Fritzi and I exchange a look. We have already seen how powerful her brother is with just one stone. It’s not enough that we protect magic and the Well. We have to protect the people Dieter is willing to plow down to get what he wants.
Johann’s empty eyes, the slight blue tinge to his lips, his lifeless body on the wet stone floor...
“I know,” Cornelia says, noting Fritzi’s sour face. “But it’ssomething. And we can celebrate this for the win it is.”
I glance around the room. The shattered remains of the statues crackle underfoot, while the one that offered Fritzi the stone is now standing straight and tall again, its arm molded against its side. “Let’s get out of here first,” I say.
Cornelia and Alois agree, turning at once to the corridor that opens up to the large room we fell into.
“Are you truly all right?” I ask Fritzi quietly. My muscles are tense; I’m weary from the battle but not as tired as I should be. Thanks to her. She gives me a confident nod of assurance, but if her step falters even once, I will carry her out of this damned barrow.
She doesn’t falter, though. Her fingers are white around the stone, clenching it so tightly that I can hardly see its smooth surface beneath her grip, and she quickly catches up with Cornelia and Alois.
The entire area feels darker and claustrophobic. “Does…does this area seem smaller than before?” I ask, looking around.
“Yes,” Alois comments. “And…” He points to the corridor we just exited. Rather than a narrow passage and door, the wall is widening, as if the rooms are merging. The tables fold away, the offerings sinking out of sight into the dirt. The alcoves blend into the walls; the statue stutters forward. Every blink brings the linen-wrapped corpse closer, but there’s no obvious movement, just a constant readjustment of my eyes. The torches are gone, and with it, all the light except that from the hole above us. The only standing sandstone statue shifts, embedding itself into the earth of the barrow, the shards of its brethren sinking down, lost in the dirt.
“This barrow wasn’t just a tomb,” Fritzi says, her voice bouncing off the walls as they close in around us. “This was a place Perchta graced. She gave me the stone, and then she left. Which means…”
“The magic that has sustained this barrow, making it larger on the inside, is disappearing,” Cornelia finishes. “We have to get out of here before we’re buried alive!”
The circular walls line over and over again with layers of earth, each coil tightening around us. But the ground, too, is rising, bringing us closer to the opening.
“You first,” Alois tells Cornelia, and before she can protest, he grabs her by the waist, lifts her up so her feet fall on his knees, and pushes her by her rear toward the opening. Hands reach down, and I almost call out a warning, but then I recognize the voices above—Brigitta and the other members of the Watch.
“Come on,” I tell Fritzi, grabbing for her. She’s going to fight me, insist that Alois go up first, but Alois is on my side. He shoves her to me, and I scoop her up, lifting her lithe body higher even as the dirt under my feet boosts me closer to the top. Our friends grab her wrists and pull her the rest of the way.
I turn to Alois. The walls are so tight now that I cannot throw my arms out on either side. The once vast series of chambers is now one tiny room. There is barely space for both Alois and me to stand, our knees butting against the low bronze couch with the linen-wrapped corpse, the body outline surely nothing but bones, but still, definitely, human.
“You next,” I tell him, prepared for a fight, but Alois just nods eagerly, eyes wide and terrified, stepping into my scooped hands and jumping up. His legs kick, hitting me in the shoulder. The hole above us is starting to constrict as well, the passage narrowing.
“Otto!” Fritzi cries, the sound strangled.
With no one to offer me a leg up, I jump on the bronze couch the corpse rests on. I feel the old bones crunching under my feet, and I say a quick mourning prayer, but I have no intention of joining this person in their grave.
Pushing up from the table, I jump toward the hole, arms raised. I can feel hands grabbing my own, yanking, but the dirt closes around me. I kick, trying to raise my body, but there’s no room to move my legs. Soil clogs my eyes, my nose, my mouth. I part my lips to shout, but mud washes past my teeth, choking me. I cannot see, cannot hear. Terror floods my mind, and even as I feel the arms pulling me, my body doesn’t budge, encased in earth as if the hill itself had formed around me.
A crackle of magic burns in my chest, near my tattoo. A sob claws at my throat, blocked by mud, unable to escape, as I realize that my fight with the statues has drained Fritzi dry of her own magic. It will return, of course, but she cannot save me now.
And then the hill explodes.
A burst of wind so violent that my entire body and the top half of the barrow rips through the earth, dirt and mud and rocks swirling in atornado that’s cut into the ground with a surgeon’s precision. My body, which had been tightly constrained, now flies free, my limbs flailing like a rag doll. I go up, high, my back bending awkwardly—
And then the wind stops.
I drop, dimly aware of the thuds of countless clods of earth and pebbles falling onto the ground, skittering over the grass. I have one instant where I remember the way the bones of the corpse crunched under my feet and wonder if my bones, too, will crunch into the dirt, when a billowing burst of wind buffets my fall, pushing my chest up and my legs down, until I settle back on the ground.
I stagger, dropping to my knees. Alois rushes forward, clapping me hard on the back, and I spew bile and mud, choking on rocks that tumble past my teeth. When I breathe, I can still smell dirt. My fingernails are shredded, black with soil and red with blood. My eyes are blurry and burning. Someone brings a skin filled with water, and Brigitta dumps it over my head, washing away some of the dirt that had been pressed into me. My teeth still crunch with grit, and I grab another waterskin, swishing and spitting.
“Thanks,” I choke out, my eyes on Fritzi, streaked with dirt from her own ascent. She holds the air stone in her palm.
She had run out of magic, but the stone had given her more.
Fritzi passes the stone to Cornelia and grabs my hand, rubbing my grimy knuckles.
“Well, that was exciting. Let’s never, ever,everdo that again,” Alois says. He stands and offers me a hand to help pull me up.
“By each and every hell of each and every god on this planet or any other, what is going on?” Brigitta snarls, eyes flashing from me to Fritzi to Alois to Cornelia and back. “You four disappear in some mist and then pop out of the ground like daisies?”
