“And he told you,” said Abigail softly, “that God had forged you to be His Weapon?”

Orion nodded, his face ghastly in the flickering yellow light. Soldiers came, knocking grave-dirt from their hands and boots, to help him onto a horse. Abigail wondered if the men of the Gilead Congregation would come at daybreak, to dig the Chosen of the Lord up again and bury him in Gilead itself. The energy that had kept her going through flight and confrontation, scouting the town boundaries and climbing down ropes from the burning blockhouse, was long gone. When someone brought up Balthazar to her, she could only gaze aghast at the saddle; one of the men had to help her mount. She reined him over beside the sturdy middle-aged trooper behind whose saddle Rebecca clung: “Will she be all right?” She was mildly astonished that Rebecca hadn’t fainted long ago.

The trooper saluted her. “I’ll look after ’er, mum, don’t you worry.” He showed her where, under his cloak, he held Rebecca’s wrists tight together against his chest with one big hand. “She starts to shift or slack, I’ll feel it ’fore she feels it ’erself, won’t I, Mrs. M?”

Her head pressed to his back, Rebecca barely had the strength to nod.

Abigail recalled one of Sam’s choice broadsides, about every redcoat being the scum of the London backstreets, whose sole wish was to bayonet every honest American woman he saw.

The little troop started away down the road, one man walking ahead with a torch to light the road. Tarry flakes of fire dripped down from it, to hiss out on the wet earth; the horses moved among rising threads of steam. The world smelled of smoke.

John and his party finally met them, halfway back to the Salem-Danvers road.

Or, rather, Coldstone’s party was intercepted by a gang of unknown men dressed up and painted to look like Indians, who stopped them at gunpoint and searched the sad dlebags on Orion’s horse, something Lieutenant Coldstone had neglected to do. As one of the Indians—who under all his paint looked suspiciously like Paul Revere—brought out of the bag a brown-backed quarto-sized notebook la beled “Household Expenses,” another—short, chubby, sitting his horse with the uncomfortable stiffness of a man who has his dignity to consider—reined up beside Abigail. Blue, slightly protuberant eyes met hers worriedly from a black-painted face.

Abigail inquired coolly, “Did you get lost?”

The Indian nodded, and said, rather unwillingly, “Ugh.”

“Ugh indeed.”