Traitor to the Crown (23 page)

Then he was back in his own body. It felt as strange and foreign to him as occupying Deborah’s body did. Immediately he tried to pull free his soul.

Behind him, he felt Deborah trying to reel him back, trying to draw on his power.

She could have it, have it all, as soon he undid the last thread that connected him to his mortal body. His flesh felt reluctant to give up his ghost, so he tore at it, fighting against himself in a suicide’s attempt to save Deborah.

No!

It was her voice in his head, less in words than in presence, imploring him to stop, demanding that he quit.

I have to
, he answered. It was all the explanation he could manage.

He found the frayed end of his soul, wrapped around his heart like a ragged rope. He took hold of it with his right hand, and the hand was complete and whole again. He braced himself to pull free. When he joined Deborah inside the house, he would lend her his power, and they would fight off the demon’s attempt to enter—

Oh.

Deborah understood. She understood the demon’s plan, or her own danger, or Proctor’s intention, or something. But what ever she understood, she flung him loose, like a child letting go of a kite in a strong wind. He had already pulled free the rope end of his soul, and so he sailed away across the sky, buffeted this way and that, helpless to return to his body or to go join Deborah.

The demon roared in frustration and aimed a wild slap of raw power at Proctor, then made a furious lunge
for Deborah and The Farm. Proctor clutched at the hem of its coat, just to slow it down, but the demon’s blow had sent him spinning wildly into a darkness no sight could pierce, cut off from Deborah and lost to his own self.

If this was it, if he wandered lost forever, it was worth it to save Deborah.

If he had saved her.

I love you
, he said, less in words than with the last essence of his spirit, even though there was no way for her to hear.

And then he felt Lydia reach out and pluck him from the void, a hand catching a string in the wind. She wound in the string, hand over hand, cutting her flesh to pull him back.

When she tucked him into the heart of his own flesh, he opened his eyes and saw her frightened face, lit by candles. Hours had passed. She leaned forward over him.

“Is she safe?” he whispered, his voice weak.

Lydia shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what just happened.”

He was too exhausted, too weary, to explain. So he didn’t try. He fell again, like a man stepping off a scaffold into a different darkness, black like the soil, heavy as a mound of earth.

Proctor slowly crawled his way back into the world, but when he reached it his first sensation was falling, like a man in a dream with no ground to catch him. From time to time, he heard Lydia’s voice, felt her hands roll him over and change his bedding, hold warm broth to his lips.

He could feel his spirit growing stronger at the same time his body wasted away, and he wondered if they would cross paths, like two strangers headed opposite directions, or if they would stop just short of meeting each other.

From time to time, he fell again through darkness, and a time came when he fell again but the ground rushed toward him. He closed his eyes and braced for the impact, but he landed as delicately as the falling snow. He woke in a bed with a mattress so soft it felt like a trap.

But he was awake. He turned his head to the side and saw large windows thrown open to an overcast sky. The unfamiliar trees outside had filled out with leaf. He felt thirsty and sore, but he was alive. He had survived. Lydia had saved him.

Had he saved Deborah?

An ash-black shape flapped out of the air and landed on the sill. Proctor’s heart pounded, but the appearance of the bird fixed his location. He was still at the inn on the edge of Epping Forest, and the bird was only
the simpleton’s pet raven. It cocked its head at him sideways and tapped the sill.

“Hallo, you’re a devil,” it squawked. “You’re a saucy devil.”

Proctor pushed back the covers and slowly sat up on the edge of the bed. “Shoo,” he told the bird. “Go on, shoo.”

“Shoo yourself, shoo your god-damned self!” the bird replied, beating its wings.

Suddenly it flapped away as quickly as it had come.

The door cracked open quietly behind Proctor, as if someone wanted to sneak up on him. He knew he was too weak to defend himself, so he drew on his power. There was no time for a protective spell, but he might be able to fling objects at an attacker, and stop them with a lucky blow. A ceramic pitcher sat on the wash table. It rose in the air and flew over to the door, hovering where he could drop it on someone’s head.

The door creaked wide.

Lydia stood there. “Thank God you’re finally up.”

