A Spell for the Revolution (20 page)

Proctor ran the other way, still holding tight to the imp Dickon.

“Release him,” Bootzamon said, his voice rustling like straw in the wind. “Release him or your death will be longer and infinitely more painful than your life.”

He raised the tomahawk to strike Proctor, but with his pipe out, the magic binding his body together had begun to fail. His straw hand, too weak to hold the hatchet, dropped it in the street.

“Dickon!” Bootzamon cried. His knees buckled and he fell in the street. “Dickon, come to me! At once!”

The imp lashed like a snake. It smashed the hot coal against the back of Proctor’s hand. “Everything that can endure fire, you shall put through the fire, and it shall be clean,” Proctor recited. His well of magic felt empty, but he dug down deep and pulled everything he had into the protective spell. “Everything that can endure fire, you shall put through the fire, and it shall be clean …”

The imp’s struggles grew weaker. The coal in its hand
faded and grew cold. Bootzamon struggled once more to reach him, rippling like a sack of straw full of mice.

And then he fell still.

“Sorry, Dickon,” Proctor said. But he was afraid that now he would be stuck with the imp, cursed to carry it forever.

With a piercing wail of despair, the imp smashed the coal against its own head, destroying it in a rain of ash and soot. Then Dickon turned to smoke, pouring through Proctor’s fingers and sinking back into the ground.

When it was gone, Proctor stood there, panting, looking at his hand. The back of it was covered with scratches, and he had burns halfway to his elbow. But he had done it—he had beaten Bootzamon again.

“Proctor?” The voice was soft, tentative.

He spun around, clenching his fist, ready to strike.

Deborah stood there, holding so much power she shone like a lantern in a steeple top.

“Are you all right?” she said.

He released his fist and dropped his hand to his side. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

“I … I saw it attack you. I … I didn’t know what to do,” she stammered. “Was that … ?”

“Yes, that was Bootzamon.”

“Is it dead?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He remembered his failure to get any aid from Emily. “Deborah, I—”

He was interrupted by another voice that said, “Deborah?”

Only the voice sounded like a curse. The scarecrow woman knelt beside Bootzamon’s limp body. Her pipe was clenched firmly in her artificial mouth, and she breathed forth a stream of smoke.

“Who—?” Deborah asked.

Her words were cut short by a shrill scream of rage that seemed to come from the scarecrow and from everywhere
around them at the same time. The scarecrow lurched to her feet and flung herself at Proctor and Deborah. She had fists full of straw pulled from Bootzamon’s body.

“I offered you power!” the scarecrow screamed. “I offered you life! And you repaid me with this … this
curse
!”

The coal in her pipe flared. For a second she took on more nearly human features, like the ghost of a person behind the mask of gourd and rags and straw.

“The widow Nance,” whispered Proctor.

“But—” Deborah said.

He grabbed her arm. “Run!”

The straw in her fists erupted into flames. They had taken only a few steps when the first ball of fire whizzed wildly past their heads and burst against the side of a tinder-dry house. The second fireball missed them too, splashing flames across the wood. Fingers of burning magic jumped out of the flames, skittering up the walls and across the rooftops.

“She’s trying to trap us,” Deborah cried.

Proctor covered her with his body and dragged them to the ground as another fireball flew over them, singeing his hair.

“Fire!” someone shouted nearby. The Fighting Cocks was already ablaze, and a second house was rapidly catching flame. Another voice screamed, “Fire!”

Proctor scooped Deborah up around the waist and looked for a clear way out of the inferno that crackled all around them. He carried Deborah into the next street, but the widow Nance pursued them.

“Run!” she screamed. “I’ll burn it all down around you—I’ll burn it all!”

Proctor dragged Deborah with him, dodging through the warren of alleys and streets. The widow Nance followed them like an avenging angel, snatching any material at hand and setting it ablaze as she hurled it after them.

“That way,” Deborah said, pulling Proctor toward a broader street. “I think the river’s that way.”

Nance cast the fireballs ahead and behind and to either side, so that flames surrounded them. Panicked crowds surged past them, running the opposite way, desperate to escape their matchstick houses. Proctor held his elbow across his mouth, choking on the smoke, stumbling blindly through the stinging ash.

Deborah clutched Proctor’s arm and dragged him back. “We’re trapped—this is a dead end.”

She was right. Rickety tenements, their rooftops already on fire, surrounded them on three sides. They turned back, but it was too late.

The widow blocked their way. She walked down the alley, cackling as she came. Her rag and straw body had caught flame at several places.

“I hope your death is as painful as mine was,” she screamed. “I hope you linger for days, burned beyond healing.”

Her head turned from side to side, searching for something to throw at them. Seeing nothing, she reached into her chest and pulled out a fistful of her own stuffing. She raised it above her head, speaking words of power.

Deborah fumbled through her pockets for salt, stammering a spell of protection. Proctor wrapped his body around Deborah to guard her.

The straw in Nance’s fist flared bright as sunrise. In an instant, the flames ran down her arm and turned her into a torch. Her clothes whipped away in fire and ash. The charred dowel-and-spindle bones that held her together clattered to the street. Only her mad laughter, hollow and bodiless, remained, mixing in with the roar of the fire until Proctor heard nothing but the flame.

A building collapsed, sending a shower of flames and sparks across the narrow street and lighting another house on fire.

“Can you call the rain?” Proctor asked.

“Not this fast, not with this weather,” Deborah said. Tears streamed from her eyes.

“Then we must save ourselves.” He grabbed Deborah by the hand and skirted the burning pile of the widow’s remains. The flames seemed to jump at them, but they ran by and escaped the dead-end alley.

