by C. C. Finlay
A British volley cracked and Proctor lifted his musket and aimed for Pitcairn. From the corner of his eye, he saw British soldiers down everywhere, their lines as broken as the lines of the colonial defenders.
As he sighted down the musket, he saw a bright spot of Amos's blood on the end of the barrel.
He thought back to the counterspell Deborah had taught them on The Farm, the one that turned a spell with bad intentions back on itself. There could be no intentions worse than the widow's. With the blood for a focus, he formed the thought of the widow's spell in his head, just as Deborah had done.
“An eye for an eye,” he whispered. “Reverse the widow's spell.”
He squeezed the trigger. Fire erupted from the barrel.
The wind whipped away the smoke from his gun and he saw Pitcairn's sleeve torn. Pitcairn stopped, fingers on the bloody wound, as red as his jacket. He seemed surprised.
Proctor ducked his head again.
His spell had worked. He had, at least, broken the widow's protective spells. Pitcairn could be hurt. He took another shot from Amos's bag and lifted the horn to pour.
But there was no powder left.
He looked over the wall, hoping to see the British charge broken. Pitcairn had been wounded—he had to know his spell no longer protected him. But he still marched at the front of the line, his sword drawn and raised above his head, urging his men onward.
Warren and Salem were both loading their weapons. Salem tilted his head toward Pitcairn. “I've been saving my last round for him.”
“Really?” Proctor asked.
“Naw,” Salem replied as he put his ramrod away and jabbed a thumb toward one of the dead bodies. “But I saw him on the field at Lexington. He's got too many airs to suit me.”
He rose up behind the bulwark, aimed, and shot. Pitcairn fell, his sword spinning in an arc through the air away from his hand. A cry went up from his troops as he went down and Proctor saw his son William, the young officer who'd tried to make amends to him outside the coffee house in Boston, rush to his father's side.
Warren tugged at their shoulders. “Well done, men. We're out of powder—it's time to go.”
Proctor nodded, relief washing through him. They had paid a terrible price, but he had broken the widow's spell. What ever was settled on that hill today was settled by men, and not by witchcraft.
They were four steps away from the wall when another volley cracked behind them. Proctor ducked as the shots zinged past them. Warren lurched a step ahead.
“Oh,” he said. “That's not good.”
He pitched forward, head turned to the side, eyes already empty.
Salem kept running. Proctor hesitated for a moment, then chased after him. They were the last stragglers, racing to the narrow road that led across the Charlestown Neck.
They stopped there, protected by a wall of hay bales, and looked back down the double slope to see the tiny figures of the Redcoats climbing over the redoubts.
Salem shook his head, disappointed. “A couple more rounds per man would have made all the difference,” he said. “It's a shame we had to lose this one.”
“I'm not sure we did lose,” Proctor answered, seeing the carnage among the Redcoats. A trail of bodies led down the slopes to the bay, and the trampled grass was slick with blood. The soldiers occupied the redoubts, but their enemy had fled before them, able to fight another day. “What's the name of that hill anyway?”
“Which one?” Salem said. “Breed's Hill or Bunker Hill?”
A cannonball smashed into the wall of bales, showering them with bits of hay, and they both ducked, covering their heads. When they looked up, Salem tipped his hat to Proctor, then ran to join the rest of the retreating colonists.
Proctor lingered a moment longer, trying to pick out Amos's body or Warren's among the scene below. But the walls were jumbled, and with the Redcoats milling about, he couldn't tell where he'd fought or which bodies were theirs.
“Never mind,” he said to no one in particular, answering his own question. “It doesn't make a difference.”
Chapter 26
Proctor spent the rest of the day behind the colonials' fallback line in Cambridge, waiting for the next wave of the British assault, but it never came.
That night he went to work, helping the wounded where he could. Though he knew no healing spells, he changed dressings and prayed for every injured man he met.
A week later, with no further British advance, he sought out Elihu Danvers, hoping to find a way back into Boston. He wasn't sure if he was looking for Deborah or his mother.
