A Spell for the Revolution (22 page)

“Aren’t you coming along?” she asked.

“But Deborah—”

“These coins won’t last us very long. We need to make the most of every day, friend Brown.”

After all they had been through together, to call him
friend like
anyone else was so formal. “Friend?”

“For now,” she said, then turned and kept walking. He stood watching her go until he realized she wasn’t stopping, wasn’t going to even look back, and then he ran to catch up. As he ran, he looked over his shoulder and saw Emily’s small figure shrink in the distance while she made her way up the hill to the British.

Two British pickets stopped them north of the city, as they made their way toward Washington Heights. They weren’t the only refugees headed north after the fire, and most, like Deborah and Proctor, had nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

“Are you sure you want to be going?” the first soldier asked, blocking the road. They were young, skinny boys with acne still on their faces. Their weapons were propped against a fence, close to hand, but not as if they expected immediate use.

“We’re sure,” Deborah said. Proctor stood behind her in the road. They hadn’t spoken since taking their leave of Emily miles ago.

The second soldier smiled at Deborah. “General Howe, and the royal governor, they’re certain to do something to help folks if you give them a day or two to come up with a plan.”

“It was a dirty trick them rebels did, burning the city that way,” the first one said. “Hurt their own folk as much as they hurt us.”

“Shows what kinds of scoundrels they are,” the second one said.

Proctor had no desire to chat. He was sore and tired and hungry. And something worse—the encounter with Emily, the way Deborah had treated him since, it all left him feeling hollow inside and angry. He reached down inside himself, searching for the source of his magic, and into his
memory for a verse that might cast a spell to help them on their way.

He felt a tickle of magic rise in his belly and start to flow rapidly through him. Turning his head to the side, he murmured, “For their ears are dull of hearing and their eyes they have closed.”

Deborah and the two soldiers stared at him.

“Well, my ears ain’t so dull of hearing that I couldn’t hear that,” the first soldier said, and they both laughed.

“Are you two related?” the second one asked.

“Brother and sister,” Proctor snapped. “Our home in the city was destroyed in last night’s fire. We’re on our way upstate to stay with some relatives there.”

The second soldier didn’t hear anything after
sister
. He turned his attention back to Deborah and smiled at her with teeth that were white, if crooked. “The name’s James, James Hanigan, miss, although everyone calls me Jimmy. You ought to think about sticking around—”

Without waiting for permission—or Deborah—Proctor walked around both soldiers and continued on the road north.

He was a quarter mile on before he heard Deborah’s voice.

“Slow down, will you? My legs aren’t as long as yours, and they’re already aching.”

He stopped where he was, lowering his head and rubbing his face. As soon as he saw her out of the corner of his eye, he started walking again, but at a slower pace he knew she could keep up with.

“What’s wrong with you?” Deborah asked sharply.

“What isn’t?” he snapped back, thinking of everything they’d gone through—the travel, the battle in Brooklyn, the German’s attempt to kill them, the fight and the fire with Bootzamon and the widow Nance’s scarecrow puppet. The last conversation with Emily that left him feeling so pitiful and inadequate.

Deborah let that pass. Maybe she was thinking similar thoughts. They continued walking.

“I reached for it and it wasn’t there,” he said, more softly, as if admitting a terrible guilt.

“What?”

“The magic. Back there, I reached for it, so we could pass those British soldiers, and it just flowed through my hands like water.”

“You didn’t even need to use magic. They would have let us pass regardless.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It is the point. It’s not something you need to worry about.”

“What if it never comes back?”

“It’ll come back. Believe me, you still have the talent within you, like water in a deep well.”

“It’s not just this one time. Back there with the guards, in the alley when I was fighting Bootzamon—”

“You had it back at the farm, when the German arrived.”

He had, hadn’t he? What had been different about that time? He wasn’t sure. “That’s just once. For weeks, every time I’ve reached for it, it’s like there’s nothing there.”

“It’ll get better,” she said. “I can help you.”

“Yes, probably you can,” he admitted. He thought about the storm she called in to stop the British fleet when they were caught in the battle at Brooklyn, or the furious wind that slammed the farmhouse when they needed to escape the German. “You’ve grown more powerful than I could ever imagine.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“There’s no maybe in the recipe,” he snorted. “You’re powerful. No wonder the widow Nance wanted to recruit you for the Covenant.”

“Don’t say that,” she said, suddenly angry again.

“It’s true.”

“I’m not a thing like her, like any of them. They’re murderers. They killed my parents, and they tried to kill us.”

“That’s not what I was saying, and you’re smart enough to know it. You’re as powerful as she is—”

“No, I’m not!” She turned to Proctor and clutched his arm. “They are so powerful, and they’re willing to do such horrible things. The German, he put a curse on thousands of soldiers, on the whole Continental army—you saw it yourself!”

“Yes,” Proctor admitted.

“I can’t even break the curse on one man, and I
tried.”

“If you’d had another chance, you would have found a way. You will find a way. We have to break that curse and stop the Covenant.”

“We do. And I can’t do it without you, Proctor. You have to keep trying to use your talent. If you stop trying to wrestle it into submission, and just relax and let it flow into you—”

“It’s been pretty damned hard to relax,” Proctor murmured.

“Halt,” cried a voice ahead of them. Proctor saw two bayonet-wielding Continental soldiers step into the road to block their way.

Both men wore patched and weather-stained clothes. Neither appeared to have bathed in a long while, nor shaved recently. One was surly, looking for a fight, while the other was as twitchy as a cat watching birds from the wrong side of a window. But that was hardly the most remarkable thing.

Both men carried the curse.

Each man had a ghost chained to him.

