Chapter 17 #2
“And yet you do nothing.” He rounded on me, and his eyes—God help me, his eyes were wrong. The pupils had stretched too wide, swallowing the brown until only darkness remained. “You save one woman at a time while hundreds burn. How long will you keep playing this game?”
“It’s not a game,” I gasped, taken aback.
“No, it certainly isn’t.” The air seemed to tighten with every turn he made. “I have been patient with you, but we are out of time. You are hiding your gifts while butchers in vestments slaughter the innocent.”
I straightened my spine. “I do what I can. I’ve made more medicines in these last weeks than ever before. I—”
“I do not mean your medicines.” He was in front of me suddenly, though I hadn’t seen him move.
His hands gripped my shoulders, and heat poured off him like a fever.
“You could do so much more. You could save them all—Wilhelm and every woman rotting in the Drudenhaus right now. You have the gift, Katharina. I’ve seen it in you since the moment we met. All you lack is the will to use it.”
“What are you talking about?” My voice shook. “What gift? I’m just a healer. I use herbs and—”
“You are so much more than that.” His face was inches from mine, and I could see now that his features were shifting, flickering between the Heinrich I knew and something with too many eyes, with light pouring from wounds that weren’t there a moment ago.
“You have walked between worlds since you were small. Your dreams bring you truth, and your anger brings you power, and you waste it. You waste it while innocents scream.”
My eyes went wide. How could he know?
I remembered the sound of Heinrich’s voice, split into something inhuman. You knew. You have always known.
I tried to pull away, but his grip was firm. “You’re not Heinrich.”
“Who else would I be?” His voice echoed in the room with that low thrum I’d tried so hard to ignore.
“And I finally have everything I prayed for. I have the strength to act, the power to protect, and the will to do what must be done.” He leaned closer, and I was engulfed in miasma and the thrumming coming from deep inside him that resonated in my bones.
“I am what you have been praying for, Katharina. Whether you knew it or not.”
“Let go of me.”
“Not until you understand.” His hands moved from my shoulders to cup my face, and where his skin touched mine, I felt fire—not painful but alive, singing through my blood.
“I am offering you everything. The power you have always desired. The power to make Forner and every witch-hunter in Bamberg kneel at your feet and beg for the mercy they never showed others. All you have to do is reach out and take it.”
My heart pounded so hard I could barely hear him over the roar in my ears. For a moment I saw it all. Forner cowering at my feet, his eyes filled with the fear that had haunted me for a decade. I saw the cathedral engulfed in flames that burned not with pain, but righteous fury.
But then I saw her, my mother, with blood dripping down her face. “I can’t!”
My mother’s hands were shaking as she lifted me and shoved me into the narrow darkness between bundles of dried chamomile and yarrow.
Stems scratched my cheeks and leaves crumbled against my hair.
The familiar scents of healing, of safety, of home closed around me like a shroud in the small hidden cabinet.
“Not a sound.” Her face filled the gap before the door closed, pale in the candlelight. Her eyes were wet. I had never seen my mother cry. “No matter what you see, no matter what you hear, you must stay silent, my little one. Promise me.”
My throat had sealed shut. I could not speak.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.” The words came out broken, barely a whisper.
She pressed her lips to my forehead. Then the cabinet door swung shut, and the world shattered into fragments. Nothing more than thin strips of light through wooden slats, showing the edge of our table and my mother’s worn brown boots stepping backward.
The door exploded open.
I flinched so hard my skull cracked against the back of the cabinet. Pain bloomed white and hot, but I did not cry out.
I had promised. I had promised.
Black boots flooded our floor. So many boots, thundering against the boards my mother had swept that morning, tracking mud across the rushes I had helped her lay.
I tried to count them—four, five, more—but they moved too fast, swarming like wasps, and my vision had gone strange and swimmy with terror.
Someone grabbed my mother’s arm.
She did not scream. I watched through the slats as a soldier’s gloved hand closed around her wrist, wrenching it behind her back at an unnatural angle. Her jaw clenched, the tendons in her neck standing out like cords, but she still made no sound.
Be like her, I thought. Be brave like her.
