Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  How could this Firstborn woman, whoever she was, know to expect Sarah? Or did she? Were she and her men waiting in ambush for someone else?

  It took an effort of will to neither speed up nor turn and run.

  Sarah passed through two small valleys at a stately pace and entered a broad natural bowl. Wild grass grew tall all through it, and sturdy oak trees sheltered it on the east and west.

  She saw the ambush immediately, through her talented eye. She saw it as a luminescent line of blue trying hard to flatten itself to the ground beneath each stand of trees.

  “Under the oaks,” she said to her companions.

  “I do not see the scoundrels,” Sir William said. “But that’s where I would hide my men.”

  “They cannot mean to kill us, Your Majesty,” Cathy Filmer said. “They’re so far away, if they sprang their ambush, we could ride from the valley before they reached us.”

  “I see our three friends, too,” Sarah said. “Don’t look, but they’re on the hilltop to the east, behind that line of Cahokians.”

  “Perhaps the Cahokians are only here as bodyguards, Your Majesty,” Sir William suggested. “The woman we approach appears to be someone of importance.”

  “Because she’s rich?”

  “Because the man beside her holds a banner. And because she isn’t touching the ground, Your Majesty. I do not pretend to understand it, but there are members of Cahokia’s priestly caste—forgive me for using the term if it is offensive, Your Majesty, but these are your people.”

  “My people—you mean Cahokians? The Firstborn?”

  Sir William shook his head. “I mean the priests of Cahokia. The royal family is one line of a larger clan from which many of the hierophants, prognosticators, and entrail-gazers of the kingdom are drawn. And some of them, at certain times and for reasons I do not understand, insist upon not touching the ground.”

  “You know this because you rode with my father?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. And there were periods—whole weeks at a time, though not corresponding to any calendar I could recognize—when he would eat in the saddle and sleep in a tree.”

  “In a tree?” Sarah could hear the smile in Cathy Filmer’s voice. “Somehow, this detail didn’t make it into any of the songs about the Lion of Missouri.”

  “He was a pious man,” Sir William said. “Though I did not understand his piety.”

  “That woman is a priestess?”

  “Likely,” Sir William said. “Or a very, very delicate flower, indeed.”

  Sarah slowed her horse further and gazed at the stands of oak, trying to appear casual. The blue auras of the soldiers were agitated, and she reminded herself that she rode with a pack of monstrous warriors at her heels.

  Like Herne in English belief, whose Wild Hunt rode the night sky once a year and destroyed anyone who witnessed the event, either by tearing them to pieces or by driving them mad.

  “These people are my subjects,” she said gently, “let’s try not to kill them.”

  “I can always try, Your Majesty,” Sir William said.

  “Shall I act the herald again, Your Majesty?” Cathy asked.

  Sarah considered the possibility. “No. Let’s meet them incognito.”

  Sarah brought her horse to a stop. The beast was a big, fearsome animal, a mount more fit for a soldier than for a young woman, but it was obedient. The litter fifty feet away was made of silk and filled inside with cushions. The eight men who carried it were muscular and brutish-looking; they wore wool trousers and cotton shirts, and all wore a thin band of iron around their necks. The slaves, by their auras, were children of Eve.

  Standing on the ground to one side were two men and a woman; she could tell these three were Firstborn even without the gift of her witchy eye, from the pallor of their skin, their slender eyebrows, and their long fingers. They looked a bit like Thalanes. They looked like Sarah herself.

  The older of the two men had a weathered face, deep-set eyes, and hair sprouting from his ears. He wore a long gray tunic and gray leggings under his blue cloak and he looked on Sarah and her party coolly, probably counting the beastfolk and noting their weapons. A military man, or a counselor, or a spy. He was the man holding the banner on a ten-foot pole—when the breeze unfurled it, Sarah saw a horizontal gray bar across a royal blue field, and in the very center of the banner, the black silhouette of a flower blossom.

  Beside the standard-bearer stood a much shorter man in Polite red. A wizard, then, and honest enough to announce himself as such. She looked more closely at him and saw several sharp points of light about his body—those would be enchanted objects, mana reservoirs, or the like. The wizard smiled blandly and held his hands in front of himself, fingers laced together. He didn’t seem young either, but he had the smooth-skinned look of a man who had aged indoors, rather than on the trail; his eyes were oddly far apart.

  The third person was a woman. She wore a mail shirt of bronze scales that fell halfway down her thighs; a long scimitar hung at her belt, its scabbarded tip grazing the earth. Her black hair was cut nearly as short as Sarah’s. Her thin lips were set into a frown that showed a hint of white teeth.

  The woman inside the sedan chair drew aside the curtain to reveal herself. She was middle-aged—definitely not Margaret—and she looked taut and polished, like a well-used and well-maintained bow, with its string pulled back to shoot. Her eyes were large and her lips full, and when she spoke she leaned forward ear-first, as if she were hearing Sarah rather than looking at her. The woman wore a simple blue robe and her feet were bare.

  “Travelers!” the woman called. “You come from the Serpent Mound!”

  Sir William shifted uneasily in his saddle.

  “We’ve come from farther than that,” Sarah answered. She rode closer, prompting the mail-clad woman to put her hand on the hilt of her sword and hiss. From close up, she saw lines of age around the priestess’s face. “We’ve come from Nashville, some of us. Though I was born in Pennsland. And now I’m coming home.”

  The priestess smiled. “A riddle?”

  “If you will.”

  The priestess nodded. “Then riddle me this: three things lay buried with a dead king, and no one could unearth them. What power would bring those sacred objects to light again?”

  “What power but the king’s own?” Sarah was enjoying this veiled mutual provocation. In part, she liked it because she felt safe with Cathy and Sir William at her side. “But then what power would part those three objects?”

