20 Fritzi

20

Fritzi

The statue holds out the stone. Otto looks at me and waits for my move, the grating of our breaths echoing in the suddenly silent tomb. I can hear Cornelia and Alois talking softly, fussing over a wound she got, and hearing both of their gentle murmurs sets me at ease from worrying about their fates.

My focus goes to the statue. The now motionless statue, still holding that stone out, an offering.

"It was too easy," I whisper.

Otto huffs. I can feel the depletion of my magic now slowly starting to refill, an empty bucket being brought back to full with a steady drip-drip-drip of wild magic funneling in. The magic that Otto drew on to fight the statues. I'm glad he had it to call on; I don't regret the terrifyingly low level I can feel my own internal source at now. Other than that, though, we're all still standing. We're all relatively unharmed.

I grab the stone from the statue's palm.

The moment my skin touches it, I blink, and the tomb changes.

Otto vanishes. The murmuring of Alois and Cornelia deadens. The statue in front of me warps, ripples, and in a burst of foggy white light, it's gone.

In its place is a woman with a hefty braid of brown and gray hair that hangs to the floor, various plants interwoven through her plait—yellow agrimony, spiked blessed thistle, fluffy green nettle, all plants for protection and consecration. Her gown is a long, swooping flow of midnight blue, the collar and sleeves set with ivory patterns of stitched animals. She has the same impeccable posture I remember from before, queenly and controlling, the same withering look in her pale blue eyes.

"Hello, Perchta," I say, my voice a croaked whisper.

She still has the stone in her grip. I have my own hand over the top of it, but she doesn't release it into my care.

I risk a glance around. The tomb is transformed. It's just the two of us, the corpse, and the one intact statue back in its alcove. The tables set with finery and food are unmarred and righted, like the feast has only just been laid out, the gifts only recently displayed. A steady white light fills the room now, not the flicker of torches or even the pulse of the sun, but something consuming and resonant and otherworldly.

Perchta narrows her eyes at me. "You should not have come, Friederike Kirch. This stone is not yours to use."

"I don't want to use it," I say. "I want to keep it safe from—"

" Liar ." She cuts me off with a shout that echoes off the walls. "I see your heart, champion —you would use this stone. You would use them all. You would break the Origin Tree, and you would doom us ."

My instinct is to lurch back, away from her anger, but the moment I try, I can feel my skin tug—it's stuck to the stone, trapping me in front of her. She gives a cruel glare that tells me she will only release me when she is ready.

So I harden my shoulders and will myself to meet her gaze.

"I do not want to break the Origin Tree," I try, but I hear the flimsiness in it. "I don't want whatever cataclysm would come from breaking the Origin Tree," I try again, and that at least is true.

Perchta scoffs. "But you would, if given the chance, utterly decimate our ways. You would make it so no witch was bound to the Tree. You think I cannot smell the wild magic on you? That I cannot hear the deadly wishes you make in the dark? You would undo our entire world."

My chest kicks. In fear, yes; each word from her swells her presence until I forget that there was ever anyone else in this chamber but us. She is a goddess, and Holda cannot reach me in this tomb Perchta created to keep the stone safe, and I am so very, very mortal.

But I'm also breathless in grief.

"I don't want to undo our world," I say, pleading. "It is our world, mine too. I don't want to destroy anything!"

"You bastardize our ways at every turn!" Perchta shouts. "You—"

"I am not trying to bastardize anything!" Her voice is resonant, so I shout too, desperation finally snapping in me. "I never wanted any of this! I never wanted to be a goddess's champion, I never wanted to get thrown into the middle of your war, I never wanted to be here !"

"And yet you are, and you have—"

"Yes. I am." My jaw is tense, muscles winding so tight they vibrate. "I am here. I am here, and I have seen what Holda wants, what you and Abnoba want, and I'm not sure any of it is right. I don't want to break our world. But I cannot let the rest of the world continue to suffer when we have the power to help. That is what I want. Not to break the Tree. Not to decimate our ways. But to grow . To—"

"How is that not shirking our teachings, our way of life? See the way you came into this tomb, the way you fought off my soldiers. This was a test, a test of worthiness for any who would seek the stone, and you failed . You have abandoned all your teachings, your spells, and the methods imparted to you on how to access magic properly. You used the bond made between you and your warrior, but even that you have bastardized with wild magic! You have given yourself over to the vilest force we know, and you use it to corrupt the most sacred union between a witch and a warrior, so even the magic your bonded draws on is tainted."

