Reborn as the Prince the Witch Stabbed, I Bought Her Off the Pyre novel · Chapter 2 of 64

Chapter 2: The Locked Cellar

In the hated prince's lodge he finds a bloodstained list of nineteen women and a cellar no one may touch, and the witch reads one name on the list aloud: her sister's.

I didn't move.

In my first life I had stood next to molten steel, and I knew what that iron would do to a face.

"I don't know where they are," I said.

"Liar."

"I don't remember anything from before that table. Not them, not you, not my own name until the Captain said it."

She came a step closer, and the heat off the iron dried my eyes.

The hall door banged open, and Gerd limped in with a roll of linen.

"Put that down, girl," he said. "If the finders see smoke from this chimney with no fire laid, you both burn."

She held it a moment longer.

Then she pushed it into the cold ashes of the hearth, and the ashes hissed.

"He says he doesn't remember," she told Gerd.

"He never remembered anything that cost him." Gerd jerked his chin at me. "Shirt."

I pulled up the black shirt.

The hole under my ribs was the width of a thumb, and the edges were already shut and purple.

Gerd stared at it longer than he needed to.

"That's two days of healing," he said. "You were cold at midnight. I closed your eyes myself."

"I don't know how," I said.

That was the first true thing anyone had said in that house.

While he worked, he told me what I was.

I was Lorenz Rhenmar, twenty-six, the king's only son.

Two and a half years ago my father had paid nine thousand marks of my dice debts in the capital.

Then he sent me here, to the poorest town in Aldmark, so the court would never have to see me again.

Velde had six hundred people now.

Forty years ago it had six thousand, before the silver mine above the town flooded and drowned the work.

"And you came here and found a new way to spend money," Gerd said.

"Witches."

"Nineteen of them. You paid the Captain for every one, and none of them ever walked out of this house."

He tied off the bandage hard.

"At your first burning here you threw up on the Captain's boots," he said. "The town's called you a drunk ever since, and worse."

"What do you call me?"

"Highness," he said. "I'm the queen's man. She asked me to keep you alive, so I do."

An old woman in a stained apron came in with a bowl of soup.

She set it in front of me, looked me in the eye, and spat in it.

Then she walked out.

"The cook," Gerd said. "She stays for the wage."

I ate it anyway.

I had been dead that morning, and I was very hungry.

There was a knock, and a young man in the Reeve's green livery stood in the doorway without taking his hat off.

"The Reeve's compliments, Highness. He heard you were alive."

"The crown's levy is due at first frost. Two hundred sacks of grain from Velde."

"And if the town can't pay?"

"Then its common fields go to the Reeve, to hold for the crown."

"How much grain does the town have?"

"Seventy sacks, Highness. Give or take a mouse."

He bowed exactly enough and left.

I went looking for the study.

It was at the end of the hall, a narrow room with a cold stove and a desk under the window.

There was blood on the desk.

It had dried brown across the wood and over a sheet of paper, and it had run down one leg of the chair.

I picked up the paper.

It was a list of women's first names, nineteen of them, in a small, neat hand.

Beside each name was a little mark.

Under it was a ledger of debts to lenders down the river, two thousand nine hundred marks.

"That's the list," Gerd said from the doorway. "The town knows the number. Nobody knows the names but you."

There was a heavy iron key on a cord around my neck.

I hadn't noticed it until I bent over the desk and it swung out of my shirt.

"What does this open?"

Gerd's face changed.

"The cellar. You never let a soul down there. A groom tried the door once, and you nearly broke his arm."

The cellar door was iron, under the kitchen stairs.

The key turned easily.

Inside, the cold smelled of dry grain.

Sacks were stacked to the beams on both walls, ten rows deep.

A hundred and sixty.

Behind them were barrels of salt, bales of wool blankets, jars of lamp oil and a row of new boots, all small sizes.

"What is all this?"

"Every October I load it in the covered cart," Gerd said.

"I drive it up the old salt road to the Hollow Cross, at the foot of the pass."

"And then?"

"I leave it there. Hooded folk come down for it."

"Who are they?"

"I never saw a face. I reckon you sold those women over the mountains, to the salt-pit men, and that's the price."

A hundred and sixty sacks.

The town had seventy, and it owed two hundred.

I was still doing the sum when I heard paper move behind me.

Anke had followed us into the study.

She was standing at the desk with the bloody list in her hands, reading it with her lips moving.

Her finger stopped near the bottom.

"Lotte Kohler," she said.

She looked up at me.

"My sister. You bought her a year ago. Where is she?"

I had the key in my hand and nothing in my head.

"I don't know," I said.

She folded the list very carefully and put it inside her dress.

"Then I'm not leaving this house until you remember."

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