“The British won the battle but they've lost the will to fight,” Danvers said between puffs on his pipe. “They sacrificed almost a thousand men to take that hill, and all their best officers killed. A few more victories like that, and they're done for.”
Proctor sat at his table while Mrs. Danvers stirred the cooking pot and the smallest children aimed sticks at each other, pretending to be minutemen and Redcoats.
“And no,” Danvers said. “I can't arrange for you to go back into the city. They're so frightened now, they've shut it up tighter than a nun's drawers.”
Mrs. Danvers smacked him on the back of his head. His pipe popped out of his mouth, and he caught it in his hand. He put it back to his lips and blew a ring of smoke after her.
“If you're worrying about a certain relative,” Danvers said, “I wouldn't. With the siege on, the British are eager to let anyone out of the city who wants out, so long as they've no value as a hostage.”
Neither his mother nor Deborah had any value as a hostage, not to anyone but him. Emily could go anytime she wanted, if she made up her mind where she wanted to go.
Mrs. Danvers served him a bowl of pork and beans, flavored with molasses. His favorite meal. He thanked her and laid into it with gusto.
That night he set out for home.
The roads were full of men, coming from every colony in New En gland. Word had it that there would soon be forty thousand men to shut up Boston. The war was just beginning.
He wandered by back roads, carrying the musket and bag he had taken from Amos, and thinking about his talent, and what it meant. His mother was right about one thing: there would never be any place for it in the open. But that didn't mean there wasn't any place for it. Even Emily, who had feared his talent at first, had come looking for him, ready to make peace with it. That was something to think on. Maybe there wouldn't be any more witch hangings. Maybe someday, there wouldn't be a need for the Quaker Highway anymore.
But there would always be a need for someone to train witches. No one should ever be left as he had been, ignorant of his heritage, without knowledge or guidance for his talent.
It was midmorning when he cut across the rocky fields toward the familiar farm house.
She stood waiting for him at the front door. He paused below the step and bit his cheek to keep from smiling.
“What took you so long?” Deborah asked, hands in her dress pockets. After all they'd been through, he expected her to appear older, harder. More like her mother, or his. But a softness touched her eyes and a slight smile turned the corners of her lips.
He looked off in the other direction. “Didn't you see me coming?”
“I might have scryed it,” she said. She pulled her hand from her pocket and opened it to reveal a speckled egg.
He laughed and followed her inside.
Acknowledgments
Thanks, first of all, to Saul Cornell at the Ohio State University for employing me as a research assistant on his Langum Prize–winning history A Well-Regulated Militia. I was buried up to my neck in primary source material about muskets, minutemen, and the Revolution when the character of Proctor Brown and the idea for the novel came to me. Any history I get correct is because of skills Saul taught me. Esther Forbes is best known for her novel Johnny Tremain, but she was also an excellent historian. I kept her book Paul Revere and the World He Lived In at hand whenever I was writing, along with Pa
ul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer.
Matt Bialer, my agent, and Chris Schluep, my editor at Del Rey, nurtured the idea until it grew into several books, for which I will be ever grateful. Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, bought the initial story about Proctor Brown and the Battle of Lexington and Concord and let me know that I was headed in the right direction.
James Walker and Dr. Lisa Tuvelle-Walker won the chance to name a character in this book at a charity auction for St. Joseph Montessori School. Thank you for the generous donation. If Alexandra is not quite the character you imagined, I can only plead that she is willful and did not want to be the character I originally imagined either.
Traitor to the Crown has been powered by Luck Bros' Coffee. For all the early mornings and late nights, I must acknowledge Ed and Andy and their cheerful, funny, creative baristas.