"We aren't—"

"Had you wanted to pass my test," Perchta barrels on, color rising in her pale cheeks, "you would have seen that this room holds everything a witch might need to cast the spells to unlock the stone from the statue. The table has herbs for one such as you, Friederike. It has supplies—supplies the priestess, Cornelia, used, when you did not. The way she fought with that soldier, Alois—they were far more in tune with the intentions of a bonded pair than the way you let your warrior nearly drain your magic dry. Did you even try to work with your warrior? Did you even try to make a potion? No. You are a danger to us. You and your warrior."

I yank on my hand again, but it holds fast to the stone in Perchta's grip, and I gape up at her with wide, panicked eyes as she towers over me.

"Otto and I have no one to train us," I fumble, my voice losing its bite. "There's no one to—"

"You and your warrior came here and dared to stand in the tomb of one of my greatest champions." Perchta waves at the corpse beside her, wrapped in fine linen, laid out in this room of decadence and death. "You dare to think you would take this stone. You are entitled and selfish, as dangerous as Dieter, and I have let Holda have her experiments. I have let her, even when she failed us so horribly with your brother. But I will not let you lay waste to our ways."

The room darkens. Wind stirs from somewhere up the tunnel and fills the air with a scent like static, like the swell before a lightning strike. My mind is a whirl of terror and primal drive, and I yank at my hand again, again, trying to get away—

But then I hear her.

I hear what she said echo, echo.

Our ways .

Over and over again.

She is the goddess of tradition.

"But—" I lick my lips, mouth dry, and look up at her, fear pausing, like a held breath. "You broke our ways too."

Perchta's furious eyes burn at me. "What did you say?"

A crack forms. A sliver that lets in light, fresh air, and I heave a breath, feeling, suddenly, through the fog, and the fear lifts enough that I can think .

"You broke our ways too," I repeat. "This tomb—the layout is all wrong. There should be no upper level, no hall. The old teachings were for it to be one room. That's it."

Perchta's jaw works. "You think you can—"

But I'm not done. Not by a long way. That crack widens until all my fear is bathed in righteous fury, anger that sparks from every moment I've been suppressing my true feelings from Philomena, Rochus, Perchta, even Dieter and the hexenj?gers and everyone who has pointed at who and what I am and forced me to exert every last scrap of my energy trying to conform to their criticism. I have wasted so much time , so much precious, fleeting time on trying to be accepted by all these different forces that I haven't spared so much as a thought toward how to embrace who I actually am .

It hits me in this moment, this breath before the scream, how much I have lost in focusing on how to fit into the demands of others.

Imagine how great I could be, right now, if I had spent all these years not surviving, but living .

Tears prick my eyes, and my look shocks another flinch from Perchta. It isn't as satisfying as it should be.

"You hate me for breaking our traditions," I say, voice as unyielding as the stone in our hands. "Yet you have broken more of our traditions than anyone. In this chamber, yes, but beyond too—you let so many perceived infractions slide."

"I am the goddess of rules and traditions," Perchta snaps. "I do not allow those rules to be broken, not by you, not by any who live under—"

"We no longer bury our dead this way. In these grand tombs—we stopped heralding the mighty fallen in this manner, but this was once a tradition, yes? So why did you let us stop doing this? Shouldn't you be punishing us for burying our dead in simple graves now instead of enshrining their bodies like this?"

Perchta's brows go up, a fraction of a pulse.

"Berate me all you want for the rules I have broken." My voice drops until I'm snarling, practically bearing my teeth at her. "But I have done what I needed to do to survive in a world where everyone in positions of power creates arbitrary rules they implement at their leisure. You think you are different from the other forces at work? You think you are better than the hexenj?gers, than the Catholic priests, than the Protestant princes? You are all the same. You take out your pathetic need for control on those less strong than you so you can pretend you are better than us when what you really are is weak ."

The room had paused with Perchta's shock. Now it reawakens, the stirring wind, the growing darkness.

Perchta's face goes red with rising anger. "You would speak this way to a goddess ?" She drags the last word out, a hiss.

"Yes. I would. Because you have made that title mean nothing ." The tears heating my eyes finally fall, and when I let my face droop, anger shifts to grief.

I can feel another jolt of surprise go through Perchta. But that surprise hardens into distrust; she thinks I am playing a game.

