A few minutes after I was done the warband arrived, having finished Anneliese’s execution. Apparently burgomaster Friedrich had joined them in the town square and publicly thanked us for our services, and the argument about whether we should steal from the townsfolk had resurfaced despite Jacob’s death.

However that conversation came to a halt when the group saw me standing by the prepared horses.

‘Where did you go?’ Gunnar asked.

‘Jaromil,’ I responded. ‘He’s here. I fought him.’

I was met with some raised eyebrows. Godke responded, ‘did you win?’

I shook my head sadly. ‘He’s too strong. He wants to kill all of us for executing his brother and putting a nail in his tongue.’

‘But his brother was a witch,’ Gunnar said as if that somehow changed things.

‘We need to be on our guard,’ Godke said.

I don’t know why I refrained from telling the others that Jaromil may have influenced Jacob’s death. I believed the Bohemian pest when he said that he hadn’t directly killed Jacob, but it was of importance that he had talked Jacob into suicide and even supplied the means. Probably I was sick of being the bearer of bad news. Or maybe it was an uncommon streak of sympathy: I knew how bad it felt knowing that if I’d gone with Jacob, I would have been able to save him from Jaromil. I didn’t want the others to feel the same pain that I did.

In either case, we mounted our horses and Fleur joined me on Grane as she always did.

‘So are we leaving or are we getting paid?’ Gunnar asked Godke.

‘We’re leaving,’ Godke said and that was that.

Gunnar looked chuffed but he said nothing and I think we all understood the importance of getting out of East Frisia. The place was essentially a warzone and now we knew that we were being watched by a would-be assassin. Besides, we had already been paid by the burgomaster, even if we would have preferred a larger sum. Godke pointed out that we had actually been paid more than we realised. Originally the money was going to be split five ways, but with Jacob’s death we only had to split it between the four of us. With that in mind we left Leer in peace, yielding to the fact that we would be unable to unearth any property belonging to Anneliese to confiscate.

‘To Metz,’ Godke said, and it was then that I realised that Metz had become our de facto home town. Though none of the warband were French, we all spoke it to varying degrees due to the years we’d spent there and much of the population was German anyway. Some of the warband, including myself, had become tenants to property there, and all of us felt safe and at home there. As such, we hit the road back to Metz once more, one member less than on the previous journey.

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Metz was comfortable as usual. We stayed there for quite a few months, and we mostly idled the time by, but there were two things of note that occurred during our most recent stay in the beautiful city. I shall recount the second first, as it is a more pleasant memory.

I spent a month travelling with Fleur after my eighteenth birthday. We travelled through the Duchy of Bavaria and southern Germany and reached Bohemia during autumn. Fleur had never been to Bohemia before and she was fascinated by it and we stopped at several towns before arriving in Prague.

When we reached Prague, I was glad that the town guardsmen didn’t recognise me from my visit four years earlier and I went directly to the shady neighbourhood. Though the wheellock pistol I so desired was not on display I recognised the merchant who attended the stall and he found it in a nearby wooden crate.

I immediately offered to purchase it from him and I bartered him down to a reasonable price. I also purchased several boxes of rounds and took both the beautiful pistol and the rounds back to Metz with me.

I was truly a warrior now. A full adult clad in leather armour with a sword in one hand and a gun in the other. I was no longer the groups acolyte, I was a fully-fledged witch hunter second only to Godke in the group hierarchy.

And I could challenge Godke anytime now.

As I had spent time in Metz the consequences of my blood-oath had lingered closer to the front of my mind. My father was dead and the man responsible lived down the street for me. I knew that the matter would come to a head soon but for now I kept my cool. My experience with Jaromil had taught me that though I was a capable fighter, I was not invincible.

I had to wait until I was ready.

The second tale took place almost immediately upon our return to Metz. I sought Konrad and found him languishing in the city jail. I did not take Fleur with me, and I was glad that I was not denied permission to see him by the guards. I spoke to him of my gratefulness at his intervention. I told him that he'd saved my life and I owed him. I offered, quietly, to break him out if that was what he wanted. I said that I would give what coin I had to support his family until he found a new livelihood. I did not want the fate of Konrad and his family to weigh on my conscience, and I offered him all that I could give in recognition of his sacrifice for me.

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I shall never forget his response, not if I take a blow to the head or the senility of old age enthralls me. He turned to me, eyes as cold as snow, and said through the bars, 'I think you've done enough.'

I frowned, too stupid to realise that I should leave. As with Melchior, I wanted to put things right and I tried to press him. 'I said I'm sorry about what happened. It was stupid. Please let me help you.'

But Konrad would speak no more. I sighed and left the building. I was wracked with guilt for what I had cost Konrad, and now I felt an additional layer of anguish stemming from his blunt refusal of my aid. I did not begrudge him that refusal, as I was in his debt and it was his right, yet it stung me deeply.

On my way out of the prison I spoke to one of the wardens and asked if Konrad had been sentenced.

'Aye,' the man responded. 'He cost Melchior his leg and his command. The magistrate sentenced him to exile else he'd be killed.'

