Traitor to the Crown The Patriot Witch (34 page)

She leaned back in her chair.

“Anyone can be lucky twice, but you beat me a third time. Cecily performed her master's piece for me, animating Jolly's companions so they could finish the work your lumpkin wrecked. But once again, that spell was undone. Very impressive work, girl. Once may be chance, twice may be luck, but three times is skill.”

Deborah shook her head more vigorously this time, stealing a glance at Proctor.

“Girl,” the widow sneered. “I can sense the magic you're attempting. Don't even try it, or I will smack you down like a puppy that nips its master at the table. I could sever you in an instant, but I want your skill.”

The fire in the hearth flared, shooting sparks into the room. The widow stood and went to the window.

“Do you want to live your whole life in this dirty country of pig farms and ramshackle villages? Or do you want to take your rightful place in the world? Do you want to be a master or a slave?”

She had her back turned, giving Proctor the chance he'd been waiting for. He ducked his head like a battering ram and charged her.

Without looking up, she flicked her pipe stem to one side and he was flung across the room, banging his chin on the rough log wall, filling his mouth with the taste of blood.

“The Covenant of Witches belongs to no country, girl. We exist in every country, spreading our invisible empire across the globe. My master sent me here to put down this
simpleton's backwater rebellion. It is not in our interest to see the British empire weakened. But I found something in this pitiful barbaric country that I did not expect: I found power. Cecily has some, but you have so much more.”

She walked over and grabbed a handful of Deborah's poorly cut hair, arching her head back.

“Cecily has ambition too. The question is, do you? Do you have the will to become one of the Twelve who serve me? To become one of the masters instead of one of the slaves?”

Proctor watched Deborah closely for her response. Deep in his heart, he knew the alternative was death, so part of him hoped Deborah took the widow's offer. If she survived today, she could escape tomorrow, or another day.

There was a tap at the door. The widow tossed Deborah's head aside almost casually and went to answer it.

Proctor stared at Deborah, trying to catch her eye.
Accept the widow's offer
, he pleaded with her silently, hoping she understood.
Do what you must, but stay alive
.

Deborah lay still, breathing hard, her eyes closed.

The widow opened the door. Jolly stomped in, unshaven, smelling like whiskey. His good hand clutched a bayonet as well as a struggling, kicking ten-year-old boy. The boy's curly hair was tangled and unkempt, his secondhand shirt hung almost to his knees, and his feet were bare and dirty.

“Lemme goooooooo!” he howled.

The widow slapped the boy hard across his face as casually as she'd tossed aside Deborah. “Quit your whining,” she said calmly.

Putting a hand to his reddened cheek, he stared up at her wide-eyed, mouth shut. Proctor wanted to scream at him to run, but he couldn't force the words past the muffle of his gag.

“Will he suit?” she asked.

Jolly nodded. “He's orphaned, father dead at sea, mother dead of a fever this year past. He's been a servant in three house holds, but ran away from the first two. Hancock took him in as an act of charity, put him to work in the stables, left him behind when he left town.”

“I still do my chores,” the boy said.

“Good,” the widow answered, but whether to Jolly or the boy was unclear. She nodded absently, already turning away. Jolly shoved the boy toward the corner opposite Deborah, and he stumbled to the floor.

Proctor struggled to one knee—if he couldn't touch the widow, he could at least knock down her bully. But Jolly punched his chin, sending him to the floor.

“That one was for me,” Jolly said, pulling his fist back to hit him again. “This one is for my mates—”

“Enough,” the widow cried. “I need him sensible and whole for my spell to work.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Jolly said.

“Where's the rest of it?”

He reached outside the door and carried in a bowl, balancing it against his chest. Inside the bowl was a small embroidered bag and several candles.

“Set it by the hearth,” she said. She pointed her pipe stem at Proctor. His skin tingled, and a knot shifted low in his belly. She swept the pipe through the air, pointing it to the center of the room, and Proctor's body slid across the floor to the exact spot.

He lay there, panting through his nose, feeling sick again. He'd taken too many blows, gone too long without food or water. He didn't know how much longer he could keep fighting.

