Spirited (8 page)

Isaiah rarely watched sentences being imposed and never when someone else had made the capture, but with Chief Magistrate Cotton present, Isaiah had to attend, although he knew that the woman on the pyre was innocent.

Alder cast nervous glances between the woman and Cotton, who stood atop a granite slab on the far side of the crowd, the smoke and heat of the fire making him appear as a shimmering phantom of vengeance.

To Isaiah’s knowledge, none could sense the stain except himself, though he’d never asked anyone except Reverend Wildes, who had ordered Isaiah not to mention it again. But even without the gift, Alder still whispered doubts regarding the guilt of Sarah Goode, a young girl accused by her own husband. Her husband testified that Sarah had sent apparitions to kill him, but rumor said he was unable to perform on their wedding night, and Sarah had made the girlish mistake of laughing.

Unfortunately, Isaiah could do nothing about it, not with Cotton there. Vouching for another’s innocence after conviction was a sure way to get the finger pointed at yourself.

Isaiah swallowed back acid and closed his eyes. But he could not close his ears to Sarah Goode’s screams. The crowd screamed too, cheering the torturous death of someone they’d known all their lives. But she was a witch in their minds now—responsible for the drought, the sickness, the dead animals, the stillborn babies—not some poor girl who had giggled at her husband.

Isaiah silently cursed his gift and wished for the villagers’ gift of blind ignorance.

~*~*~

After the fired had died, Chief Magistrate Cotton approached Isaiah. Older than Alder, he wore a lace-flounced jacket with a ruffed collar and a wig of powdered curls. Flanking him were four mercenary horsemen with matchlocks and sabers.

As Cotton neared, Isaiah gasped and took a step back. At the same time, Cotton paused and put a handkerchief to his nose, as though a stench more foul than New Coventry’s had suddenly assaulted his senses. He cocked his head at Isaiah before composing himself and lowering the handkerchief.

Isaiah did not know what had possessed Cotton. The only thing Isaiah knew was that Chief Magistrate Cotton was stained!

“Mr. Wildes.” Cotton bowed his head slightly. “This territory’s finest young witch hunter, I hear. But that does not surprise me. It takes a certain perception into the witch’s mind to be successful, don’t you think?”

Isaiah mumbled general assent, still shocked by what he sensed in Cotton.

Cotton narrowed his eyes and cocked his head as if trying to come to some decision. “We must proceed with all caution here. These are delicate times, what with the governor and his investigation. There are even those who deny the existence of witches, and I will not stand for that.”

Isaiah nodded. He couldn’t accuse the chief magistrate of witchcraft. Not here. Not now. Not with four heavily armed horsemen backing Cotton.

“I was present at your birth,” Cotton said after taking another whiff of his kerchief. “Right alongside Reverend Wildes and Magistrate Alder. We watched as you arrived into this world in the morning, and we watched your mother depart that same afternoon.”

Cotton shook his head. “It is no wonder you have a talent for spotting witches, Wildes, considering your mother was one.” He pointed a crooked finger at Isaiah. “I should have never let Reverend Wildes talk me into letting you live. This man is stained. Seize him.”

Metal scraped against metal as the horsemen drew their swords. A drop of sweat crawled down Isaiah’s back. Alder looked down and stepped away. Isaiah didn’t blame him. Alder could do nothing to help him now, or he would share Isaiah’s fate.

As the crowd grew silent, Nan stomped and snorted across the town square. Isaiah whirled and shoved through the crowd as Nan galloped toward him, the mob retreating from her bulk and snapping teeth. Behind Isaiah, people screamed as the horsemen charged through the crowd.

Isaiah reached Nan, leapt into her saddle, and galloped off between a tight row of buildings. He hugged Nan’s neck as a volley of matchlock shots boomed. Wood exploded from the building beside him, showering him with sawdust and splinters.

At the main road, Nan’s stride lengthened. Isaiah glanced back through the dust cloud kicked up by her hooves. With no rain in months, the haze thickened, and the horsemen faded into phantoms. When they finally disappeared behind the cloud, Isaiah pulled Nan’s head toward the old mill where Faith Jacobs lived. He had to warn her. He could not bear to have Faith come to the same end as Sarah Goode.

~*~*~

Isaiah circled the old mill, with its rotting timbers and caved in roof. Charcoal and dry rot and emptiness filled the air. It had obviously been abandoned years ago. Faith had lied.

