Chapter 24
Katharina
The iron manacles that had held me lay in puddles of cooling metal on the cell floor.
The door stood open before me, and I walked toward it, power thrumming beneath my skin, the torchlight flickering and dancing with its rhythm.
In the hall, dozens of bodies lay slumped against the walls, eyes burned out to an oozing black.
Then I heard the sobbing.
A girl’s voice, raw and broken, repeating the same words over and over: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Heinrich glanced at me before leaning in to kiss my forehead. “What do you desire, my dove?”
“Find the Bishop. Make sure he suffers for all he has done. Then meet me in the cathedral.”
He nodded and began to walk away when I grabbed his collar.
“You leave Forner for me.”
At that, his grin split into something just beyond human.
“As you command.”
He left, and I followed the sound of the sobbing.
Greta’s cell was three doors down from mine.
She was chained to the wall the way I had been, but Forner had done so much more to her.
Her hands had been shattered, fingers bent at angles that made my stomach turn.
Burn marks covered her forearms in neat rows where they’d applied hot irons, testing for anywhere she didn’t feel pain.
Her face was swollen almost beyond recognition, one eye sealed shut with dried blood, her lip split so deeply I could see the white of her teeth through the wound.
She’d told them about me. I had helped her, and she had condemned me to the Drudenhaus. And if Forner had his way, the pyre.
The rage came—hot and vicious—more powerful than anything I’d ever felt before. Flames danced in the palm of my hand, ready to strike those who had wronged me. She had done this. She had betrayed me. I’d helped her, had risked everything for her. I’d told her to be careful, and she’d repaid me by—
“Katharina.” Her voice was barely a whisper, thick with pain and shame. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—I tried not to tell them. I tried. But they kept—” A sob choked off whatever she’d been about to say.
The flames softened as my fury shifted. They cooled from a raging inferno into a gentle hearth. It was easy to see fault in those around you, those who slighted you. But she had never been my enemy.
Not Greta.
Never Greta.
Help who you can. Love thy neighbor.
The flames embraced her, not burning but a comfort in the cold that seeped from the walls of this place.
“Am I dead? Are you really an angel?” she asked.
I shook my head. Tears welled in her one eye that could still open. “It hurts, it hurts so much. I’m so sorry. I know you must hate me. I know I’m—”
“Stop.” I moved closer, kneeling in the filth of her cell floor. “Look at me, Greta.”
She raised her head slowly, pain evident on her face.
“This isn’t your fault,” I said.
“I told them—”
“Because they tortured you. Because they broke your body until your mind couldn’t hold anymore.
” I reached out carefully, brushing her ruined hand with just my fingertips.
She jerked back, blood bubbling on her lips.
“They did this. Forner did this. The Bishop, the Church, the men who built this place and filled it with instruments designed to unmake people. Not you.”
“But I said your name.”
“It does not matter. Not anymore.”
Tears tracked through the dirt on her face.
“I killed him. My husband. I did kill him, Katharina. I used too much of the tincture, just like you warned me not to. I was so tired of being afraid, and one night he came home drunk and angry and I—I just wanted it to be over. I put the whole vial in his wine.”
I saw her nose was crooked now, but it was not a recent break. “He hurt you and would have kept hurting you. You had no choice.”
She shook her head. “That is not how God will see it.”
“I think a god who punishes the small for fighting those who would abuse them is no god worth our devotion.”
Her eyes went wide, but then she looked at me—really looked—and seemed to notice for the first time that I was standing in her cell unchained. That the guards hadn’t stopped me. That power was radiating from me like heat from a forge.
“What happened to you?”
“Something I should have accepted a long time ago.” I stood, moving to where her chains were bolted to the wall.
The metal was thick, well made. It didn’t matter.
I wrapped my hands around the iron and felt it soften, felt it bend and break like wet clay.
The manacles fell away from her wrists. I cradled her broken hands in mine, and she flinched, but then golden light flared between my fingers, and when I removed them, she was whole.
Greta stared at her freed hands like she’d never seen them before.
“Can you walk?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t—they haven’t let me stand.”
I helped her up, supporting her weight when her legs buckled. She was so small, it was easy.
“Why are you helping me?” she whispered against my shoulder. “After what I did—”
“Because they wanted us to hate each other,” I said.
“They’ve made us afraid of each other, teaching us that survival means betraying our neighbors.
Turning on one another so we’re too busy destroying each other to see who’s really destroying us.
” I glanced at her ruined face and traced my hand down her cheek.
The swelling and bruises dimmed until I could see the girl she was underneath.
“I won’t give them that. I won’t let them make enemies of us. ”
I walked her into the hallway lined with cells. “You need to get out of Bamberg. Tonight. If there is anyone you love, take them with you, but leave and do not look back. Do you understand?”
“What are you going to do?”
I thought of Heinrich waiting in the cathedral. Of the power thrumming through me, dark and eager. Of Forner sleeping soundly in his bed, of the Bishop counting his seized properties, of a church that had built its doctrine around the inherent sin of being a woman.
“When a man hurts you, you can run or you can fight. But what if it is not one man who harms you? What if it’s generations, legions? What if the violence has become so ingrained that it hides in broad daylight? That it’s what allows men like your husband to go unpunished? What do you do then?”
She did not answer, so I did.
“You burn it all down.”