Finally, I have always depended on the kindness of writers. Catherine Morrison and Amber van Dyk got me on track with the early drafts. It's all about the egg, Amber. Special thanks to the 2007 Blue Heaven writers, especially Holly McDowell and Greg van Eekhout. Sarah, I'm sorry about the tick. Tobias Buckell and Paul Melko kicked me in the butt when I needed kicking, the way they always do. Thanks, guys. Lisa Bao read the whole manuscript on short notice and helped me nail Deborah and Proctor's relationship. Rae Carson Finlay read every word critically, from the first paragraph of the first draft to the final correction in the copy editor's notes. This one's for you, Rae.
Chapter 1
August 1776
Proctor Brown urged his horse into the shallows and forded the Potomac River an hour before sunset. Water splashed up and soaked his shoes; after ten days in the saddle, with his stockings almost as stiff as his legs, he hardly noticed wet shoes. If he found the Walker farm tonight, he'd have a chance to dry off and clean up. Assuming he was welcome.
The jarring lunge up the far bank reminded him that he was more accustomed to being behind a horse, hitched to a cart or plow, than on top of one. He grunted, shifting weight from his sorest parts to those parts almost as sore. A day of rest could be a good thing. It might take that long to convince Alexandra Walker to return with him to The Farm outside Salem, Massachusetts. It depended on how vividly she remembered the assassins sent to kill them during her last visit.
Proctor wanted her help, in case the killers came again. It took a witch to defeat witchcraft, and Alexandra was stronger and more experienced than any of the other witches he'd been able to find this past year.
When they reached the road, Proctor's sturdy little bay mare turned toward the smoke and rooftops a mile away. “No, Singer, the other way,” he said.
With a weary toss of her head, Singer circled onto the cart road that led south into the Shenandoah Valley. Even this late in the day, the August air lay on them like a damp wool blanket, one that had been warmed by a fire and filled with biting insects. Land stretched out around them, lush and green, all the way to the mountains.
So this was Virginia, the home of General Washington and half the leaders of the Revolution. Last night about this time, Proctor had arrived in McAllister's Town, Pennsylvania, where the innkeeper at The Sign of the Horse bragged about Thomas Jefferson's visit last April. Jefferson had praised the inn's sausages, which were made by the innkeeper's cousin. The sausages were good, but Proctor doubted that he'd slept in the very same room as Jefferson, no matter what the innkeeper claimed. Still, it had been worth the extra half a shilling to get that close to the author of the Declaration of Independence.
Proctor pushed back his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead as he scanned the landscape. He was a bit twitchy, wary even. This was the farthest he had ever been from home. The crickets chuckled at him from the safety of the tall grass that lined the trail.
Something rustled through that grass, startling him from his thoughts. Proctor reached for his musket, but by the time he sighted down the barrel, whatever had been there was gone.
He tried to convince himself that it was only a stray dog, or maybe a pig loose from some nearby farm. He'd been jumpy ever since the battles with the Covenant last year. Being this far from home only made him jumpier.
Not that he needed more reasons to be jumpy. As a young man in Massachusetts, he'd been forced to conceal his talent for magic lest his neighbors turn on him. But ever since the battle at Lexington, he'd needed that magic to spoil the plots of the Covenant, a mysterious group of European witches who wanted to crush the American rebellion. The Covenant's ultimate purpose remained hidden, but the stakes were so high that they'd murdered other American witches and had tried several times to kill Proctor. Not just kill him, but turn the magic in his blood into a curse against American soldiers.
He rolled down his sleeves to cover the pink scars on his forearms, a memento from that particular encounter. Thanks to Deborah, he'd survived and they'd reversed the Covenant's spell before the battle at Bunker Hill.
Deborah Walcott. Prior to the war, he'd been engaged to Emily Rucke, the beautiful daughter of a West Indies merchant, the kind of young woman everyone noticed. These days only Deborah filled his thoughts, though she kept herself plain as a Quaker and tried, like every witch he knew, to go unobserved.
What Deborah couldn't hide was the spark inside her. When the Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, she perceived the new danger.
“The Covenant will strike back hard,” she told Proctor. “Only a third of Americans support the rebellion. If the Covenant can make a mockery of independence and break our will to fight, people will go running back to Mother England like chastened children.”
