Reborn as the Prince the Witch Stabbed, I Bought Her Off the Pyre novel · Chapter 1 of 64
Chapter 1: The Bier
A mine engineer drowns in our world and wakes as Prince Lorenz, laid out in a border town square beside the pyre where the witch who stabbed him is about to burn, and he buys her off it with his mother's ring.
The last thing I saw in my first life was black water coming up the shaft faster than my pumps could throw it out.
I was thirty-eight, and I had kept the pumps running in that Pennsylvania mine for twenty years.
The water got me anyway.
I woke up cold, under a sheet, to the sound of a crowd laughing.
Somebody had laid me out on a wooden table in the open air, with my hands folded on my chest.
Something under my right ribs hurt.
I pulled the sheet off my face.
I was in a town square I had never seen, under a hard blue sky, with snow on the mountains above the roofs.
Fifteen feet away, a young woman stood tied to a post on a stack of firewood.
Her hands were chained behind the post, and her black hair had been hacked off at the jaw with a knife.
A heavy man in a black coat with an iron badge at his collar was walking around the woodpile with a torch.
"People of Velde!" he called. "This witch melted the bar off your town gate at dawn."
"Last night she put a knife into His Highness, Prince Lorenz, while he sat at his desk."
Half the crowd cheered at the word knife.
The man pointed his torch at my table.
"There he lies, so he can watch the Finders do justice for him."
"He'll like that!" a man shouted. "He's bought enough of them!"
Up on the woodpile, the chained woman turned her head toward me.
She saw my eyes open, and every bit of color left her face.
An old woman beside my table screamed.
The man with the torch turned around.
I sat up, and the pain under my ribs nearly put me back down.
Three hundred faces stared at me in silence, and not one of them looked glad.
"Highness," said the man with the torch. "The surgeon said your heart stopped at midnight."
He had a gold ring on every finger.
I had no idea who he was, or who I was supposed to be.
Then an old man in a faded blue coat shoved through the crowd and caught my shoulder.
He had a square white beard and a limp, and he smelled of horses.
"Lie down, Highness, before you bleed out a second time."
"Who is she?" I asked.
He looked at me as if I'd hit my head.
"The laundress who stabbed you. The Captain caught her at the gate."
"What happens to her?"
"The Captain burns her. Volker Kranz, of the Finders. Now, in front of you."
The man with the rings, Captain Kranz, was smiling at me.
"Unless His Highness would rather have her," he said, loud enough for the whole square.
The crowd laughed.
Somebody near the well called, "Buying another one, Highness?"
They all knew something about this body that I didn't.
I looked at the woman on the woodpile.
She was maybe twenty-five, with strong arms and knuckles rubbed raw from work, and she was shaking.
She wasn't crying.
She was staring at me.
"Can I stop it?" I asked the old man under my breath.
His mouth went thin under the beard.
"You're lord of this town. The lord's ransom. You pay her bounty before the fire's lit, and she's yours."
"You've done it nineteen times," he said.
I knew what a fire did to a person.
I stood up off the table.
"I'll pay her ransom," I said.
The crowd made a sound I had only ever heard at a fight.
Kranz kept smiling.
"Two hundred marks, Highness. The price went up again in spring. You remember."
"I'll need to get it."
"The torch won't wait."
The old man spoke low at my ear.
"You haven't got twenty marks in the house."
A tall young man with a ring of gate keys on his belt pushed to the front.
"That's my thirty!" he shouted at Kranz. "I swore on her! The accuser gets thirty!"
I looked down at my hands.
They weren't my hands.
They were long, pale and soft, and on the right one was a gold ring with a red stone the size of my thumbnail.
The old man saw where I was looking.
"That's your mother's ring," he said quietly. "The queen wore it twenty-five years."
I pulled it off.
I walked to Kranz and held it up between two fingers where the whole square could see it.
"That's worth more than two hundred marks. Untie her."
Kranz took it.
"His Highness wants the woman who knifed him," he told the crowd. "I can guess what for."
The square laughed with him.
The man with the gate keys spat at my feet.
Kranz waved, and two men in black coats climbed the woodpile and unlocked the chain from the post.
They left the cuffs on her wrists.
She came down the wood stiff-legged, and they shoved her at me.
I caught her by the elbow.
She pulled it out of my hand.
"She's yours by the lord's ransom," Kranz said. "She never uses her gift again, and she never leaves your house."
He leaned close, and his breath smelled of wine.
"If she does either, I'll burn her myself, and I won't need a court."
The old man got his arm under mine, and we walked her up the hill to a gray stone house above the square.
The house was cold inside, with a long hall and a dead fireplace.
The old man lowered me onto a bench.
"I'm Gerd," he said. "Gerd Holler. Seeing as you're looking at me like you never saw me before."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't remember."
"You never remembered anything you didn't want to."
He limped off for bandages, and I was alone with her.
She stood in the middle of the hall with her chained hands in front of her.
Then she closed her right hand around the chain between the cuffs.
The iron went red, then yellow.
It dripped onto the floorboards and set them smoking.
She shook the cuffs off one at a time, and they hit the floor soft and bent.
"I put a knife in you," she said. "I felt your heart stop under my hand."
"I know," I said. "I've got the hole to prove it."
She picked up a fire iron from the hearth.
It began to glow in her fist.
"My name is Anke Kohler," she said. "Before me, you bought nineteen of us."
The iron went white.
"Not one of them has ever been seen again."
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