by C. C. Finlay
The other two understood. The top man climbed back up in the rigging. Shelden scurried off through the shadows also. Patrick rose to leave, but Hacker, the first officer, called out, “Who’s fore? Name yourself.”
Patrick crouched down on the opposite side of the chicken crates. The birds flapped their wings, raising the smell of damp feathers. Proctor peered through the crates at the ringleader. No talent at all in him, unless it was a talent for murder. But then they already knew that Dee would use anyone for his purposes.
Proctor was keenly aware of every sound—the footsteps on the quarterdeck, the creak of the wood, the slap of the sails, the strain of the ropes. Mostly he listened to the waves: every few rolls one thumped the side of the ship, sending water rushing over the rail.
The ship rolled, and Patrick crouched.
The wood creaked, and he made ready to dart to safety.
The wave thumped the side of the ship and Proctor tackled the would-be mutineer, slamming him to the deck. He sat on top of him, and clamped his hand tight around the other man’s throat. Hands clawed at Proctor’s face, but he had the longer reach, and punched the other man in the temple a few times until he was groggy.
The chickens squawked and flapped their wings, covering any noise.
Proctor dragged the man to his feet, torn in his intentions. He wanted to take him back to the captain and turn him over, but he wanted to question him about Dee first too.
Making up his mind nearly proved his undoing. The mutineer only pretended to be groggy. As soon as he was on his feet, he grabbed a belaying pin and swung at Proctor. Proctor dodged the blow and lunged back with a powerful shove just as the ship rolled.
The mutineer hit the railing and toppled over the side into the waves.
Proctor watched him go, trying to decide whether to tell anyone or not.
There was a fury of activity in the mast above Proctor, and then a voice called out, “Man overboard! There’s a man overboard!”
“Heave to,” ordered Barry. Men ran up over the deck, pulling in ropes and sails with a speed and order that Proctor couldn’t follow. He wandered across the deck like a curious passenger.
Hacker yelled, “Who is it?”
“Patrick Duggan,” the top man yelled.
All heads turned toward the rear mast.
“A tail tackle gave way,” the top man yelled.
But though the ship stopped and searched for an hour, no further sign of Patrick Duggan was found. They resumed sail in the dark as a drenching squall blew in.
Proctor stood on the deck, letting the rain soak him to the skin. He had just killed a man and he had no strong feelings one way or the other. The man had been planning a mutiny, had been planning to kill him personally, but he didn’t have to be murdered to be stopped. Proctor could have turned him in to Captain Barry.
He didn’t know whether he should be more worried about what had happened to Deborah, or about what was happening to him.
He stopped and checked the cages one more time, but there were still no eggs. The hens were probably disturbed by the transition to the sea. It might be days before they started laying again.
Unhappily, he went below.
Chapter 24
With the ringleader of the mutiny dead, the other conspirators lost their will to murder, and late the next day someone went to Captain Barry and confessed everything. Proctor discovered it late that night when the captain shook him awake in his cabin.
“There’s a mutiny hatching but I mean to step on its throat,” Barry whispered. He offered Proctor the grip-end of a pistol. “Apparently the ringleader fell overboard, but I’m asking the officers, the marines, and every other man I can trust to help rouse the crew so we can get to the bottom of this. I figure, since you’re willing to say sir these days, you might be willing to point a gun. Can I trust you?”
“You can trust me,” Proctor said. He took the pistol and checked to see that it was loaded.
He bumped shoulders with the marines crowded on the quarterdeck, while the night officer dumped the crew from their hammocks and called them up to midship. Sailors were used to being roused in the middle of the night, so this didn’t alarm them. When they had assembled and saw the row of guns resting on the quarterdeck rail and aimed in their direction, however, their mood took a different turn. Three conspirators—McElhaney, Shelden, and Crawford, the quartermaster—were strung up by their thumbs to the mizzen stay, stripped to the waist, and lashed in turns from dawn until they implicated other mutineers, which was close enough to noon that Proctor’s stomach rumbled. The men they named were strung up in turn and flogged through the afternoon until the whole plan was laid as bare and raw as their backs.
