Chapter 1
Katharina
Iwoke gasping in the pre-dawn darkness of my small, cold chamber, my shift soaked through with sweat that smelled of char.
The stone walls of the convent pressed close—solid and real—but I could still feel the phantom heat licking at my legs.
My hands shook as I pressed them to my face, feeling for skin that wasn’t peeling away like parchment in the flames.
“Only a dream,” I whispered into my palms, the words a prayer I’d repeated countless times. “Only ever a dream.”
But dreams had power in Bamberg. Dreams could be evidence. Dreams could tie the rope around your wrists and stack the wood beneath your feet.
The bell tower struck five times, the sound rolling across the sleeping city. Soon the people would wake. The sisters here had already been awake for hours, baking bread and tending the kitchens.
I rose from my narrow bed, my bare feet finding the cold stone floor silently.
I’d learned to move like a shadow through these halls, how to fade into corners, how to lower my eyes, how to make myself small and forgettable.
Children were not meant to be seen or heard, Mother Agnes said, especially children whose very existence reminded the city of its righteous violence.
Keep to the shadows. Help those who cannot help themselves. Survive.
My mother’s words echoed through my mind, as they often did.
They were more familiar to me than the daily psalms we repeated during Mass.
She was gone, but still I felt her guiding hand as I moved through the early morning darkness—just a shadow in a world that would put anything that shone to the torch.
My kirtle hung on its peg by the door, rough wool that still smelled faintly of yesterday’s rain.
I tugged it on over my head, being careful not to rip the seams already fraying from my last mending.
It had been a hand-me-down, left in the layperson’s quarters by a pilgrim, and in truth did not fit me properly.
But I didn’t have the funds for a new one, and the red-dyed wool appealed to me—a small luxury, something I’d never had before.
I laced the front and tucked a partlet along the neckline for the modicum of warmth it provided on this chilly April morning.
I slipped out of my chamber, navigating the dark corridors from memory. Ten years I’d lived within these walls, and the stones knew my footsteps by now, worn smooth beneath the paths I traveled as I completed my daily chores.
First, I made my way to the small field behind our stone building. Already I heard Leibchen, the convent’s single dairy cow, making quite a fuss.
“Yes, yes, I’m here,” I said, stroking her side as I set the tin pail beneath her.
In some ways, Leibchen was my oldest friend.
She had been pregnant with her first calf when I arrived at the convent at thirteen, freshly orphaned and still smelling of smoke from my mother’s pyre.
The sisters hadn’t known what to do with me.
I was too old to be raised properly, too young to take vows, and carried the taint of witchcraft in my very blood.
So, they’d given me the work no one else wanted: mucking stalls, hauling water, and milking Leibchen twice a day, every day, my back bent and aching before I’d even finished growing.
“You saved me, you know,” I murmured to her as my hands found their familiar rhythm. “Though you nearly killed me first.”
She lowed softly. Three months after I’d started milking her, cowpox had come—angry pustules covering my hands and arms, fever that made me delirious for days.
Mother Agnes had tended me with her usual grim detachment, muttering that perhaps God was claiming the witch’s daughter after all. But I’d survived, scarred but stronger.
Then, two winters later, smallpox had swept through Bamberg like God’s own wrath.
It took the young and old without discrimination—except for me.
I’d moved amongst the dying, bringing water and tending wounds when the priests were too afraid to enter the convent’s sick house, the nuns succumbing left and right. Not a single pustule touched my skin.
“That’s when the whispers really started,” I told Leibchen, who flicked her tail in what I chose to interpret as sympathy.
“The witch’s daughter who couldn’t be killed by disease.
Even Sister Margareta looked at me differently after that.
” Sister Margareta, who had taught me to tend the sick, whose hands bore the same scars as mine.
The milk rang against the sides of the pail, a comfortable, familiar sound.
Leibchen was old now, older than any dairy cow had a right to be.
