The Witch Hunter (The Witch Hunter #1)(29)

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.”

“It’s just…” I shake my head. “You say Nicholas is trying to help people. But all he’s doing is helping them to the stakes.” John’s eyes narrow, but I go on. “Magic is against the law. You know this. Your lives depend on not doing it, yet you keep on. It seems to me that if he really wanted to help you, he’d make you stop.”

John stands up then, so quickly he bumps into the table, nearly overturning the pitcher of wine. He reaches out without looking and steadies it.

“So you’re saying that when Nicholas brought you to me, coughing and shaking and delirious and dying, it would have been better for me not to do anything? For me to stand by and watch you die, knowing all the while there was something I could do, and instead do nothing?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I think that’s exactly what you mean.” He swipes a hand across his jaw, frustrated. “Magic isn’t something you can just stop. It’s who you are. You’re born with it or you aren’t. You can make the most of it, as I do, as Fifer does, or you can ignore it. But you can’t make it go away.” He shakes his head. “I use it to help people. So I wouldn’t stop even if I could.”

Immediately, I’m reminded of the witches and wizards on the stake in the square, their expression mirrored in the way he’s looking at me now: anger and defiance on the surface of an almost desperate sadness.

“What about you? You were arrested with those herbs”—his eyes meet mine, steady and unabashed, and I know immediately he knows what I used them for—“and if Nicholas hadn’t come, hadn’t broken you out using magic, you’d be dead now. If not by fire, then by fever. Does that seem right to you?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I say. “Magic is against the law. I got exactly what I deserved.”

John walks to the window and pulls open the curtain. It’s completely dark outside now. He stands there for a long time, staring out the window. Finally, he speaks without turning around.

“Downstairs. You said you lost your parents. May I ask what happened to them?”

“Plague. First my father, then my mother a few days later. I was nine.”

That’s how I met Caleb. The plague that killed my parents killed his, too—along with a million others—during the hottest summer and the worst plague outbreak anyone could remember. It started in the crowded, hot cities and ran rampant, killing the young, the old, the poor, and the rich, before making its way to the country. It was less than a week before the population of Anglia had been decimated, leaving kids like Caleb and me to fend for ourselves.

The first time I saw him, I thought I was dreaming. I hadn’t seen anyone—at least, anyone who was still alive—for weeks. It felt as if I were the only one in the world still left. Water was scarce and the food had long since disappeared. I survived by eating grass, tree bark, and the odd surviving flower, and I wished—more than once—that one of them would poison me. Kill me and put me out of my misery.

The day Caleb found me, riding by my house on a stolen horse on his way to court to beg for a job, I was a mess. The bodies of my mother and father were still in the house, and the heat and the stench of their decay had forced me to live outside. He approached me, talking slowly and quietly as you might to an injured animal. I was covered in dirt and filth, hunched over in the mud, eating the last of the raw vegetables I managed to dig up from the garden. I remember screaming and throwing a half-eaten parsnip at him. I was long past reason.

But he picked me up, more like a man than an eleven-year-old boy, put me on his horse, and managed to get us to the king’s palace in Upminster. It was a three-day journey, but he got us there safely. And he managed to secure us jobs—not terribly difficult since the plague had killed off most of the servants, along with the king himself.

His only surviving son, Malcolm, was just twelve and wouldn’t be able to run the country for four more years. So the business of running what was left of Anglia went to his uncle, Thomas Blackwell, who became Lord Protector of the kingdom. There was no queen to wait on then, but I wouldn’t have been fit for that anyway. Instead, I did laundry, worked in the kitchen when they needed help, ran errands into town. I was content to do this forever, but Caleb had other plans for us.

“I’m sorry about your family.” John turns to face me. “But if you could have done something to save them—even if it meant using magic, even if it meant breaking the law—wouldn’t you have done it anyway?”

I shake my head. “Magic is what killed them. A wizard started that plague—you know that. Some say Nicholas did it. That he was the one who killed Malcolm’s father—”

The fire roars sharply in the grate then, the flames shooting high into the chimney.

“Hastings, it’s fine.” John waves his hand toward the fire and it abruptly dies. “Nicholas didn’t start that plague. And he didn’t kill the king. He would never do anything like that.”

“Then who was it?” I demand. “Only a very powerful wizard could start a plague and spread it like that. And Nicholas is the most powerful wizard in Anglia.”

“What would Nicholas gain by wiping out half the country?”

I shrug. “Maybe being the most powerful wizard in Anglia isn’t enough for him. Maybe he wants more. Maybe he wants the throne, too.”