Prologue
Boston Gaol, Prison Lane, Boston, Massachusetts
16 November 1688
Though it was cold, bitterly cold, and windy, it wasn’t the weather that set the creature to trembling. Oh, no; the Q’riln trembled with anticipation as the old, worn woman—the Q’riln thought of her as “the pursuer”—bound in cold and rough iron chains, was hustled from the jail and pushed into a crude wagon, drawn by a single horse. Forming a circle around the short passage from jail to cart were some scores of catcalling, sneering, garbage- and mud-hurling men and women. Those emotions were spice, perhaps, but the main meal, the “juice,” as the Q’riln termed it, was still to come.
The old woman about to be mounted on the cart was not so old as all that, not as her own people measured things. But, since being assigned to Earth, along with her mate, everything in her assignment had gone utterly wrong. First there came a hard life of war, capture, deportation, and sale as an indentured servant to Barbados. In the course of all this, she’d lost her mate, a loss that pressed down upon her soul like a stone block. This, more than anything, was what made her seeming seem prematurely aged. Indeed, she’d grown old at heart and soul, these last fifty years, even as her people measured things.
Worst of all, the old woman going to her miserable death was further agonized by the knowledge of failure. Sent to track down and eliminate the Q’riln, she, instead, had been arrested. Worse, the Q’riln had somehow managed to deprive her of sensible local speech. All she had left was her own native Galactic Common III, and nobody here spoke that, not even the Q’riln.
The pursuer’s name here and now was Ann Glover but among her own people she was, and to her late mate she had been, called something that meant “Topaz,” for her smoky yellow eyes. Those eyes sought desperately for an open human she could transfer to and inhabit to continue her pursuit. But no, no, These are as closed-minded a bunch as Sinesquotian War Tarts, no hope of even a temporary home with them.
But where can I find shelter? I’ve set up the cat, but that’s not my first choice of a future.
Around the cart, a group of halberdiers and arquebusiers, the latter with their long matches smoking, formed a secure ring, three of each to each side. The driver flicked the reins, causing the horse to begin its slow trek to the town gallows, which stood near to a muddy, stinking, corpse contaminated pool, out on Boston Neck.