My jaw dropped. 'What about his family?'

'They done nothing wrong,' he said. He was absent-mindedly chewing something, perhaps a stem of wheat. 'They can leave too if they like.'

I recovered from my expression of surprise, but was unable to quell what I was feeling inside. Turmoil mostly. Konrad had saved my life, but I had put myself in that situation by taunting Melchior and challenging his authority. Now Konrad would have to leave, and his family would be faced with the choice of relocation or starvation. All because of me, an entire family would be uprooted. I grimly remembered the Dutch refugees I had seen the last time I had ventured to that accursed knoll on my own. Perhaps they had been driven from their homes not by war with the Spanish, but by a stupid Karl of their own.

Konrad didn't see me before he left. I don't even know when it happened. One day I decided to check the jail and was no longer present. I never saw him around Metz again, and I assumed that he had taken his family and departed without saying goodbye. I was hardly surprised after our earlier encounter, and I was stung by what had happened. The fact that Melchior's injury had cost him his position in the town guard was small solace for what had happened with Konrad. I still recalled that Hurland would have faced a similar price had he not been killed before the penalty became due.

Eventually the incident faded into the past. With Melchior powerless and Konrad exiled I was not reminded of it again for some time, and I resumed my life in Metz for the duration of our stay. Fleur and I still humped regularly, but such activities took up a smaller proportion of our time together. For whatever reason we did not profess to love each other, nor did we consider wedding, but we were enjoying ourselves and I’m not sure Fleur had ever experienced that before. She liked to jump and dance through the farmlands south of Metz and, once I was certain that Melchior was not going to be at the gate, sometimes I’d wander down there and join her. I liked to see her smile. Maybe I did love her. If I did, it was immaterial as I was never possessed to make a commitment to her.

As always, the time to leave Metz came eventually, in 1624. This was not one of our longer stays in the city, and soon enough we were on the road again.

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This time we were heading for Cologne, a Prince-Bishopric a day or two’s ride from Metz with our entire party mounted on horseback. Godke commented that he was surprised that we were being summoned to such a place, as Prince-Bishoprics were notoriously capable of holding their own witch trials, but the meagre rewards of Leer were wearing thin and Gunnar had grown bored with the women of Metz, so we travelled there nonetheless.

Rather cannily, Fleur waited until we were on the road to lift her blouse and put my hand against her belly. I understood at once that she was pregnant. She was quite aware that I would have tried to make her stay in Metz if I had known, and as it was I tried to send her back. But she would have none of it, and the bump was invisible so I allowed her to come to Cologne with us.

‘But this is the last witch hunt until our child is born,’ I said.

I was glad I said that, because it allowed me to release all the joy that I had been suppressing until the matter of Fleur’s locale had been sorted out. We hugged and kissed and generally embarrassed the rest of the warband for the rest of the day and even though Gunnar told us that we should wed I was uncertain that I wanted to do so. I did not want my child to be a bastard, but I did not want to wed Fleur. She was my best friend, and I enjoyed our intimate moments, but she was not the last woman I wanted to share such moments with. Nor was I the last man she wished for.

In fact, the pregnancy was somewhat inconvenient, but I would never have said such a thing to Fleur. I wasn’t lying when I said that I was joyful, but nor did I want to displease God and father a child out of wedlock.

I left it as a matter to worry about another time. We arrived in Cologne as a group of four men, one woman, and an unborn infant, and without dismounting rode to the palace to meet the Prince-Bishop. We did this because we did not feel comfortable in Cologne: the town guardsmen stared at us as we walked past and no witch house could be seen anywhere near the church. Godke did not like the situation at all and so he kept us together as we went to the palace.

When we approached the palace, a group of Cologne guardsmen approached through the open gate with a fat man in their midst. As I suspected, it was the Prince-Bishop and he spoke to us with a shout rather than coming closer to us.

‘Dismount from your horses so that we may discuss the matter of our witch,’ he called to us and Thies instantly said under his breath that we should leave.

‘Where is the hospitality of the Prince-Bishopric?’ Godke shouted back. ‘Does the town lay quiet for our approach?’

Godke made a mistake letting the Prince-Bishop know that we were suspicious, for he walked back into the palace while his guards remained.

‘What do we do?’ Gunnar asked nervously.

‘We get out of here,’ Godke said.

We turned our horses around but Ros’ carriage, which was being led by Gunnar, took some time to wheel around and by the time we were ready to leave the palace’s doorstep a familiar face stepped out of it.

It was Jaromil again.

‘Jaromil!’ I called to the group, alerting them to his presence.

‘Gallop!’ ordered Godke and we immediately kicked our steeds into a gallop. The guardsmen behind us began to fire at us but their shots reverberated off of the back of the carriage.

We ploughed back through the city with three times the speed we’d made entering it, but Jaromil had laid a trap for us. I don’t know how he did it, but he had lured us to Cologne and gained the support of the Prince-Bishop in his attempts to kill us.

It looked like he might succeed this time.