Traitor to the Crown The Patriot Witch (35 page)

“Let those who hold commissions be the first to fall. Let them be soaked in blood, and then be destroyed. Let the
army be leaderless, like a ship without a rudder, unable to steer itself toward any shore.”

Her face was beatific, as though she had prayed for a blessing of rain and saw the clouds form overhead. She smiled down at Proctor, and he could not tell her age. Though her eyes seemed as old as his mother's, or older, her face was free of wrinkles but for the corners of her eyes, and her mouth curved like a young girl's.

“This is the last part,” she said, softly, stroking Proctor's hair just as she had stroked the boy's. He tensed to kick her, hoping for a lucky strike with his knee or foot, but the life force drained from him more completely than ever before. She was drawing on him, drawing on his magic, every drop of it, for her next act. He could feel it flowing out of him, but he didn't know how to stop it.

She held the killing knife in her left hand. Up close, it was shorter than he expected, and curved like a sickle.

“With the death of this rebel, let there be fear of death among all rebels,” she whispered to Proctor, still smiling.

Energy poured from him now, like water gushing through a broken dam. She tugged open his shirt, and he tried to drive his elbow into her, but it lay dead against his side.

“When this knife pierces his heart, let fear pierce the heart of all the rebels.” She placed the point of the knife between his ribs, and pressed one hand on the hilt to push it home. “As the soul flees this mortal shell, let men flee the battlefield in fear for their own flesh and souls.”

This was his last chance. He grunted with all the force of life left in him and rolled away from her, thrusting his knees at her side, hoping for something that would give him even a momentary advantage.

He landed a mere six inches away from the tip of her knife. His knees bounced off her and rested still on the ground while he panted through his nose for more breath. He looked for Deborah, but couldn't see her. Maybe he had caused enough of a distraction to allow her to escape.

“Good,” the widow murmured, focused entirely on him, drawing on his magic until the pond inside him was dry and the ground beneath was cracked and split. “The greater your courage, the greater their fear.”

She leaned forward again. And stopped.

He panted, his eyes wet with tears, so at first he thought he was mistaken. Wrinkles appeared at the corner of the widow's mouth. Her cheeks grew sunken while she stared at her hands, now bent and arthritic. Gray roots appeared at her scalp.

The gray roots lengthened. The hair seemed to flow out of her scalp, like water pouring from a fountain, dusty gray tresses that fell in abrupt cascades about her shoulders, draining toward the floor. Her hands withered and her fingernails grew, first to sharp points, then to cracked edges. The knife fell from her hand with a clatter to the floor and the nails kept growing, curling back on themselves like yellowed snakes, nine or ten inches long, making her hands useless for work.

“You slut,” she screamed, turning toward Deborah, who cowered in the corner directly behind her, but the words came out of her mouth like a puff of dust. “You whore, you miserable fat sow!”

The last was no more than the croak of a small frog.

Deborah sat upright, her eyes fierce and fearless, fixed on the widow. Though it was night, she seemed to glow, as if the sun had been poured into her.

The widow, ashen-faced and filthy, like a figure drawn in charcoal, turned toward Deborah. Too weak to rise, she fell forward on her hands and knees. Unable to use her deformed hands, she wriggled forward like a snake, smearing the blood of her star, breaking the salt of her circle, tipping over a candle and extinguishing the flame.

Deborah leaned forward, prepared to meet her, but the widow's body grew smaller with each inch she crawled until she collapsed in a pile of rags at Deborah's feet.

Deborah's face lifted to meet Proctor's eyes, searching to see if he was all right. He felt life flow back into him like the first drops of a welcome rain.

He pulled himself up, tipping away the bloody bayonet between his knees. With that gesture, he realized his hands were free, and his mouth. He crawled toward Deborah, gasping for air through his unblocked mouth.

She stared at the rags, saying, “I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to kill her.”

“You did that? Was it a severing spell?”

“Because of you,” she said. “She grew so focused on you when you tried to roll away that I was able to pull her magic into me—a circle always flows both ways. But there was so much of it.”