Proctor breathed a sigh of relief. The pitcher dropped suddenly, grazing Lydia as it fell. It shattered on the floor in a burst of water and ceramics.

He held out his hands. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was you—”

“Are you—?” she asked.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you yourself? Are you—?”

“I’m myself,” he said. “Is Deborah safe? Do we know what happened to her?”

She stepped over the pieces of the broken pitcher, latching the door behind her. Then she crossed to the window and shut it as well. “I don’t know what happened to Deborah,” she said, turning back to him. “I thought she was trying to spirit-talk to you again.”

“She was. But she was doing it because she wanted—needed—help. The Covenant summoned a demon.”
Balfri.
He didn’t want to say the name, in case invoking the creature called it to oneself.

Lydia was skilled at turning her face into a blank wall that hid her feelings, but this time Proctor could see her wondering if he had been hurt or if maybe he was touched in the head. She crossed her arm over her chest and covered her mouth with her hand.

“I don’t know if I can explain what happened,” Proctor said. “When I arrived at The Farm, and saw it through her eyes, the whole world was wrong. It was noon, but the sky was so dark you could only see inside the house with candles.”

“Like an eclipse?” Lydia asked.

Proctor tried to remember what he’d seen and felt while he was there. “It felt like there was a great fire, as if all the forests in Canada were burning, but it was a fire set to summon the demon. A black cloud blotted out the sun. The air was so thick with smoke you couldn’t breathe. Ash fell out of the sky like dust. Do you remember the demon in the fireplace?”

Lydia glanced toward the hearth in their room and nodded once.

“Imagine that but on a larger scale—a rowboat compared with a warship, a spitball straw compared to a cannonade.” He shook his head. “No, even that doesn’t do it justice. It filled the sky.”

“But why?” Lydia asked.

Proctor pushed himself to his feet. His legs were wobbly, but he could stand. He was wearing only a nightshirt, and his bare legs looked thin. His skin was a sickly yellow. He touched his head. His hair was long and greasy. “How long have I been unconscious?”

“Weeks,” she said.

“Weeks?”

“I told the innkeeper you were suffering a relapse of malaria,” she said. “You’ve had a fever. His wife sent up
broth for you at every meal, and his son came up every day and we helped you walk around the room to keep up your strength. How much do you remember?”

“I remember falling,” he said. Maybe the sensation of falling had been the daily walks around the room. “That’s all I remember is the falling. What about Digges?”

She shook her head. “I haven’t seen a hair or heard a rumor of him. But the innkeeper says that he disappears for weeks or months at a time and then shows up with one guest or another, much like he did with us.”

“The Covenant is desperate to finish the war,” Proctor said. “They want to crush the spirit of freedom, to force everyone to declare allegiance to a single sovereign. It’s a focus to bring all the power they can draw together.”

“But … demons?”

He paced the small room, walking from the window around the bed and back again. “Maybe it’s a scorched-earth policy, a true scorched earth.” He thought about the way the countess had described America. “Our continent is not a real place to them, not part of civilization. They don’t care what happens to it.”

She picked up a towel draped over the edge of the bed and used it to wipe up the water and collect the shattered pitcher into a single pile. The pieces clicked and screeched as they tumbled together. He stared out the window while she worked, trying to sort out the explanation.

“So you think that King George is behind the plan?” Lydia asked.

“I don’t know,” Proctor said. “I don’t think so. The prince-bishop, Countess Cagliostro, they’re not even English.”

“They’re royalty.”

“But the widow Nance wasn’t and neither is Cecily,” Proctor said. “Besides, if what the widow said was true, if Rotenhahn told the truth about his age and the prince-bishop’s, if Digges is right about his ancestor, then this
has been building for centuries, long before King George was born.”

“That’s a heavy load of truth to accept from a group of known liars.” She bundled the pieces of the pitcher together and set them on the washstand.

“It is,” he admitted. “King George may only be a convenient tool for the Covenant’s purpose. Think about it. Of all the Covenant’s agents we’ve fought, only one, Major Pitcairn, had a direct connection to the Crown. And his magic was only a minor protective charm.” Funny to think it minor now—when Proctor first encountered Pit-cairn and his protective charm, it had seemed the height of sorcery. “But the people behind the Covenant may very well be advisers to the king, or connected to the Crown in some other way. We just don’t know.”

