The little girl burst into tears, but Pieter just laughed. “Pieter strong,” he pointed out, and proved it by putting a hand on each of two of the iron bars and literally bending the bars apart until the boy inside could squeeze out. He did the same with all the other cages, and the boy in the middle one fell on the girl who had been free and the two of them hugged and cried with happiness. It was so moving that Giselle felt a lump in her own throat.

Meanwhile the other five children clustered around Pieter and Rosa and Giselle and clung to them, some laughing, some crying, some doing both at the same time. The poor things were so filthy, their clothing in rags, their hair in dirty mats, that it was impossible even to tell what sex they were.

“Where did they come from? How did they get here?” Giselle asked, trying to figure out how to comfort them.

“Mutti left me in the woods an’ never came back,” said one.

“Mama and Papa died,” another said sadly. “I tried to find someone to live with, but they all sent me away.”

And so went the tragic stories. Three, the boy and the girl who still clung together, and the first one that had spoken, had been taken into the woods by a parent and left there. Three had been orphaned and had been searching for someone to give them a place to stay. And the last had run away from a father who beat him until his bones broke. All of them had found the cottage, been drawn to it, and had been taken in by what they thought was a kindly old woman, who fed them, and put them to bed—

—whereupon they woke up to find themselves in cages. Or, in the little girl’s case, the Blood Witch’s slave.

“She cooked an’ ate us,” the little girl said, shaking like a leaf in a windstorm. “Since Hans an’ I got here, she ate Fritz, an’ Dietrick, an’ Franz, an’ Josef.”

“She likely ate a lot more than four,” Rosa muttered to Giselle and Pieter, who nodded. “It has been a while since someone from the Bruderschaft who was also an Earth Magician has been through here.”

Is the light . . . going away? Giselle realized it was getting difficult to see, and glanced over at the cottage. And her jaw dropped.

The light from the windows was fading, but more than that, the cottage itself seemed to be aging before her very eyes. Black mold was visibly growing over the walls, the plaster was forming cracks, and the thatch of the roof was rotting. Even as she looked, astonished, one of the shutters on the window nearest her started swinging by only one hinge. “What’s happening to the cottage?” she gasped. Rosa cast a glance in the direction she was looking.