But I was not brave. I was thirteen years old, and I’d wet myself, the warmth spreading down my thighs and pooling beneath me in the cabinet, and the shame of it burned almost as hot as the fear.
A soldier backhanded her across the face.
The sound caused my stomach to drop—a wet crack, like a branch snapping in a storm.
Her head whipped to the side. Blood sprayed from her lip, droplets catching the candlelight, spattering across the table where we ate our meals.
Where she had taught me to read. Where she had held my hands and shown me which herbs healed and which ones harmed.
I bit down on my own hand to keep from screaming. My teeth sank through skin, and I tasted blood, felt the meat of my palm give way, but the pain was distant, unreal. The only real thing was my mother’s blood on the table. My mother’s silence, holding even as they hit her again.
I prayed for this.
The thought came unbidden, and with it a wave of nausea so violent I nearly retched.
Three days ago, in the confessional, I’d knelt in the darkness and whispered my selfish, childish wishes. I miss her when she goes out at night. I wish she would stop.
I had prayed for her to stop.
Now she would never leave at night again.
I prayed for this. I prayed for this. God answered me, and this is what he gave.
They were dragging her toward the door now.
Her feet scrabbled against the floor, trying to find purchase, and one of her boots came off.
It just lay there, abandoned. Such a small thing, such a stupid thing to notice, but I could not look away from that boot, from the way her bare foot dragged across the floor.
She did not look at the cabinet.
Even as they wrenched her arms, even as another blow landed against her ribs with a sound like a drum, she kept her eyes forward. She kept me safe, kept her promise even as I struggled to keep mine.
At the threshold, she planted her feet.
“Wait.” Her voice was steady. How was her voice so steady when mine would have been nothing but screaming? “Please, one moment.”
The Schergen paused, I didn’t know why. Perhaps even they had some scrap of humanity left—or they simply wanted to see what she would do.
My mother turned. Not toward the cabinet—never toward the cabinet—but toward the window, toward the late evening light falling golden across her drying herbs.
“Do not let hatred take root,” she said, her voice bright despite the blood streaming down her chin. “Help those who cannot help themselves. Keep to the shadows. Survive.” Her voice cracked on the last word, just barely, a fracture in the stone of her composure. “And be kind.”
Then they dragged her through the door, and she was gone.
I stayed in the cabinet.
I stayed as the sunlight moved across the floor, as the blood on the table dried to rust, as my mother’s boot lay abandoned like a corpse.
I stayed as my legs cramped and my bladder emptied again, as the smell of my own urine mixed with the lavender and rue until I could not clear the stench from my nose.
I stayed, and I did not make a sound, because I had promised.
But inside, where no one could hear, I was screaming.
I prayed for this. I asked God to make her stay, and he answered. This is my fault. This is my fault. This is my fault.
The guilt wrapped around my heart like ivy crawling up a stone pillar—but beneath it was something hot and dark and writhing. Something that did not want to survive, but to burn.
A buzzing filled my ears, soft at first, like a single bee trapped against a window. Then louder. A thousand wings beating inside my skull, drowning out thought, drowning out grief, leaving only the white-hot core of rage I’d been taught never to feel.
Do not let hatred take root, my mother had said.
But it was too late. The roots were already there, burrowing deep, drinking from the well of my fury.
The buzzing built to a crescendo until my teeth ached with it, until my vision blurred and sparked at the edges. I clamped my hands over my ears, but it made no difference—the sound was inside me, was me, a swarm given flesh.
The bundle of dried rosemary hanging nearest the window burst into flame.
I watched it happen through the slats, herbs curling and blackening as fire spread across my mother’s carefully gathered stores.
The smoke reached my nostrils, causing me to choke, and still I could not move.
Still the buzzing held me frozen as the flames climbed higher, catching the wooden beams, racing across the thatched ceiling.
Yes, something whispered beneath the drone. Yes. Let it burn. Let it all burn.
The heat broke through my paralysis. I burst from the cabinet, gasping, coughing, my eyes streaming as smoke filled the small house that had been my entire world. The fire was everywhere now.
I ran.