They spent the night at the cabin, with Dias setting up his hammock on the porch. When she couldn’t get any rest, Maria came to lie beside him.

“What made you come here now?” she asked.

“The tree.” They could see the magnolia, the blooms like white stars. He had come here to let the tree speak for him. His heart was hitting against his chest, and he hoped Maria couldn’t feel its ragged rhythm, despite the curse she had called down from the gallows. He, a man who could talk to anyone in six languages, was now tongue-tied in her presence. If he could speak he would say the magnolia was his heart, given to her to do with it as she wished.

When Maria awoke in the dark of morning, she found that Samuel had gone to the harbor and returned with news. Martha had paid for two passages to New York. She’d had a red-haired girl with her. Maria threw her arms around him, as she had when he was so near death. She’d thought he didn’t know how close he’d come to the end, but he’d always known, just as he knew that she would ask him to take her to New York Harbor, and that he would agree.

“You will not find New York to be like any other place,” he warned her. “You can go there as one person and become someone else entirely.”

Searching a city of nearly five thousand people would be all but impossible. It was easy to disappear in New York. It was here that men who wished to avoid their marriages vanished without a trace, women who yearned for a world where there were no rules settled in, sailors who jumped ship found that no sheriff could find them, and Dutchmen went off into the wild land beyond the wall that marked the limits of the city and were soon forgotten.

Before they left, Maria went inside her cabin one last time. She’d been barefoot, and now she pulled on the red boots her mother had bought in the first Essex County. She took the blue blanket and the poppet Samuel had made for Faith and packed them along with the Grimoire and the black mirror. She peered into the glass before she stored the mirror, but didn’t recognize herself. Maria was more magic than mortal, but even a witch can be changed by sorrow. Nothing would ever be the same, but Hannah had taught her that there were times, rare as they were, when what was done could be undone.

PART THREE Divination

1686 I.