Their voices, which had begun as whispers, had risen to normal pitch, carried along by the energy of their discussion. The sound of feet shuffling in the hall outside the door brought their conversation to a sudden halt.

Proctor’s hand jumped up from his side and he looked for something to fling now that the pitcher was broken.

Lydia covered her hand with his and pushed it down.

“It’s an inn,” she said. “People walk in the halls.”

His nostrils flared and he tried to settle his breath. “Maybe we should take a walk outside. Is there someplace …”

“The forest beyond the village is usually empty. I take walks there almost every day.”

“That’s what we’ll do,” he said.

He sipped a cup of broth and ate some cold lamb stew while he dressed himself in the same clothes that he had been wearing for months. Lydia had washed and patched them, but there was no hiding the worn fabric or the frayed hems.

“Are you sure you’re well enough to do this?” she asked.

He wiped his mouth. “Yes,” he said. “I must regain my strength. If Digges doesn’t return, we should go to London to look for the Covenant.” He looked out the window at the trees. Winter had passed by swiftly, and spring was already on the verge of summer. He had no idea if Deborah was safe or not. “I thought we would sail over here and find the Covenant as easy as finding a street in Philadelphia or a farm in Virginia. I expected to be home by now.”

Lydia stood with her arms crossed and stared out the window also. “This hasn’t been what I expected either.”

There was a meaning in her words that Proctor knew he missed, but he decided it would be better to pursue it again when they were outside and away from casual listeners. “Shall we go?”

“The sooner the better,” she said. Then she snapped to her senses. “Oh, you mean to take our walk. Yes, of course.”

On their way through the common room, an old man in an apron stopped wiping the tables and waved to them. “It’s good to see you up and about again, Mister Brown,” he said. “That malaria, it’s something awful. The missus, she says she’d like to go to the Bahamas and try our hand at an inn there, but I say no thank you. Give me a healthy climate and something I know. I trust my Joe has given you good service.”

“He has, excellent service,” Proctor assured him. “The best thing for me now is fresh air and exercise.”

“Oh, we have plenty of both here, never you mind,” the innkeeper said. He walked around the tables to continue the conversation, but Proctor smiled and banged through the door out into the street.

The village was much as he remembered it, a small cluster of buildings dominated by the inn. Down the wagon-rutted road, the simpleton—Barnaby, that was his name—leaned in a window to talk to someone. The
raven bobbed on his shoulder, cocking its head at Proctor. He recalled a manor house nearby as well, but it wasn’t visible because the forest surrounded everything. The air held the crisp, fresh smell of greenery and dew.

“Which way?” Proctor asked.

“This way,” Lydia said, leading him off the road.

The woods were unlike those Proctor knew in America. There was no underbrush filling the forest floor, no thickets of wild berries or brush piles covered with vines. Instead, the ancient trees rose high above, providing a roof so thick that only a slight carpet of grasses grew beneath. The trees were not quite laid out in rows, but they were regularly spaced, as if they had been carefully selected over time while their brothers and sisters were cleared away. Even the roots had room to stretch out, half exposed, along the surface. Proctor saw piles of deer scat here and there, but the profusion of wild animals of all sizes that he’d expected when he entered the woods was nowhere to be seen. It was like thinking he was going into a crowded tavern and instead finding himself in an empty church. But there was something peaceful and restorative about it at the same time. Although they had chosen the forest as a place to talk, instead they found themselves walking for a long time in silence.

“I belong nowhere,” Lydia said.

“What?” Proctor asked, shaken from his own worries for Deborah and Maggie.

“Except maybe Deborah’s farm,” she said. “I felt at home there, like I belonged in my own right, equal to everyone else.”

“We all belonged there,” Proctor said. Dogs barked in the far distance. The direction was indiscernible because of the way sound was amplified and distorted by the open space beneath the trees. “I feel better now that I’m out in the fresh air,” Proctor said. “Maybe another day
or two of rest, and then we’ll leave for London to search for the Covenant.”