Thieves' Quarry (The Thieftaker Chronicles) (5 page)

Kannice stirred beside him. “Whassamatter?” she asked in a muffled, sleepy voice.

Ethan kissed her bare shoulder. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

But he was already wide awake. He lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, his body tense as he waited for another pulse of power. None came, and as the minutes dragged by he began to doubt that he had actually felt the first one. It would have taken a powerful conjurer to cast such a deep spell, and there weren’t that many in Boston. At least, not among the people he knew.

His thoughts turned once more to the foreigner he had seen downstairs in the Dowser the night before. His awareness of Ethan’s conjuring marked him as a speller. But Ethan had no reason to think that the bespectacled stranger was powerful or skilled enough to cast a spell as strong as the one he had just felt. Such an accomplished conjurer would have known what kind of casting Ethan had used the night before, and would have left the tavern rather than continue a conversation that, for good reason, he didn’t want others to hear. A speller with such abilities might even have determined exactly who in the tavern had cast the listening spell.

But if Sephira’s friend hadn’t cast the spell this morning, who had? Tarijanna Windcatcher, a self-described “marriage smith,” was a powerful speller and made no effort to hide the fact that she conjured. Janna, though, did most of her conjuring at night; the one time Ethan had gone by her place before midmorning, he had woken her with his knocking. Janna had been none too pleased.

Gavin Black, an old conjurer who lived on Hillier’s Lane, gave up spells long ago, or so he claimed. From what he had told Ethan, it seemed he had done most of his conjuring as a younger man while sailing on merchant ships and captaining his own vessel. But he had long since made his fortune, and though Ethan had spoken to him about conjuring, he had never known him to cast a spell.

The other conjurers he knew of in Boston weren’t skilled enough to work such powerful castings.

If the spell had been real.

Ethan closed his eyes again, trying to remember what he felt in the instant before he woke. At first all that came to him was the physical sensation, the feeling that the air around him, the bed beneath him, the walls of the room, were all reverberating with a single tone, as if God himself had struck some enormous bell. But sifting through his memory of those first few sensations, he realized that he had awakened feeling vaguely uneasy, though whether because of his dreams or something inherently dark in the casting, he couldn’t say.

His pulse had slowed, but still Ethan knew that he wouldn’t get back to sleep. He swung himself out of bed and began to pull on his clothes.

“Where are you going?” Kannice asked, her voice husky with sleep. She smiled up at him. “It’s early still.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“I wasn’t suggesting sleep.”

He sat on the bed beside her. “I’m not sure I’m in the mood for that, either.”

Her expression grew serious. “What’s the matter?”

“I thought I felt something. A spell. That’s what woke me.”

“Nearby?”

He shook his head. “No. Maybe. It was so powerful it was hard to tell. Somewhere here in Boston, but I can’t be sure of much beyond that. The truth is, I’m not even sure it was real.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“I might have dreamt it. It felt real enough, but I can’t think of anyone in this city with the strength or skill needed to cast such a spell.”

“You said last night that there was a man in the tavern. A conjurer.”

“I don’t think it was him,” Ethan said. He stood again and reached for his shirt. “But I should go. Something about this isn’t right.” He wanted to know more about the bespectacled man, and eventually he would speak with Janna. She might not have been responsible for the spell that woke him, but at least she would be able to tell him whether or not he had imagined it.

He finished dressing and leaned over to kiss Kannice.

“A spell as big as what you felt,” she whispered. “Could you have cast it?”

Ethan hesitated, nodded. “Aye. But only by taking a life.”

She didn’t blanch, or give any other indication that his answer had scared her. She merely said, “Watch yourself,” and reached up to touch his cheek.

He wrapped his hand around hers for a moment. “Always.”

He left her room, descended the stairs, and walked out of the Dowser into the street. The sun still hung low in the east, but the sky above was cloudless and a deep shade of azure. Vapor from his breath billowed into the morning air and was swept away by a cool breeze. A perfect autumn morning. No doubt October would bring gray skies and cold rains. But for today, at least, September maintained its gentle hold on the province.

