“Yes,” she said. “That much is true. Satan your master wants me dead.”

He winked at her, got up, and went to the door. “That’s good. Keep that up. That’ll get you hanged.” And he was gone, the door locked behind him.

She shook with cold as if it weren’t summer with the heat already oppressive this early in the morning. Everything was clear to her now. Quill came here ready to do exactly what he had done—take a simple accusation of the use of a knack, and turn it into a story about Satan and gross perversions. He knew he had to do this because honest people never told stories about Satan. He knew that she would not name others she saw at witches’ sabbaths because there were never any such conclaves, and all such denunciations had to be extracted through whatever torture the law would allow. Witchers did what Quill did because if they did not do it, no one would ever be convicted of trafficking with Satan.

This was how her parents died. Not because they really did have knacks that came from Satan, but because they would not play along with the witchers and join them in persecuting others. They would not confess to falsehood. They died because the City of God tried so hard to be pure that it created its own impurity. The evil the witchers did was worse than any evil they might prevent. And yet the people of New England were so afraid that they might not live up to the ideals of Puritanism that they dared not speak against a law that purported to protect them from Satan.

I believed them. They killed my parents, raised me as an orphan, tainted with the rumor of evil, and instead of denouncing them for what they had done to me, I believed them and tried to do the same thing to someone else. To Alvin Smith, who did me no harm.

Purity threw herself to her knees and prayed. O Father in heaven, what have I done, what have I done.

Alvin finished the piss-poor breakfast they served to prisoners in the jail, then lay back on his cot to survey the people that he cared about. Far away in Camelot, his wife and their unborn daughter thrived. In Vigor Church, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters, all were doing well, none sick, none injured. Nearby, Verily was being let out of his cell. Alvin tracked him for a while, to be sure that he was being released. Yes, at the door of the courthouse they turned him loose to go find his own breakfast.

Out on the riverbank, Arthur Stuart and Mike Fink were fishing while Audubon was painting a kingfisher in the early-morning light. All was well.

It was only by chance that Alvin noticed the other heartfires converging on the river. He might not even have noticed them, in his reverie about eating fish just caught from the river, roasted over a smoky fire, except that something was wrong, some indefinable change in the world his doodlebug passed through. A sort of shimmering in the air, a feeling of something that loomed just out of sight, trembling on the verge of visibility.