“Is he gone?” Otto asks urgently.
“I…think so,” I say. I hate the whimper that comes, but I hear and feel it and that jolt of sensation stretches out, sending tendrils that shake and twitch across my limbs. I take a breath, but the shaking continues, vibrations that don’t stop. I’m cold, that’s it; I must be cold.
I reach for the pendant Cornelia gave me. It hangs from the leather string around my neck, but it’s thrown to the side, resting on my shoulder.
I’d let my magic get too low. Her protection wasn’t enough.
The thought comes to me as innocuously as if I’d thought,There is rain coming, and I do not have a cloak.Absent. Unbothered.
Holda?I try.
I do not get a response in words, not this time. I see an image oftowering trees and protective plants in a barrier around my mind, the way she tried to fend Dieter off when he overtook me in the council’s library. She is fighting to protect me from him. Fighting though I can feel her exhaustion still, ripples of trying to defend against too many things at once.
My teeth chatter.
The cloth of my chemise sticks to my skin.
“Why am I w-wet?” I ask, shaking, shaking. “F-from washing?”
“Liebste.” It’s out of Otto in a punch of horror, and I note the white pallor to his face.
Cornelia crouches next to me, reaches one hand out, and I brace for her touch, only realizing when she withdraws that I didn’t brace, Iflinched.
“I’m sorry,” Otto says, talking fast, panicking. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know how to stop him.”
I can’t seem to focus. “I know.” I blink slowly. “You can’t. You don’t have m-magic.”
No, that’s not right. He has my magic.Ididn’t have enough magic.
What is wrong with me? Is Dieter still in my mind? No, that’s not it. I almost laugh. I stifle it, but it comes anyway, a high, crooning giggle that makes Otto’s already sunken face break even more. Brigitta shares a look with Alois. Cornelia puts a hand to her mouth; her eyes are tearing.
The shaking continues. Muscles cramping, releasing. My head is pounding, and everything’s so foggy. Not just my eyes, but all my senses. As if I had been away for a long while, and my body is a neglected house. The fires are cold; there is dust in the corners, cobwebs in the ceiling.
“I had some of your magic, still,” Otto whispers. “In my—well? In my body, at least. I sent it back to you. It made you stop enough for Alois and Brigitta to pull you off of me. Then you collapsed.”
Pull me off of him?
There are bruises blossoming on his skin, green and purple. Claw marks cover his face and arms, the scratches deep.
A hand lifts in front of my face. My own. I’m holding it up, and I study the nail beds, ragged and caked with dried blood under the torn edges.
“Did I do that to you?” My stomach churns, bile rising, tart against the iron tang of blood still in my mouth.
Cornelia shakes her head. “Only when Otto tried to stop you.”
So, yes, then.
His eyes drift down.
My chemise is wet. Right. I’d almost forgotten.
That fog of absence lets me look down at myself.
The wetness isn’t from the well water. It’s blood. Mine.
I try to peel away my clothes, hissing as the cloth sticks to open wounds. Scraggly lines are crusty with drying blood.
Otto already has a tankard of water out. He twists in front of me with a spare cloth and gently dabs at the cuts.