Ethan set out toward Cornhill and the South End, where he leased a room from Henry Dall, a cooper. He had food there and he liked to check in with Henry periodically, just to let the old man know that he was well. Henry might have been his landlord, but he treated Ethan as he would a son. Knowing that Ethan was a thieftaker, he worried when he didn’t hear from him for more than a day or two.

As Ethan walked toward his home, he considered again Kannice’s question and his answer to it.

The spells cast by conjurers fell into three broad categories. Elemental spells were by far the simplest, and also the least powerful. Using one of the basic elements—air, water, earth, or fire—a conjurer could summon phantom sounds or visual illusions to confuse a foe or deceive the unsuspecting. When Ethan’s mother first began to teach him and his sisters how to conjure, these were the spells she showed them.

Living spells were more potent and more difficult to cast. As the name implied, a living spell drew its power from some part of a living thing: blood or flesh, hair, feathers, or fish scales, grass, leaves, or tree bark … Such spellmaking went far beyond mere illusion. Using living spells, a conjurer could heal with blood, as Ethan had done the night before, or he could could kill with it. A powerful conjurer might raise a wind or a storm; he might conjure fire or draw water from the earth.

And yet, as powerful as living spells could be, they were nothing compared to killing spells. These conjurings required the taking of a life, and there were almost no limits to what they could do. A conjurer who was willing to kill for his spellmaking could reduce Boston to a pile of rubble or boil away the waters of Boston Harbor. He could rob others of their free will and force them to do his bidding, no matter how heinous.

In all his years, Ethan had cast only one killing spell, and though he’d had little choice at the time, he was still haunted by the memory. But he had encountered conjurers who had no qualms about taking lives in order to enhance their power. The spell he had felt this morning was almost certainly a killing spell. That would explain not only the potency of the casting, but also the unsettled feeling that had plagued him since he woke.

And once more, a voice in his head echoed,
If it was real.

Breakfast could wait, and so could Henry. He needed to know more about this spell.

Under most circumstances he never would have gone to Tarijanna so early in the morning. On the best of days she was difficult, even ill-tempered. She had few friends and though she tolerated Ethan because he was a speller and also because they shared a deep and abiding hatred of Sephira Pryce, she probably didn’t like him any more than she did anyone else. But he had to know if he had dreamt that spell or truly felt it.

Making his way to Janna’s home, Ethan passed the old Granary Burying Ground and King’s Chapel, where his friend Trevor Pell served as a minister under the authority of the rector, the Reverend Henry Caner. Once beyond the chapel, Ethan cut south to Newbury Street, where homes and shops gave way to open pastures and wooded country estates. Sugar maples and white-barked birch trees lined the road and grew in clusters along the edges of fields and grazing tracts, their leaves, shading toward orange and bright yellow, rustling in the wind.

Tarijanna lived at the southern edge of Boston, near the town gate, on a narrow strip of land known as the Neck. She owned a run-down tavern called the Fat Spider, and lived in a small room on the second floor of the building. Most of those who frequented the Spider were themselves conjurers or people who came to Janna seeking her services as a spellmaker. She served food and drink in her tavern, just like the proprietor of any other publick house. But she also sold herbs, oils, and talismans. And she peddled her services as a conjurer. She specialized in love spells, which she used to find love matches for her clients. The sign outside her tavern read “T. Windcatcher, Marriage Smith. Love is magick.” It might as well have said, “A speller lives here!”

Spellers were feared, even hated. Most people mistakenly equated conjuring with witchcraft, and though it had been the better part of a century since witch trials led to the execution of twenty men and women in nearby Salem, Massachusetts, suspected witches were still put to death throughout the province. Janna didn’t seem to care.

Reaching the Fat Spider, Ethan knocked on the tavern door, expecting that he would have to rap on the gray, weathered wood for several minutes before hearing any response. He was wrong.

At the first knock, he heard a strong voice call out, “It’s unlocked!”

Ethan pushed the door open and stepped into the dark tavern. As always, the air within smelled strongly of cinnamon, clove, roasting meat, and ale. Janna sat in a low chair by the fire, a cup in her hand, filled no doubt with watered Madeira wine.

