Alois groans. “Perchta’s messing with us. Fantastic.” He sheaths the knife he’d tried to attack me with, and I start to say something about it when Otto juts his chin at the weapon.
“Don’t put it away.”
Alois takes it back out, but he gives Otto a searching look. “We haven’t seen any of those creatures down here. No one else, really, except you.”
And in an instant, his confusion turns to suspicion.
“How do we know youareyou?” he asks.
Alois’s usual banter makes me want to dismiss it as a joke, but his question grows roots and settles in my brain, and I clench my jaw tight.
“How do we knowyou’reyou?” I return. “And not some figment of Perchta meant to stick a blade in our backs? You already tried to attack me.”
Alois’s suspicion holds on me. “Say something only Fritzi would know.” He blanches. “Notabout Otto, I beg of you.”
I can’t help it. I snort. It draws a smile across Alois’s face, and Otto shakes his head, but one corner of his mouth lifts.
“Hehas to be himself, at least,” Otto says. Alois bows.
“Where’s everyone else?” I ask. “Brigitta, Ignatz, the rest of—”
Alois shrugs. His face goes a bit gray, and he settles, humor sliding off. His silence hangs, and my own uncertainty wells up in it.
We don’t know. The creatures could have corralled them elsewhere, or—
No. Thoughts like that won’t help.
But why are the four of us down here, then? Why not the rest?
“If you’re quite finished,” Cornelia says, “I’d rather like to get out of here.”
“Were there any teachings about how to escape a goddess-created barrow in your journey to become a priestess?” I ask.
She grunts. “If only. I’m beginning to wonder what in my teachings and positionwasactually useful, outside of falling in line.”
My eyebrows smooth out. She’s always been the closest to believing the things Holda speaks of, but I haven’t heard Cornelia outright say anything of that sort before.
I manage a shaky smile.You have no idea, I want to say.
“Any god that expects obedience may do well to not be so damned obscure,” Otto mutters, which makes my eyebrows shoot up.
Cornelia steps deeper into the room, moving gracefully around the tables, her focus set on the back wall.
I cross with her and stare up at the four statues.
“They’re unsettling,” I say.
She folds her arms. “There’s something…off about them. Isn’t there?”
I cock my head as Otto and Alois join us, and we stand in stillness for a moment, mimicking the statues in front of us. Each one is massive, at least six feet tall, with mistletoe headdresses, armor, a sword, and a shield all carved of the same stone. Theylookidentical, scowling faces set for all eternity—but it isn’t that there’s something off about all of them. It’s that there’s something off aboutoneof them.
I take a step closer. Three of the statues are a terracotta orange-red, and their texture looks rough, like sand. But one is not quite orange, not quite red. And the texture is broken up by almost minuscule pieces of something lighter, strips of—is that straw?
The moment I think that, I’m hit with memories. Mama threatening my brother and me that if we didn’t behave, Perchta would come andslice open our bellies and stuff us full of straw. She threatened Dieter far more than me, but those were the tales always, haunted whispers that the goddess of rules exacted her punishment with a knife and straw. That was how Perchta threatened me, too, when she was testing me in the Black Forest before I gained entry to the Well.
“This statue,” I point at the one second from the left. “The stone is in this statue.”
Cornelia comes closer. “Are you sure?”
