A Spell for the Revolution (41 page)

“Let my people go.”

The fires crackled, flames leaping up, and spit out showers of sparks. A hole, but a hole made of light instead of darkness, formed in the air above the circle. The soldier’s ghost clung to him now, desperate and afraid. But as Deborah began reciting the spell again, it stretched out, drawn toward the light. The more that it was drawn, the more furiously it fought to stay behind.

“Let my people go.”

Sweat formed on Deborah’s brow as she concentrated, focusing all the power of the witches in the circle through
her. Other spirits were drawn to the light now, lines as thin as shooting stars across the sky, pulled from miles away.

“I need more power,” Deborah whispered to Proctor between repetitions of the verse.

Proctor looked around frantically. He waved Alex over. “We need you in the circle,” he said. “We need your power.”

She shook her head, afraid, watching the flow of spirits, stretched out like snakes, toward the hole in the sky. “I can’t … I won’t …”

“I will,” Lydia said. Her arm was in a sling, and a threadbare blanket was all that covered a thin dress made for southern climes. Her breath frosted the air as she spoke.

“Follow me,” Deborah said, and she continued the circle, chanting the next verse again.

Proctor felt the power flow through him, into Deborah. More and more ghosts appeared above them, stretched thin across the sky, but still tethered to the living soldiers miles away. The ghost with them in the camp thrashed and flailed like a child throwing a tantrum, clinging desperately to the soldier with the amputated leg. The soldier stood up with his crutch and moved away from the fires, back toward the wagons.

The spell was working. A power resisted them—the German himself perhaps, as if he was nearby, just across the river. But Proctor knew they could break through it with a final push. “Alex, please?” he begged.

She took a step away, afraid, and shook her head.

Remembering the way the widow Nance had drawn on Deborah, he realized they had an untapped source of talent. “We can draw on Cecily,” he whispered.

Deborah missed a step. “… will let the souls go, even the souls that ye hunt …”

Lydia firmly said, “No.”

And the power faltered. The ghosts pulled back, held by
the power of the German’s magic to this world until the curse was fulfilled.

“Let my people …,” said the chorus of voices, but there was doubt in their words, and the unity fell apart before they completed the verse.

“That woman made a slave of me,” Lydia said, “but that does not give us any right to make a slave of her in turn, and I will not be part of that.”

Deborah nodded at once. There was justice in Lydia’s argument. They would not win against evil if they were unjust.

“One more time,” Proctor said. “We can do it.”

He’d been holding back, afraid to let go with Deborah because of what she’d done to him before, but this time he opened the floodgates and poured everything he had into her. She started the circle again, trailed by Proctor and Lydia; she started the spell, and this time when the chorus came back, it came with power, and everyone pushed their talent through her.

The ghosts all surged toward the light again. Proctor pushed harder. Deborah, instead of trying to hold his power and control it, let go, opening up so that it flowed straight through her.

“… go!”

The ghost in the camp peeled loose from the soldier and flowed into the light like water spiraling down a drain. A keening cry built to a crescendo and then he was gone. The fires in the circle flared and sparked.

A grin splashed across Proctor’s face, and all the witches cheered. At that instant, their focus broke, the hole blinked out of existence, and all the other ghosts stretching toward it snapped back to their living hosts miles away.

Deborah turned around and threw herself into Proctor’s arms. He hugged her back, reveling in the smell and feel of her body against his, amazed at her power and talent. Now, even more than their night together at Betsy Ross’s
house, he knew that things were finally right between them, the way they were meant to be.

“We must finish this now,” Magdalena said, pounding her cane in the ground. “One is not enough when there are thousands.”

Deborah stepped away from Proctor and nodded. “We’re very close. I just need one more element to my focus—what’s this?”

She grabbed the pamphlet from Proctor’s back pocket. As she held it open, he saw the title that Deborah had noticed. It was Paine’s new essay,
The American Crisis
. She read the first line.
“These are the times that try men’s souls …
He has no idea how true that is.”

“I bet Washington had all the men read this before they marched tonight,” Proctor said. “That’s why he ordered up copies from Philadelphia.”

“A focus of our own, against the Covenant.”

“Now,” Magdalena said. She had directed Ezra to feed wood to the fires, to keep them going strong.

Deborah held up the pamphlet. “I think I have what we need right here—”

A child’s scream interrupted them.

The soldier lay sprawled on the ground at the back of the cart. It was empty, and Cecily was gone. William and Zoe knelt beside him.

But that was not the vise that squeezed Proctor’s heart.

Bootzamon stood at the edge of the camp. He had watched the end of the curse-breaking, the release of the trapped soul. The scream and the sight of everyone turning toward him seemed to snap him to his senses. As Proctor watched in horror, the scarecrow covered the distance to the children in a single leap. He scooped them up, one under each arm. “I’ve got the young ones,” he cried. “Find the master’s pretty.”

His sentence was addressed to the widow Nance, who
emerged from one tent and entered another. “She’s already gone.”

A rifle cracked.

Alex stood with her gun at her shoulder, smoke trailing from the barrel. The ball smashed through Nance, doing no more harm than a piece of hail in a bag of straw.

Nance turned on Alex, but before she could call up the first flame, Deborah attacked. As she ran toward the widow, her hands plucked at the air, unmaking the widow where she stood. Straw stuffing flew out of a pucker in Nance’s dress and scattered every direction, while invisible hands tugged off her gloves and pulled the wooden bones out of her sleeves. The widow screeched, but her empty sleeves flapped loose when she tried a counterconjure.

“There’re too many of them,” Bootzamon said. The children under his arm screamed and struggled.

“Proctor!” Zoe yelled.

Proctor was already running toward them, but the scarecrow-man turned and jumped twenty feet at a step. At the edge of the camp, Bootzamon turned and yelled at Nance, “We have what we came for—run!”