“She was far older than she looked,” he said, watching the blood run down his slashed arms and over his hands. “Magic must have been the only thing keeping her alive.”

“It was horrible,” Deborah said. Proctor held her elbow and tried to help her to her feet. “And glorious.”

She stood, took a step forward, and collapsed, her body shaking as she vomited. Although her stomach was empty, she heaved again and again, dry spasms that racked her body. Proctor touched her forehead—she was burning with a fever.

“Where's Jolly?” she asked, wiping her mouth.

He followed her gaze and saw the open door. Outside, the boom of cannons echoed from across the bay.

“This isn't over yet, is it?” Proctor asked.

Numbly, Deborah shook her head.

Proctor looked at the room—the broken drawing, the tipped candle, the pile of dusty rags. He lurched to his feet, kicked over the other four lights, scattered the salt, and stamped out the lines of blood.

Without the candles, the room was dark again, lit only by the glow of the coals in the hearth.

He turned back toward Deborah. The curve of her face glowed red in the light. He held his arms open to her, pleading, as the blood ran from his cuts and dripped from his palms. “Isn't that enough?” he asked. “The widow's dead—won't that break her spell?”

Deborah tried to sit up again, but fell back dizzy, leaned against the wall.

“My mother used to say that the good we do dies with us, but the evil lives long after. She was talking about magic, and this is evil, so evil.” She looked at the body of the stable boy, who lay there openmouthed, surprised. “I think this could live much longer.”

Outside, the cannons boomed again.

“What can we do?” he said.

“You have to go,” she said. She turned her head frantically around the room, crawled to the stable boy and took hold of his shirt, then let go. “You have to go warn them.”

“Warn who?”

“The militia.” She tugged off her jacket and scrambled across the floor, groping in the near dark until she found the
widow's knife. “They won't have a chance unless you do. Come here.”

He knelt beside her. “What?”

“Hold out your arms,” she said, slashing her lightweight jacket into strips. “Let me bind them up.”

Her hands were steady as she wrapped the cloth around his arm and knotted it. She pulled the sleeve down to his wrist when she was done. “There, that'll pass in the dark.”

“It itches—”

“A healing spell, the best I can do, I'm sorry it's not more. Give me the other arm.”

He didn't want to interrupt her spell, but as soon as she tugged down his other sleeve, he asked, “What difference will a warning make?”

“You're right. A warning's not enough.” She sat back, wiping her face, smearing dark lines of his blood across her cheeks. Looking at the scattered pieces of the spell, she said, “The fear—they won't feel any fear, that part of her spell was interrupted, never completed. But we have to counter the rest of it.”

Proctor thought of Pitcairn's golden medallion, the one he'd received from the widow. “We could make charms, something to keep them safe.”

“But then we'd have to get them there, to the men.”

“I can do that,” he said, looking around the room for something to charm. He saw the lead ball the widow had dropped on the floor—he didn't want to touch that. But the bag of flints still sat by the door. He ran to it and pulled out a handful of lead balls.

“Can we make these into charms?”

“Those will work,” she said. “They'll work perfectly, countering the ball she used for her spell.”

Outside, the ship's cannons boomed again. From the commons nearby, they heard the British regulars answer it with a huzzah.

“We don't have much time,” he said.

“Give them to me.”

He poured the musket balls into her cupped hands, which dropped from the weight. Wrapping his own hands around hers, he helped lift them to her mouth. She whispered into the gap at her thumbs.

“May Thy light shine on these simple balls of lead. If it be Thy will, let them become shields of life rather than takers of life, let no man who bears them fall before his appointed time.”

Light flowed down her arms and into her hands. Proctor's skin tingled and all his hair prickled. Inside their cupped hands, the balls glowed for a moment like coals.

Sweat beaded on Deborah's forehead and her eyes blinked, unfocused. It passed, and she leaned back to support herself against the wall.

“Are you all right?” Proctor asked. “Should I find a doctor?”

“I'm fine,” she whispered.

“You don't look fine. I'm worried.”

“It's just the widow's magic still swimming in me, and all of it tainted like bad water,” she said. “Look.”

