Taking him had granted me power, of a sort. It had allowed me access to the city, enabled me to become the leader of the hexenjägers. But that was never the type of power I needed.
I need power like my sister’s. Magic.Strongmagic.
Fritzi opened herself up to wild magic, and my brand opened her up tome.Will she feel it, I wonder, as I siphon off the power she taps into? Probably not. The wild magic is so much stronger than the Well’s after all, and she won’t notice as I divert a little back into me.
She is mine,I think, my mind stretching back, recalling the way her skin seared, her flesh burned, the smell ripe and delicious. My mouth waters at the thought.
She is mine, and so is her magic, and she doesn’t even realize it.
“I told you, Fritzi,” I murmur, “some scars don’t ever heal.”
“Some scars don’t ever heal,” the archbishop repeats hollowly as he lays down the quill.
I watch the ink dry, my smile spreading as I think of our mother’s death, our mother who died without screaming. Pity, that. I had thought that the only way to take a witch’s magic was to mark it as my own and then burn the body of the witch. With nowhere else to go, the magic came to me.
My sister showed me the foolishness of that. I do not need to kill for power.
I can do it simply for pleasure.
I frown, and the archbishop stills, like a rabbit under the shadow of a hawk.
That damn potion had been a surprise, enough to sever my original connection to magic, but not enough to break the ties that bind me to Fritzi andhermagic. A clever trick, though, to use a potion like that. A trick I had not believed Ernst capable of manufacturing. I’ll give him that. He played a good game.
But I play a better one.
Wild magic is a flood, one I drowned in. But I learned to swim. And even if they dammed the magic up and tried to take it away from me, a river stronger than the Rhine pours from my sister’s brand, straight into me.
I flex my fingers, feeling the magic pooling inside me.
Oh, this is going to befun.
