Reborn as the Prince the Witch Stabbed, I Bought Her Off the Pyre novel · Chapter 3 of 64

Chapter 3: Grain for a Witch

When the town comes with torches to burn the prince's witch, he opens the forbidden cellar and feeds them instead, then bets his lodge against the Reeve's mine that Velde will pay its levy at first frost.

She meant it.

By dark she had taken the little room behind the kitchen and wedged a chair under its door handle from inside.

At midnight Gerd knocked on the doorframe.

"Torches at the gate," he said. "Forty, maybe. They want her."

He had an old sword on his hip and didn't look like he expected it to help.

I went down to the yard.

The lodge gate was only a wooden one, and the young gate warden had his hands on it, shaking it on its hinges.

Behind him, the torchlight showed me Velde for the first time.

There were women with babies tied to their backs and two boys in their fathers' coats.

Every one of them was thin in a way I had only seen in old photographs.

"Give us the witch!" the warden shouted. "She burned the bar off my gate. She'll curse the wells next."

"And you want your thirty marks," Gerd said.

"I swore on her! It's mine by law!"

"Send her out," a woman called, "and go back to bed with your other nineteen!"

They laughed, and it was an ugly, tired laugh.

I looked back at the house.

Anke stood in the kitchen doorway with a fire iron in her hand, cold this time.

If she heated it in front of forty witnesses, she would burn, and she knew it.

She was going to do it anyway.

I could see it in the way she held her shoulders.

"Gerd," I said. "When did these people last eat bread?"

He frowned at me.

"Bread? The hail took the summer barley in July. They sowed the low field again for nothing, and they've had turnip soup since."

"Open the gate."

"Highness, they'll..."

"Open it."

He lifted the bar, and the crowd stumbled into the yard as the gate swung.

I walked past them to the iron door under the kitchen stairs and turned the key.

"Bring your sacks," I said. "Bring your children's arms. There's a hundred and sixty sacks of grain down here."

Nobody moved.

A big woman with a wooden ladle stuck through her belt pushed to the front and looked down the cellar steps.

Then she went down, came back up with a sack on her shoulder, and dropped it at the feet of a woman with a baby.

"Well?" she said to the yard. "You heard His Highness. Or are you waiting for him to carry it?"

They went down in a rush.

I stood by the door and watched the sacks go out through the gate on shoulders, in wheelbarrows and in the two boys' arms.

Gerd stood beside me.

"That's the cart," he said under his breath. "That's every October."

"Who is it for, Gerd?"

"I don't know."

"Then tonight it's for whoever is hungry."

The gate warden was the last one left in the yard.

He looked at the empty cellar, then at Anke in the doorway, and then at me.

"This doesn't change what you are," he said.

"No," I said. "But you can eat while you think about it."

He went without a sack.

I was about to close the cellar when a lantern came up the hill with four men in green livery behind it.

The man in front was soft and pink, with a silver chain of office over his coat.

"The Reeve," Gerd said. "He'll have heard."

The Reeve stopped inside my gate and smiled at the empty doorway.

"Highness, alive. What a day for Velde."

"Good evening."

"I came to see the noise." He spread his soft hands. "And I find you've fed the whole levy to the town."

"It was my grain."

"Of course. And now the town will eat it by midwinter, and the crown will still want two hundred sacks at first frost."

He looked past me, down the hill, at the dark low field.

"That barley is green as grass. It won't ripen before frost up here. It never does."

"Then what happens?"

"Then the common fields come to me," he said pleasantly.

"And when your lenders come for their money, I'll buy this house off them for the price of the roof."

There were still people in the gateway with sacks on their shoulders, listening.

I thought about the iron going white in Anke's hand.

If one woman in this valley could do that, others could do other things.

"Velde will pay its levy in full at first frost," I said. "From that green field."

The Reeve laughed.

"From that field you'd need a witch."

"Then make it worth my while. What do you hold?"

His eyes went sharp for the first time.

"The crown's lease on the old mine."

"The drowned one."

"Forty years drowned, and still mine."

"My lodge against your lease," I said.

"Velde pays two hundred sacks from that field at first frost, or this house is yours and I sleep in the street."

Gerd made a noise.

"Dice again," he muttered. "God help us."

The Reeve held out his soft hand, and I took it, in front of everyone in the gateway.

"First frost," he said. "I'll bring a cart for your furniture."

He went down the hill, still laughing.

A horse came up as he went, a finder in a black coat riding it.

"Captain's compliments, Highness. In Lindhof they've named a girl who made a dead orchard fruit in one night."

My heart started to pound.

"The Captain takes her at noon tomorrow," the finder said. "He says to tell you: no more rings."

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