spied on him, you see, with the barrel boy in the cold room. So many fingers and mouths where they shouldn’t be.”
“He knew you’d seen them,” Elena said, drawing Gerda back in when she’d begun to spool off in distant thought.
“Mmm, I would have looked the other way to keep learning his magic, but . . .” A shudder ran through her, a convulsion perhaps brought on by those thoughts she’d revisited. “I was too green to know what lengths a man with power would go to preserve what he’d attained. Oh, but the child doth learn.”
The old witch paused and stuck a crooked finger in the red liquid of her tasting cup. She stirred it once, then licked her finger, smacking her lips before setting the cup back down on the pentagram and turning the handle to the north.
“To punish me and protect his secret he had me cursed,” she continued. “He’d offered me a sample of his latest brew under the guise of wanting to know my opinion.” She “hmphed,” as if ashamed of being taken in by such a notion. “The ‘brew’ turned out to be a barbed potion. It stitched up my voice with a thousand unseen hooks that worked their way into my throat, binding the vocal cords immobile. I couldn’t speak a word, let alone utter a spell, when he was through.”
Elena had read about similar concoctions in old grimoires—dated, dusty books that reeked of mold and damp from sitting in cellars and crawl spaces for too long. Such sadistic spells were illegal in the Chanceaux Valley and most regions beyond, though things were possibly different in the northern forests.
Gerda cupped a hand over her saggy neck as if reliving the pain. “We didn’t practice in the open the way they do now. It was a different time. The world was caught in a riptide of corruption and cruelty. Accusation was all it took to create a cloud of guilt. After the braumeister stole my voice, he publicly accused me of witchcraft, knowing I’d be swept up with the hapless mortals being rounded up like sheep. And then it was off to the drudenhaus for me.”
Elena tilted her head as if she hadn’t heard right. She understood there were still places where witches had to practice with discretion. But the drudenhaus were northern prisons erected during the height of the witch hunts to house those unfortunate mortals accused of malefaction. They were older than the castle that had held Celestine. “But there hasn’t been a drudenhaus for—”
“Two hundred and seventy-eight years.”
“That’s impossible.”
A wave of dizziness swept over Elena as logic and reason struggled to make sense of the time gap. If the witch’s claim were true, she would have to be nearly three hundred years old. And yet looking at the shrunken, grotesque figure Gerda had become, Elena could almost believe it was true.
“It wasn’t all mortals, despite what you were taught.” The witch took the femur of a small animal from her pocket and set the bone on the southern point of the star. “Do you remember the frailty you felt when you woke from your curse? The feeling that your head was filled with a thousand bees and your skin had turned colder than an eel fished out of black water?” She nodded, seeing Elena understood. “They hunted witches then, but it was like wolves chasing after deer. The strong got away while only the weak and old were taken. Hex-weak. Feebleminded. Those of us who fell behind were just as pathetically vulnerable as nonmagic folk. And just as susceptible to pain.”
“Was there no mercy to be found?”
The witch reached in her other pocket and brought out a black feather, which she placed on the southeastern point of the star. “Mercy? There was precious little of that to be scraped off the floor of the drudenhaus. No one left that place under their own power. Including me.” She gave the feather a turn so it sat horizontal on an east-west axis. “They had a room, built two stories high, made of stacked white stones. There was a window at the top where thin northern daylight grazed the ceiling.” The witch cast her eye on the medieval winepress. “It had a windlass with a rope attached to a beam and pulley in the high ceiling. The rope wriggled down from on high to a reddish-brown stain on the stone floor. The smell of copper, salt, and piss was so strong it embedded itself