I awoke for the third time soon after dawn. Godke greeted me once more and this time I responded.

‘Godke…’ I mumbled. For some reason the words I was thinking were having difficulty forming themselves on my lips. ‘Water.’

I spent the morning eating and drinking my fill, which was substantial and far more than Fleur or Godke ate. They did not protest because I was clearly in need of all of the strength that I could get.

‘We need to get out of Cologne,’ Godke said. ‘We might be safe here for another night or two, but we’re not very far from the city. Every hour we spend here during daylight increases our risk of being discovered. We need to get your wound looked at.’

I nodded. He was right, of course, but I didn’t see how we could fulfil any of those goals while I was in my current state.

Fleur mimed holding a horse’s reigns and Godke smiled sadly. ‘We don’t have the money to purchase or hire a horse,’ he said. ‘Most of our possessions were in Ros’ carriage or Grane’s saddlebags. There’s also the risk that if I start asking after a horse someone will report me to the Prince-Bishop.’

‘Leave me,’ I said and Fleur shook her head rapidly.

‘Things aren’t that bad yet,’ Godke replied.

I sighed. Things seemed pretty bad. We couldn’t move because I was wounded and that would slow us down to the point where discovery by the Prince-Bishop’s men would be inevitable. We couldn’t stay because we were too close to the city and I needed medical attention. I had told them to leave me because I didn’t want to drag them down with me. I’d promised Godke that I wouldn’t try and harm him without informing him of my intentions beforehand, and so I had a duty to my master and to the mother of my dead child to get them out of a mess that only I was required to endure.

‘Pray for me,’ I said. ‘Leave me and pray for me.’

Fleur was shaking her head again. Godke raised my blood-stained shirt and looked at my wound.

‘You may survive the infection,’ Godke said. ‘Your fever isn’t that high.’

I didn’t bother responding. I wasn’t going to dissuade him and I needed to conserve what energy I had.

‘We need to make a fire for you,’ Godke said. ‘We’ll wait until nightfall when it gets cold and the darkness can make the smoke invisible. We’ll keep it small and I’ll find a good place for it so that the firelight isn’t visible.’

Again I didn’t protest. I was having trouble thinking and soon I went back to sleep. When I awoke I could hear voices, which was strange because Godke and Fleur were my only companions and Fleur was mute.

At first I was fearful that we had been discovered by the Prince-Bishop’s men due to the small fire that burned a few metres from me. It was obscured from most directions by a convenient series of bushes that Godke had obviously deliberately sought out.

However upon listening further, I realised that the first voice was Godke’s and the second was a woman’s. I relaxed somewhat, though I was still tense due to the fact that we had been discovered and there was a risk that the woman would inform the town guard.

Eventually the voices came closer and Godke and the woman came into view. She was old, in her forties at least, with brown hair tainted by greying roots.

She knelt beside me and lifted my shirt to inspect my wound. At first I frowned and tried feebly to bat her probing hands away, but Godke told me that she was going to help and I was too weak to protest. Her face was motherly and gentle and I had no choice but to trust her.

Fleur looked on from a few feet away. She seemed distant and I hoped that it was just how poor I felt that was making me think that. Sure, I didn’t love her as a wife, but I needed her to be there for me. All of my other friends were dead except for Godke, who was an enemy-to-be. Maybe I should have considered marrying Fleur.

Maybe I still could. The woman was saying that she had a house only a few hundred metres away and that she had honey there. Honey was good for infections I think, and Godke agreed to this even though he knew we had little to pay her with. She seemed nice and I got the feeling that if she saved me it would have been out of charity rather than any desire for compensation.

Godke carried me to the woman’s house. I didn’t catch her name. Her home was a medieval-style wooden shack with a thatch roof and there was a small, well-tended garden out the front. Godke carried me along the pebbled garden path and lay me on a small wooden table inside the house.

The next few days I spent in a transitory state somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. My memories of that time are of flashes of Godke, Fleur, and the old woman. I remember the sweet smell of honey and fresh herbs, tainted by the shivering cold brought on by my condition.

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I don’t know if the Prince-Bishop’s men came to the old woman’s house at any point, but it seems unlikely for my time there was uninterrupted. Most likely they’d asked her about us before she met us and never bothered to check on her again. She was a strange old hermit and hermits are usually avoided by city folk. I was thankful for the lack of military attention that the old lady attracted. It probably kept us alive for those weeks.

We stayed in the lady’s shack for at least a fortnight. I don’t know how she fed us but none of us were ever hungry while we were there. I wondered if she’d once had children who had died or left and now we were all she had to dote on.

I survived the infection which was the worst of my life. Jaromil had split my skin and probably my intestines too, but with the care of the old woman I pulled through and almost immediately I was faced with a moral dilemma:

She was a witch.