An unnatural chill pricked over Proctor’s skin. The surly soldier stepped forward, the bayonet on his musket aimed squarely at Proctor, who wasn’t carrying any weapon at all. Proctor had to squint to see the ghosts at first, to make sure it was more than a trick of light and shadow.

But no, the ghost was there, a pale gray shade of an old man with his face slashed opened in several places—raw, open wounds that were all the more unsettling for being bloodless. The ghost’s arm was draped over the soldier’s right shoulder, and his body hung on the soldier’s back, dragging its feet in the dirt behind him. The ghost’s face was propped up on the soldier’s left side, lolling over his other shoulder, licking its lips and leering at Proctor. It appeared to know that Proctor could see him.

The soldier almost seemed aware of the ghost’s presence as well—twice, in the space of a few seconds, he reached up and adjusted the strap of his hunting bag where the ghost clung to him. And his head tilted slightly to the left, as if he were listening to the ghost.

“Who are you, friend or Tory?” he demanded.

“Friend,” Proctor said, and Deborah answered, “Friends, in all meanings of the word, for we are of the Society of Friends.”

The surly soldier sneered. “If you’re that kind of Friend, you’re no friend to us.”

The second soldier—the thinner, twitchy one—laughed at that and then winced. It was harder to see the ghost that clung to him. It was a skinny lad, cowering behind the soldier as if it were afraid. When the soldier stepped closer to Proctor and Deborah, the ghost tried to pull away. It seemed that his hand was trapped in the soldier’s chest—locked in the living man’s heart, Proctor guessed. The cowering shade tried to pull away another time, and the soldier winced again.

“We’re here to volunteer, to do what we can to help the army,” Proctor said.

He had meant to discuss more specific plans with Deborah, but now that they were here, it seemed the only plan they could have. They needed to stay near the army long enough to find out how to break the curse.

“I don’t know where you came from,” the second soldier
said, his voice thin and reedy. “But you’d be better off turning your boots around and letting them take you straight back there.”

“Thank you for the advice,” Proctor said. “But we mean to help however we can.”

“Don’t talk them out of it,” the surly soldier said. “We can always use extra hands to clean up after the horses and empty the jacks.”

He kept an eye on Proctor as he spoke, as if he expected this to drive him away. But Proctor had lived his whole life on a farm, and he had seen the camps around Boston during the siege. It would take a lot more than that to drive him off. “If that’s what we need to do. We all do whatever we need to do to help, right?”

Surly growled in disappointment. His twitchy partner laughed nervously and took a step away, looking up and down the road. His ghost was trying frantically to escape, tugging and pulling like a small dog on a leash. Pain flashed across the young soldier’s face every few seconds.

Deborah glowed as she drew in power. The surly soldier’s ghost stared at her, whispering something in his host’s ear.

Proctor reached out a hand to Deborah, letting his fingertips brush her arm. He felt his skin tingle as it came close to her.

“Is now the right time?” he whispered.

“They’re in so much pain,” she said.

“What’s that?” the surly soldier said, jabbing his bayonet at Proctor. “How do we know we can trust you?”

“Maybe you, we, maybe we should just take them to the officers and let them decide,” the second soldier said.

“There’s something wrong about them,” the surly soldier said.

His companion laughed nervously again. “You say that about everybody and everything. Take them to the officers and let them decide.”

The surly soldier grunted, thinking it over.

Twitchy put out his hand and gently pushed down the bayonet. “They’re not even carrying weapons.”

“What about watching the road?”

He lifted his head to the distance. As far as the eye could see, there was no one on the road behind Proctor and Deborah. “Who’s coming? Besides, Zachary and Will are at the next post back. And we’ll be back here shortly.”

“If you just point the way, I’m sure we can find it ourselves,” Proctor said.

The bayonet jerked in Surly’s hand but didn’t come up again. “No, we’ll take you to headquarters and let them decide.”

Proctor held out his hand for Deborah to go first. As she passed him, he saw that she still held on to the power—in fact, she held on to it almost all the time these days. He rarely saw her let it go. The two soldiers fell in behind them. After a few paces, the twitchy one said, “Go on ahead, if you don’t mind.”

“I do mind,” barked Surly. “You talk us into this, and then—”

Twitchy put one hand over his stomach and grimaced. “It’s that bad water I had when we were stationed down at the Battery. My stomach’s still not right yet.”

Surly frowned and reached up reflexively to cover his nose. “All right, then. But after the trots, you better gallop to catch up with us.”

Twitchy laughed nervously again. “Sure, sure, I will, promise.” He waited in the road a moment while they continued, then veered off into the cover of some bushes.

The widow Nance had put a sickness spell on the siege camp around Boston the year before. Everything had smelled of illness and fallen quickly into disrepair. Proctor had thought the effects of the curse on the Continentals’ camp might be similar, but as they passed up the road and into the camp that wasn’t what he noticed at all. There
weren’t thousands of ghosts as there had been at Brooklyn, not enough to chill the air and raise fog from the water. Yet something made his skin goose-pimple. Things felt wrong, even though they looked orderly and fine.

He had to relax and blur his eyes to see the ghosts clearly, but they were everywhere, hanging on to every soldier in the camp.

One clutched a man’s ankles, dragging along behind him like a child in a tantrum; another had his hands tangled in the waistband of a soldier and would have tripped him had he been flesh—in the moments Proctor watched, the soldier seemed constantly off-balance; a third had his arms wrapped around his man in a bear hug. Many others were simply tied to their soldier: a rope running from one neck to the other neck, a sash of cloth binding one wrist to another. Some of the soldiers seemed unaware of the presence, or at least showed no outward sign. But in all, a pervasive sense of worry and gloom hung over everything.