Janna hailed from one of the Caribbean islands, though because she was orphaned at sea as a young girl, she didn’t know which one. She also didn’t know her exact age, or her family name—she chose Windcatcher because she liked the sound of it.

Her skin was a rich nut brown, and her hair, which she wore shorn almost to her scalp, was as white as bone. But though her thin, wrinkled face made her appear ancient, her dark eyes were as bright and alert as those of a child. If she had asked Ethan how old he thought she was, he wouldn’t have known what to say.

“Kaille,” she said upon seeing him, her mouth turned down in a scowl. “I shoulda known it was you. First person to come through that door, and you ain’t gonna spend one pence. You like a bad omen comin’ at this hour.”

She said much the same thing whenever he came to her tavern. In fairness, she had a point. He rarely bought anything from her; he sought her counsel when he had questions about spells, because no one in the city knew more about conjuring than she did. The truth was, Ethan might well have been as close a friend as Janna had in Boston. He chose to believe that she greeted him this way because she liked him. Others she simply would have ignored.

“Nice to see you, too, Janna.”

The scowl deepened. “What d’you want, anyway?”

He crossed to where she sat and pulled up a chair next to hers. The fire in her hearth threw off a lot of heat, but still she had a shawl wrapped around her bony shoulders and a threadbare woolen blanket covering her legs. She often complained of the cold, even on the mildest days of spring and fall. For all the years she had lived in the city, it seemed to Ethan that she had never adjusted to leaving the islands.

“You’re up early today,” he said. “Earlier than usual.”

She shrugged, her gaze sliding away. “Why would you care about when I sleep and when I don’t?”

“You felt it too, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

“Look me in the eye, Janna.”

Grudgingly, she faced him again.

“Did you feel something this morning?” he asked. “Did you feel a pulse of power? It came just after dawn, and it would have been strong enough to make it feel like the Spider was going to come down on top of you.”

Janna glared back at him. “Yeah,” she said at last. “I felt it.”

Ethan sat back in his chair, feeling both relieved and alarmed. He hadn’t imagined it. But then who could have cast such a spell?

“You weren’t certain,” Janna said.

He shook his head. “It woke me from a dream, and I didn’t know if it was real or not.”

She gave a low chuckle. “Oh, it was real. Like you said, I thought this old buildin’ was gonna crumble it started shakin’ so.”

“Do you know what kind of spell it was?” Ethan asked.

“No,” Janna said. “But it was dark, and strong as can be. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a killin’ spell. But I couldn’t tell what the magick was supposed to do.”

“Neither could I. Do you know where it came from?”

“Somewhere in the city. But you knew that.”

“There aren’t too many of us who can conjure like that,” Ethan said.

She shook her head. “You, me, Ole Black. We’re the only ones I can think of.” Her expression turned sly. “To be honest, Kaille, I figured it was you.”

“It wasn’t. And I don’t think it was Gavin, either.” He raised his eyebrows. “I assume it wasn’t you.”

“Woke me from a deep sleep,” she said.

“So I figured, seeing as you’re awake before noon.” He smiled; she frowned. “I encountered a new conjurer last night, a friend of Sephira’s, I believe. But I don’t think he’s powerful enough to have cast the spell we felt.”

Janna’s frown deepened. “You sure? A dark spell from a friend of Sephira sounds just about right to me.”

“Most times I’d be inclined to agree. And maybe you’re right. I intend to keep an eye on him. But right now, as far as I can tell, he’s not strong enough.”

“If you say so,” Janna said, not sounding convinced.

“Is there anyone else new in town, Janna? Anyone who could cast a spell like this?”

“No one I can think of.”

He had expected her to say as much. “All right,” he said, standing. “My thanks.” He crossed back to the tavern door and pulled it open. “If you hear anything about a new speller in Boston, someone capable of this kind of conjuring, you’ll let me know, right?”

“There any gold in it?”

“I’m not working for anyone. I’m doing this for me.”

“Yeah,” she said, the scowl returning. “I thought so.”

He smiled, stepped out onto the street, and started to pull the door closed.