“I’m telling you, that leg was broke and the wound was bad. The whole family figured the boy was bound to die. They asked me about buying nails for a coffin. And they looked so bad from grieving that I wasn’t sure but what we’d bury the boy’s ma and pa, too.”

“Then it can’t be as fully healed as you say.”

“Well, it ain’t fully healed, and that’s why I come to you. I know you don’t believe in such things, but I tell you they witched the boy’s leg to heal somehow. Elly says the boy did the witching himself. He was even walking on the leg for a few days, no splint even. But the pain never let up, and now he says there’s a sick place on his bone. He’s got a fever, too.”

“There’s a perfectly natural explanation for everything,” said Thrower.

“Well, be that as you like, the way I see it the boy invited the devil with his witchery, and now the devil’s eating him alive inside. And seeing how you’re an ordained minister of God, I thought maybe you could cast out that devil in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Superstitions and sorceries were nonsense, of course, but when Armor brought up the possibility of a devil being in the boy, it made sense, it fit with what he knew from the Visitor. Maybe the Lord wanted him to exorcise the child, to purge the evil from him, not to kill the boy at all. It was a chance for him to redeem himself from his failure of will a few minutes before.

“I’ll go,” he said. He reached for his heavy cloak and whipped it around his shoulders.

“I better warn you, nobody up at their house asked me to bring you.”

“I’m prepared to deal with the anger of the unfaithful,” said Thrower. “It’s the victim of deviltry that concerns me, not his foolish and superstitious family.”

Alvin lay on his bed, burning with the heat of his fever. Now, in the daylight, they kept his shutters closed, so the light wouldn’t hurt his eyes. At night, though, he made them open things up, let some of the cold air in. He would breathe it in relief. During the few days when he could walk, he had seen the snow covering the meadow. Now he tried to imagine himself lying under that blanket of snow. Relief from the fire burning through his body.