Nance slithered from side to side in a desperate attempt to dodge Deborah’s magic. She was a near-empty bag of clothes with a feedsack skull, shrunken and brown, more snake-like than anything. With a shrill scream of fury, she turned and fled after Bootzamon.

Proctor untethered his horse and mounted. The other witches ran toward him. Ezra lurched from one direction to another, dazed. “It happened so fast,” he said. “God almighty, what am I going to tell Captain Mak?”

“You’ll tell him how we rescued his daughter,” Proctor said. “Deborah?”

Her fists were clenched. “I’ll take them both apart. I’ll take them both apart piece by piece.”

“Leave that to me,” he said. “You need to break the curse.”

She hesitated. “What? We can’t do it without your talent.”

“You have to,” he said. “If I have to face the German, I’ll need him to be distracted. It’s the only thing that will give me a chance.”

He didn’t say
a chance to live
, but he and Deborah were looking directly at each other, and she saw the meaning of his words.

“Go,” she said. She held her hand to her heart, as if to keep it from splitting. “We’ll break the curse, I promise.”

Proctor kicked the horse hard and took off after Bootzamon and Nance. They followed a trail through the forest, and he chased them recklessly. The moon was full, the skies clear, but the trees blocked the light, turning everything into a webwork of gray. He leaned close to the animal’s neck, his hand resting on the pulse in its throat. He willed it the courage to make blind leaps and drove it to keep running until froth flecked its mouth and its energy flagged. Two dark figures dashed through the trees ahead of him.

“More,” Proctor whispered to the horse. “Give me a little more.” The horse bent its head and struggled, spit flying from its mouth as it strained. Branches tore against Proctor’s face and legs, and he prayed. The figures appeared again, much closer.

And then they plunged out of the trees into an open field. The horse stumbled and fell, giving Proctor just enough time to leap free. He rolled over the frozen furrows and came to his feet bruised and stunned. Bootzamon and Nance had crossed the field to the river’s edge. Moonlight reflected off the snow, giving details an eerie blue clarity. The lights of Trenton burned faintly on the far shore. The falls of the Delaware, an eight-foot drop over gray boulders, rumbled in the night.

“Proctor!” Zoe screamed. Immediately she started beating the scarecrow’s arms, trying to tear him apart with her hands.

Bootzamon turned back and stared at Proctor. Proctor
saw through the illusion to the gourd face, which was incapable of showing emotion. And yet this one seemed to register surprise.

“Mein Gott, I have never seen such a relentless mortal.”

“You forget our master,” the widow Nance said. She danced in her near-empty clothes like a snake about to strike. With a hiss, she turned and slid onto the river. Near the falls, the water was choked with chunks of thin ice lodged among the rocks.

“Too true,” Bootzamon said. The little boy hung limply, his thumb rubbing his lip, too afraid to respond. But Zoe redoubled her fury, trying to set the scarecrow on fire. He tightened his grip on her, saying something in another language. She grimaced in pain and her flames sputtered out.

Proctor stumbled across the field toward them. “Drop her now.”

“You’re welcome to follow us if you wish,” Bootzamon said. The cockfeather on his hat bobbed as he bowed his head. As Proctor lunged for him, he turned and jumped out onto the ice, leaping from block to floe, rock to rock, crossing to the other side. Proctor stepped on the edge and broke through. Frozen water sloshed up to his ankles. There was no way he could follow.

But there was a ferry a few miles upriver. Where the army was crossing. He turned and ran back to the horse. It lifted its head at his approach, but its chest was still heaving as it tried to catch its breath.

Proctor laid a hand on the neck and, after a moment, it started to breathe easier. But there was no way it would rise or run again tonight. He would have to walk.

“There you are, thank God.”

He looked up at the voice. It was Alex, riding bareback on Singer, her rifle across her legs.

“I followed as fast as I could,” she said. “Where are they?”

He pointed to the distant lights of Trenton. “Across the river. I couldn’t stop them.”

“Then we have to follow,” she said. Singer stamped and circled, ready to go. Proctor began untying a roll of cloth from the other horse’s back. “What’s that?”

“Betsy’s flag,” he said, rising with the bundle in his arm. “If the army is crossing, they’ve got the ferries and every boat on this part of the river. We’ll need something to get to Washington so we can talk our way across. This is it.”

Alex offered him a hand, and he climbed onto Singer. The horse braced herself against the extra weight, but she was sturdy and could carry them both a short way. Her hooves kicked up snow behind her as she headed north along the river.

A few dark miles later, they found the army. A sentry stopped them, but Proctor said, “Message for General Washington,” and they were waved on through.

It was eerily quiet despite the chaos. Horses and artillery had been loaded onto a ferryboat, which struggled, almost capsizing, as it moved away from shore. The current slung the boat downriver and banged chunks of ice at its sides until the guide ropes snapped taut. Without a word, crews on the distant shore began to slowly pull it across.

Proctor and Alex rode past the ferry landing. Along the riverbank shadowy lines of men waited to crowd into several Durham boats, heavy craft meant for shipping ironwork up and down the river. Farther on, they saw other boats, some larger, some smaller. The scene reminded Proctor of the armada that evacuated the army from Brooklyn only a few months before. The mood on the shore tonight was no less desperate. That there were only a tenth as many men in the army now, and that they were going toward battle rather than away, amplified rather than diminished the feeling.

The ghosts they carried had much to do with that. As Proctor and Alex rode along the bank, faces glanced at
them then turned grimly back to the task of crossing. Not so the ghosts—they were agitated, some of them angry, cruelly stabbing, punching, or choking their hosts. These spectral faces, the same color as the moonlight, turned toward Proctor and Alex, showing glee in their torments.