by C. C. Finlay
“What did you think, that they’d made a slave of me, without me knowing?”
She flinched. The accusation cut deeper than he intended, hitting another, rawer nerve. “They’ve been spreading panic among the leaders of the rebellion,” she said.
“Another curse?” Proctor asked.
“There are not enough tormented souls to spare,” she said, still refusing to meet his eyes. “But the effect is very similar. Someone has been moving through the city, casting seeds of fear among the leading men. From there it spreads like a fever, leaping house-to-house upon each street, even though we are yet far from the front lines of the war.”
“I am lucky that Deborah came to us when she did,” Betsy said. “She was able to protect our shop.”
“You must say nothing to her husband, John, when he returns,” Deborah said. “He knows nothing of the talent.”
“Is he not a Friend?” Proctor asked.
“He is not,” Betsy said. “He was raised in the Church of England. We were apprenticed together, in Webster’s upholstery shop. We fell in love and married against the wishes of our families.”
Proctor’s respect for Betsy increased. Few people were that brave, and fewer still prospered after, with the judgment of the community against them. “Do you ever regret your decision?” he asked.
“Not once, not even for a second,” she said. “We’ve been happy together, and have done good work. He is serving with the militia now, readying the city against a possible attack. He only knows that Deborah is an old friend of my family.”
“I was lucky that Betsy recalled the code of the highway,” Deborah said.
Shadows paused outside the shop’s display window, a group of three or four—a man and wife, perhaps a servant and child. Proctor, seeing them, said, “Maybe we should continue this conversation in back, in case someone enters.”
“Business has been slow,” Betsy admitted. “I’d be grateful for any sale.”
“We’ll stay out of your way,” Proctor said.
Deborah chivvied Proctor and Alex into the back room while Betsy went to answer the bell at the door. Muted voices came from the front room. Another table, also covered with work, crowded the back room, along with a pair of chairs. The tight space forced Proctor and Deborah to stand near each other. He hadn’t been this close to her in weeks. For the moment, it was as though they stood alone.
“I’m sorry,” Deborah said softly. She blinked back tears. “What I did was wrong. No circumstance excuses it.”
He found his breath taken from him. “You don’t have to ask for my forgiveness.”
“No, but I do need to earn it. I have to find a way to make things right.”
Make things right? She’d been gone for weeks, without sending any word to him. “You can’t make things right by running away.”
“I’m not running away.” She turned to the table and picked up a piece of fabric. “I’ve been looking for other ways to defeat the Covenant.”
“You plan to distract them with brightly colored bits of cloth while the rest of us sneak up and bang them on the head?”
She scowled at him. “No, I was thinking about the things we’d talked about, how the Covenant wants to use the empire, King George himself, as a focus for their magic. In America, we have no such focus for the common power. We all identify each with our separate states. Every state has a different leader, a different capital, a different flag.”
“We have the grand union flag,” he said.
“Yes, and it includes the Union Jack. As if we’ve never let go of Britain. Think about it, Proctor. Even with the Continental Congress, we all look to our local representative, not the body as a whole. Our national focus is divided, and that makes us more vulnerable to the curse.”
Deborah could be so smart. “There’s the Declaration of Independence,” Proctor offered. “We all shared in that.”
“We did,” Deborah said. “And we shared in Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Those words united us as a people. But it’s not enough; those two things have passed.”
“There’s Paine’s new pamphlet,” Proctor said.
Deborah nodded eagerly, as if he understood now. “I opened the floodgates and let the full measure of my power flow into Paine as he wrote that first page. I couldn’t help myself, not with his … guardian angel lending her hand. Only later did I consider the possible benefits of it. But I doubt that any soldiers will stop to read his words during the smoke and slash of battle, and that’s when their course is most easily changed by the spectral riders at their reins.”
He saw the point she was driving toward. “There needs to be a simple focus, a symbol that all men share.”
