Read Chapter 20: The Trial's Eve

Dawn crept gray through the cracked shutter of the abandoned smokehouse where Nathaniel had carried her. Mercy hadn't slept. Every rustle of wind through the timbers sent her hand to the chest at her side, the wood smooth and cold against her fingers. Inside lay her father's cure, the letter that exposed Willard, and the key her mother had hidden for fifteen years. For fifteen years her family had been stalked by a man who wanted what her father had made. Tonight she would end it.

Nathaniel stirred on the straw beside her, a low groan escaping through his split lip. His face had taken the brunt of it—bruised purple beneath the swelling, one eye nearly sealed shut. He'd favored his right side all night, ribs wrapped tight with strips Mercy had torn from her own shift. He was no messenger now, no quiet clerk slipping through doorways. He was a soldier with a ruined face and a cause he'd chosen with his body.

"How bad?" she asked.

"Feels worse than it looks," he said, and managed the ghost of a smile. "But I'm standing. That's what matters."

She wanted to argue. She'd seen the way he'd gone down under those boots, the way he'd curled around the chest like a mother around a child. But there was no time for tenderness. Court convened at nine. Patience had hours left in this world as a free woman, and if Mercy failed, hours left at all.

"We need a plan," she said. "Something that survives contact with Hathorne's courtroom."

Nathaniel sat up slowly, bracing a hand against the wall. "We present the evidence. The formula proves Willard's motive. The letter proves he knew your father refused to sell. Ruth's testimony ties it to the girls."

"Ruth." Mercy pressed her palms to her eyes. In the fevered fog of the girls' affliction, Ruth had been the one who'd wavered, who'd glanced at Mercy with something like recognition rather than accusation. They'd planned to ask her to speak, but now—

"She'd promised," Nathaniel said. "She knows what Willard is doing to them."

"Abigail isn't wavering. She's dying." Mercy pulled the cloth from her pocket, the one she'd used to wipe the girl's brow the night before last. It still held the faint, sweet-sour smell of the fever. "Whatever poison Willard has fed them, it's pushing through to the full crisis. Her lungs are filling. I've seen it in half a dozen children this winter. They go blue, then they go still, and there is nothing any herb can do once the fluid takes them."

Nathaniel was quiet a moment. "If Abigail dies before testifying—"

"Then she takes her accusation with her." Mercy's voice cracked. "And the court will have no reason to doubt her dying word. A dead girl screaming 'Mercy Hart bewitched me' is worth more to Hathorne than a living witness."

The plan had seemed so certain in the dark. Walk into court. Show the formula. Speak the truth. Let justice find its shape. But in daylight, through the slats of a broken wall, she could see the scaffolding being raised in the square outside. Rope coiled like a snake beside it. Justice, in Salem, wore a hood.

"I need to see her," Mercy said suddenly. "Abigail. I need to try."

"You can't walk into town without being seized. You know what they'll do."

"Then you'll go. You know the way to the Putnams'."

Nathaniel stared at her with his one good eye. "I'm a clerk in Thomas Putnam's own house. If I'm seen tending to his stricken daughter in the night—"

"You'll be seen as a loyal servant fetching herbs for her recovery." Mercy pulled the small leather pouch from the chest, the one containing yarrow and pleurisy root. She pressed it into his hand. "This won't cure her. God knows I wish it would. But it may ease her breathing long enough to get her into that courtroom and out of it again."

"And if she can't speak?"

"Then we put Ruth on the stand alone and pray her nerve holds." Mercy looked at the letter, at her mother's hand curling across the page. "But if Abigail dies, prayer may not be enough."

Nathaniel rose, testing his ribs with a hiss. "There's one more thing we haven't discussed."

She knew what he meant. The night before, in the chaos of escape, she'd let slip what she suspected of Hathorne. And Nathaniel, despite his loyalty to the court, had not looked surprised.

"Hathorne," she said.

"He will not let that evidence see the light of day. Not if it implicates him."

"Give me another way into that courtroom, then."

"Mercy—"

"He has my sister. He has already convicted her in his heart." Her voice rose, sharp and ragged. "If I do not carry that chest into court myself, if I let one more man carry my cause for me, Patience will hang. I will not fail her again."

Nathaniel said nothing for a long moment. Then he reached into his coat and pulled a folded paper from the inner pocket—wrinkled, stamped with the court's seal.

"I retrieved your charge before I left the clerk's office," he said quietly. "It was to be read at nine o'clock, after Patience's verdict. A second warrant. For you."

Mercy took it. Her own name, spelled in Hathorne's careful hand. *For the crime of witchcraft, having already fled lawful custody…*

"They expected you to run," Nathaniel said. "They've set the trap for a fugitive. If you walk in present, calm, with evidence in hand—"

"You said it yourself. Hathorne won't let the evidence speak." Mercy lifted her chin. "So we don't ask his permission. We don't enter as prisoners seeking mercy. We enter as accusers, of the court itself."

Nathaniel's brow furrowed. "That's not a trial. That's a revolt."

"It's a trial where the prisoners walk in free and name their own witnesses." Mercy looked at the formula, at the letter, at the key that had unlocked a secret buried since her father's death. "Willard stole my family's work. Hathorne helped him bury it. And the whole town is burning because of what they did. If I go in meek, they'll burn me too. But if I go in with evidence of their crime in my hands and accusation on my tongue—"

"Then every man who's lost a child to this fever will listen," Nathaniel finished. "Whether Hathorne wants them to or not."

They stood in silence as the gray light brightened. Somewhere a rooster crowed. The smell of woodsmoke drifted from chimneys already stoked for the morning's work.

"He'll have men at the door," Nathaniel said.

"He'll have them inside too."

"You'll need me beside you."

"Not for this." Mercy closed her fingers around his. "You need to find Ruth. Whatever way I enter that court, I need her ready to speak when I call her name."

"And Abigail?"

Mercy pressed the pouch of herbs into his other hand. "Take her this. Ease her lungs enough to hold her spirit. And tell her—" She swallowed hard. "Tell her that Mercy Hart sends her no curse but a cure, and that if she has any vestige of truth left in her heart, God will give her strength to speak it."

Nathaniel tucked the pouch into his coat. He was swaying slightly, color high in his cheeks beneath the bruises—fever beginning maybe, or just exhaustion and pain. But he straightened and met her eyes, and for a moment Mercy saw the man he would have been had Salem been a different place. A man who kept his word.

"I will find her," he said. "And I will be there."

The door creaked open. Cold morning air swept in, carrying the distant sound of the town bell.

Nine o'clock was two hours away. And Patience Hart's fate was written in a sentence Mercy had one chance to rewrite.