Nan snorted. Isaiah sighed and patted her flank. When his hand came away wet, he dismounted. Blood seeped from a musket ball hole in Nan’s side. And yet the ornery old nag had carried him to safety.

“Stupid horse!” Isaiah buried his head against Nanna’s neck and fought back tears. “Good, loyal, stupid horse.”

Nanna snorted again and collapsed, knocking the two of them tumbling down a hill, crashing through trees and underbrush.

Isaiah’s ankle snapped as Nan rolled over him. Agony robbed him of consciousness.

~*~*~

Isaiah opened his eyes to darkness and pain. He tried to stand, but his leg couldn’t hold his weight. He fell back to the ground, his scream echoing around him before fading away like a ghost retreating through a catacomb.

He took a deep breath and bit his lip, the throbbing in his head matched only by the throbbing in his ankle, twisted and pinned beneath his calf and swelling to the size and color of a prize turnip.

Overhead, a full moon shone down the hole that had swallowed him. He pushed himself across the damp earth and gravel, his britches soaking up the fetid water beneath him. He leaned back against the cold stone wall of the old well and took another breath. The cloying stench of moldering dirt, like freshly dug graves, assaulted his nostrils, gagging him.

He coughed out muddy phlegm and then whistled for Nan. There was no answer. He was truly alone now. Nanna was dead. His mother was dead. The Reverend Wildes was dead. And this hole would be his grave.

But at least he hadn’t led the horsemen to Faith Jacobs.

And then Isaiah sensed the stain.

Someone—a witch—was out in the underground darkness, watching him.

He drew his knife as a dim light emerged in the distance and grew brighter and closer. Advancing toward him down a rough-hewn tunnel burrowed out from the old well, the light flickered off shadowed walls of dirt and stone.

Isaiah shielded his eyes from the blinding glow with one hand as the knife handle grew sweat-slickened in his other. His ankle throbbed. With his good leg, he pushed his back against the curving wall. The well’s crumbling stone pressed into his spine.

A few moments later, a phantom outline appeared. Isaiah blinked dust from his eyes and tightened his grip on the knife. When the light dimmed so that he could see, a little girl stood before him with a dancing flame burning in her palm.

“Get back, witch!” Isaiah hissed as he waved his knife.

“You’re hurt,” the girl said. “I can help.”

“Your innocent form does not fool me. Be gone.”

The girl laughed. “You’re silly. What’s your name? Mine is Destiny. Destiny Jacobs.”

“Jacobs?” Isaiah narrowed his eyes. “Do you know Faith Jacobs?”

The girl’s smile seemed familiar. “Of course I know her. She’s my sister.”

Isaiah jerked back onto his broken ankle, and blackness flooded in once again.

~*~*~

Isaiah woke to warmth spreading through his ankle. He opened his eyes. The little girl, Destiny Jacobs, was rubbing his ankle with burning palms.

“Get back.” Isaiah jumped to his feet, and the flames in the girl’s palms sputtered. He raised his arms to push her away and found his hands tied.

“She helped you, but you would strike her,” a man’s voice said. “And you call us evil.”

Isaiah’s ankle was bearing his weight with little pain. Destiny looked up at him with a proud smile, but the two men who stepped out of the shadows had no smiles for Isaiah. And they both reeked of the stain.

“We should kill him now and take no chances,” one of them said.

“No, Mathias,” Destiny said. The flame grew again in her hand, chasing away the darkness and lighting her earnest face. “Mother said God would send us help, and he dropped from the sky, so he must’ve come from God.”

“From God?” Mathias snorted. “This man is Isaiah Wildes. No man is more surely from the devil. I say we send him back to hell where he belongs.”

Destiny looked up at the second man with pleading eyes. “Bartholomew?”

“We must take him to the counsel,” Bartholomew said. “And if they decide it, then God or devil, Isaiah Wildes will meet his maker.”

~*~*~

Isaiah followed Bartholomew while Mathias trailed behind with a hayfork. Destiny walked beside Isaiah, passing a flame from hand to hand while babbling endless childish nonsense.

The tunnel eventually opened into a cavern, where people filled buckets from a spring-fed pool circled by lanterns and torches. They watched Isaiah pass, dust-covered children clutching the legs of worn-looking women, men with expressions of hate like Mathias’s, and others with no expression save weariness. The whole place reeked of the stain.

