Page 3 of The Sea Witch
The other women nodded.
“Good lasses,” Alys said. “Spines stronger than any mainmast—that’s what you’ve got.”
Polly gave her a brief smile. “With you as our example.”
“The sun will be up too soon. Grab Susannah and Jane and Josephine and Faith. I’ll gather the others. Find me at the docks.”
“Yes, Alys.”
Cecily and Polly moved toward the clothes press, but Cecily stopped and moved back to the window. She grabbed Alys’s wrist.
Pride swelled in Alys’s chest to feel the tightness of Cecily’s grip, power that was acquired from hauling ropes and manning the tiller. Only six months earlier, Cecily had possessed the soft hands that belonged to a reverend’s daughter, but they were rougher now, callused and strong. Bright currents of magical energy coursed through her fingertips, traveling into Alys’s skin, strengthening her own power. Surging through them both with life.
“I’m not sorry,” Cecily said, fierce.
“Not for a moment,” Polly added as she stuffed clothing into a satchel.
“Me, either,” Alys answered.
She slipped free from Cecily’s hold and climbed down the tree. Quickly, she mounted up before leading her horse back onto the road, careful to stay within the shadows and mists she’d fashioned so the sentry outside the reverend’s house wouldn’t notice her. When she was in the clear, she pressed on toward the east end of the village. Here, amongst the austere stone cottages with faces as dour as the people of Norham, more of the witches lived. Women whose power was nurtured and strengthened by the sea.
She could smell it here, the brine of the water, heavy in her lungs yet lifting her up.
Though she put no faith in Sunday sermons, Alys prayed to any listening deity that the women she’d taught had the courage to see this through to the end. It was only going to get harder from here.
Twelve women waited in the shadows by the harbor. Not all of them possessed magic, but they each held power of one form or another. The women looked to Alys, fear in their faces, their postures tense but ready.
Closer to the sea, more magical power flowed into Alys. It lapped against the pilings with welcome murmurs, filling her with energy, like the rush of catching a gust of wind in the sails, and it pushed back against the terror that wanted to consume her.
Cecily and Polly were there. With them was Susannah, who was technically a freedwoman but treated as an unpaid servant by Josiah and Mary Lawford. Also amongst their band of escapees was Jane, the wife of the town bully, as well as eight more, women who had sought something for themselves alone.
Alys had trained them to sail, helped some to nurture their magic, but the next step was into the unknown.
In their hands, they held carpet bags, battered and worn satchels, or blankets hastily tied into bundles, holding the contents of their lives. Alys had left behind the cedar chest she had packed when she’d moved from her childhood home into Samuel’s house, too heavy and clumsy to take with her in the heat of flight. Instead, she’d grabbed a quilt her mother had sewn and given to her when she’d first bled, and used it to hold only the most basic of needs. Shifts, stockings, a seashell that Ellen had given her, and a compass that had once been Samuel’s, but she’d given to herself after his death.
Nothing else in his house held meaning or value for her. Everything else was tainted by shame and drudgery.
“There must be a plan.” Without fail, Polly thought ahead, and Alys was grateful for her clear-eyed perspective.
“There’s only one way out of here to safety,” Alys answered. To muffle their voices, she summoned a mist, cool and damp.
She looked behind her, to the dock, where the tied fishing boats bobbed on the swells of the water, including her own boat. It was a small vessel, barely able to hold a crew more than four in number. A stab of pain lanced through her to think of leaving the boat behind. Humble though it was, the boat had given her the gift of the sea, and awakened the power that had simmered in her veins. It was more her parent than her mother or her father had ever been.
“Take a fishing boat?” Jane asked. “We can sail it down to Delaware or Maryland. Somewhere far away.”
“I’ve a bigger prize in mind.”
Alys pointed to a two-masted brigantine, its foremast square-sailed and its mainsail gaff-rigged, anchored at the end of the dock. Norham seldom saw ships of that size, since merchantmen usually sailed into Portsmouth or Boston, but as fortune had it, this brigantine had docked earlier in the day to unload its cargo of British pewter and furniture to be sold around the Cape.Some fanciful boatwright had carved and gilded leaves around the bow and at the railing of the quarterdeck. The figurehead was a buxom woman in flowing robes, her hair streaming across her shoulders.
“The biggest vessel we’ve sailed is a trawler,” Cecily said.
“We’ll learn the way of it,” Alys answered. “Slow and cautious earns us nooses around our necks.”
Anxious murmurs rose up from the women.
“They’ll soon discover all of us gone,” Alys continued. “We have to get aboard and set sail now.”
Susannah exclaimed, “They won’t simplyletus take the ship. Not without at least raising the alarm and bringing the whole town down on us.”
