Reborn as the Prince the Witch Stabbed, I Bought Her Off the Pyre novel · Chapter 33 of 64

Chapter 33: The Wheel

The smith was already in the cage when we came down the last switchback into Steinau.

It was an iron cage the size of a dog kennel, hanging from a rope over the river.

The rope ran up to the axle of a water wheel, and the wheel was turning.

Every turn let the cage down another hand's width toward the water.

The river under it was snowmelt, gray and fast, straight off the White Teeth.

Two hundred people stood along the bank in their best clothes, and five women in gray robes sat at the front on a stone bench.

Behind them, garlands of spring flowers hung across the street for the guests from over the mountain, which meant us.

The woman in the white coat who had walked us over the north ridge had stopped dead on the path.

"What did he do?" my wife asked her.

Anke was a smith herself, and she was looking at the burn scars up the man's arms.

"He built the wheel," the woman in the white coat said. "It lifts water to the fields above the town."

"The water-keeper used to bring it up for them with her gift. Now a wheel does it."

"So?"

"So here they call it stealing a gift."

The five gray women were the town's council, and every one of them was a witch.

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