All Chapters of The Witch Keeps Time: Chapter 41 - Chapter 44

The morning smells like damp wool and iron.It always does before a fight.Men shift beside me in the gray light, boots sinking slightly into churned earth. Powder horns knock against ribs. Breath fogs in the cold air. Somewhere behind us, a captain is speaking in low tones meant to sound steady. Somewhere ahead, a line of red coats stands like a wound across the field.Nothing about this feels new.And that is precisely what feels different.There was a time when I could feel the narrowing before battle. A tightening in my chest not from fear, but from inevitability. As if the ground beneath my boots had already chosen which way I would fall. As if the moment was not arriving but returning.

Massachusetts, 1798The war was long finished.Men still spoke of it as if it had ended yesterday, but the fields had grown back over the trenches, and the roads between towns had been widened, and children now played in places where soldiers once bled.History had hardened.Or so it pretended.The farmhouse stood at the edge of a gently sloping field bordered by low stone walls and stubborn grass. The roof sagged slightly on the north side. The paint on the shutters had peeled to reveal older layers beneath—blue beneath gray, gray beneath white.Inside, the air smelled of flour and woodsmoke.Thomas stood at the table, sleeves rolled, hands stea