This is how he spent the afternoon, until at last a breeze arose, rattling the papers pinned under the paperweight on his writing desk. A breeze, and a shadow of cloud that dimmed the light in the room, and then the sound he had been waiting for: the trot-trot-trot of a horse drawing a little shay behind it. Micah Quill. Micah the Witcher.

Hezekiah rose and walked to the window. The shay was only just passing on the street below; Hezekiah caught but a glimpse of the face in profile, from above. So sweet and open, so trustworthy—Hezekiah had once trusted it, believed the words that came out of the shyly smiling mouth. “God will not permit the innocent to be punished,” said that mouth. “Only the Lord Savior was foreordained to suffer innocently.” The first of a thousand lies. Truth flowed to Micah Quill, was sucked in and disappeared, and emerged again looking ever so much like it used to, but changed subtly, at the edges, where none would notice, so that simple truth became a complicated fabric indeed, one that could wrap you up so tightly and close you off from the air until you suffocated in it.

Micah Quill, my best pupil. He has not come to Cambridge to visit his old schoolmaster, or hear the sermons he now preached on Sundays.

Leaning out his window, Hezekiah saw the shay stop at the main entrance of the orphanage. How like Micah. He does not stop for refreshment after his journey, or even to void his bladder, but goes instead directly to work. Purity, I cannot help you now. You didn’t heed my warning.

Purity came into the room, relieved to see that the witcher was not some fearsome creature, some destroying angel, but rather was a man who must have been in his forties but still had the freshness of youth about him. He smiled at her, and she was at once relaxed and comfortable. She was much relieved, for she had feared the torment of conscience it would cost her, to have Alvin Smith, who seemed such a nice man, examined and tried by some monster. Instead the proceeding would be fair, the trial just, for this man had no malice in him.

“You are Purity,” said the witcher. “My name is Micah Quill.”

“I’m pleased to meet you,” said Purity.

“And I to meet you,” said Quill. “I came the moment your deposition was sent to me. I admire your courage, speaking up so boldly against a witch so dire.”

“He made no threat to me,” said Purity.

“His very existence is a menace to all godly souls,” said Quill. “You could feel that, even if he uttered no threat, because the spirit of Christ dwells in you.”

“Do you think so, sir?” asked Purity.

Quill was writing in his book.

“What do you write, sir?”

“I keep notes of all interviews,” said Quill. “You never know what might turn out to be evidence. Don’t mind me.”