Chapter Fifty-Eight
Sybil
Sybil could not mute her horror as the magistrate strode toward her in the small room.
There was no penknife in her pocket for protection. No servants to give him pause. No elevated status to lend her power.
Her strength had been whittled away for far too long, leaving her a shell of who she’d once been.
She was alone with him, vulnerable.
Afraid.
And he knew it.
He sucked air between his teeth as his eyes devoured her. “Prison has not been kind to you.”
“It is disagreeable.” She kept her gaze locked on his, refusing to break contact, playing the only card she had. “As are the
circumstances that have placed me here. All falsehoods as you are aware.”
He lifted a brow. “Am I?”
She didn’t deign to reply.
“You could have avoided this.” His head tilted to the side in a condescending show of disappointment.
“I prefer this prison to the one with you.”
The back of his hand replied for him, connecting with her jaw like a brick. Her head snapped hard to the right and the world
spun for moment, knocked off its axis.
Before she could recover, his hand curled around her throat, cutting off her air.
“I could do anything I want right now.” His teeth were yellow this close, his breath fetid, noxious against the dizzying scent
of ambergris and musk and nightmares.
He was not wrong. Even if she cried out, no one would come to her aid.
She was entirely at his mercy.
Panic fluttered in the back of her mind, at her inability to draw breath, and her vision began to darken. Eyes gleaming with
malice, he lifted her by the neck, so her toes swirled and kicked in the air for purchase.
All at once, the pressure at her throat loosened and she dropped to the ground. Her bony limbs landed hard, but the gift of
air was greater than the pain in her body and she sucked at the air in great, heaving gasps.
He withdrew a rope from his belt as he stood over her. “Give me your hands.”
Before she could lift them, he yanked her right wrist, which he bound with the coarse rope. This was followed by the left.
From his pocket, he withdrew a metal key.
Her breath froze as she realized what he planned to do.
Not just her breath, but her heart, even the very blood in her veins—all went still, afraid to disrupt this impending miracle.
He knelt and inserted the key into the lock at her ankle where the shackles left the skin chaffed and mottled with bruises.
The iron clattered to the ground, the air kissing her tortured flesh.
As he unlocked the second, his lip curled in disgust. “You aren’t worth the loss of these shackles when you burn. ”
The iron fell away from her skin.
The power of the earth that had been suffocated into silence at the first touch of the shackles now rushed into her like the
crescendo of an orchestra. Humming and singing and throbbing and pulsing and vibrating through every part of her being. A
reminder of all the strength she once had and never thought again to possess.
For all the times she’d been deprived of food and water, never had she been more ravenous with need as she had been for this.
For the beauty of the earth pouring into her, fortifying her with the strength of centuries of women.
Her skin glowed to her own eyes, shimmering with the force of the energy charging through her.
She did not know how long she would have this power. Mayhap a minute. Mayhap until the flames consumed her.
Her death would be easier to bear with the earth to guide her from agony to a place of eternal rest. But she could not waste
this one opportunity. She had to try to save as many as she could.
For that reason, she did not cast a spell for herself. Nor did she compose one for the other souls condemned to die within
an hour alongside her.
There were so many left to save. Women who would be persecuted for being different, and the men who stood up for those women.
The many who would suffer the fate of false accusation, persecution, and death.
Sybil stood, rising up like a phoenix from the ashes, like Elizabeth from Shakespeare’s The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth.
In a strong, clear voice, she began her enchantment, infusing it with the entirety of the earth’s power.
“May the earth afford you, Robert Walsingham and Matthew Hopkins, the treatment you have granted others.”
He scoffed. “Quiet yourself.”
“May the earth afford you, Robert Walsingham and Matthew Hopkins, the treatment you have granted others.”
Not a curse. Not a blessing. But a promise. That the earth would cycle back to Walsingham and Hopkins with the heavy debts
they’d accumulated.
Uncertainty flickered in the magistrate’s eyes.
Fear?
She said the words a final time. “May the earth afford you, Robert Walsingham and Matthew Hopkins, the treatment you have
granted others.”
A rush of cool air whipped through the room, ripe with the fragrance of honeysuckle blossoms.
If the earth was good, these men would be rendered impotent through accusation. Unable to convict any more innocent souls
to death.
The door to the room slammed open and the magistrate startled, a clear sign she had indeed unnerved him.
Matthew Hopkins swept in like a winter storm, brittle with cold indifference. “Why did you take off those shackles?”
“They’ll melt and become unusable.”
“Better than the rope burning and letting her free.” Matthew Hopkins examined Sybil. “The time has come.”
Then he quit the room, leaving the magistrate to comply with his order. The shackles clapped onto her ankle bones once more.
The immediate silence so stark and empty compared to the euphoria she’d felt only moments ago that she could not help but
weep.
She had run out of time.