“Let the goddess guide you,” Cornelia says. “Remember: magic is about intent. The two of you are bound in ways beyond the potion you’ll drink tomorrow.”
Fritzi dips her finger into the puddle of black in her palm and lifts it. A slow smirk that spells trouble smears across her face. “Lean down,” she instructs me, and I almost do it, but I’m well aware of my Fritzi and instead take a step back. “I’m just going to draw a big smile on your face so that Liesel doesn’t think you’re sobroody.”
“Myface?” I say, gaping. A tattoo is indelible. I do not need a black smile across my face permanently. Or ever, really.
“Well, where do you want the sigil?” Fritzi says, rolling her eyes but smiling regardless.
I grab the hem of my tunic and pull it off, exposing my torso. “I was thinking my arm or my chest…” I know very little about what this process would include, only that the end result will be a black mark staining my skin, imbuing me with magic.
Brigitta is marked all over her body, from her neck to her toes, various swirling designs. She has shown me some—the fox at the base of her skull to give her cleverness, the runic symbol over her heart to bolster her courage, the black line on her lip to make her inspiring in her speeches to her soldiers. “There are two limitations,” Brigitta told me earlier this night. “The marks enhance, but do not create—they will not make an evil heart good or a severed limb regrow.”
“And the second?” I asked.
“The magic must come from somewhere. Usually, it is a witch who earns the marks, and their magic focuses through the sigil.”
But I have no magic of my own. I am not a witch. Whatever mark Fritzi gives me will mean that, when I need to draw power from the sigil, I will be drawing power fromher.Brigitta has dozens of tattoos, not only because she needs them and earned them, but because she has the magic to focus them. They enhance her natural skill, and the power for that enhancement comes from her own resources.
Resources I do not have.
Once I understood that, I resolved to only take one mark tonight. I do not want to steal from Fritzi. She is the champion. She needs her magic more than me. But Brigitta assured me that it would not drain Fritzi’s magic to divert power toward one tattoo, and such a thing may help me be strong enough to aid her. Being bonded will mean that I can work with Fritzi’s magic and that we can work together.
“I don’t know what to draw,” Fritzi says, turning to Cornelia. “I’m not sure… What if I get the sigil wrong?”
She is so worried, but I’m not.
Cornelia shakes her head. “It’s not like that. All you have to do is hold the ash to his skin andwillthe magic into the marking that will best enhance his own strengths.”
Brigitta had explained this to me, too, showing how the more intricately woven designs created a tighter spell casting, reflecting not the skill of a tattoo artist but the magic behind it.
“It’s okay,” Cornelia starts to tell Fritzi, but I ignore her. I take Fritzi’s trembling wrist, rubbing my thumb over the rapid firing of her pulse. I look right in her wide eyes, noting the flickering flames reflected over the cool blue.
And I press the flat of her palm against my chest, right over my own heart.
For one moment, I feel the warm black paste made of ash and oil.
The bonfire disappears.
Theworlddisappears.
My mind floods with memories so vivid that I cannot see anything else. Kneeling in the parish church at Bernkastel, Hilde to one side of me, my father to the other. The priest stooping to smear ash on my forehead, the ritual reminder of Ash Wednesday, but the char reminding me of my stepmother’s recent burning. My father shouting at me when I pulled away from the priest, the racket turning into hacking, blood-spattered coughs, red blending with the purple-dyed linen. But then my sister slipped her hand in mine, and we knelt, together, a prayer on both our lips, not for forgiveness, but for revenge.
Fritzi’s palm burns on my chest, as if the ash were smoldering embers, not cold and dead. Although I can feel her, I cannot see her, and theenveloping smoke gives me the impression of solitude. Much like the trials in the Black Forest, the goddesses have separated us.
As I blink away that first memory, the nauseating smell of burned flesh gags me. I try to rip away, to vomit, but I can’t move. I can only feel the heat of the fire—not the bonfire, but the stakes, the hundreds of stakes lining the streets of Trier—
I quit fighting it.
I pulled away from the priest when I was a child. I turned away from the stakes when I was a man.
I had not understood the chasm between my father’s interpretation of his god and the God I worship. I had not been willing to see the consequences of my too-subtle rebellions, the time it took to plan, the lives lost while I did so.
I will face it now. I will stand, unflinching, before any fire.
And if Fritzi were in that fire, I would stride into it after her.
No one will burn any witch from this moment on without burning me too.
And no one willeverhurt Fritzi without answering to my unbridled wrath.
