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“My dear Goodman Mather, there is not a de quite other, and reen and sweet, I was a grain-god with the head of a bull In the rough valley of the Tyne I was a god of fertility and ith the head of a croas a fish-headed lord of plenty in the depths of the Tigris Before language I was she-who-makes-the-harvest-come, and I rode a red boar The earth anshen I call it by name I know its name because we are family”
“You admit your demonic nature?”
“I would have admitted it before now if anyone had asked They ask only if I am a witch, and a witch is small pennies to me I am what I am, as you are what you are I want to live, as all creatures do I cannot sin, so I have done no wrong”
The minister wet his throat with the demon’s cider His hand shook upon the tankard When he had mastered himself he spoke quickly and softly, in the round between hiave her those things because she proved his whole heart, his invisible world, she proved hi hill in his heart
“Tell me,” he rasped finally, as the dawn cadom of God in my lifetime Tell er of it, you er and its handmaiden Tell me the dead will rise and ill shed out bodies like the shells of beautiful snails, that I will leave behind this horror that is flesh and becoain be a man, that I need never err more, nor dwell in the curse of this life Tell ht s us all”
The demon looked on him with infernal pity, which is, in the end, not worth the tears it sheds Demons may pity men every hour of the day, but that pity never moves
“No,” the demon said
And, slipping her chains, Geown oncethe black obliteration of her skin She folded her arht down the scythe of herhis doubt, the demon made plain the reality of his flesh, and the arrow of his need
They burned her at sunrise, before the Free Gathered Church could say anything about it Bad enough they had brought that man to their town, the better people of Sauve-Majeure would not stand to let a Protestant nobody pass judgment on her There were feitnesses: Father Audrien, who ies to Father Si Basile clutched between theuerite le Clerq and her husband Isaac The Church would handle their witch and the schisirls down south—Rome had to have its due in the virtuous north
Father Audrien tied the demon to a pine trunk and read her last rites She did not spit or howl, but only stared down the priest with a stare like dying She said one word before the end, and no one understood it Each of the witnesses lit the flaht of the sin A year later, Sébastienne Sazarin would insist, drunk and half-toothless, hiding sores on her breast and losing her voice, would rasp to her daughter, insisting that as Sister Agnes burned she saw a bull’s head glowing through the pyre, its horns uerite le Clerq, half-inia, would weep to her priest that she had seen a red boar in the flames, its tusks made of diamond, its head croith millet and barley Hierosme Sazarin, shipwrecked three years hence in Nova Scotia, his cargo of Madeira spilling out into the icy sea, would tell his blue-mouthed, doomed sailors that once he had seen a saint burn, and in the conflagration a white crow, its beak ith blood, had flown up to Heaven, its wings seared black
Father Audrien dreaht until he died, and the moment her bones shattered into a thousand fiery fish, he woke up reaching for his Bible and finding nothing in the dark
The derew in her stove Moss thickened her great Bible The girls she had drawn close around her grew up—Basile Sazarin so lovely men winced to look at her, so lovely she married a Parisian banker and never returned to Sauve-Majeure Weep-Not Dryland bore eight daughters without pain or even much blood, and every autumn took them up to the top of the Bald Moose while her husband
slept in his comfort Lizzie Wadham’s cloth wove so fine she could sell it in Boston and even New York for enoughthe young ladies’ lessons, the content of which no male was ever able to spy out
And whenever Basile and Weep-Not went up to Sister Agnes’s house to shoo out the foxes and raccoons and keep the garden weeded, they saw a crow perched on the chi at thelet with black spots sca off into the forest as soon as they called after it
The cod went scarce in the bays The textile usta, with bolts of linen andready buyers in Remembrance Dryland and Walter Chedderley The few Penobscot and Passamaquoddy left found theirl had once ran crying froe doorstep in the snow The Free Gathered Church declined into Presbyterianism and the Cathedral of St Geraud and St Adelard re a door and its own relic—the kneecap of St Geraud himself—before the Sazarin fortune wrecked on the New York market and scattered like so much seafoam And the demon waited