Her face was burning as she ran through the fields. She went back to the house with the elm trees and began to simmer her cursed stew over the fire in the kitchen. When she cut up the bird, the lifeline on her left hand stopped. If she had glanced down that afternoon as she swept the Hathornes’ house and boiled their laundry with ashes and lye, she would have seen that she had made her own fate out of bitterness and spite. According to the rules of magic, she would have to pay a price for the actions she had taken that had been born of vengeance.

Samuel Dias had returned to New York to stand at Abraham’s gravesite, where he said the Kaddish to honor his father’s passing from the world. He had been gone to Jamaica and Brazil, and to islands that had no name and seas where there was no wind. He’d spied dozens of trees he might have brought back, beautiful, unusual specimens that had never been seen in New York, pink trumpet trees, blue jacarandas, rosewood trees with green and white flowers, but this time his only cargo had been barrels of dark rum. Samuel left the trees where they were, though each one had made him think of Maria Owens. All the same, a gift given to someone who wants nothing from you is worthless. He knew that now, though he still dreamed of the expression on Maria’s face when she looked out the window of the jail and declared the magnolia to be a miracle.

Samuel was growing tired of the sea and its loneliness, something he had always been grateful for as a younger man. At night he stood on the deck and watched the creatures beneath the water and thought of the first ship he’d ever sailed upon, when the navigator his father had enlisted took him under his wing and taught him to read the stars. Back then, he could still remember everything about his mother and sisters. Now it was difficult for him to bring up their faces, although there were certain things that he would never forget, his sisters singing as they walked up a hill, his mother telling him his first stories, the bonfire on her burning day, the white hood covered with stars that she was made to wear, how empty the world was without her.