Prologue
Katharina
Wicked, gnarled fingers held my face as I watched my mother burn. The fire had only just caught the hem of her dress, but her face was already contorted in fear. Sweat plastered her golden hair to her forehead and soaked through the thin fabric of her shift as she struggled against her bindings.
I wanted to close my eyes, but even when I did, the light of the flames still glowed red behind them. Nothing I did could block out the screams.
The screams of the crowd.
Her screams.
Hexe. Hexe. Hexe.
The crowd chanted with one voice, one mouth, one bottomless appetite for suffering. I tried to run to her, but those horrible hands held me fast. I was rooted to the cobblestones as surely as she was bound to the stake.
I screamed, my voice joining the horrible choir in the city square of Bamberg, before a finger was shoved into my mouth, gagging me. The flames climbed her legs, which from a distance almost looked gentle. Her shift blackened first, and I saw the moment the fire found flesh. Her skin blistered and split, peelingback like the rind of fruit left too long in the sun. The fat beneath began to render, dripping in yellow rivulets that hissed and spat where they met the hungry flames.
The stench reached me along with the smoke. Smoke—I prayed for more smoke, to choke her, to take the pain away. I prayed for her to die so it could all be over.
You prayed for this. This is your fault.
The fire reached her belly, and something inside her ruptured. I heard it—a wet, gruesome sound beneath the roar of the flames. Her shift had burned away entirely now, the white gleam of rib bone emerging through charred muscle, opening like a flower blooming in hellfire.
She looked at me.
Through the smoke and shimmering heat and agony that must have been beyond comprehension, she found my face in the crowd andlookedat me. Her lips moved, shaping words the fire swallowed before they could reach my ears.
The grip on my arms tightened, and it was no longer hands but ropes. I wasn’t in the crowd anymore but tied to that same stake as they condemned me.
Hexe. Hexe. Hexe.
The flames crept up through the soles of my feet like carnivorous ivy. The chant rose with the smoke, and I could taste my mother’s name on the wind—Anna Müller, a midwife, a healer, condemned as a witch. The fire reached my knees, and I tried to scream, but my throat filled with ash. It always filled with ash. I looked down and watched my own flesh blacken and curl. The pain was beyond reckoning; it embodied every terrible thing they had promised me since they took her away.
Ten years of swallowing down her death, and still it rose in my dreams, coating my tongue with the memory of that summer morning when I was thirteen and learned that love could burn.
And it was all my fault.
Chapter 1
Katharina
Bamberg, Germany 1629 AD
Iwoke gasping in the pre-dawn darkness of my small, cold chamber, my shift soaked through with sweat that smelled of char. The stone walls of the convent pressed close—solid and real—but I could still feel the phantom heat licking at my legs. My hands shook as I pressed them to my face, feeling for skin that wasn’t peeling away like parchment in the flames.
“Only a dream,” I whispered into my palms, the words a prayer I’d repeated countless times. “Only ever a dream.”
But dreams had power in Bamberg. Dreams could be evidence. Dreams could tie the rope around your wrists and stack the wood beneath your feet.
The bell tower struck five times, the sound rolling across the sleeping city. Soon the people would wake. The sisters here had already been awake for hours, baking bread and tending the kitchens.
I rose from my narrow bed, my bare feet finding the cold stone floor silently. I’d learned to move like a shadow through these halls, how to fade into corners, how to lower my eyes, how to make myself small and forgettable. Children were not meant tobe seen or heard, Mother Agnes said, especially children whose very existence reminded the city of its righteous violence.
Keep to the shadows. Help those who cannot help themselves. Survive.
My mother’s words echoed through my mind, as they often did. They were more familiar to me than the daily psalms we repeated during Mass. She was gone, but still I felt her guiding hand as I moved through the early morning darkness—just a shadow in a world that would put anything that shone to the torch.
My kirtle hung on its peg by the door, rough wool that still smelled faintly of yesterday’s rain. I tugged it on over my head, being careful not to rip the seams already fraying from my last mending. It had been a hand-me-down, left in the layperson’s quarters by a pilgrim, and in truth did not fit me properly. But I didn’t have the funds for a new one, and the red-dyed wool appealed to me—a small luxury, something I’d never had before. I laced the front and tucked a partlet along the neckline for the modicum of warmth it provided on this chilly April morning.