Twelve years at least, when most were sent to slaughter after eight or nine.
Her milk had thinned, came slower each season.
Last week, I’d overheard Mother Agnes discussing her fate with the butcher.
“But you’re still here, aren’t you, old friend?” I stroked her flank, feeling the prominent bones beneath her hide. “Still useful enough to avoid the knife. Though barely.”
She turned her broad head to look at me, and I saw my own future in her patient brown eyes. How quickly the world disposed of women who outlived their utility.
Help those who cannot help themselves.
I leaned over, feeding her a handful of oats laced with fenugreek I made just for her.
“We’ll keep going, won’t we?” I whispered, pressing my forehead against her warm side. “You’ll keep producing milk, even if it’s just a trickle. And I’ll keep healing—the work Mother left for me. We will survive.”
The pail was only half full when she ran dry. It used to fill completely, sometimes requiring a second container. But I patted her neck gratefully anyway.
“Every drop is rebellion,” I told her. “Every day you survive past your usefulness is a small victory against a world that measures our worth in what we can provide—milk, babies…silence.”
I carried the pail back toward the convent, depositing it in the kitchen where many of the sisters toiled, covered in flour and sweat. One grabbed the bucket without ceremony and prepared the milk for cheese-making. I swept out of the kitchen, equally silent. On to my next use.
The convent’s garden gate creaked on ancient hinges, the only gap in the stone walls separating it from the cloisters.
The plants stretched before me as dawn broke, rows of herbs and early-season vegetables I had tended into a garden fruitful enough to provide for the convent.
The wind stirred as I entered, and it was as if all the flowers turned toward me, their fragrance a familiar comfort.
Here, the tightness in my chest loosened.
The soil beneath my feet was dark and rich, and I knew every inch of it.
I knew which patches drained well and which held moisture, where the mint spread too eagerly and had to be cut back each spring.
This was the one place in Bamberg where no one watched me.
The plants did not care whose blood ran in my veins.
They only cared that I watered them, weeded them, spoke to them in the early morning when no one else was awake, as my mother had taught me.
Talk to them. The plants listen, and what they hear, they tell the bees. What the bees know, they share with the wind, and the wind carries secrets to all who know how to listen. This is how we pray to the earth that our Lord God made for us.
The bees were early this morning. Two landed on the back of my hand; their tiny feet moving over the scars on my hand as they danced in tandem.
“Good morning, any news for me today?” I asked, lifting my hand in front of my face.
They continued to circle before they rose in unison, spiraling into the air and flying off. But before they headed back to their home, they paused on the petals of the purple flowers that grew in nodes along the tall stems hidden in the shade. So, there was news for the day…
For there were other plants in this garden, ones that grew in the shadows between the approved herbs, tucked behind the sage and rosemary where only knowing eyes would spot them.
The purple flowers of the pennyroyal crept along the north wall, innocent enough to those who didn’t know their purpose, perhaps even mistaken for lavender.
Tansy grew wild by the well, its yellow buttons bright even in dim light.
Blue cohosh hid beneath the apple trees, and rue thrived in a corner where most never ventured.
I hadn’t planted them. They’d been here when I first began my quiet work, as if the garden itself knew what the women of Bamberg needed and had provided.
Sister Margareta had found me here once, three summers past, gathering rue in the small hours before Matins.
I had frozen, certain she would raise the alarm, would drag me before the Witch Bishop himself.
Instead, she’d knelt beside me in the damp earth and shown me how to harvest the leaves without damaging the plant’s ability to regenerate.
“God’s creation serves many purposes,” she’d said quietly, her weathered hands gentle on the stems. “Very few written in the herbals the priests approve.”
She never spoke of it again, but sometimes I found fresh herbs bundled and dried in the garden shed—plants I hadn’t harvested myself—tied with a particular knot.
Perhaps they were meant for the priests to sprinkle holy water, but I didn’t think so.
A secret Sister Margareta had shared, unspoken, for nearly a decade.
