Chapter 22
Katharina
The cart stopped moving. I heard murmurs, the creak of hinges, the hollow echo of a lock opening.
Then hands grabbed my arms and hauled me out.
My knees buckled when I hit the ground, cobblestones biting through the thin fabric of my skirt, but they did not let me fall.
They simply dragged me forward, my feet scraping uselessly against the stones as I tried to find purchase.
The air changed into something colder, damper, crueler.
The sounds of the city faded behind me, swallowed by something thick. We’d passed the threshold and were inside.
The Drudenhaus.
They dragged me down a corridor that seemed to stretch forever, the darkness beneath the hood absolute.
I counted my footsteps, trying to map the space in my mind, trying to hold on to something, anything real.
But the fear was creeping in now, cold fingers wrapping around my heart, squeezing until I thought it might stop beating.
Iron groaned as a cell was opened. The hands on my arms shoved me forward, and I stumbled across a threshold into air colder still, thick with the stench of old blood and shit. Blinded, I tripped and crashed to the floor, unable to catch myself with my hands still locked behind me.
Pain radiated from my nose and brow, then flared as someone grabbed my hair, yanking me back.
The hood was ripped from my head.
I blinked against the torchlight, my eyes watering, and the Drudenhaus revealed itself to me.
Stone walls, caked with filth, cut only by the horrible drag of fingernails. No windows, the only light from the torches that lined the hallway of cells. Multiple sets of iron manacles lined the walls, the floor beneath darkened by the fluids of those who’d been chained there.
A man pulled me back against his hard chest. His hands gripped me where they shouldn’t, and rough stubble scraped the back of my neck, along with the hot stink of his breath.
“You’re a pretty one. I bet you taste good.” A wet, unbearable feeling crept up my neck as he licked me. I threw my head back, satisfied by the crunch of his nose, before I tried biting the hand on my shoulder.
More pain shattered through my face, then my ribs, as he struck me, sending me sprawling across the floor.
“Witch whore. You’ll probably like this.” I screamed as his knee came down on my back, pinning me down. I was helpless. I was fucking helpless.
I looked for that fire again, but there was nothing—only fear as he fumbled with his clothes.
I hated that all I could do was cry.
Then suddenly his weight shifted back, and that voice I hated more than anything filled the cell.
“No, not this one. This one is mine.” Vicar Forner.
The scarred guard grunted, and I tried to roll over. My body screamed in protest, but I forced myself toward my knees when a hand closed around my throat.
The guard slammed me backward into the wall, and the impact drove the air from my lungs. Before I could recover, he’d seized my wrists, wrenching them above my head. A sharp click echoed as he locked me into the chains on the wall.
I kicked at him, but he stepped back easily before punching me in the stomach again. I collapsed.
Get up, Katharina! You will not die on your knees before this man.
Forner stood in the doorway, torchlight flickering behind him, casting his face half in shadow. To me, he looked more like the Devil than Heinrich ever had. His gaze held the same cold certainty it had when I was a child, kneeling in his confessional, trusting him with my childish fears.
He stepped inside the cell, nodding at the scarred man, who left without another word.
“Little Katharina, you have tried so hard to be a good girl, but as I predicted, you could not resist the corruption in your heart. I have waited a very long time for this.”
I spat at his feet.
He smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. “Your mother had that same defiance.” He stepped closer, his robes whispering against the filthy floor. “She screamed so beautifully in the end. But she would not give you up.”
My stomach lurched. I pressed my bound hands against the iron that held them, using the pain to anchor myself.
“I did terrible things to her, Katharina. Things that would make you weep to hear them described.” His voice was calm, conversational, as if describing something of no consequence. “But still, she insisted you were innocent. That you were just a child.”
He moved toward me, close enough that I could smell the sourness of his breath.
“I knew better.”
His hand shot out and gripped my chin, forcing my face up toward his. His fingers dug into the bruises the guards had left, and I bit down on my tongue to keep from crying out.
“All of you carry the sin of Eve,” he said softly. “Every daughter of that first betrayer, born with corruption already flowering in your hearts. None of you are innocent. You cannot be. It is not in your nature.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” I spat the words at him. “When you torture women for confessions you know are false? That you’re doing God’s work?”
“I am doing God’s work.” There was no hesitation in his voice, no flicker of doubt.
“I am the shepherd, culling the diseased sheep before they can infect the flock. Every witch I burn is a soul I save—not hers, perhaps, but the souls of all those she might have corrupted.” He released my chin and stood, brushing off his hands as if my skin had soiled them.
“Your mother understood, in the end. They all understand, eventually.”
“My mother understood you are a monster.”
“Your mother confessed to consorting with the Devil.” His smile widened. “She signed her name to every charge. She thanked me for showing her the depths of her own depravity.”
“After you tortured her.” Tears burned my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. “After you broke her body until she would have said anything to make it stop. That is no true confession.”
“The flesh is weak.” He shrugged, as if this were self-evident. “But the confession cleanses the soul. Your mother died absolved of her sins, Katharina. She should be grateful.”
“She died screaming while you made me watch!”
“Yes.” His eyes glittered in the torchlight. “She did.”
I had looked into the Devil’s eyes and seen less hatred there. “You’re terrified of me.”
“What terrifies me”—he gnashed his teeth, and for the first time I saw doubt in his eyes, but it quickly turned into a depraved hunger—“is the corruption that lives in every woman’s heart.
The weakness that led Eve to bite the apple.
The vanity that makes you believe you can be more than what God made you.