Jolly watched Proctor's movement with a wild gleam in his eye, something like lust, Proctor thought. Keeping his gaze on Proctor, he went and pulled another bag through the door, then shut it, taking up a guard's position beside it.

The curly-haired boy gulped a few times, cowering in the corner. Deborah sat quiet and helpless in hers.

The widow set her pipe on a ledge by the fire, lifted the bag, and undid the drawstrings. She plunged her hand inside and removed a scoopful of salt, glittering and crystalline. “Pay attention,” she told Deborah. “This is salt from the sea, for an empire that spans all seas. It was very clever of you to use my own salt to bind me before.”

She poured it in a circle around Proctor, stretching out almost to the edges of the room. That much, Proctor thought, was no different than Deborah's mother had done with her magic on the farm.

When she was done, she knotted the bag and placed it
back by the hearth. Taking the large bowl, she stepped over to the boy cowering in the corner.

“That's a good lad,” she said. “Are you a wicked boy, or a good lad?”

His knees were drawn up to his chest. He nodded hesitantly, eyes wide with fear. “I'm a good boy.”

She smiled toward Deborah. “He's a good lad.” She placed the bowl in front of the boy, saying, “Behave just a moment longer, and we'll be done with you, all right?”

He nodded again, more enthusiastically.

“Good, that's a good lad. Now lean forward for me, so I can see your pretty hair. You have very pretty hair, my lamb. Have you been told that before?”

“Yes, ma'am, my mother used to say so.” He uncurled his knees and rose up straight, tilting his dirty face up so she could see it.

“Bend forward a bit, so I can see it better,” she said. “We're almost done.”

As he bent forward, she removed a knife from her sleeve. Deborah's muffled cry of anguish pierced the room as the blade slid across the boy's throat. The widow held up his head as his blood spurted into the bowl. He kicked once, then twitched, then hung limp and still while she drained him. She did it calmly, and smoothly, wasting no motion and spilling no blood but in the bowl. The knot in Proctor's stomach twisted again: he was sure she'd done this before.

The blood in the bowl reminded Proctor of the eggs his mother used for scrying. Both represented a sacrificial offering of life …

While the blood poured, an image began to form in front of Proctor's face—militiamen on a hillside—gunfire, smoke—their backs as they ran away, retreating—he looked down and he saw blood on his hands.

Jolly chuckled and inched forward for a closer look at
the widow's work. “Don't break the circle,” she snapped at him, and he fell back.

The images dissipated and disappeared. Proctor didn't know what he was supposed to see. Blood on his hands? He still didn't trust his scrying, and he especially didn't trust anything touched by this kind of evil.

Finished with the boy, the widow bent him back into the corner and stroked his curly hair. “Such a pretty, pretty lamb,” she murmured.

His paled face stared up at the sky, seeing nothing. She wiped the knife on his shirt, leaving long red streaks in the dusty linen, then tucked it back into her sleeve.

Rising with the bloody bowl in her hands, she stepped over the line of salt, carefully so as not to break it, and stood inside the circle. She set the bowl down again, a few feet from Proctor's head, where he could not reach it to spill it. Then she removed a small wand from her other sleeve. The wood looked like blackthorn, worn smooth with age and use. There were several unnatural twists in the middle.

Tilting her head toward Deborah, she said, “This is the blood of a servant, that all the world may be bent to serve us.”

So saying, she dipped the wand in the bowl and cast a line of blood across the floor. She dipped and cast again. The third line splashed drops across Proctor's cheek. The liquid was warm when it hit him, and he felt it run, leaving a trail down his throat.

As she continued to work, the widow explained to Deborah, “This is the five-point star signifying the force of our will. Each point breaks the edge of the circle, so that our will might break the natural order and cycle of events to create a new order.”

Again, she moved carefully and precisely, her wand rising and falling as she cast the lines of her drawing. Although his head throbbed with pain, Proctor's vision had cleared,
and with it his thoughts. When she came to him, he was not going to go as easily as that poor boy had.

She finished and moved the bowl outside the circle, pausing to wipe her wand on the boy's shirt just as she had the knife. Picking up her pipe, she gestured with it and the coals stirred in the hearth until a few blazed red. Then she held a taper to the coals; when it flamed, she lit a candle and placed it at one point of the star.