It should have sat wrong with Proctor: it was as bad as the Inquisition, torturing men until they confessed whatever crimes were expected of them. It was no different from the witch trials in Salem eight decades before.
But Proctor felt nothing.
The would-be mutineers had made bad choices and brought it on themselves. He didn’t know if all the men were guilty, but he knew enough to understand that some of them, at least, were only getting what they deserved. Just like Patrick Duggan.
He saw the blood, the wet cuts in the men’s backs, the drops on the deck, the flecks that flew back across the bosun wielding the lash. He sensed the pulse in it, sensed it throb and fade. He heard the grinding teeth, the reluctant grunts of pain, the wretched gasps. But ever since he had seen men and women burned alive in the streets of London while demons danced in the flames, the stream of his feelings had been dammed.
Or maybe it had been the months that followed in prison, when he was locked away from his talent as well as his freedom.
He shook his head. None of those was right. It had started before that. It had started on the day his soul was yanked halfway around the world, when he fought a demon in the smoke and clouds over Salem in order to protect his wife and child. Even now, all this time later, he had no idea if they’d been saved, or if the demon had shimmied down that last rope of spirit to possess Deborah.
By the time the day was finished, three men were in chains in the hold, eight more had been whipped and put on probation, and the rest of the crew was angry and worried.
Two days later, the ship was approached by a pair of English brigs. The privateer sails appeared on the horizon at dawn while Barry was reading from the Bible to the crew.
The Lafayette was about a mile distant, and fell off at the appearance of the brigs. Barry beat to quarters and had his best crew put a warning shot across the bow of the first ship. The brigs ignored the warning and swept in for the attack.
The brigs think they’re facing a leaderless crew, Proctor thought. They had knowledge of the mutiny and expected it to succeed.
He went to the ship’s rail and watched the lead brig approach. It had its cannons aimed low. “They’re going to try to hull us below the waterline,” Barry said. “Aim for their sails.”
But the roll of the ship and the narrow approach of the brig gave the advantage to the attacker. The Alliance’s cannons tore some holes in their sails but failed to slow the ship considerably. The brig turned broadside on them as the Alliance rolled to the other side in the swell. One well-aimed volley would wreck them.
Proctor leaned over the rail, counted twenty guns on the brig, and then drew on all his power. He had seen Deborah perform a spell, once, in which she deflected a volley of musket balls. He reached out and, as the cannons jetted smoke and fire, slapped his hands down.
The cannonballs dropped into the water. The momentum sent one or two skipping over the surface to bounce loudly off the Alliance’s hull, but no damage was done. The ship rolled the other way and, with its cannons aimed at the brig’s deck, Barry yelled, “Fire!”
The deck shook, shot whistled through the air, and bitter smoke obscured Proctor’s view. When it cleared, the deck of the brig was cut to pieces. Barry had used chain shot. Sails and rigging were in tatters, the railing a
nd deck were peppered with holes, and dead and injured men lay bleeding all over the deck.
Even this far away, Proctor could feel the blood call to him. It beat in him like a pulse.
He looked up to see Lydia watching him. He fought the feeling down and turned away.
The smaller brig tried to run for it then, perhaps realizing that it wasn’t facing a bunch of mutineers. Barry chased it and forced a surrender. Their two-ship convoy had now become a four-ship convoy, joined by Mars and Minerva. It wasn’t necessarily an advantage. There were more than a hundred prisoners in irons on the lowest deck, and part of the Alliance’s crew had to be sent to man the brig.
“We were shorthanded before the mutiny,” the captain told Proctor confidentially on the quarterdeck one day. “I’ll give Lieutenant Fletcher command of the brig, with a small handful of men, but he’ll need to keep all the others locked up.”
“Why not just send it back to France?”
