Maria pulled at the collar of her dress so that Faith could see the mark of the rope. “They tried to hang me. I had no one to turn to and I didn’t want you to be in jail.”

“But I was in jail,” Faith said softly, eyes shining with resentment. She was picking at the black mark on her hand, a nervous habit. “I couldn’t escape.” She held up her hands so that her mother could see the indentations from the metal bracelets around both wrists. “She had me in irons.”

Maria blamed herself for all that had happened and mostly for trusting Martha, though it could be so difficult to see inside someone who was bound and determined to trick you, who hid her intentions beneath a scrim of false kindness. Even a witch can be betrayed.

Faith nodded to the barn, where Finney was seeing to his horse. “He was the one who sawed off the cuffs. That’s why we must reward him. He deserves whatever his heart desires. You should see that he gets it. I wouldn’t like to be thought of as a liar.”

“Of course. I’ll see to it.” Maria had a strange lurching feeling in the pit of her stomach. Faith had power, that much was certain. This girl of hers was a complicated being.

Faith was thoughtful, biting her lip. “Does a person have to pay for any life they’ve taken?”

Finney had begun to wash off the carriage, carrying buckets of water from the well. Maria assumed he was the reason Faith had asked about penance. “Did he kill Martha?” Maria asked.

“No,” Faith said grimly. “It was me.”

There was a film of black behind the girl’s pale gray eyes, the mark of guilt. Still, she was a child.

“No,” Maria said. “You didn’t.”

“I might as well have,” Faith admitted. “I watched her die. I could have pulled her out of the tide, but I left her there to perish as it rose around her.”

If anyone was to blame, Maria felt it was herself. She thought of the wax figure and the pins, and the fire that had melted it into a black pool as Martha’s name was recited. You get what you give. You walk into the dark and the darkness abides within you. “I wished her ill and tried to cause it to be so,” she told her daughter. “I used the sort of magic we must never turn to.”

“What sort is that?” Faith asked, her eyes bright.

Maria shook her head. “We should not discuss it.”

Faith showed her mother the red blotch in the palm of her hand that had appeared as she climbed up from the stream in the Flatlands, away from the rising tide.