“Yes,” Deborah answered, holding up a piece of cloth with red and white stripes, and stars on a field of blue. “Then I met Betsy and she was working on a banner for the Pennsylvania navy—”
“Uh,” Alex said, conveying a world of panic with that single syllable. She stood in the doorway, peering into the front room. A muffled squeal of fear came from Betsy as Alex turned to run, her eyes as big as silver dollars.
Proctor and Deborah leapt forward together, pinning Alex between them and carrying her into the doorway, where they all froze.
In the front room, Betsy was bound by strips of cloth, hands tied to her sides, ankles wound together, mouth gagged.
That would have been remarkable by itself, but she also floated a full foot above the floor, the toes of her shoes dangling, stretching for something to touch.
Yet what made her squeal through the gag were the shears. The pointed ends floated in midair an inch from her eyes, scissoring open and shut.
Across from Betsy stood a petite blond woman, wearing a silk dress worth more than a farm. The glee written on her face at Betsy’s fear and discomfort chilled Proctor like the coldest wind. Cecily Sumpter Pinckney. Behind her stood Jolly, Lydia, and the orphan boy.
“You,” growled Deborah.
Cecily stepped back, startled. Her expression flashed from glee to fury, as though there was little difference between the two. Betsy collapsed against the floor. Cecily flicked her fingertips, and the shears flew at Deborah’s face.
Proctor snatched them out of the air, clicking them shut in his fist. There was no magic involved, just his reflexes.
Deborah drew on her talent, flinging items at Cecily the way she’d flung stones at the barn. Folded curtains flew across the room, rolls of cloth unfurled in the air, and a set of Venetian blinds clattered as they came at Cecily from every direction.
Cecily passed her arm across her body, and the items all flew back at the doorway where Deborah and Proctor stood, the heavy fabric pelting them. The blinds smacked Proctor across the face, and when he shook off the stars and saw clearly again, yards of cloth were swirling around Deborah, binding her tightly.
He lunged forward with the point of the shears, slashing down through the fabric. Long curtains lifted off the floor, winding around her, pinning her arms to her sides, and covering her mouth. He desperately tried to pull them off, just enough for Deborah to speak, to cast a spell, but his hand had no more than touched the fabric when knuckles crashed into his jaw, knocking him to the floor.
“Sometimes the older ways work best,” said Jolly’s rough voice.
Proctor rolled over, dazed. Jolly’s huge fist lashed out at him again. Proctor rolled to the side to dodge it, and the blow glanced off his ear. Then he felt fingers in his hair, and knuckles crashed into his temple several times until everything went black.
Proctor woke up choking, a huge knot of cloth shoved in his mouth and tied so tightly his jaws ached. He tried to reach up to pull it out and found his hands tied to his waist. He attempted to stand before he realized his ankles were bound. Spots swam before his eyes, and he crashed back against the wall, panting through his nose.
A body pressed against him. Deborah. He glimpsed Betsy just beyond her. The three of them were propped against the wall in the front room of the shop like so much merchandise.
As his vision cleared, he noticed the other four people in the room. Cecily sat primly on a chair in front of them, her lace gloves folded on her lap. Her face wore the façade they had grown to accept as fact when she’d been part of their group at The Farm, a particular closemouthed smile that Proctor now realized signaled neither happiness nor agreement, nor necessarily anything pleasant at all.
Behind Cecily stood Lydia, the lean, weathered slave who had served her for so many years. She wore a checked dress meant more for summer than winter, with no more than a thin shawl on top of it to keep her warm. A forlorn boy of nine or ten, his face as sad as an empty bowl, leaned against Lydia’s hip. He rubbed a thumb across his lower lip like a much younger child. The orphan Revere had sent them to find on Long Island, William Reed. Lydia rested a hand on his untidy hair.
Lydia had helped Proctor on The Farm, introducing him to magic that no one else would teach him. She’d even tried to warn him about Cecily.
But Cecily had grown in power during the past year. Lydia and the orphan stood passively at her side, their faces emptied of passion and volition. Behind the dead surface of Lydia’s eyes, Proctor thought he glimpsed something furtive, like the flight of birds in a cage.