“The American navy needs the ships and guns,” Barry said. “American ships have had a difficult time crossing the Atlantic. They’ve been captured, like the ship that carried Henry Laurens, or they’ve simply disappeared, like the Saratoga.”
“Or come close to sinking, like the ship that carried John Adams,” Proctor said, remembering their own difficulty. “What do you mean disappeared?”
“Gone without a trace,” Barry said. “Anything can happen at sea, and weather is always a danger, but that ship was seaworthy and built to ride out even a fierce storm.”
Proctor stared out over the water at the dark horizon. “Looks like a fierce storm coming on us.”
Barry turned his ruddy face to the dark clouds and clapped Proctor on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry. It will take more than a storm to keep me from the American shore.”
The storm hit them hard the next day, pushing them back toward Europe. The four ships hung lights to keep sight of one another and struggled on together through the wind and the rain. The Alliance tossed so much that only the hardiest men could keep any food down. Proctor was not one of them. Lydia and Proctor huddled together belowdeck.
“How powerful is Dee?” Lydia asked.
Meaning, Could he have sent this storm?
“I’ve seen Deborah pray up a storm this big once,” he whispered. “But she had to use herself for a focus, and the effort left her drained for weeks.” Drained nearly to the point of death. That had been right after the battle of Brooklyn, when Deborah had called in a storm they had seen forming over the ocean, to dampen the fighting with rain and bring winds that kept the British navy from cutting off Washington’s escape.
“So maybe this storm is just a coincidence,” Lydia said, bracing herself against the side of the cabin to keep from pitching over. “Coming days after a failed mutiny, and immediately after a failed attack by privateers. Maybe it’s too much for even Dee to do.”
“Maybe it is,” Proctor said, but he had already had all the same thoughts.
The fury of nature was daunting enough, but the prospect that this storm was guided somehow, fed, by a witch not even present—that was more daunting still. If Dee, tapping into the power of all the witches of the Covenant, could draw this much weather, then he was beyond any power that Proctor could imagine.
“Maybe it is,” Proctor said. “But maybe I should try to blunt the force of it anyway.”
“What ever I can do to help, let me know,” Lydia said.
His effort from the cabin was useless. He could feel the storm raging around them, but he felt separate from it. So he went up the deck and pulled himself along the safety lines. When the wind ripped his hat away, he caught it and stuffed it into his belt. Rain pelted his face and burrowed through his clothes. With an elbow hooked around the rope, slipping and sliding as the ship fell off the peak of one wave and plunged through the next crest, he slowly made his way to the spot where the men had been whipped and the blood had stained the wood.
He had grown in power during his time in the Tower, but it had been from using blood as a focus. Now he would use it again.
He pulled his knife and drew it across his right palm—it was exposed and the easiest place to reach. He meant to drip the blood onto the deck and grind it in with his shoe, connecting him to the ship and its fate. Instead the wind and the rain tore the drops sideways as they fell from his hand. His severed knuckle throbbed.
The blood scattered in the storm, nothing compared with the volume of its fury, but it was enough to let him know that it was no natural wind. Dee had sent this. The storm had a purpose, and it was to see them sink.
Proctor had never been good with weather—that was Deborah’s talent—but he would learn now or they would all die. The storm came at them from the deepest part of the ocean, so he reached out to the Continent for winds to come clear the clouds away. He spent a whole day standing there, soaked to the bone, trying to pull clear skies toward them. Crew members came and tried to persuade him to go back inside, but he growled at them until they went away. He could not let his focus be broken.
He thought through the Psalms for a good verse. “They cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses,” he mumbled. “He maketh the storm a calm, so the waves thereof are still.”