“Your mother thought she could defy the natural order. She thought her herbs and charms made her powerful. But in the end, she burned like all the others.” He loomed over me, blocking out the torchlight. “And now I finally have you.”
“What do you want from me?”
“A confession, of course.” He said it so simply. “You will tell me every woman you have helped. You will give me names, Katharina. Enough names to keep the pyres burning for months.”
“I will tell you nothing.”
“That is what they all say.” He reached out and patted my cheek, like one would with a cheeky child.
“But this place has a way of loosening tongues. There are the normal ways, and if those fail”—his hand trailed down to my throat, fingers pressing lightly against my pulse—“there are other methods. Methods I have been refining for years, waiting for this very moment.”
He straightened and moved toward the door.
“Rest while you can, Katharina. Tomorrow, we begin.”
“Forner.”
He paused, turning back. Rage pulsed through me, but no flames came. Instead, an oath.
“I am going to make you feel every moment of pain you have ever inflicted on another person. And when you are finally begging for death, I am going to remind you of this conversation.”
He laughed. It was a warm sound, genuine, as if I’d told him a particularly amusing joke.
“I believe your mother made similar threats, although that was on day two,” he replied. “I still have the tooth I pulled from her mouth when she did.”
The cell door clanged shut behind him, and I was alone with nothing but the distant sound of screams. A woman, of course. It wasn’t words anymore, just sounds—animal sounds or human sounds, the difference hardly mattered. Not in this place.
My wrists were raw where the manacles held me to the wall. I could sit overextended, could stand if I bent. Could do neither comfortably. That was the point, I supposed. To make the waiting itself a kind of torture. To make me soften like meat before the real work began.
I pulled against the chains without meaning to. The iron bit deeper and blood, warm and slick, ran down my forearms.
Stop. Stop it. Save your strength.
For what?
The question sat in my chest like a stone. For what? For the trial that was no trial, where my guilt was already certain? For the pyre? My mother had screamed. Would I scream like that? Would my voice sound like hers?
I was going to vomit.
No, I would not give them that. I would not foul myself before they even began. I still had that much control.
I closed my eyes and tried to pray. Unsurprisingly, I found no peace there.
Footsteps sounded down the hall. I went rigid, my heart hammering against my ribs.
They passed, then faded. It was someone else’s turn.
I sagged against the chains, shaking so hard my teeth rattled.
How long had I been here? The torch gave no measure of time, only that constant sullen light, that smoke that made my eyes water and my throat close. I was thirsty—so thirsty. They’d given me nothing. Another softening, to make me grateful when they offered water in exchange for confession.
Would they even need a confession? My body was covered in marks made by Heinrich, made by the Devil. Was that enough evidence for a conviction? Would Forner torture me anyway, just because he could? I had no doubt.
I tried to focus on that, on his depravity wrapped in the Church’s dogma. Anger swelled in me, but no flames. Blood rushed hot beneath my skin. My stomach roiled, but I couldn’t find that heat I’d felt in the garden.
It’s because you are weak. You thought you could want something and not be damned for it, a voice whispered in my mind.
My voice. My mother’s. Sister Margareta’s.
All the women who’d learned that lesson before me.
You thought if you were good enough, selfless enough, you could earn the right to desire.
I had thought that. Had believed that if I helped others, if I made myself useful, if I kept my own wants small and quiet, then maybe—maybe—I could have something for myself. Could have him. Could have one thing that was mine.
Foolish girl. Foolish, foolish girl.
Unless…
The thought came like a serpent, coiling in my mind. Crushing and deeply seductive.
Unless I accepted what the demon had offered.
Power, freedom, the strength to break these chains, to rain fire on the men who’d built it. To make them scream as they’d made so many scream. To burn the Drudenhaus, the cathedral, the Bishop’s palace. To burn it all.
I could do it, if I said yes. If I became what they already believed me to be.
The witch they’d been searching for all along.
My mother had died powerless. Sister Margareta had died powerless. How many others? How many women had died powerless?
The demon had been right about one thing: this world was not just. God, if he existed at all, did not intervene. Did not stop the torture, the burnings, the endless crushing weight of men who believed their cruelty was holy.
So why not power? Why not vengeance? Why not become the monster they’d been hunting and make them fear they’d ever spoken my name?
The fantasy was sweet. I could practically taste it—Forner’s face as I turned his instruments against him, the Bishop screaming, Heinrich—
Heinrich.
The sweetness curdled.
If I did this—if I became this—would he even want me anymore? Not the demon. The man. Would there be anything of Heinrich left to want anything, or would the demon have consumed him entirely, the way it would consume me?
How do you know he ever wanted you at all?
I didn’t. Couldn’t. The demon had spoken with his mouth, touched me with his hands. How much had been Heinrich and how much had been the creature wearing him? How much of what I’d felt had been real?
I should have kissed him, before all of this. When he was still himself. I should have been brave enough to damn myself for something real. I should have touched him the way I’d wanted to touch him, should have said the words that I knew now had never been a sin.
I love you. I loved you. I’m sorry.
Would he come? Would the demon wear his face one last time, come to gloat, to offer me damnation when I was already condemned? Or would they keep him away, afraid of what a witch loving a priest meant?
Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe we were both already damned, already lost. Maybe the only question left was whether I would die powerless or die fighting.
Maybe there was no Heinrich left to save…
No. I’d seen his face as he fought for me. He was still there; I knew it. He would come, and I would walk through the very fires of Hell to save him, even if it meant losing him.