Chapter ONE - Weebly

knew him well enough to understand that he had sailed
into dangerous waters.
Marielle Harper—Elli, Ethan called her—had once
been his betrothed. Among the better families of the
North End it had been said that she was too fine for
him. She was the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder; he,
the wayward son of a captain in the British navy. But
she loved him, and he adored her. Still, in all their time
together, he never revealed to her that he was a
conjurer, and when he was accused of taking part in the
Ruby Blade mutiny, of using “witchcraft” to subdue the
ship’s captain, she wrote a letter to him that to this day
he could recite from memory. In it she said that he had
betrayed her trust, and she vowed never to see him
again. By the time he returned, bitter and maimed, from
the plantation in Barbados where he had labored and
bled and, on more than one occasion, nearly died, Elli
had married another and borne the man’s children.
She had since been widowed, but she still insisted
that she wanted nothing to do with Ethan or his
spellmaking. Ethan knew better than to expect that she
would ever change her mind, even as he also knew that