be trusted, and that they belonged to one another. Faith raced home carrying the tiny surviving pup. Maria gave Faith a leather glove filled with goat’s milk for the wolf pup to drink, sucking on a hole cut in the fingertip. Faith kept the wolf in her bed that night, to make sure he stayed warm. She named him Keeper, for she didn’t intend to let him go. Sometime after midnight the pup ceased whimpering, and soon they were dreaming the same dream, girl and wolf alike, a dream of blood in the snow, and of warm milk, and of a bed in which to sleep without worry or fear.
In the early morning, Faith carried Keeper through the dark to the little shed where they kept two goats, and filled the glove with milk. Maria found her there once the sun had risen, asleep in the straw with the wolf by her side. She recognized a familiar when she saw one. Such a creature must always come to you on its own. You cannot choose it, it must choose you. Once it does, it will be loyal for the rest of its life, as Cadin had been.
“Wolves are killed here,” Maria told her daughter that day. “But if you call the creature a dog, then a dog is what it will be.”
Faith nodded solemnly. She knew that people in town stared at her red hair, thought by some to be a mark of the devil’s own, and gawked at her mother’s red boots. Everything they were must be a secret, and the same was true for the wolf. From the very first day, when Keeper was a tiny half-blind pup, he did his best to follow Faith wherever she went, refusing to be parted from her, fiercely loyal. She laughed and called him her little goat, for he soon enough ran to the goats in the barn, wishing to be fed, and he played with the tolerant creatures, biting at their hooves and running beneath them, until, having had enough, they butted him and chased him from the barn. Maria wondered if her daughter remembered the man they’d called Goat, for she still slept with the poppet doll he’d made for her. Maria had never told anyone how close Samuel Dias had come to death, a mere breath away. Even then he had continued to talk, as if there would never be enough time to say all that was inside of him. His stories had often seemed like imaginary tales of sea monsters and storms, but his advice to Maria had been true. He’d warned her to be careful in Massachusetts, for men would be men, especially in such a self-righteous place as Salem, and judges would continue to judge those who came before them.
* * *
Once Faith had learned to read and write, Maria brought out the Grimoire, their greatest secret, kept in the kitchen under lock and key, in a bureau drawer with a false bottom, so that even if someone jimmied open the drawer, they’d come upon nothing more than two large wooden spoons.
“This will belong to you someday,” Maria told Faith.
Faith was delighted with this news. “Which day is that?”
“A day when you’re very grown-up and I’m a very old woman.”
Maria had hired a carpenter who went from town to town. He chinked the holes in the walls of the cabin, then rebuilt the shed for the goats so that it would no longer shake in the wind and he helped Maria to lay down a path of blue stones that reminded her of Hannah’s cottage. When Maria claimed there was an underground stream nearby, the carpenter had grudgingly dug their well, surprised when he hit a pool of fresh, clear water.
“It’s a talent to be able to find water,” he told her. It was said only witches could do so, for they could not drown and had an affinity with water that people used against them. There were those who said they could smell water, and that water had the scent of sweet iris to such women. Maria planned to pay the carpenter with the last silver coin, but instead he asked for her help in exchange for the work he’d done on the house. He had unending headaches and his hands had begun to shake. In time he would not be able to earn his living. He had figured out that Maria Owens practiced the Nameless Art, and if she could help him, there