Her hands were open. The lead balls had been transformed into tiny skulls, the irregularities in their surface forming the divots of eyes and noses, lines scored like teeth.

“These will work,” she said, thrusting them at Proctor. “They will protect whoever carries them.”

He took them and turned them over in his palm in amazement. The enormity of the task ahead hit him then, and he shoved the little skulls into his pocket. “All I need to do now is find a thousand more. At which point, I will be so weighted down that when I try to swim across the bay, I will sink to the bottom, unable to rise.”

“There are enough to protect the officers. They're in the most danger from her spell. You must find a way to the battlefield and give them these charms. Protect them.”

Proctor nodded and rose. She was right, of course. He offered her his hand to help her up.

She shook her head. “I'm too weak to go anywhere right now. You'll have to do it on your own.”

“But—”

“You can do it.” Her voice was weak, but full of conviction. She beckoned him close, and he knelt beside her to hear her better.

Placing her hand on his, she leaned her mouth up to his head.

“Keep one charm for yourself,” she said, her lips brushing his ear. And then she kissed his cheek.

He felt himself blush. “Do I look like the sort of fellow who's going to put himself in the way of danger?”

Before she could answer, before he could change his mind, he ran out the door.

Cool air washed over him, blessedly fresh.

Cannons boomed at his back and he jumped—the sound traveled clearer out here, the cannons seemed closer. The noise came across the water, from Charlestown, not from the militia lines at Roxbury.

He looked toward the road. Down at the bottom of the hill, British troops marched in formation, the lights they carried glinting off their bayonets. They were headed into the city, not toward The Neck, which meant a staging area for boats. That made sense—the colonials were no match for the Royal Navy.

So he had to get to Charlestown, and the quickest way there was through The Neck.

He smelled horse manure, and where there was horse manure, there had to be horses. He spun around until he saw the stables—so large that at first he took them for an inn or another home.

Inside, they were nearly deserted. He walked from stall to stall, trying not to think of the curly-haired stable boy, never mind the restlessness of the horses. There was a sturdy
animal in the first stall, the kind he'd like to have on the farm, but it nipped at his hand. If he had more time, that wouldn't be a problem. The horse in the second stall was a gelding that looked to run like the wind, but the cannons boomed again and it whinnied and shied from him. The sorrel mare in the third stall was swaybacked, built more like the plow horse than the gelding, but she'd have to do.

He spotted the tack at the far end of the stable. He had it in his hands and was carrying it back to the stall when he realized he had nowhere to ride to—if there was a battle to-night, they wouldn't let anyone cross The Neck. Assuming he could talk or force his way through the town gate, by the time he rode the miles around through Roxbury and Cambridge, it might already be too late.

He hurled the saddle down in frustration, and kicked up the straw.

There must be some other way—

He spotted it by the door. He sprinted over and took the broom in his hands, then thrust it between his knees, like a child playing horsey.

“Up!” he said, trying to focus. “Up, up, into the air!”

The broom did nothing.

“Giddyup?” he said, adding a hop.

The mare in the third stall stamped at the ground and craned her neck toward him.

“What're you looking at?” he asked.

The horse snorted.

He leaned the broom against the wall. Maybe he needed a stronger focus—

The door slammed open—a British junior officer stepped in, lean, with a long chin and his hat in his hand. His face was as red as his coat. Proctor balled his fists, prepared to knock down the officer and make his escape before an alarm was raised.

“Stable boy!”

Caught in mid-step, Proctor said, “Yes?”

“That's
yes, sir
, you insolent colonial trash,” he said, noticing the saddle on the floor with an air of disgust. “Colonel Jack's horse just threw a shoe. We're requisitioning one of these.”

“If you say so.”

“Saddle up the best horse and bring it down to the boats or I will return and see you whipped.”

As he turned to go, Proctor called out to him, “I'm sorry, but which boats where?”

“The North Battery, and hurry, we're due to embark in half an hour.”

“All right,” Proctor said.

Lifting his rifle butt, the officer started forward to strike Proctor, probably to make him obey more quickly.