'What?' I asked the men surrounding me, feigning innocence. Anything to break the excruciating silence.

'You have disobeyed my orders, Karl Bauer,' Melchior said, stepping towards me. 'I will not have you creating dissidence in my city. The penalty must be paid.'

'Penalty?' I asked. I gulped again.

'A fine,' he said. 'Ten gold coins should suffice.'

'I have to pay you ten gold coins?' Konrad and Hurland turned away, as if they were unable to stomach watching the conversation.

'One must. Your guardian, if you are a boy. Are you a man, lad, or are you a boy?'

It was a good question. At sixteen I would have been considered by many to be a man, but in the warband I was very much still the boy. I had yet to prove myself in combat, and I had failed in the task of interrogation. I wanted to be a man, I longed to be accepted as one by Godke and the others, but in truth I was not. In this instance, gladly so. If I had said that I was a man, then my escape through the wall would have incurred more than a fine. Melchior would likely have charged me with sabotaging the city's defences.

'I am not yet a man,' I replied.

'Then your guardian must pay your fine,' he said, and before I could protest he grabbed Hurland, frail elderly Hurland, roughly by the arm. Melchior pulled him towards me so that the three of us stood away from the watching crowd. 'Old man, I have seen you with this boy. Do you take responsibility for his actions?'

Hurland downcast his eyes and nodded. I felt truly awful. Hurland certainly did not have ten gold coins. The warband, together, could have scrounged the money, but it would have rendered us poverty-stricken. Besides, this had nothing to do with the others. It was my fault, I had caused this, and the consequences should have been mine to bear. I would have preferred a hundred lashes to having Hurland suffer for my impetuosity.

'I do,' Hurland said sombrely.

'Bring the money to the barracks within the week,' Melchior said. 'You are far too old to be given work to pay off your debt. If you cannot pay, you will be exiled from the city.'

Hurland nodded gingerly, and my jaw dropped in shock. All this, for a failed journey outside of the city? I foolishly tapped Melchior on the shoulder and said, 'that's not fair, he didn't do anything!'

'So you are a man then? You accept the debt?' he asked me. A sly grin spread across his face. I stepped back involuntarily. Of course that was what was going to happen if I acted on Hurland's behalf. Any idiot could see that, but I hadn't. I had been too reckless, and now I had to retract my objection. I broke his gaze in submission, studying the gravel at my feet instead. 'I thought so,' he said, before turning back to Hurland. 'Within the week.'

At that, Melchior turned and left, signalling that his men should come with him. Konrad spared me a pitying glance before falling in with the soldiers. I had no doubt that Melchior would send men to seal the cattle gate in the coming days. The onlookers who had obviously followed Melchior's purposeful movements to the gate scattered with his departure, and Hurland turned to me.

'Do not take it to heart, boy,' he said to me. His kind words only furthered my shame. 'Melchior takes his responsibilities very seriously.'

'He'd warned me not to leave the city before,' I said, wanting Hurland to be angry with me so that I might suffer whatever punishment I felt I had earned. 'That's why I came here, so I could sneak out.'

'You were not forbidden to leave Metz, but forbidden to leave it without adult accompaniment. The fault is mine, I should have seen to your whereabouts with greater dedication.' He looked me in the eye and saw my pain, my agony at having done the wrong thing. 'The warband has faced worse before. We have been exiled from many cities.'

That thought did little to quell my unhappiness, but I let Hurland walk me to Godke's house. We told him what had happened and he thanked Hurland and told him that he'd deal with it. 'Now you may leave,' he said, and we went to leave, but he spoke to me directly. 'Not you, Karl.'

I froze as Hurland continued his stifled walk to the door. Upon his departure and its closing behind him, I turned to face Godke. He walked up to me and clamped his hands on my shoulders. 'You mustn't take advantage of Hurland's kindness,' he said. 'We are a warband; we must look out for each other.'

I shook my head vociferously. 'I didn't mean to! I don't even know why he was there. By chance, I think.' I wanted to offer to be indebted to the warband if they'd pay Hurland's fine, but I knew that paying off such a large sum could take years. I felt that I'd have to act on my blood-debt sooner than that to do justice to my father's memory.

'You were right to say that you are not a man,' he said harshly. 'A man takes responsibility for his own actions.'

I was angry at that. Though I'd made the choice to be considered still a boy by passing the debt onto Hurland, I knew that Godke's words were intended as an insult, albeit one borne from disappointment. Anger ebbed to the forefront of my mind and the thought of my blood-debt surged almost to my lips, but the fact that I did not even own a weapon prevented me from saying anything. Godke let his words hang in the air for several long seconds before dismissing me.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

In the end, we did not need to plan for the end of Melchior's week. The call came to travel to Reims two days after the incident at the cattle gate, and we immediately set out on the road. Before we moved, however, there was an incident at the nearby chapel. In the summer of 1622, Jacob entered a church for the first time since I had known him. While inside, he had attempted to hang himself from the tall stone ceiling.

Thankfully, a churchgoer happened to stop by and prevented the hanging. Godke did not seem surprised by it, nor did he seem scared for Jacob’s well-being. At first, I thought he was unnaturally callous, but I came to suspect he knew Jacob’s secret and had judged it as being worthy of death.

