As we stood in that great salon, we wondered what our punishment would be. Many men looked at us with disgust but we could also feel their fear, even though we were the ones tied from head to toes. We missed our home in Zugarramurdi and our sisters, who luckily managed to escape but while we listened to those men talk nonsense, we knew without any doubt that we would never come back.
They called themselves “The Holy Inquisition”, and pretended to be an institution whose only aim was to protect the catholic orthodoxy in Spain. However, these men loved torturing and manipulating weak and powerless people like us, witches. Many of us were captured, 18 of us were set free because we confessed to our crimes, but six sisters refused to do so and were burnt alive.
Thinking about it now, that girl was to blame for our misfortune. In 1608, a young girl called Maria de Ximildegui turned up at our small town. She started getting along with some witches and very soon, she was practising witchcraft. I never trusted her, but nobody cared. Still, I was right about everything. As she learnt more and more, fear overwhelmed her till one day, when she declared that she had danced with demons. These accusations came to the Inquisition’s notice and from that moment on, we were persecuted.
Luckily for us, after these events, an inquisitor called Alonso de Salazar y Frías, became sceptical about magic practice and started an investigation which lasted 3 years. In the end, he managed to get the Church to confess their error.
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