare at the side of my cousin’s face in the afternoon sun.
“Liesel,” I start, “what are you talking about?”
She whips a glare at Otto, misreading my hesitation. “You don’t have to pretend, Fritzi. He’s one ofthem, andtheyknow everything about us now because of Dieter.” She pauses, noticeably flinches. “Almost everything.”
Otto frowns and shakes his head. “Where is my sister? Is she—”
Liesel leans forward, teeth baring, and I think I should intervene, but I’m at a loss, missing something in what she’s saying, my body gone to ice and stone. “The Well. In the Black Forest. The place where allgood witches draw their power. The place yourkommandantis trying to destroy.”
I grab Liesel’s arm. “What are you talking about?”
She turns her fury on me. But somehow, it’s still directed at Otto, and it’s breaking my heart.
“That’s why Dieter wanted me,” she hisses. “He wanted me to divine a way for him to break through the barrier of the Well.”
My shock is too potent. It warps into horror and back again, and my stomach burns with nausea.
Because the Well, the coven in the Black Forest, is protected with wards even more powerful than the ones Mama put around Birresborn. Wards meant to let good witches in and keep bad witches out.
Only unlike Birresborn, there is no stupid, naive witch waiting inside the Well to drop the wards for him. He’d need a different way in if he wanted to go.
That’s what he wants? To access the Well?
Why?
My shocked horror clashes sharply with the ever-present wall of my grief. I choke on it, rocking toward Liesel; I catch Otto’s sudden spike of awareness, the way he twitches as if to lean toward me, but I’m fixed wholly on my cousin, on memories surging and biting.
Liesel’s bottom lip trembles, and she drops her gaze to the small fire. Her fingers curl over the crackling orange and gold flames. “He forced me to look for ways to break the Well’s wards. And I—I almost did. I would’ve broken, Fritzi. But I pretended the fire only told me where it’s located in the Forest, that Abnoba wouldn’t explain how exactly the wards work or how he could break them. It was enough to make him stop.” Her voice pinches, and tears drop down into the fire. “I just wanted to make him stop.”
I pull Liesel against me, burying my face in her hair. She smells of cinder and burning, a baked-in heat that she carries always.
Has she realized that I’m to blame? Has she realized that she helped me bring Dieter to Birresborn?