After the incident at the chapel Jacob stayed in Metz with me while the others went out to earn our living. The rest of the warband returned from a witch hunt in Verdun, and brought with them word that the services of a witch hunter were requested in a town in Champagne. I was pleased that we were to remain in France as I had assimilated much of the French way of speaking through osmosis, and could speak both of the dominant languages in Metz at least conversationally.

Immediately, we gathered our possessions in Metz and piled them into saddlebags and Ros’ carriage. Ros was getting old but she was not slow, unlike Hurland who had withered in recent months. He was in his fifties – at least according to him – and was becoming shaky and lethargic. I often saw him talking with Thies, and Thies always looked concerned during these conversations. I worried for Hurland, and the trip to Reims was devoid of his usual story-telling. I think that riding on horseback had rendered him out of breath.

The journey to Reims took us a second day due to Hurland’s need to stop every hour or so, and we were forced to make a fire and sleep by the side of the road. This gave me time to think, and I realised that in Reims lay the chance that I had been waiting for. Godke had finally let me out of my cage in Metz to try my hand at being the lead witch hunter of the group once more, and at sixteen years of age I was ready to try again. I was a man, or at least on the verge of manhood, and I wanted to prove that I had grown in more than size over the past two years.

We arrived in Reims on the morning of the second day of travel. The city was small but grand, like some hybrid of Prague’s glory and Bielefeld’s population. There were centres of learning, particularly focused around the arts of logic and rhetoric, yet the marketplace that we passed had but a few stalls.

Immediately, Godke took me to meet the Archbishop of the city. He stressed to me that this was not some insignificant chapel cleric.

‘This man is an Archbishop. He is responsible for crowning the Kings of France,’ he warned me. ‘His cathedral is the most important in France.’

I nodded vigorously, not attempting to hide my awe of the institution at all. Bielefeld had been adequately served by a Lutheran priest, but a Catholic Archbishop was something else. Especially one who guaranteed the divine influence of Kings.

We entered the massive cathedral, even larger than the one in Prague. It was definitely the largest church I’d ever seen, and grand arches welcomed us into the spacious interior. The Archbishop appeared and approached us, and I had little choice but to take note of his extravagant, ornate white and gold robes. He spoke in French, though it was tainted by an unfamiliar accent.

‘Welcome to my holy abode,’ the man said.

‘Greetings and blessings, Father’ Godke said. I could tell that this wasn’t the first time he’d been summoned by a man of God. ‘I answer your request for a witch hunter.’

The man smiled. ‘I am Archbishop Gifford of Hampshire,’ he said, and I realised that his accent was English.

‘Godke,’ my master responded.

‘Karl.’

‘Good to meet you, both of you,’ Gifford responded. ‘Sadly it is on a sour note. The witch in question is currently being held in the city prison.’

‘Not in the witch house?’ Godke asked. Some towns did not have a witch house, but Reims was an important centre of Christianity and a large city so that possibility seemed unlikely.

‘It is a delicate matter. The witch, Mathilde le Clerc, is a popular singer, and her family has been prominent in Reims since Roman times.’

‘So she has a lot of supporters then?’ Godke asked, and it was an important question: we did not want to become caught in a dispute over possessions. Of course, we were entitled to them if she was indeed a witch.

‘Yes, dozens of them. I need this dealt with quickly,’ Gifford said. ‘If she is found guilty, her execution must be performed privately and you should leave Reims before word reaches the commoners.’

Godke nodded his understanding. ‘And our payment?’

Though at Prague I had grown bored of the financial negotiations, this time I was determined to listen. I wanted to see how Godke operated and what a good price for a witch hunt of this difficulty was.

‘The Church has fallen on hard times,’ Gifford said, though I doubted it. Churchmen, especially Catholics, are always begging for money, yet every man knows that if you risk the wrath of God and plunder a church you will have wealth to the end of your days. ‘If Mathilde is a witch and confesses as such, you may purchase from the market enough goods to fill the pockets of your warband and place the cost of these items on the Church.’

Godke nodded, and I realised what was happening. Unlike at Prague, where Wallenstein had offered us a fair price for the job, Reims was attempting to offload the cost of our labour onto the rest of the city. He was essentially giving us license to extract a tax as we had done at Pilsen, and I better understood how the group could justify the act.

We turned to leave but after a few steps Godke slowed and stopped. He turned back to Gifford and asked a question so unimportant that it had only occurred to him as an afterthought.

‘Of what crime is the witch guilty?’

‘Infanticide,’ Gifford replied. ‘She knowingly devised and imbibed a brew of sowbread and birthwort root.’

Godke nodded and we left the cathedral. I had no problem with churches, not like Jacob, but I often preferred my prayers to be made in solitude. I made them every night before sleeping. Perhaps I would have made a better Protestant than I did a Catholic; I certainly harboured no ill will towards any of my Christian brethren because of their denomination. I sympathised equally with Catholic and Orthodox Christians living in fear of Saracen conquest, and I knew that both were suffering as a result of forts lost by the Austrians to the Turks during my childhood.

I had little time for such thoughts as the prison was not far. It was time for another extraction.