I have no moves left to make, though. I am tired and strung thin and this is what I am now. This is what I have been since Birresborn, I think. Hollow and empty, a witch, a girl, who watched her world burn to ashes and stood in the rubble, not as some proud symbol of defiance, but because I didn't even have the strength it would've taken to crumble.

All that lack of strength, all that absence, all that grief , I feel it now like tilled earth. But I hate the idea that anything good could grow in all this pain—if anything good comes from this, it is not because of what happened.

It is because I choose to create it.

"You have made that title mean nothing," I repeat. I suck in a breath. "But it could mean something. It could mean something glorious , Perchta. All the rules and traditions you oversee—we need them. I'm not trying to take them away, I swear to you. I love our traditions. I love the way my mother loved them—"

My voice catches, and I feel her loss like a fresh knife.

She would have loved speaking to Perchta like this. She would have loved seeing this barrow. She would have even loved Perchta's guardian monsters—any creature was her friend.

Tears track down my cheeks. I swallow, keep going, knowing I'm not imagining the sudden sheen in Perchta's eyes.

"—and how they are interwoven into all my memories of her and my childhood. She sang me to sleep with our songs. My whole family would gather to cook our recipes. My coven passed down spells and taught the phases of the moon and the best ways of harvesting ingredients. With wild magic, we don't need spells or ingredients, but that doesn't undercut the importance of them as a uniting force. You gave us that, Perchta. You gave me happiness in your traditions. I haven't—" I suck in another breath, a gulp, a sob. "I haven't thanked you."

Her surprise holds. Sharpens.

"So thank you," I press on. "Thank you for guarding the things that made my childhood sweet. Thank you for giving me traditions that link me with Liesel, with everyone in the Well. Thank you for connecting us, Perchta. But I wouldn't be connected to the Alamanni, if they were still around, would I? The ancient tribes' traditions differed from ours. All these traditions, all these beautiful things you safeguard—they were not always traditions. They've evolved. They were once concepts that married to other concepts until they became something we could build a foundation on. They were once ideas of change , weren't they, Perchta?" I'm breathing heavier, begging her to hear me. "Tradition has always been change."

Perchta's hand, the one holding the stone beneath mine, trembles. Her shocked face doesn't change, her lips in a thin, clasped line.

"You say traditions are sacred, that they cannot be altered, but tradition is alteration." Tears roll down my face so when I try to smile at her, I know it is helpless and brittle. "You are the goddess of tradition, but that means you are also the goddess of change, because change is the mark of the success of tradition. It means we survived long enough to evolve."

I bow my head at her. The first time I have ever done so willingly, not out of threat or fear.

"So thank you, Perchta," I say again. "Thank you, Mother, for keeping your children safe enough to let us grow. But we are grown now. And that is because you succeeded. You, the goddess of change and tradition."

"You seek to manipulate me," is all she says, but her voice is rough.

I don't look up, hand still stuck to that stone in her palm. "No. I am tired of fighting you. I don't want to fight you. I may be Holda's champion, but I am a witch first, and a witch belongs to all three goddesses. I don't want you to be my enemy. I want you to help me." Now I do look up at her. "Help me make new traditions for our people so we can keep growing."

Perchta's eyes hold on mine. Her face is a mask, as stony as the statues she commanded, as fierce as the monsters that corralled us into this tomb. Her hand, though, trembles under mine, and it is that shake that betrays the emotion in the depths of her eyes, a glossiness that could be agony.

She's afraid. She's as afraid as Holda. They have watched our people get beaten and tortured and burned, imprisoned and exiled and murdered. They have seen it all, done everything they could, over and over, to try to stop it, however misguided their attempts were. But in Perchta's eyes, I see all of the sorrow that went into creating the Origin Tree, all of the terror that has made her the vicious, fearsome goddess of rules that haunted so many children's nightmares.

She tried to use that fear to keep us safe. But it is no longer time for us to be safe.

"I will do everything I can to stop Dieter from breaking the Origin Tree," I promise her. "But I do not think I can do it without you."

A muscle tics in Perchta's jaw.

The darkness that had been creeping into the edges of the room retracts, chased away by the sudden swell of that ethereal white light. It grows, grows, and I have to snap my eyes shut in the piercing clarity of it all—

When I open my eyes, Perchta is gone.

The statue is back in its alcove.

And the air stone is in my hand.