“Sit down,” Bartholomew said when they reached the far wall of the cavern.

Mathias pushed Isaiah to the ground and chained him to an iron ring set in the stone. Then the two walked off, leaving Destiny standing in front of him, tossing the flame from hand to hand.

“Put that demon-fire out,” Isaiah growled. And the fire in her hand vanished.

Destiny’s shock turned to a pout. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do it,” Isaiah said. “And if you can make fire, why not do something useful and make rain?”

Destiny’s brow furrowed. She cocked her head to the side.

“Destiny,” Mathias shouted. “Get home.”

Destiny ran off into the shadows, leaving Isaiah alone. He’d rarely encountered more than one witch at a time before, and here he’d stumbled into a whole coven. He needed to escape, so he could convince Governor Danvers that the hunts must continue, starting right here. Then he could reclaim the reputation that Ezekiel Cotton had stolen from him.

~*~*~

Isaiah woke to the bustle of activity surrounding the cavern’s pool. A new day must have arrived, but without sunshine it was difficult to tell. In appearance, the place wasn’t much different from other villages, aside from being underground and full almost entirely of witches. Shadowy forms came and went with buckets of water. Women did laundry. Small boys tried to swim in the pool while their mothers shooed them away. Some of the braver boys—those not old enough to know to fear and hate him—tried to approach Isaiah, but their mothers called them back.

Mathias knelt in front of Isaiah, blocking his view. “So, the finest of witch hunters is a witch himself?”

“I’m no witch.”

“You extinguished Destiny’s flame,” Mathias said. “That’s witchcraft, which makes you a witch. You’re in league with the devil. So you must be hunted down and burned. Is my logic correct?”

Mathias shrugged off Isaiah’s silence. “When my brother was young he showed a talent for music. My parents were so proud they bought him a fine piano. I tried to play too, but though I could hear the beauty in my brother’s playing, all I produced was hideous noise.” Mathias laughed bitterly. “I hated him for having a gift that I could appreciate but never master. And so I burned his piano.”

Mathias stood and looked down at Isaiah. “You’re like that, Wildes. You sense the talent around you, and you hate those who possess what you can never have. I was a child when I burned my brother’s piano, so I have some excuse. What is your excuse?”

~*~*~

Destiny came later that day with a plateful of gruel and an apologetic frown. “We have very little.”

Isaiah’s chains rattled as he took the plate. “Destiny, how did you… get the way you are?”

“You mean this?” Destiny smiled and produced a flame in her hand. She bounced it back and forth between her palms until it vanished in a puff of smoke. “It’s the way I was born. How’d you get so you could blow it out?”

Isaiah shook his head. “I didn’t do it.”

“Yes, you did. You did it last night, and you did it again now.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did, you did, you did,” Destiny chanted while clapping her hands. She flopped onto the ground in front of him. “Teach me how. Please. I’m a fast learner. Really, I am. I’m a faster learner than anyone, even the adults.”

She looked around conspiratorially and whispered, “I’m a faster learner than anyone because they don’t hardly know any tricks at all. Sure, some of them can do a few little things, but I can do my fire trick, and I healed your leg and—”

“What do you mean they can’t do any tricks?” Isaiah interrupted. “I can sense it in them.”

Destiny shrugged. “I dunno. They can do some little things, I guess, but it takes a long time, and isn’t much anyway. Not like us. No one could put out my flame before. Show me how to do it. Please.”

Isaiah frowned. He
had
wanted Destiny to stop both times. And what about the cloud of dust as he escaped New Coventry. Was that just a dry road, or something more?

“I’ll tell you what,” Isaiah said. “If you teach me your flame trick, I’ll teach you to put it out.”

~*~*~

A small, flickering flame emerged from Isaiah’s palm. Excitement and disgust filled him at the same time.

Destiny extinguished his flame and frowned. “It’s more than putting out the fire. It’s like your flame goes out too. Like your talent is gone. Or hidden.”

Isaiah nodded. He’d noticed something similar during their practice. When he extinguished Destiny’s flame, he could no longer sense the stain in her.

He frowned and shook his head. Using the word
stain
to describe this bright little girl seemed wrong. And the sense of the stain—or to use Mathias’ term,
the talent—
was not as offensive as it had been, though it still pervaded the cavern. It reminded him of how tea had tasted when he first tried it— bitter at first, but he eventually grew accustomed to it and even came to savor it.