Yes, that was the verse. Proctor prayed it over and over again without ceasing, holding on to the image of clear skies reaching them from the Continent. He pictured the bluest sky he ever saw over England from the window of his cell, and he pulled it out over the ocean. “He maketh the storm a calm … He maketh the storm a calm …”
Hours passed, and Proctor reached the point of despair, and then continued. The world was big, the oceans were vast, and he needed to give the spell time to have an effect. Finally, in the middle of the night, the fury of the storm abated. The winds died down, and all that was left was a soaking downpour. It felt as if they were swimming through the sea instead of sailing over it. All four ships were battered but safe, their lanterns shining over the dark sea. They called to one another through the rain as Proctor limped back to his cabin. The captain sent him a bowl of hot beans and salted meat.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Lydia said, spooning the food to him because he was too weak to feed himself.
“Deborah can do it better than I can,” Proctor replied. It took all his effort to chew and swallow.
“Does she use blood magic also?” Lydia asked, keeping her eyes cast down.
“No, she used earth—what does it matter what she used?” he snapped. She held out another spoon for him and he swatted at it. She pulled it easily out of his reach, and he rolled over. It was one thing to grab a sheet and drag it across the bed. It was a different thing entirely to grab the sky and drag it over the ocean. Before he could pull up the sheet, he had closed his eyes and fallen asleep.
The sound of the rain beating on the deck jerked him awake. He was covered with a sheet and a blanket, and Lydia sat in a chair at his side. The wind had whistled back to strength again. The waves dropped the ship like they meant to break it, and water ran everywhere.
“It’s not through,” he said.
Lydia, her eyes wide, simply shook her head.
Proctor struggled back up to the deck and once again prepared to fight the storm.
The tops of the masts were invisible through the sheets of rain above him. A lantern lit the quarterdeck, where two men, bundled in heavy hats and coats, stood at the wheel. A few other men hunkered at their posts on the deck or the masts, but Proctor couldn’t be sure how many. The rain combined with a wind-whipped mist that obscured even the bow and stern of the ship from his view.
“I can do this for another day,” he told himself, and he stood at the heart of the ship and tried to draw better weather toward them, tethering his spell to the mainmast the way one might tie a kite to a lightning rod.
But though the storm ebbed and surged, it did not break that day or the next.
For two more weeks, the storm pounded the ship, wai
ting for them to tire or make a mistake. Even the crew muttered how unnatural it was. Every time it lessened, they would see the lanterns of the Lafayette and the captured brigs bobbing nearby. During the calm, Captain Barry ordered the ships to stay within hailing distance. Every time the storm lessened, Proctor would go below to eat and rest. Every time he did, the storm came back at them from another direction.
Nor was he the only one exhausted by the trial. For all the work that Proctor did keeping the storm at bay, the crew worked just as hard to keep the ship afloat and aimed toward America. With the weather, it was impossible to take a sighting, and so they had no idea if they had traveled a thousand miles or simply bobbed in place like a buoy. Every time Proctor thought he was spent, that he had reached the limits of his power, he would have to dig deep inside to find more will to fight.
During his breaks from the deck, Lydia would feed him and help him rest. He could feel her pouring healing strength into him, just enough to keep him going.
“Do you want to survive, even if the blood magic changes you?” she asked.
“Yes, I do,” he said. He found he wanted to live more than anything else. He needed to know what had happened to Deborah and Maggie. He needed to stop the witches who had tried to hurt them. Not just stop them, but kill them.
Lydia kept her face expressionless. Finally, she said, “It may not matter. I don’t think the storm will abate until we’ve sunk.”
Of course not. The storm was set on them by a spell. It wouldn’t let up until they had sunk. That’s why every time he brought them a respite, it renewed its power from a different direction.
Proctor scooped another bite of cold meal and biscuit into his mouth and handed Lydia the bowl. She had given him an idea. What if he could make the storm think that it had won? He rummaged below the deck, looking for the things he needed—a piece of wood from the ship, a strip of sailcloth, a length of rope.
Blood magic. He needed more blood.
He knocked at the surgeon’s cabin. Throughout the storm, the surgeon had been treating men injured by falls or blows dealt by snapped rigging, broken tackles, and the twice-sprung foremast. At least a dozen men carried fresh stitches on their faces and hands. A pile of bloody rags or bloody thread would give Proctor what he needed.