Chapter 4
Chapter Four
The bell began to ring. Three tolls, then a pause that stretched forever, then three more.
I was in the market square when the sound rolled over us.
My basket slipped from my hands and turnips scattered across the dirt.
That pattern. I’d heard it once before, when I was a girl and old Mathilde was dragged to the river for supposedly cursing a farmer’s cattle.
The bell had rung exactly like this, three and three and three, and by sunset Mathilde’s body floated face-down in the shallows.
Around me, people stopped mid-transaction.
The baker’s wife went still with her hand outstretched for payment, two boys playing with a hoop stopped short, and everyone turned toward the sound.
Then the movement started — bodies streaming from shops and doorways.
Not toward the hanging square. Toward the river. The trial grounds.
My legs wouldn’t move. This was it. The vision. The drowning I’d seen with my own hands bound and water filling my lungs. Any moment now, Klaus would push through the crowd and point at me and drag me to the water.
“Red!” Emma’s hand closed around my arm, her fingers biting in hard enough to bruise. Thomas clung to her skirt with his good arm while the sling held his injured one tight against his chest. “Come on.” She yanked me forward, her face hard with fear. “We have to go.”
“I can’t.” The words scraped out of my throat. “I need to. I should go home...”
“Are you mad?” She leaned close, eyes wild. “Elder Klaus summoned the whole village. If he finds out someone stayed behind...” She dropped to a whisper. “Heinrich told me what Klaus does to people who don’t show. Please, Red. Just come. Stay quiet. Let this be over.”
I let her lead me. I had no choice. My feet moved one step and then another with Emma’s hand like iron around my wrist, and the crowd swept us forward.
Bodies pressed close on all sides, the stink of unwashed wool and fear-sweat thick in the air, and beneath it all the murmur of voices rising with that particular rhythm, anticipation dressed up as righteousness.
We reached the riverbank and Emma elbowed her way through until we stood near the front, right at the water’s edge.
“There.” She exhaled hard, some tension leaving her shoulders. “We’ll be seen. Klaus will know we came.”
“Look, Mother.” Thomas pointed with his good hand, his face pale but curious. “There’s Father.”
Heinrich stood near the river with the other Selectmen, his face drawn and his mouth pressed into a hard line. He didn’t look like a man who wanted to be there.
I looked at the water. The river was dark and slow, swollen from recent rains, the same river I’d stood in weeks ago, the same river from my vision. And then I saw her.
Anna Müller knelt in the mud by the river’s edge, bound so thoroughly she couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to.
The ropes were exactly as I’d felt them in my vision, hemp fibers cutting into her wrists, pulling her thumbs back at angles that had to be agonizing.
They’d stripped her down to her shift and the thin fabric clung wet to her body, her hair hanging in tangles around a face that was swollen on the left side, a bruise blooming purple and black from her cheekbone to her chin.
Someone had hit her. Hard. More than once.
It wasn’t me. It was Anna.
My chest seized and the air wouldn’t come. The pennyroyal. The trembling hands. The lie about headaches. And now this.
Elder Klaus stood on a wooden platform above her.
Jakob stood next to the platform with Klaus’s other men, arms crossed, face hard, not looking at Anna.
Klaus filled the space above them all, thick neck, barrel chest, hands like slabs of meat, his doublet straining across his gut.
His face was flushed and ruddy, sweating despite the cold.
Those eyes found me in the crowd. Found my red cloak. He smiled.
“People of this village.” He boomed across the water, spreading his arms wide. “We are gathered to witness God’s judgment upon a sinner.”
The crowd pressed closer. Their hunger hung thick in the air, their need for spectacle, for someone else’s suffering to make their own lives feel less small.
“This woman.” Klaus pointed down at Anna, his lip curling back.
“This creature has committed sins against God and nature. She has lain with a man outside the bonds of holy matrimony. She conceived a child in wickedness. And when that child began to grow in her womb...” He paused and let the silence stretch. “She murdered it.”
A gasp rippled through the crowd. Women clutched their children closer while men shook their heads in practiced disgust.
“She took devil’s herbs.” Klaus rose to a shout, scanning the crowd until he found me again. “Pennyroyal. The witch’s tool. She brewed them into a tea and drank it down and flushed her own child from her body like waste.”