Outside in the street, a crowd fled in one direction, carrying Proctor and Deborah along. Soon they found themselves in a street without flames, and then came to one without smoke, and then north to an open commons where men were running the other direction in an attempt to fight the fire and keep it from spreading to the rest of the city.

Proctor and Deborah stumbled free of the crowds and stood in the dark on the trampled grass. Their faces were black with soot, and they smelled of smoke.

Deborah turned back to look at the fire, clearly visible over the nearer rooftops. A thick column of black smoke roped its way into the darker heavens. Her jaw was set, and her face was grim.

“There’s nothing we could have done,” Proctor said.

“Did she give you the money?” Deborah asked.

Proctor hesitated for a moment. “Did who—?”

Deborah’s face grew blacker, but she continued to stare at the flames.

“You mean Emily Rucke,” Proctor said. He swallowed, his throat raw from the smoke. “She said no.”

With her head hung despondently, Deborah turned and walked away from him.

After a moment, he followed her without speaking, trailing her the way he’d trailed the scarecrow through the city streets.

The crowds were thick—refugees once turned refugees twice. Those who’d lost their homes because of the war now lost their shelter because of the fire. But wherever she went in the crowd, Proctor found her again. A chain of energy seemed to bind them, the way that lightning connected sky and earth. Whenever he lost sight of her, he would close his eyes for a moment and sense the energy, then follow her to it.

They spent the night, with other newly homeless families, in Artillery Park. The area around the park had been untouched by the flames. Neighboring families offered sheets and blankets to the refugees.

Deborah simply found a place on the grass and lay down. Proctor sat beside her, watching the crowds for enemies.

“I’m not sleeping,” she said after a while.

“Neither am I,” he said.

“We’ve got no food. We’ve got no way home. We’ve got no one to turn to.”

“I’ll find work,” Proctor said.

“I’m sure it’ll be easy to find work, what with only hundreds or thousands of men in the same spot you are, now that their homes have burned. Charity will be just as easy to come by, I’m sure.”

Proctor leaned his face against his hands and rubbed his eyes. The action hurt the hand, slashed and burned by Bootzamon’s imp, and it rubbed soot into his eyes and made them sting and water. Near them in the park, a mother gathered half a dozen children to her. The youngest cried inconsolably in her arms while she tried to comfort the others and make them lie down. The only thing that came to him was a Bible verse that Deborah had quoted recently.

“And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece.”

Deborah lay still for a moment, then she too sat up, facing the mother with the crying children. “Are you chastising me or saying a spell for luck?”

“Neither,” Proctor said. “Just reminding myself that if Jesus sent out His disciples with no food, no money, and no extra clothes, and they could still fight evil and change the world, then we might do as much.”

“He sent them out to heal the sick,” Deborah said.

“The soldiers under that curse are sick,” Proctor said.

“We have yet to heal one of them.” She gestured at the mother with the children. One of her boys was throwing a tantrum and threatening to run away. “Meanwhile, we’ve burned people’s homes and ruined their lives.”

“That’s not our fault.”

“Isn’t it?”

The mother didn’t even have a dress, only her nightgown. Proctor guessed she wasn’t more than a year or two older than he was. All the children were under the age of seven. The boy throwing the tantrum—the oldest—ran away. Her shoulders sagged, too weary to give chase.

Proctor cut off the boy with outspread arms.

“What’s your name?” he asked, smiling.

The tears and the screaming stopped. The boy’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open. He turned and
ran back to his mother, hiding his face in the hem of her gown.

The mother scowled at Proctor in warning, then hurried her children off to another corner of the park.

Proctor stood there, deflated.

Deborah chuckled at him.

“I was only trying to help,” he said.

“The people we’re trying to help don’t want our help.”

The mother in the nightgown glanced back to make sure he wasn’t following her. “Why not?” he said.

“Because they’re afraid of us,” Deborah said. “If you saw yourself right now, you’d be afraid too.”

He looked at his hands, which looked the way his hands always did, if a little worse for wear, then over to Deborah, hoping for an explanation.

“You look as scary as that bogeyman creature you fought outside the tavern—your clothes are ragged and dirty, you haven’t shaved in a couple of days, you’re covered with soot and blood, and you stink of smoke and sweat.”

“What’s a little dirt?” Proctor said, trying to brush the soot from his sleeves and pants. He made up his mind to find a stream in the morning and clean himself up.

“It’s not just the clothes,” Deborah said, more softly. “Your eyes are sharp with a hint of madness, and your voice has the raw edge of anger to it when you speak.”

Proctor flopped onto the ground, rolling up his hat for a pillow and stretching out with his head on it. “You’d be angry too if you were hungry, dirty, and stinky.”

“Believe me,” Deborah said. “I
am
hungry, dirty, and stinky.”

“You’re not as dirty or stinky as I am,” Proctor said.

“That’s true,” she admitted, stretching out. “But I hold myself to higher standards than you, even under normal circumstances.”

They lay there quietly while small groups of people
nearby whispered to one another, and groups farther away shouted something indistinct. Bells still rang, warning people of the fire and calling volunteers to help fight it. A heavy weight settled down on Proctor, and a chill ran through him, so much that he started, checking to see if a ghost had settled on him.

But there was nothing there except the smoke-hazy sky above. “They really are afraid of us,” Proctor said.

“So much so that they killed our ancestors, murdered those with talents just like ours,” Deborah replied. “They would rather die from things they cannot see than knowingly accept our help.”

“Does it make you sympathize with Miss Cecily Sumpter Pinckney then, or with her German master? Do you wish you were on their side, that you had taken advantage of the widow Nance’s offer to join her last year?”