Traitor to the Crown The Patriot Witch (27 page)

“And then not be able to wake if we're attacked again? No thanks.”

They fell silent as a group of militiamen passed them. By their rough appearance—with beards and hunting caps—and the backwoods sound of their voices, they'd come all the way down from the Maine territory beyond New Hampshire. The men stared at Proctor, who, after several sleepless nights and a day without shaving, looked just like them. Several of them nodded greetings to him.

Either the heat of the sun or the lack of sleep caught up with him. As he nodded back, two of their faces turned to bone-white skulls shining through translucent skin.

He stumbled. Deborah reached out to grab him, and the men laughed as they walked by.

“What just happened?” she asked in a hushed tone.

“I tripped over a rut in the road,” Proctor said, pulling his arm free and staggering forward to regain his balance.

“That's nonsense,” she spit back, chasing after him. “I saw your knees buckle—I felt the surge of power through you.”

“I haven't been sleeping well,” he said. “I think I'm falling asleep on my feet, dreaming while I walk.”

“What kind of dream?”

He described the vision of the skulls, how it was specific to two of the men.

“Sometimes the talent surges through in a dream state,” she said. “Maybe you're still agitated about … what happened. And since you're sleepy, it pushes through.”

“Maybe you're right,” he said.

“You'll have to rest before we get to Boston. I'll need all your energy and strength when we find this Nance. You must let me perform a spell to help you sleep to night.”

He thought about it for a moment. “If you show me how you do it, so I can do it too. And if you promise to stand guard.”

She nodded and immediately slipped into other thoughts.

Her cheeks had dust on them from the road. Proctor wanted to reach out and brush it off, but her head was bowed in such serious contemplation that he let it go.

The Charlestown peninsula was dominated by two large hills that overlooked the little city at the water's edge. Across the narrow bay stood Boston. On his last visit, he had gone to Charlestown and taken the ferry to Boston. He thought they might do the same this time, but they found the road down to the water blocked by militia.

A dozen or so farmers and tradesmen lounged about on a couple of stumps and an old fence, laughing and talking. At Deborah and Proctor's approach, they picked up their weapons and blocked the way.

“Excuse me—” Proctor said.

Their leader was an older man in a buckskin hunting shirt—he grew pale and washed-out before Proctor's eyes: his face became a skull and his flesh hung dead and bruised on his skeleton like the walking corpses on Deborah's farm. Proctor's knees buckled and he jammed his musket in the ground for a crutch.

The men aimed their weapons at Proctor. “What's the matter?” the old man asked.

“Nothing,” Proctor said, forcing himself upright. “We're just trying to find a way into Boston.”

The old man looked Proctor up and down, then spit. “Nobody but Tories is trying to go into Boston.”

Deborah stepped forward and placed her hand on his bare wrist. He could feel the power flowing into him, giving him strength to stand. The strength didn't erase the vision before his eyes: the old man was still a skeleton covered with rotting flesh. Now that Proctor looked, he saw that several of the other men were too.

“We're sorry to bother you,” she said. “But our aunt is trapped in the city. We want to bring her out before the Lobsters do any more harm.”

Our aunt
sounded wrong to Proctor, even though he and Deborah had agreed on the pretense of being brother and sister.

“Doesn't she have a husband to look after her?” the leader asked suspiciously. Proctor winced and averted his eyes because the talking skull unnerved him.

“Not since our uncle died,” he said. “She rents a small house, does laundry for folks.”

“If she does laundry for people, she's doing it for British officers,” said one of the young men.

The leader answered, “Now, now, Elias, just because you never wash doesn't mean no one else does.”

The men laughed at this. Proctor said, “My name's Proctor Brown, and I served with the Lincoln minutemen on April nineteenth, all the way from Concord to Lexington. We'd really like to help our aunt.”

The leader looked at him sideways. “So you served under Captain Lamb?”

“No, sir, that'd be Captain Smith.”

The leader smiled. “Sorry, about the deception there, but I had to be sure.” He offered his hand. “The name's Nehemiah Johnson, and I wish I'd been there with you to give the Redcoats a licking.”

