Faith put down salt around the garden as she spoke words Hannah had taught Maria, to keep unwelcome pests out of a garden. It was a Latin spell, and it sounded otherworldly spoken here in the flatlands. Coming from Cornwall, Maude knew something about the Nameless Art. She most certainly could spot a witch. As soon as the spell was cast, the rabbits moved on to Maude’s neighbor’s place, a good ten miles away. There were so many that the sandy ground shook as they ran east. Impressed, Maude invited Faith into her parlor, her best room, one Jack Finney had never set foot in, for there was a precious Turkish carpet there that was far too good for the peddler to stomp upon with his muddy boots. To Faith’s surprise, a black mirror was set upon a small wooden table.

“One favor deserves another,” Maude Cardy said. “Perhaps you’d like to look into the future.”

Maude came from a long line of what people called the cunning folk, not among those born to be a witch, but practiced in healing, descended from a tradition of women who could see what others could not. She’d sat at her grandmother’s knee and heard about how to bring a baby along when it refused to be born and how to save a man in the throes of a fever.

Faith sat in a hard-backed wooden chair and gazed into the mirror that had belonged to Maude’s grandmother in the time when not many could afford mirrors. It was an old piece, in use for more than fifty years, and though the glass was silvered and the black paint thick and peeling, its power was strong. Many women had seen what was to come when looking into it, for it was pure and asked for nothing in return.

Faith placed her elbows on the table, and looked down. Immediately she felt as if she were being pulled underwater. There was the lake with no bottom, and the serpent she’d fed crusts of bread, and the blue-green sea they had crossed while aboard the Queen Esther. There was the marsh where Martha Chase lay dying, her eyes fluttering open to see how bright the world was before she left it behind. In that black mirror, Faith saw the time she’d been away pass quickly, like pages turned in a book, five years that had vanished in the blink of an eye. For all this time, Keeper had searched New York for her. He was full-grown now, not a leggy, skinny, half-starved creature, but her familiar, her heart and soul, in pain over his loss. When he howled at night, those who heard him shivered in their beds, well aware that there was never a dog that made such mournful cries. Faith could hear him now, across the water, her other, her familiar, who had chosen her.