Over at the door, peering out the window, was the man who’d punched Proctor: Jolly. He’d come dressed as an Indian to The Farm to assassinate them; on Long Island, he had dressed in the colors of the Loyalist rangers who served King George; now he wore a buff coat with gold trim like a gentleman.
Cecily stared at Proctor. “I confess I find myself surprised,” she said in her slow southern accent, “that someone of your unusual and remarkable talents would not even attempt to use them to preserve yourself, much less protect your especial lady friend.”
Proctor lurched forward, meaning to lash out, but the bonds immobilized him even without the benefit of magic. He strained until sweat formed on his brow, then fell back against the wall.
Cecily laughed, a high tinkling sound, genuine as her smile, as though he’d made a hilarious jest. Tilting her head over her shoulder, addressing Lydia without actually looking at her, she said, “Doesn’t that just go to show? You can take the boy off the farm, but you can’t scrape the farm off the boy.”
He didn’t care if Cecily was a lady, he’d scrape her off his boots given a chance. He just doubted he’d get one.
Cecily inclined her head toward Deborah with similar condescension. “And you—if you had only drawn on him, the two of you might have been as powerful as me,” she said, opening her palm toward Lydia and the orphan boy. Lydia’s eyes revealed a present will, but it moved within tight constraints. The boy had a dreamy look about him, a ship unmoored from the world.
Jolly stepped away from the door. “Let’s just kill them and get it over with. I don’t like it here.”
“Don’t be in such a careless hurry, my dear man,” Cecily said. “You wouldn’t butcher a cow just because you were tired of milking it. I believe these two can be useful to me, in the same way that I am useful to our master.”
There was an edge to her voice at the end of her sentence. Though she enslaved others, she didn’t want to be treated like a slave by anyone. She was much like some of the southern officers in the Continental army in that respect, Proctor thought. Not that those thoughts helped him.
He shook his head. How muzzy were his thoughts? Cecily had said these two—did that mean Alex had escaped in the confusion? Should he expect help or just be glad of her escape? The latter, he decided at once. There was nothing Alex could do alone against this witch and her assassin.
“Let’s just kill her then,” Jolly said, jerking his head toward Betsy.
“Is killing your answer to everything?” Cecily asked. “We’ll have a hard time making it look like the work of Indians here in Philadelphia.”
He grunted in complaint but not in contradiction.
“A simple spell of forgetting will render her harmless to our purposes,” Cecily said, rising. “But these others may yet serve me, willingly or not. Fetch the carriage around to the front.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, relieved to finally take some action. He opened the door to the shop.
A rifle cracked outside, and Jolly was thrown back against the wall, bleeding from his chest.
That stupid Alex, Proctor thought. She hadn’t run.
Cecily shrieked, a sound of fear mixed with fury. She grabbed Lydia and the orphan by the shoulders and moved them in front of her, blocking the door.
Jolly pressed his fist into the bloody hole in his chest, kicking his way back from the door, leaving a smear of blood across the floorboards. “God damn it,” he said between clenched teeth and short, sharp breaths. “God damn it.”
Deborah had rolled over onto her knees and crawled toward the back room. Proctor reached out with bound hands and grabbed Betsy by the shoulder, tugging her toward the door. She’d been paralyzed with fear, like a climber stuck at some precarious height, but the moment Proctor started her in motion, she understood his intent and moved as fast as she could.
It wasn’t fast enough, not for any of them.
A charge shot through Proctor’s skin, like someone pulling on all his hairs at once and locking him in place. A muffled gasp from Deborah meant she’d felt the same thing. Only Betsy continued to crawl.
Cecily chanted in some foreign language Proctor didn’t recognize. It was not French or German or Dutch or any of the other tongues he’d heard in Boston among the docks, but he didn’t care for the sound of it. To judge by the way Lydia went rigid and clutched the boy in front of her, neither did she. Cecily’s voice rose, until it sounded like a chorus of voices.