There was no doubting it, even in my delirious state. She was skilled with potions. She healed me even though I thought myself unhealable. She lived alone. And most condemning of all, there were five small wooden grave crosses in the ground behind her house.

When I was strong enough to understand Fleur talked to me through handwriting, saying that the graves were for her unborn children. That only reinforced my belief: witches were known for becoming sexually active with Satan and half-Devil children would usually be miscarried.

I shared my suspicions with Godke, who thought that I was probably not thinking clearly due to the infection. ‘She has healed you, fed you and cleaned you. We have no means by which to offer her recompense, so do not do her the disservice of accusing her of witchcraft.’

That was when my conscience began to apply to suspected witches too. It marked the beginning of the end of my witch hunting career. Witches could be executed because they gave their bodies to the Devil, but if this woman could help me then how could I torture her to find out of she was a witch?

As such, when we departed from the old lady’s shack one morning, I thanked her for her help and let her be. I had some coin that I could have offered her, but it would have been insultingly insufficient repayment for a life-debt and she would have refused it anyway. Besides, it was all the money the three of us had except for what few possessions we may have left behind at Metz.

That was where we headed after my infection passed. I was still weak and frail, but I was improving though I feared a confrontation on the road I was capable of walking at a moderate pace.

We walked for four days. It was not a long journey back to Metz and I was surprised by how much time we could shave off of our journey by continuing to walk for a few hours at night. After all, I was heavily impeded and as each day wore on my pace gradually decreased.

What distressed me was that Fleur did not walk with me. The tomboyish charm and the innocent smile that had made her the object of my desire at Reims were all but lost. She never held eye contact for long, and her mannerisms were more mild.

I feared that losing our child had damaged her and I could not bear the thought. Where was the Fleur that danced through the meadows of Lorraine?

When we arrived at Metz Godke told me to take my time. Though we were poor, there was no rush to go anywhere until I was ready.

I was glad that he didn’t rush me. If Gunnar or Thies were still alive they may have tried to, especially if they were as destitute as us, but I was all Godke had left and he treated me with more kindness than perhaps he would have if the others were still alive.

After three weeks away I was glad to find that my landlord had not evicted me. I had paid him a week in advance when I left for Cologne and I backpaid him two weeks which took nearly all of the coins that remained in my purse. Aside from my leather armour, my wheellock pistol, and Joyeuse I carried little of value any longer.

Entering the house, I looked through all of my possessions for anything which could be sold without great loss to either Fleur or myself. I committed myself to selling whichever of Hurland’s books I could in addition to some of my dishware. I was not on the verge of bankruptcy yet for I still had a gold coin, a gulden, concealed behind a wall panel, but I had no idea how long it would be before I was ready to witch hunt again and it had to last at least that long.

In the first days of Metz I found that Fleur rarely left the house. She seemed preoccupied, as if she were constantly worried about something just over the horizon but which never actually seemed to dawn. I tried to comfort her but I could never reduce the distance that had grown between us. She no longer smiled just from the sight of me, and I realised that it might be time to move on.

Nevertheless, I had a responsibility to her and my heart would have broken if I had decided it was best to expel her entirely from my life. Our lovemaking became more sparse yet I allowed her to sleep in my home and I continued to pay for her food.

I thought it was best anyway. When the time came to resume witch hunting I banned her from following me. I had been naïve to take her on witch hunts in the past and our child had paid the price. Her time on God’s earth had seen enough strife without me taking her into dangerous cities to watch executions.

There was an incident during our stay at Metz which reminded me of all that I'd lost since becoming a man. The warband had lost Hurland, then Jacob, and then Gunnar and Thies. I had also lost Konrad, not a dear friend but a man who I owed my life to, and I was reminded of this when I attempted to purchase some bread at the markets and the vendor refused my reasonable offer.

'I don't sell to traitors,' she said. She was a fat, middle-aged woman with wiry grey hair and warts across her face.

'What?' I asked, taken by surprise.

'You're the one that cost Melchior his command,' she said. 'I won't sell to you.'

I frowned and left her stall. I was unsure how word had travelled: surely Melchior would have preferred if the circumstances of his injury were not widely publicised. His own guardsman had given him his severe limp, after all. I was happy enough not to buy from that vendor, particularly as her warts had threatened to spoil my appetite. Yet after several other vendors refused me access to their wares I came to realise that, in my absence, Melchior had poisoned many of the townsfolk of Metz against me. Only select vendors – all German – would sell to me, and I was occasionally openly harrassed. Thankfully I was never attacked, yet each refusal of service and each shouted insult reminded me of how my trifling thought of pleasure had cost Konrad, and had come so close to costing Hurland. I made no effort to dissuade the citizenry from their perception of me as I wanted to suffer the reminders of my failures and my recklessness – as I deserved – lest I repeat them again. I resolved to act more responsibly in the future, in the manner befitting a man.