The door to the sick ward slammed open.
Wilhelm’s mother stood in the doorway, her face swollen and blotched with weeping, her hair escaping from beneath her cap inwild tangles. She’d been a handsome woman once, before her husband’s death had left her alone with three children and a farm she couldn’t manage. Now she looked like a shell of who she once was.
“Wilhelm.” His name tore from her throat, dry and laced with so much pain. “Wilhelm.”
She crossed the ward in three strides, shoving past Sister Margareta so hard the older woman stumbled against the wall. I barely had time to rise from my stool before she had thrown herself across her son’s bed, gathering his small, broken body into her arms with a desperation that made my chest ache.
“My boy, my sweet boy,mein Schatz. Mama is here, Mama is here?—”
Wilhelm’s eyes fluttered open. For a moment, something like peace crossed his features as he recognized her face. His cracked lips moved, forming a word too quiet to hear.
“Don’t try to speak, darling. Save your strength. You’re going to be fine. God will not take you from me too. Hecannot?—”
But God could. God did. God was doing it right now, one rattling breath at a time, and there was nothing any of us could do but watch.
Sister Margareta caught my eye and tilted her head toward the door.Give them privacy.None of the other sick needed our attention right now. I nodded, though every part of me wanted to stay, to hold Wilhelm’s other hand, to bear witness to his passing as I’d borne witness to so many others.
I slipped out into the corridor, and the door had barely closed behind me when a hand closed around my arm.
“Katharina.”
Heinrich’s voice. But not his voice. There was something beneath it now, something that resonated in my bones like the lowest note of a cathedral organ. Something I had pretended I couldn’t feel. But it was growing stronger, no longer willing to be ignored.
I turned to find him standing in the shadows of the corridor,and for a moment—just a moment—there was something vast and terrible and beautiful laced over his features.
Then I blinked, and he was simply Heinrich again, his dark eyes burning with an urgency I’d never seen before.
“Come with me,” he said. “Now.”
“I can’t. Young Wilhelm?—”
His grip on my arm tightened, not painful but immovable. “There are things we must discuss. Things that cannot wait.”
I turned to look for Sister Margareta, hoping for an excuse, but she had vanished as if into thin air.Damn that meddling old woman.
He pulled me down the corridor and into a storage room off the convent library. The air was thick and strange, heavy with incense and the pressure of a storm about to break, like the moment before lightning strikes.
“Heinrich, what?—”
“You saw it, didn’t you?” He released my arm and began pacing, each movement sharp with agitation. “The burning today are the Bishop’s new arrests. It’s accelerating, Katharina. They’re not even pretending to investigate anymore. They simply point and condemn.”
“They’ve finally stopped pretending.” My voice came out hollow.
“And yet you do nothing.” He rounded on me, and his eyes—God help me, his eyes werewrong. The pupils had stretched too wide, swallowing the brown until only darkness remained. “You save one woman at a time while hundreds burn. How long will you keep playing this game?”
“It’s not a game,” I gasped, taken aback.
“No, it certainly isn’t.” The air seemed to tighten with every turn he made. “I have been patient with you, but we are out of time. You are hiding your gifts while butchers in vestments slaughter the innocent.”
I straightened my spine. “I do what I can. I’ve made more medicines in these last weeks than everbefore. I?—”
“I do not mean your medicines.” He was in front of me suddenly, though I hadn’t seen him move. His hands gripped my shoulders, and heat poured off him like a fever. “You could do so much more. You could save them all—Wilhelm and every woman rotting in the Drudenhaus right now. You have the gift, Katharina. I’ve seen it in you since the moment we met. All you lack is the will to use it.”
“What are you talking about?” My voice shook. “What gift? I’m just a healer. I use herbs and?—”
“You are so much more than that.” His face was inches from mine, and I could see now that his features were shifting, flickering between the Heinrich I knew and something with too many eyes, with light pouring from wounds that weren’t there a moment ago. “You have walked between worlds since you were small. Your dreams bring you truth, and your anger brings you power, and you waste it. Youwasteit while innocents scream.”
My eyes went wide. How could he know?
