“Bring him this way,” the sheriff said, his voice echoing in the cramped space.
The two regulars steered Ethan down a narrow corridor and through a second door nearly as ponderous as the one in front. As soon as they stepped into this second passageway, the smell hit Ethan, and he gagged. Sweat, urine, feces, vomit, fear, desperation, hopelessness. He was drowning in a noisome sea. The men holding him practically had to carry him along the stone corridor, his feet half walking, half dragging. The soldiers’ fingers were like iron, gouging the muscles in his arm. And Ethan clung to that pain as a respite from his memories and his terror.
The last door on the left side of the corridor stood open. Greenleaf stopped beside it, smirking at Ethan as the men ushered him past and into the cell. It might as well have been the same cell in which he had been held during his trial. A shaft of silvery gray light shone through the small window high on the wall opposite the cell door. A pallet, tattered and leaking straw, lay along one wall with a single brown woolen blanket folded at the foot. The foul smell from the privy hole in the far corner permeated the chamber, forcing Ethan to clamp his teeth against a wave of nausea.
But he made himself stand on his own two feet, and tried to wrest his arms from the hands of the soldiers. He had survived prison before; he would do so again.
“Chain him up,” Greenleaf said from behind them.
Ethan tried to turn. “What?” he said, the word scraped from his throat.
The sheriff entered the cell and jangled a manacle that Ethan hadn’t noticed before. It was bolted to the wall beside him. Several of them were.
“As I said before, Kaille, I know what you are. I may not be an expert in the ways of witchcraft, but I know better than to leave you in this cell and expect you to be here still come the morn. My thought is that if you can’t speak your witchery, and if you can’t wave your hands around in all manner and call demons to you in that way, you’ll be powerless. And that’s what I want.” He gestured to the soldiers. “Chain him, lads. Don’t worry about being too gentle with him, either.”
The soldiers pushed Ethan against the wall, wrenched his arms up into an awkward position, and clamped the manacles around his wrists. The chains might have been set for a larger man, or Greenleaf might not have cared a whit for Ethan’s comfort. In either case, the cuffs were so far apart that they stretched Ethan’s arms and shoulders, leaving him in a great deal of discomfort and unable to move his hands at all. The iron carved into his skin, but only enough to bruise; not enough to make him bleed. The regulars attached two more manacles to his ankles. These were less restricting, though that hardly mattered given the positioning of the cuffs holding his wrists. At last, they put an iron collar around his neck and tied a gag in his mouth.
“There,” Greenleaf said, a smug smile on his face as he examined the chains and tested the bolts that held them to the rough, cold stone. “I don’t expect you’ll be going anywhere. At least, not until we say so.”
The sheriff reached into Ethan’s pockets and removed a few coins-maybe five shillings and as many pence. He made a quick count and pocketed the money, smiling up at Ethan again. “My thanks.”
Ethan glared at him, wanting nothing more than to speak a spell that would flay the sheriff’s skin from his bones or perhaps crush his skull. But while Greenleaf had never given any indication that he knew the first thing about conjuring, on this day he had managed inadvertently to render Ethan powerless. He didn’t need to say anything aloud to conjure, but in order to break free of the chains and the prison he did need blood. He didn’t know if he could move his hands enough to cut or scrape himself. With the gag in his mouth, he couldn’t even bite his cheek or tongue. Apparently, Greenleaf was as lucky as he was ignorant.
“Someone will come by later, I suppose,” the sheriff told him, sounding calm and confident now that he had Ethan tamed. “You’ll need some water and some food, such as it is.” He stepped out of the cell, closed the door and threw the bolt, the metallic ring of the lock reverberating in the walls like a spell. “Enjoy yourself.”
Greenleaf laughed as the click of his boots on stone retreated down the hallway. The two soldiers remained outside the cell. The sheriff wasn’t taking any chances.
Ethan’s arms and shoulders were already starting to grow sore, and the manacle around his neck held his head at an odd angle, making his neck and back ache, too. But like the pain of the soldiers’ grips on his arms, the agony in his shoulders served to clear his thoughts, searing away those haunting memories of Charleston and Barbados, and concentrating his thoughts on his predicament.
Gant was dead. Osborne, it now seemed, never had been. All this time Ethan had assumed that Gant was the killer, the one who had killed every man on the Graystone and attacked Mariz. But Ethan would have bet the ten pounds Geoffrey had promised him that a revela potestatem spell would show that Gant had been killed by that same orange power Ethan had seen on Sephira’s man and the dead soldiers aboard the ship. He wanted to believe that it had been Osborne all along, but how could he explain Osborne’s presence among the dead soldiers aboard the Graystone? It was clear to him now that Osborne and Gant had been working together all this time, but how much conjuring had Gant done? How much had he been capable of doing? Rickman might have learned of Osborne’s escape from Castle William today, but Ethan guessed that the thief had made his way back to Boston two days ago.
Too many questions still remained. And right now, there was nothing Ethan could do to answer any of them.
It occurred to him that he still had two leaves of mullein in the pouch in his pocket. Greenleaf hadn’t thought to search for those. But while two leaves might allow him to break one cuff, he couldn’t break all of them. And even if he could free himself of the chains, he still had to get through the door and past two armed regulars.
He turned and stared out the window. The sky was darkening; it would be night before long, at which point the only light would come from the single torch flickering in the corridor just outside his cell. He remembered the nights in the Charleston gaol-that had been the worst time.
No. He wasn’t going to give in to those thoughts.
Rain still fell, driven by a cutting wind. Drops slapped against the side of the prison, chiming against the bars in that high window and splattering on the floor of his cell. Rain. Water.
Videre per mea imagine ex aqua evocata, he chanted silently to himself. Sight, through my illusion, conjured from water. Power hummed in the prison walls, tickling Ethan’s back and legs. Uncle Reg appeared before him, gleaming like fire in the dim light of the cell. He stared at Ethan solemnly, with none of the mockery he sometimes showed upon finding Ethan in dire straits.
The prison was no more than a stone’s throw from King’s Chapel. Ethan hoped that Pell was there. He closed his eyes and cast his awareness west to the chapel.
Candles burned in sconces that lined the main aisle of the sanctuary, and the high windows glowed with the last light of this dreary day. Henry Caner stood at the pulpit, reading the great leather-bound Bible by the light of candles in another iron sconce. He didn’t look up, of course. Ethan’s illusion made not a sound. More to the point, Pell was nowhere to be seen.
Ethan shifted his illusion downstairs to the crypts, which were also illuminated by candles. He could almost smell the spermaceti over the reek of his cell. A corpse lay on the stone table in the center of the corridor: an old woman, her white hair unbound and hanging loose nearly to the floor, her body looking frail and tiny beneath a white cloth. Pell sat on a wooden chair near the table, his breathing heavy and slow, his eyes closed, his head lolling to the side. A sleeping vigil. Under other circumstances, Ethan would have laughed at the sight.