Mist rose from the earth like incense with each of my steps as I made my way to the far corner where the rue grew thickest, guided by the ghost of my mother’s hand…and the knowledge she had left with me before her passing.
“Good morning, grandmother rue,” I whispered, my fingers gentle on the silvered leaves.
“I need your bitter wisdom today. A girl comes seeking help. Her father arranged a marriage to a man who already buried two wives in childbirth. She has barely seen fifteen summers, and her monthly blood has only just begun its rhythm. He seems to have a taste for girls far too young.”
The plant seemed to shiver in the still air, mirroring the chill that ran down my spine. I took this as permission and carefully cut three stems, whispering my thanks.
“Tell the hive I mean no harm,” I murmured toward the skeps where the convent bees were still stirring to life. “Tell them I take only what’s needed, only to preserve a life, not to end one.”
I waited, and a single bee emerged from the nearest hive, circling me once before settling on my hand, its tiny feet tickling my skin. I held perfectly still as it walked the lines of my palm. This was the only true confession I still gave.
Whatever fate the bee found, it did not reveal it, but instead flew back to its sisters, and I knew my message would be carried through the colony’s dreams.
The sky lightened in the east, painting the gray clouds that never seemed to leave Bamberg.
The city was stirring, and with it the endless appetite of the Witch Bishop’s court.
Yesterday they’d taken the baker’s wife, accused her of cursing her neighbor’s bread to fail.
Last week, the mother of eight who lived by the river gate.
The week before that, three sisters who’d had the misfortune to remain unmarried past thirty.
A single accusation was a death sentence in Bamberg, and the pyres never stayed unlit for long.
Children had become precious in these hungry times.
War had taken the men, famine the weak, and plague anyone foolish enough to believe God might show mercy.
Perhaps that’s why they’d let me live after my mother burned—a child, any child, was worth more than vengeance.
Especially one who could be put to work.
I sometimes wondered what would happen if this city knew the full truth of what I did in these pre-dawn hours—that I could taste the weather changing in the honey from our hives, that sometimes when I touched a woman’s belly I could feel whether the quickening child would thrive or fail. That I could cause it to fail.
My mother had burned for less.
As I’d grown older, what had begun as whispers burned brighter with each passing month—a fire raging inside me, anger for each woman taken, for each child left without a family.
But it wasn’t only the trials. It was every girl married too young, never taught how her own body worked, never taught to read so she might learn more.
So she might escape the leash placed on her at birth.
Born to serve men’s purposes, and nothing more.
In the early dawn light, I felt the flames rising inside me, swore I felt them licking at my fingertips.
Keep to the shadows.
I let out a slow breath as the fire threatened to consume the very darkness I hid within, pushing it deep into my belly. Survive. Her last command to me. I tasted ash and knew I must remain hidden, must keep that fire from devouring me at all costs.
The garden gate creaked again, and I tensed before recognizing the shuffling gait of Sister Margareta. She made her way to the herbs, gathering feverfew with her arthritic hands.
“The Welser girl is lingering by the well house.” She did not look at me as she said it. We’d done this dance many times.
I nodded, though she wasn’t watching. She shuffled away, leaving me alone with my bitter harvest and the growing light that chased away shadows like me.
Somewhere in the city, a rooster crowed, and I heard the first wagon wheels on cobblestones.
There wasn’t much time before the girl would be missed.
I gathered my herbs and made my way back inside, already mixing the proportions in my mind, already preparing the words I’d use to comfort a frightened girl.
This was my inheritance—my mother’s true legacy.
Not the nightmares of fire, but the knowledge of how to kindle hope in desperate hearts, and how to preserve life in a city devoted to death.
They had taken my mother, but they hadn’t taken what she taught me. I wouldn’t let them take my purpose too.
Even now, I didn’t know what was worse—the fires that always threatened, or the shadows of guilt that ate away my heart, bit by bit.