Which was why they needed every witch who could detect or break a spell, including Alexandra Walker, who, when they saw her last, wanted nothing to do with magic ever again.
One of the farms ahead, rooftops silhouetted against the sky, must be hers. The sudden return of his thoughts to the present caused him to tense. Something was wrong.
The crickets had fallen silent.
A figure loomed suddenly beside the road, and Proctor raised his musket. Then he realized it was only a scarecrow, made real by the twilight.
As he relaxed, a small flash of light revealed the creature's distorted face, with intense, malevolent eyes and a sneering mouth.
Proctor started in the saddle, jerking on the bridle, and Singer flared her nostrils and came to a stop. The figure that he'd taken for a scarecrow emerged from the shadows as a man, his face lit red by the hot coal of his pipe.
“Good day,” the stranger said, lifting his pipe stem. He wore a pair of calfskin gloves, even in this miserable heat.
“Good night is more like it,” Proctor said. It was no wonder he had mistaken the man for a scarecrow. The stranger's jacket was of foreign cut, plum-colored with relics of silver embroidery on the cuffs and pocket-flaps. A golden velvet waistcoat was mismatched to a red silk scarf tied about his throat. His tattered wig was topped by a ragged bicorn hat sporting a cock's feather. The feather was surely the freshest piece of the motley ensemble.
“It's good to see a young man heading away from the war, instead of rushing off to join the rebels,” the stranger said. His voice was hollow, his accent as odd as his clothes.
Proctor bristled. He'd risked his life in the war, and he had been cut off by his mother for using magic to fight it. He believed it was the right thing for the country and was glad the Declaration of Independence had been issued, even if it meant renewed fighting.
“I've served as a minuteman and would rather be thought a patriot than a rebel,” Proctor said. “Do you have something against independence?”
“No, just against”—he puffed out a cloud of tobacco smoke, pausing as he searched for the right word—“pointless bloodshed. No offense intended, young man.”
“None taken,” Proctor said, though the young man felt irritated. Singer stamped her hooves aggressively, the way she did when strange dogs came too close. It would be best to move on. “I'm lookin
g for the Walker farm. You wouldn't happen to know where it is?”
“The Walker farm?” A smile spread slowly across the stranger's face. “That's a coincidence. I've just come from the Walker farm. Follow the trail up to the big oak with the blaze on it. Then turn to the left and climb over the hill. That's where you'll find it.”
“Is it far?” Proctor asked. He wondered how the stranger knew the Walkers. The way Alexandra talked, her parents and brothers were all ardent patriots.
“It's a mile, maybe a bit more,” the stranger said. “Be careful or you'll miss it in the dark.”
“May I have your name?” Proctor asked. “So that I may remember your kindness to me to the Walkers.”
The stranger puffed on his pipe again and blew out another small cloud of smoke. “Bootzamon,” he said finally. He chuckled, as if at some private joke. “Folks around here call me Bootzamon.”
“Thank you, Mister Bootzamon,” Proctor said. With a tip of his hat, and more than a bit of relief, he kicked Singer's sides and headed up the trail.
A hundred feet on, he stole a glance over his shoulder. For a second, Bootzamon once again appeared to be a scarecrow standing at the edge of the road. Then the coal flared in his pipe, destroying the fancy, and Proctor turned away from the strange man.
He followed the ruts of the road to the blazed oak standing on the little knoll just where Bootzamon said it would be. Proctor tried to stand in the saddle to look through the trees for some sign of a house, but soreness constrained him to craning his neck. The wind shifted and brought to his nose the scent of cheap tobacco. It smelled like Bootzamon's pipe; the stranger had probably refilled his tobacco pouch at the Walkers'.
He rode down the trail until the dark shape of a primitive house emerged from the trees. Rough-hewn logs, chinked with mud and stones, supported a roof with a single chimney. The plank door stood wide open, but no light shone within.
The hairs tingled on the back of Proctor's neck. He reached into his pocket for a handful of salt, in case he needed to cast a quick protective spell.