throat.
Then
These were bad times, especially for his kind.
It was almost as if the old days had returned.
William talked to the wolves as he traveled, and the ravens. They told him of burnings and hangings that were occurring on an almost regular basis in the scattered settlements of the territories. The stories chilled him. He would have been better off having been born into one of the Indian tribes, where his powers and abilities would be, if not understood, at least respected and appreciated. But he was white-skinned, and as such was fated to live within the world of the fair, that irrationally rational culture that believed only in one unseen, uninvolved God and attributed anything, even remotely supernatural to the work of Satan.
He traveled by day, slept at night, and tried to ignore the horrible sounds he heard in the darkness, the moans and wails that came from no man, no animal, no wind but seemed to emanate from the land itself.
There were Bad Places in the territories, places where neither white man nor Indian had settled, where even animals would not live. He passed through these on his way from one temporary home to another, and there was a voice in the Bad Places that spoke to him, a uniform voice that was the same in the Dakotas as it was in Wyoming, a voice he found at once tempting and terrifying, a seductive presence that pleaded with him to give up his sense of self,
to abandon his small meaningless life and become one with the land.
He did not stay long inrie place, not after what he'd done to Jane Stevens' father back in Sycamore. He thought of his mother and remembered how difficult life had been for him as a child, but if anything, settlements in the West were less tolerant than the more sophisticated and civilized cities of the East. The people here were less modern, less educated, filled with the superstitious dread that had afflicted their forefathers, indiscriminately afraid of anything they did not understand.
So he kept moving, living in Deadwood, in Cheyenne, in Colorado Springs, staying just long enough to make some money and load up on supplies, not long enough to arouse suspicion. He tried to stick to trading and trapping and other respectable ways of making a living, but somehow someone would always find out who he was, what he could do, and he'd end up helping them out.
These days he always left immediately after
He was by nature and necessity a solitary man, used to being alone. He was also, like his mother before him, familiar with forces unseen. But often, as he traveled across the great expanses, he was afraid. Moving through this vast country, he realized how small and insignificant he was, how puny and limited was his power, his gift. A heavy, brooding untapped energy lay beneath the surface of this rugged country. It ran in continuous currents beneath his feet, in veins the size of rivers.
It hung thick in the oppressive silence of the windless air. He could sense it in the huge dark mountains that hunkered waiting on the horizon, in the thick stands of ancient trees, which were home to far more than animals. And the Bad Places... They scared him.
He'd been traveling west now for over a month, nearly
losing himself in the mountains, coming through only with the help of the ravens. His supplies were almost gone, but he had some pelts he could trade, and he found a trail through the foothills that connected to a wagon- rutted road on the plain. He followed the setting sun, and on his first night on the plain he could see, maybe one or two days ahead, the small twinkling lights of what looked like a fairly large town.
He felt nothing beneath his feet, heard no voices, and he slept peacefully next to his untethered horse, not waking up until dawn.
The town was neither as far away as it looked nor as big as he'd hoped, and William knew by midmorning that he'd reach it some time in the early afternoon. The knowledge did not excite him as much as it should have, however, and he did not know whether his trepidation came from a legitimate premonition or merely reflected his disappointment at not finding a bigger settlement after all this time alone.
The sun was straight up when he reached the graveyard.
The witch graveyard.
It was several miles away from the town, out of sight of even a rooftop or flagpole, far away from the regular cemetery. It had not been fenced and had no headstones to mark the grave sites--witches did not deserve such amenities--but it was clearly a burial tract. Rectangular indentations in the barren soil, sunken from the packing of weather, identified the individual plots. A rusty pick and broken-handled shovel were embedded in the hard ground next to what was obviously the most recent grave.
William stopped his horse. No weeds grew within the graveyard, he noticed. Nothing grew. The desert bushes and cactus that rimmed the periphery of the spot were all dead and had turned a peculiar orangish brown.
From the branch of a lifeless tree nearby hung the frayed end of a thick rope.
'Bastards,' William said to himself.
He dismounted, leaving his horse to graze among the low clumps of pale weeds that grew next to the wagon trail. He could feel the power here.
Not the wild power of the land, but a familiar pleasant tingle in the air that he recognized as the energy of fellow witches.
The energy was dead, though. It was like the lingering smell of a campfire that remained in the air long after the flames had been put out, and he felt an odd sadness settle over him even as he enjoyed the warm, stimulating aura.
He walked slowly past the unmarked graves, the intentionally anonymous resting places of men and women who had once been vibrant individuals, who had been no more good or evil than the general population, but who had been condemned to death because they possessed abilities that most people were too frightened to even try and understand. It was happening all over, this killing of their kind, and if it-continued, soon there would be none of them left. They would be exterminated in America just as they had been exterminated in Europe.
He stared down at a recent grave, one that still retained a slightly raised rectangular outline. Was this to be his fate as well? Did his future lie in an unmarked grave in a cursed and segregated graveyard?
It was what had happened to his mother. He did not even know where she was buried. No one had ever told him.
He took off his hat, wiped the sweat from his forehead. What kind of life was this? He stared up at the cloudless sky.
Why had he been born a witch? It was the same question he always asked himself, and as always, he had no answer.
He put his hat back on and walked over to his horse. Taking the reins, he grabbed the horn and pulled himself onto the saddle.
As if the graveyard had not been enough of a deterrent, there was an explicit warning posted on a leaning sign next to the road leading toward town:
WITCHES WILL BE EXECUTED
William stopped the horse, looked at the sign, then glanced ahead, but the ramshackle huts that marked the outskirts of the settlement several miles down the road were obscured by watery heat waves stretching across the length of the plain.
He wondered how long the sign had been in place, how many had ignored its warning, its promise, and continued on regardless. What they needed, he thought, was someplace of their own, land in which they were in charge and they made the rules, somewhere away from everything else where they could live in peace and be free from persecution.
It sounded like a fantasy, a dream, but he'd heard that the Mormons were making for themselves just such a place, that their prophet had led them across the desert sands to a special spot their God had picked out for-them, a place where they could live among their own kind and be free to practice their own ways. His people could do the