Golden light filled the room, not the gold of jewelry but a polluted radiant yellow streaked with brown. Proctor’s head spun dizzily, and his vision blurred. He thought he saw the light swirling through the air, flowing like sewer streams across a muddy street. Lines poured out of Lydia, the boy, Deborah, and himself, and flowed into Cecily.
Whatever she was doing, Proctor had no desire to help her, willingly or not. He lifted his bound hands through the light flowing from him, trying to wrap it like a loose rope around his wrists and wind it back to himself.
Cecily shrieked and slapped her hand in his direction. The invisible blow hit him, throwing him back against the wall, and the flow of power from him increased.
“Attack me!” she screamed at the door. “I defy you to show your face and challenge me!”
Shapes moved outside the window, a body of people, close together, crossing the street. Maybe it hadn’t been Alex at all. Maybe it had been the local militia—Betsy’s husband, on his way home, had seen what happened and called for aid. Jolly saw them through the open doorway and rolled over in a last effort to escape. As he turned, he gasped in agony, and blood poured out of his mouth and his chest. He collapsed on the floor and lay, eyes open, perfectly still.
Cecily took no notice of him. She coiled power into her like a whip, ready to lash out.
The faces moved up the steps, and into the doorway.
Feet scuffed over the stone steps, and a shadow passed in front of the door. Proctor gritted his teeth, ready to try to attack Cecily again the moment she lashed out at her attackers.
The foremost shadow entered the room and immediately shrank in size. It was a small old woman in a gray dress and a white cap. She walked with a cane.
“Magdalena?” Cecily said, surprised.
The other witches from The Farm filed into the room behind Magdalena. The old sailor Ezra and the hardy farm girl Abby stood on one side. The two cousins, storklike Sukey and short, doughy Esther, stood on the other. The five were linked together, forming an open circle. Their faces revealed a mixture of terror and determination.
Alex trailed in behind them. Her rifle was aimed over their shoulders, at Cecily’s head. Cecily flinched from the rifle, backing away as she gathered words for a spell.
Magdalena, however, began speaking the moment she came thro
ugh the door. “Oh, Lord, fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help.”
Proctor felt the surge of power through their circle, more powerful than anything they had ever done before. The walls of the building shook as in a high wind, and Proctor’s ears popped. He longed to add his own talent to theirs. For a second he thought he might wrest it free from Cecily, but then he felt her yank it back to herself. With a sweep of her arm, she flung every item in the room—curtains, blinds, chairs, shears.
At the very least he expected it to break their focus, to see one or more of them fall, perhaps stricken by the chair. But they stood their ground and everything bounced off them as harmlessly as rain off a roof.
“You have no power over us,” Magdalena said. She leaned on her cane for support, looking frail and old. Ezra stood at her side and supported the arm that held the cane. Advancing like martyrs into flames, they held hands and surrounded Cecily. Esther trembled and averted her eyes as she stepped over Jolly’s corpse.
Cecily grabbed Lydia and the orphan boy by the shoulders, using them as a shield.
“You’re being foolish,” Cecily said. “You have no idea of my master’s power.”
“I doubt sincerely that it is greater than the power of the Lord God,” Magdalena said. “There is still time for you to repent the evil that you’ve done. Let the two of them go and surrender, and I promise that no harm will come to you.”
Cecily laughed, a mad sound.
“We can protect you if you repent of your deeds,” Magdalena said.
“Don’t let her,” Alex said, stepping forward. She pulled back the hammer on her rifle.
Anger flashed over Magdalena’s face, and she reached up to push Alex’s rifle aside. The effort threw her off-balance, but it would not have been enough to tip her over if Cecily had not chosen that moment to act.
Cecily made a grabbing motion in the air, and Jolly’s body slid across the floor. The deadweight of his boots hit Magdalena’s legs, knocking her over. Ezra and Abby collided as they tried to catch her, and all three fell down. Alex’s gun went off into the ceiling, knocking loose a spray of plaster.