Anna’s head hung low. She didn’t deny it, didn’t speak at all, just knelt there in the mud with her broken face and her bound hands.
“Who gave her these herbs?” A man shouted from somewhere behind me, and Klaus’s smile widened, his teeth showing in the gray light.
“A question we will answer in time.” His eyes held mine. “But first, we must deal with the sinner before us.” He stepped down from the platform and walked to where Anna knelt, grabbed a fistful of her hair and wrenched her head back until her neck arched at a painful angle.
“Do you deny these charges?” Spit flew from his mouth as he shook her.
Anna’s lips moved but no sound came out. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, like she’d already left her body, already gone somewhere the pain couldn’t reach.
“I asked you a question.” He shook her by the hair, his knuckles white around the strands. “Do you deny it?”
“No.” The word left her broken and empty, no more than breath.
The crowd heard it. They always heard confessions.
“She admits her guilt.” Klaus released her hair and let her head fall forward again, turning to face the crowd with his chest swelling. “The trial by water will determine her fate. If she floats, she is a witch and will burn. If she sinks, she is innocent and God will receive her soul.”
I wanted to scream. Wanted to run forward and cut her bonds and drag her away from this madness. Emma’s hand tightened on my arm, her nails pressing crescents into my skin through the sleeve.
“Don’t.” Her lips moved. “Don’t move. Don’t speak. There’s nothing you can do.”
She was right. I knew she was right. If I tried to help Anna, I’d be in the river next to her. But knowing didn’t make it easier to stand there and watch.
Two men lifted Anna from the mud. She didn’t struggle, didn’t cry out, just hung limp between them like a doll with its stuffing torn out.
They carried her to the water’s edge and waded in until they were waist-deep, the river dark around them and moving slow and thick.
Klaus followed them in. His fine clothes would be ruined. He didn’t seem to care.
“Thumbs to toes.” He snapped his fingers.
The men obeyed, bent Anna’s body in half and tied her thumbs to her big toes with fresh rope. The trial had turned into execution. Justice made of murder. Just like my vision. Exactly like my vision.
“Begin the count.” Klaus grabbed Anna’s head with both hands and shoved her under the water.
She didn’t fight. Didn’t thrash. Just went under like a stone sinking into darkness.
“One.” Klaus called out, loud and clear. “Two. Three.”
The crowd watched in silence. Some faces were eager, some were sick, most were blank, the faces of people who had seen this before and learned not to flinch.
“Ten. Eleven. Twelve.”
Bubbles broke the surface. Anna’s body jerked once, twice — instinct fighting against the binding even when the mind had given up.
“Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.”
I couldn’t look away. The counting. The faces watching. The water filling lungs that would never breathe again.
“Thirty. Thirty-one. Thirty-two.”
My own vision echoed underneath his count.
“Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven.”
The bubbles stopped.
“Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.”
Klaus pulled her head up. Her eyes were open and staring at nothing, water streaming from her mouth and nose. Her skin had gone gray and her lips were blue.
She was dead.
“Innocent.” Klaus let her body fall back into the water, his face showing nothing. “God has judged her soul clean. May she find peace in His kingdom.”
The men released her and let her float face-down in the shallows, her shift billowing around her like a shroud and her hair spreading across the dark water like seaweed.
The crowd began to disperse, murmuring to each other, already forgetting what they’d seen, already thinking about supper and chores and the small concerns of ordinary life.
I stood there staring at Anna’s body floating in the river. She’d stood in my cottage trembling and desperate, reaching for a way out of a trap that had no escape. Now she was dead.
“Red.” Emma’s hand found my elbow, the word reaching me like it had traveled a long way.
“Red, we need to go.” She tugged at my arm and I let her lead me away from the water, away from Anna, away from the crowd that was already scattering.
We walked in silence while Thomas hid his face against his mother’s skirt, his small shoulders shaking.
“Go home.” Emma stopped at the edge of the market square, her eyes red-rimmed and wet. “Lock your door. Don’t come out until tomorrow.”
“Emma...” I reached for her hand.
