Long ago, before they’d ever met, before either of them had come to the second Essex County, they had each made the same promise. They would never watch another woman burn. But there were other ways to be rid of a woman who didn’t behave, who did as she pleased, who had courage, who talked back. You held her head under water until she could no longer speak.

The farmers locked Faith in a neighbor’s barn, for their own barn was smoldering ash. They would have brought her to the magistrate, but the governor had outlawed the witch trials, so they tried her themselves and found her guilty. They had been the judges, and they would be the executioners. It was the Lord’s day when they dragged her to the lake in chains. It was early morning, with a mist rising and the sky breaking into bands of color. The men had frightened themselves with their own cruelty and their own imaginings. They had convinced themselves they had caught a servant of the devil and not a thirteen-year-old girl who pleaded for her life until she realized it wasn’t any use to beg. Now she was speaking backwards, an incantation from The Book of the Raven, hidden in her cloak, that beautiful book a woman had written to help other women save themselves. Women who were bought and sold, women who had no voice, women forced to have secret lives, women who knew that words were the most powerful magic. Faith had vowed to leave the left side and forsake black magic, but she turned to it now. She was wrapped in irons, therefore the spell couldn’t do much damage; still the men’s throats began to close up, and when they tried to speak to each other they could only grunt, as if they were animals. Their hands appeared to be changing, as if they had claws rather than nails. It was the spell of the beast, when an individual shows what resides within him, and it is only dark magic if there is darkness within.

The farmers were brothers, Harold and Isaac Hopwood, cruel men who were even more brutal after drink, and they had been drinking all night. Their barn had burned down and they needed someone to blame. Blame a woman, drown a woman, let the Lord be the judge. They carried her to the lake, which was as deep as the end of the world, the waters where her own mother had been tested as a witch, a lake that no man, woman, or child would enter for it was said to be cursed, and certainly there were leeches in the shallow reedy water, and the lilies were attached to black weeds that reached all the way to hell.