I get a wash of her sorrow through our connection. Between her emotions and Otto’s, I hardly have room for my own.
Perchta hid the air stone, says Holda.I was kept out of it, as she was kept out of mine.
Perchta does not like me, I say.But will she understand why we are seeking her stone? Will she help us?
It’s a futile ask. I remember all too well my few interactions with the Mother goddess. Her disgust of me and my refusal to adhere to the rules she oversees. I am the antithesis of everything she commands, order and rules and tradition.
But Dieter is a threat far larger than Perchta’s distaste for me.
I will try to speak with her, Holda says, and I feel the finality in it.
“Our best guess is to go to this fort,” I say, rubbing my forehead. “How far?”
“It’s Glauberg,” Cornelia says. “A few days’ travel.”
I nod. We’ve only just awoken but exhaustion settles over me, and I nod again, as though affirmation will take the uncertainty away.
Otto takes my hand. Squeezes hard.
“To Glauberg,” he tells me. His own roiling emotions give me something to anchor to. We did what we could for Johann, and Trierissaferwithout Dieter, but there is nothing else I can do to comfort Otto now, and it breaks my heart.
All this magic. All this power.
There has to besomethingI can do.
Because otherwise, what is the point of being a goddess-chosen champion?
“To Glauberg,” I whisper.
We stick to the land this time, not wanting to forgo horses and unable to take a river the entire way, although we pay heavily for both us and our mounts to be ferried across the Rhine.
The cost has increased, it seems, due to the unexpected flooding in the area.
All rivers we pass, offshoots and brooks, are swollen with water. Villages on the riverbanks are flooded, people rushing around to salvage belongings, rescue missions well underway. As we leave the valley behind, I voice aloud my concern.
“The excess water is Dieter,” I say.
Brigitta, from her mount next to me, only grunts.
“We could track him based on the flooding,” I try. “Follow it back to wherever he originates.”
“How long would that take, to figure out which direction the waters started? They wouldn’t have to follow the normal current of the river, so we couldn’t assume he’s upstream. What if we pick the wrong direction?”
I start to respond. But find I have nothing to say.
Brigitta gives a soft smile. “There are many paths to take in war,” she tells me. “Learning to trust your commitment to one direction is what sculpts a soldier. Indecision could cost lives.”
“The wrong decision could cost lives too.”
She nods and kicks her horse on, and I watch her push ahead in silence.
It’s only a two-day journey across the rolling hills and thick forests of the Empire, the sky alternating between crisp blue and clouded early spring.
If Dieter took this path with his hexenjägers, we see no sign of it. There are less waterways, so signs of his flooding destruction, if there are any, are fewer. They could have taken more populous roads; we stick with a direct route, charging our own trails through dense woodlands with Brigitta at the lead. I try hard not to worry about whether Dieter is on our same path. I try not to worry about whether he’s already found the air stone, and this is all futile. I try not to worry about hownotseeing him means we may have misinterpreted the next stone’s location, and Dieter has already found it elsewhere.
I think of none of those things.
Instead, I think about the town we arrive in near dusk the second night of travel, and how we’ll reach Glauberg before noon the next day.