“You'll get a chance soon enough,” Proctor said.

Johnson's hand waited for him, all bone and rot beneath the translucent sheath of his visible skin. Proctor hesitated, then took hold of it—the touch turned his stomach. He shook it quickly, then let go before he puked.

“If you head around and cross The Neck, you might get in that way,” Johnson told them. “Good luck with your aunt.”

Deborah was already tugging on Proctor's arm, pulling him away. “It happened again, didn't it?”

“Yes,” he said, mopping the cold sweat from his forehead.

“I don't think it's from lack of sleep or nightmares.”

“But they look just like those fellows we saw on the farm, all dead, even though they're up and walking. Could you see that too?”

“No, I can't see anything but by the effect it has on you. What do we do now?”

“We go around to The Neck,” he said. They walked in silence for a while, Proctor trying to control the shakiness he felt in all his limbs.

When they left the peninsula and turned down the road toward Cambridge, Deborah said, “I don't know what's going on. But both times it happened, I've felt a strong surge of magic. All the hairs on my body stood on end at once, like when lightning is about to strike.”

Proctor wasn't ready to talk about it quite yet, so he said, “You've seen lightning strike? I mean, close enough to feel it.”

“Yes, when I was living with friends of my mother's down in New York State,” she said. She paused, tilting her head up at the sky, as though she was making up her mind to continue. After a bit, she said, “The storm was coming in over the other side of the valley, black thunderheads down there and clear skies right above us, just like a line separating light and dark, drawn right through heaven. I went outside to watch the storm develop. I was holding Sissy, their cat, in my arms—I was probably the same age
as Alexandra. While I was standing there, listening to the distant thunder and watching the rain fall in torrents a mile or two away, my skin tingled and all the hairs stood on end, and then thunder went off right beside me, and lightning hit the barn roof not twenty feet away, set it on fire.”

Proctor shook his head. “That's something.”

“Yeah.” She rolled up her sleeve and held her arm out for him. Pale white scars, thin as a cat's claw, marked her skin. “The cat was terrified. Of course, I was scared too, so my first instinct was to hug her tight. Her instinct was to get away. She tore me up pretty bad trying to escape.”

They walked farther while Deborah rolled down her sleeve. “Why were you living with friends of your folks?” Proctor asked. “Couldn't they take care of you?”

“Oh, they could take care of me fine,” Deborah said.

When she didn't elaborate, he asked, “Why then?”

She had a thoughtful look to her eyes, as if she was making up her mind again how much to say. “Mother said there was only so much she could teach me, so she sent me off to stay with friends.”

“Do you mean
Friend
friends, or just friends?” Proctor asked.

“They weren't Quakers, if that's what you're asking,” she said. “Her name was Margaret, and she was Methodist, though not especially devout. On Sundays, we were as likely to be in the tavern as at church.” She frowned at some memory she was unwilling to share. “It helped me learn to make my own choices.”

“My father never said much,” Proctor said. “But my mother seemed to think the fewer choices I made, the less trouble I'd get in.”

Deborah kept walking, refusing to say anything about getting into trouble.

“So that's why you don't talk like your folks?” he asked.

“You mean with all the
thee
-ing and
thou
-ing?”

“Well, yeah, that's what I mean.”

“Yeah, that's why. When I arrived at Margaret's, all her children mocked me. Later I learned that her two boys got in a fight with some other boys who were making fun of me, but I didn't know that then. I learned to talk like Margaret's family so I could fit in there. I didn't go back to the old way, not even when I came home.”

“I am glad thee don't talk like thou parents anymore,” Proctor said in an approximation of her father's tone.

“
Thou
don't and
thy
parents,” she corrected him. Then she saw that he was mocking her. She frowned at him, but the corners of her eyes crinkled. Then the mention of her parents hit both of them, and they remembered how they had died. All the humor drained out of Deborah's face in an instant.

“I'm sorry,” Proctor said.

“Stop that,” she replied. “Just stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop apologizing every time we mention my parents. It's not your fault that they're dead.”