Proctor held his breath against the odor as she lit the next three candles. They didn't smell sweet like the candles his mother used; instead, they reeked of something like whale oil, but less wholesome. Perhaps the fat of some other animal.

She held the fifth candle to Deborah as she lit it. “The fire carries the will of our spirit, by light and smoke, into the world to make our will take flesh.”

Deborah grimaced and shut her eyes, turning her face away. Proctor was glad to see her struggle.

But the widow only chuckled and placed the candle in the last spot. “I also turned my face away, the first time my master showed me the rites. But once I witnessed her power, and saw the futility of my own life wasted, I changed my mind. Jolly?”

He seemed startled by being directly addressed. “Yes, ma'am?”

“Where are the other items I requested?”

“Here,” he said, indicating the spot where he'd dropped them by the door. Proctor twisted his head around. He saw a flint bag, like the one he carried in the militia, and the bayonet, and a scrap of paper.

“I mean hand them to me, the musket ball first,” she said. “And mind that you don't break the circle.”

He knuckled his head, as if saluting a superior officer. Retrieving a ball from the flint bag, he leaned over the circle and held it out to the widow.

She rolled up Proctor's sleeve before taking the lead ball. “I'm so glad you came,” she whispered to him. “Before now, I was relying on my spell to make the colonials sick, too weak to fight. But now that I have a real minuteman in my grasp, someone who's already fought the British, I have the focus I need to break them utterly. And a witch, no less, someone with the power in his blood.”

Proctor wanted to fight, wanted to protest, but he could feel her draw on him, pulling on his power. Then fire shot down his forearm—she'd slashed his skin with her knife.

He had intended to struggle, but weakness flooded him, the way it had when she'd touched him through the shed door on Emerson's farm. Deborah made a muffled cry and struggled against her bonds in the corner.

“You feel that, do you?” the widow asked, with a glance at Deborah. “I am borrowing your strength now too. Pay close attention. This is a difficult spell, cast to affect men who are not present, on land that is at some distance. If Boston were not connected to the mainland by The Neck, it might not work at all.”

She pressed the lead ball into the top end of Proctor's slashed forearm and slowly rolled it down the length of cut toward his hand. His breath came in ragged nasal gasps. Sweat rolled off his forehead, stinging his eyes.

“This English ball is bathed in rebel blood—in the coming battle, may it draw all balls from English muskets toward the blood of the rebels, to strike them down in their insolence and insubordination.”

She dropped the lead ball. It thumped on the wooden planks and rolled a foot away. Proctor had to force himself to breathe, despite the stench of the candles, in order to gather his strength.

“Jolly, the bayonet.”

He held it out for her as she rolled up Proctor's other sleeve. This time he made himself watch as she pressed the
tip of it into his skin and slid it along his forearm, splitting his flesh. He grunted and tried to twist away, but he was as weak as a baby.

The bayonet had three edges, to create a wound that wouldn't heal. She pressed each sharp edge, in turn, into the open wound. His vision blurred and spots swam before his eyes.

“This English bayonet is bathed in rebel blood, so that in the coming battle, every thrust of an English bayonet may find blood, to pierce the heart of rebellion and by the piercing end it.”

More than weakness had taken root in Proctor now. A chill surged through him, like winter winds pushing through the cracks in a bad window. He shivered, and only the invisible gag in his mouth kept his teeth from chattering.

An image came back to him like an echo from some distant mountain: a hillside, defended by the militia, as musket balls filled the air around them.

He could see the men falling under fire.

He could see their fallen bodies bayoneted.

He saw the survivors fleeing.

“The commission,” she said.

“It's a blank commission,” Jolly said, handing over the paper. “Copied from an original.”

The paper crackled in her hand as she unrolled it and studied the writing. “Perfect,” she said. “If it were a specific commission, the spell would work only for that one man.”

The paper ripped loudly as she tore it in half, pressing each separate piece into one of Proctor's bleeding wounds. She turned and fed the first bloody piece into the flame of the nearest candle, holding it up as it burned. When only a corner remained, she flicked it into the air and the ash spun around until the flame burned it to nothing and vanished. She did the same with the second piece.