“I know.” She cut me off, her chin trembling. “She’s gone now, and if you go near her body, everyone will talk. Klaus will talk.”
“Klaus saw me.” I gripped her fingers. “He looked right at me. He knows.”
“He suspects.” She squeezed back. “That’s not the same thing. He needs proof. He has none against you.”
“He doesn’t need proof.” I let that land between us. “He just needs an excuse.”
Emma didn’t have an answer for that. Her mouth opened and closed, and we both knew it was true. “Please, just go home.” She pulled her hand free and pressed it briefly against my cheek. “I’ll come check on you tomorrow.”
She turned and walked away. Thomas looked back at me over her shoulder, his eyes wide and scared, his face streaked with tears he’d tried to hide.
I stood alone in the empty square. Anna’s body was still floating in the river, someone would fish it out eventually, bury her in the potter’s field with the other sinners and suicides.
Emma was right. I should go home. Lock my door. Hide until this passed. I watched Emma turn the corner toward the east road, Thomas’s dark head disappearing against her shoulder. Then I started walking. Three steps before the hand closed around my arm.
“Red.” Klaus was right behind me, close enough that I could smell the river water on his clothes and the sweat underneath.
“Leaving so quickly?” His breath was hot against my ear. “I wanted to thank you for attending.”
“Let go of me.” I wrenched sideways but his grip only tightened, his fingers digging into the flesh above my elbow.
“We should talk.” He turned me to face him, his eyes bright and eager, the eyes of a predator that had finally cornered its prey. “About herbs. About visitors in the night. Shouldn’t we?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I kept my face blank.
“Don’t you?” He stepped closer, his bulk blocking out the fading light. “Anna confessed everything before the trial. Told us exactly where she got the pennyroyal. Told us who taught her how to brew it.”
“She was lying.” I refused to move even though every instinct screamed at me to run.
“Perhaps.” Klaus smiled, his lips peeling back. “But dead women don’t lie. And living women don’t call dead women liars. Not unless they want to join them in the river.”
I tried to twist free again, but his hand was a vise around my arm.
“I told you before.” He whispered near my ear, his free hand came up to touch my cheek and I flinched back. “You should have taken my offer when you had the chance.”
“I’d rather drown.” I spat the words at his face.
He smiled, cold and empty, and his hand dropped from my cheek.
“That can be arranged.” He raised his free hand and snapped his fingers.
Two men appeared from the shadows, big and rough, men who did Klaus’s dirty work and didn’t ask questions.
“Take her.” Klaus released my arm and stepped back, brushing off his sleeves like I’d dirtied them.
“Put her in the cellar. We’ll have a proper trial tomorrow. ”
They grabbed me, one on each arm. I struggled and kicked and tried to scream, and a hand clamped over my mouth, rough calluses scraping against my lips. I bit down hard and tasted blood. The man cursed and yanked his hand back.
“Help!” I screamed into the empty square. “Someone help me!” The sound echoed off the buildings and came back unanswered. Everyone had gone home and locked their doors and pretended they hadn’t seen a girl drown an hour ago. No one was coming.
They dragged me across the square with my feet scraping against the dirt. I twisted and fought, but their grip was iron while Klaus walked ahead of us, calm and unhurried, like a man taking a stroll after supper.
The meetinghouse loomed ahead — gray stone and black windows, the cellar door standing open and waiting.
I fought harder, screamed until my throat tore, kicked until my legs ached.
Someone wrenched my arms behind my back and bound my wrists with rope, tight enough that my hands went numb before they’d even finished the knot.
They threw me down the stairs. I hit the packed earth floor hard and lay there with my cheek in the dirt, arms wrenched behind me, no way to catch myself. The door slammed. The bolt ground home.
I lay still, breathing. My wrists were tied and my shoulders burned and blood ran somewhere down my shin where the stairs had caught me. Above me Klaus laughed — slow and easy, a man with nowhere to be. Then his footsteps moved away.
The only light came through the window near the ceiling, a bar of gray afternoon falling across the dirt floor. Enough to see the walls. Enough to see there was nothing here but stone.
Above me the village went about its day like nothing had happened, like I wasn’t in the dirt with my hands tied behind me, like tomorrow wasn’t already decided.