“But if I had only—”

“Stop it!”

He fell silent. She was so strong in the face of losing her parents. He didn't how he would handle the same thing. He knew his father wasn't there much in spirit anymore, but he still dreaded his passing.

“It is solely the fault of those who killed them,” she said. “And they will be called to judgment for it.”

They were far away from the militiamen now, headed toward Cambridge and the Harvard College buildings. Even though there were no men in sight, Proctor still felt ill. His limbs were rubbery and his stomach churned.

“So we could be looking for the widow, or Miss Cecily, or this fellow Nance who's behind it all,” he said. “No matter how you cut it, I'm not sure how we're going to deal with them once we find them.”

Privately, he hoped it was Nance. If they were attacked
with magic again, and their magical defenses failed, it might come to killing. He was sure he couldn't kill Cecily or even the widow, not even if his own life depended on it. He might not even be able to kill Nance. After the past week, he'd thought he might have lost any taste he had for fighting and killing. He was afraid to tell that to Deborah.

She'd been working through their options too. “There's a spell my mother taught me,” she said tentatively. “A severing spell.”

He covered his mouth, fighting an urge to retch. “You mean, to cut them up, in pieces?”

“No! A spell to sever them from the source of their magic. Mother never used it, because a simple reversal spell can turn it back on the sender. But after the widow's attack on The Farm, she taught it to me. She thought it was important to know it, in case a witch was ever using her talents for harm.”

They stepped off to the side of the road to let a wagon pass. They exchanged a glance as they fell back in behind it. With all the people around, they would have to be circumspect with what they said.

“The risk is so high,” Deborah said. “The idea of being cut off from my talent forever frightens me. Are you all right?”

His head was bent down between his shoulders, and he covered his mouth again. “I'll be all right,” he said. “I just need to concentrate a bit, walk it out of my system.”

As they passed through Cambridge and crossed the bridge over the Charles River, they began to see signs of the siege. High on a hill to their right, cannons aimed their dark muzzles at the road. Behind the cannons there were squat barracks of rough-hewn logs, surrounded by rows of tents that shook in the breeze. The wind carried the smell of the waste pits down the slopes, along with scraps of voices from the men in the camp.

Men closer to the road looked up from their work or conversations to stare curiously at Proctor and Deborah as
they passed. Some of their faces began to flicker if Proctor glanced too closely at them. At first he thought it was a trick of the light, but the longer they walked, the more he grew to realize it was their skulls, grinning at him beneath an onionskin of flesh.

“It's happening to you again, isn't it?” she asked.

“What makes you think that?”

“You mean, besides the way you're staggering like a drunk?” Her face was pale with worry. “Are you sure you're all right?”

The images of skeletons draped with rotting flesh and eyeless skulls were all around him. It was as if an entire cemetery had coughed up its dead, and not just a pair of graves.

“If we stop, I think it's going to get a whole lot worse,” he said.

“It's definitely a spell.” She dropped her voice as a wagon loaded with baskets of radishes and sweetpeas passed them. “I didn't realize it at first, because it's the largest spell I've ever felt.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how you would walk around the barn, or Elizabeth would circle the farm?”

“Yeah.”

“This surrounds everything from Charlestown to Cambridge to here. It's strongest since we crossed the bridge, so we must be near the heart of it.”

He tipped his hat to a pair of women carrying baskets of laundry away from the camp. Their faces were normal. “It's only the militiamen I see that way.”

“Maybe it's meant for the militiamen.”

The road curved through Brookline and passed under Roxbury Hill, which was also heavily fortified. The farther they went, the harder it became for Proctor to talk. It took all his effort just to keep walking upright. They were getting close to The Neck; that's where the largest concentration of militia would be.

Boston sat on a peninsula that swam away from the mainland like a tadpole leaving its sac of eggs. The fat body of the city was connected to the rest of the land by just its tail, a long narrow stretch called The Neck. The solitary road that ran down the neck toward the city was barricaded by colonial troops. In sight of their goal, Proctor staggered to a halt.