  The priestess’s eyes opened wide. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Sarah.”

  “Are you a thief?”

  “I only take what belongs to me.”

  “Are you carrying those objects now?”

  “Who are you to ask me?” Sarah asked. The questions were getting a little too personal.

  The priestess raised her chin, which made her seem to be looking down at Sarah, though the two were at about the same height. “I am Alzbieta Torias. I am Handmaid to Lady Wisdom, and the rightful Queen of Cahokia.”

  Sarah laughed once, from surprise. Then she thought about what the Firstborn woman had said and laughed again, this time at herself. Of course! Who else would be so interested in the regalia? Who else might have a sense of where they would be found, but Sarah’s unknown Ophidian relatives…who might think they had claims to Sarah’s father’s throne. Sarah bit back more laughs.

  “You’re traveling pretty light, for a queen,” she called.

  Torias didn’t answer.

  “So,” Sarah said, getting control of herself, “this Polite over here, somehow he hexed up Wisdom’s Bluff in a way that would tell you when someone had found the…three objects, as you say. Two days ago, he comes running into your chapel, only you don’t have a chapel, do you? What do you have, a treehouse? Platform on a pole, like old St. Simeon Stylites? Never mind, you can tell me later.

  “Your pet Polite comes rushing in and he says ‘Your Holiness,’ or ‘Your
Worship,’ or whatever it is he has to call you, ‘someone has taken the…objects.’ So you gather up the family retainers—that’s who these people are, right, servants? I mean, some of them are flat-out wearing slave collars, and the ones hiding in the trees, well, they’re a little too nervous to be real professionals, aren’t they?

  “But you figured it was all you’d need, or maybe it was all you could scrape together, so you gather them up and come rushing down here, to sit in this place and wait to meet me.” Sarah threw back her head and laughed again. “So either you marched really fast, or you weren’t in Cahokia, right? Because that must be, what, four days north? Family estates, is that it?”

  The Polite looked disconcerted. The counselor held an expressionless look, but his eyes darted back and forth violently. The woman with the sword definitely wanted to attack Sarah.

  “You look as if you might be Firstborn,” the priestess said slowly.

  “About time you scored a point, Alzbieta,” Sarah said.

  “Most people don’t address me by that name.”

  “Yeah?” Sarah slipped into Appalachee before she could help it. “I ain’t most people.”

  “You could be the right age,” Alzbieta Torias said.

  “I could be,” Sarah agreed. “If that age was about fifteen-sixteen.”

  “Barely,” the priestess said.

  Sarah raised her eyebrows. “Barely means exactly right. The right age to be the daughter you never heard of, the daughter nobody ever heard of.”

  “Whose daughter?”

  “Oh no you don’t, Alzbieta.” Sarah waggled a finger at the priestess. “You want a score another point, you have to tell me.”

  “The Lion,” Alzbieta Torias said.

  “Of Missouri,” Sarah agreed.

  “Not only of Missouri.”

  Curious. But Sarah wasn’t about to ask a question now. “That make us cousins, Alzbieta?”

  “Why?” Alzbieta’s face broke into a self-satisfied grin. “Are you hoping to marry me, Nashville child?”

  “Don’t mistake my willingness to banter for the toothlessness of a cub, Alzbieta Torias,” Sarah snarled. “I am every bit the lion my father was.”

  “Being the lion got your father killed.”

  “Being the lion got my father an empress for a bride, and fame that will not die.”

  “And yet his daughter is a vagrant and a thief.”

  “I found and took what was mine. And I found and took what you sought and failed to find. Are you ready to name the three objects you believe I have, Alzbieta Torias?”

  The priestess lurched forward to the edge of her palanquin, catching herself on the pole but forcing her slave bearers to stagger sideways. “The Orb of Etyles! The Sevenfold Crown! And the Heronsword!”

  Sarah chuckled slowly. “Close, Alzbieta, but wrong. Now are you and your servants—my family’s servants—ready to accompany me and my guard to our family lands, so we can discuss preparations for my enthronement?”

  “Take her!” the priestess gasped.

  The warrior in scale mail drew her scimitar, but at the same moment two pistols jumped into Sir William’s fists and she froze, sword raised over her head. Cathy Filmer pulled a pistol and pointed it at the counselor leaning on his standard. Sarah jammed her hand into the satchel hanging from her shoulder to grab the Orb of Etyles. Somewhat restored after two days of no gramarye, she shouted “dormi!” and channeled the green fire of the Mississippi River into the mind of the Polite—

  knocking down several invisible wardings in the process—

  and the wizard fell to the ground like a chopped tree, unconscious.

  With a cry, the Firstborn lying in wait on either side of the clearing rose to their feet. They wore blue cloaks over gray tunics, like their standard-bearer. Bang! Bang! Bang! Sarah heard three gunshots off to her right, in the east, and then the warriors on the west side of the valley began to scream.

  “I believe someone has dropped a bee’s nest on your servants, Lady Torias,” Cathy Filmer said. “That, or some sinister spell is causing them to slap themselves and run about in circles.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Sarah said. “Might a been your Polite.”

  “My cousin Kyres was a renowned magician.” Alzbieta Torias lay back against her cushions, looking more like a snake coiling to strike a second time than a person resigned to her fate.

  “I ain’t renowned,” Sarah said. “But I am my father’s daughter, I’m the rightful Queen of Cahokia, and I’m determined as hell. Now you can make nice or we can be enemies, but whatever you decide to do, remember this…the bees are on my side.”

  “Tell me your full name,” Alzbieta said.

  “You know it. I’m Sarah Elytharias Penn. What you don’t know is that I’ve been raised as a Calhoun these fifteen years, and I’ve got a streak of pure Appalachee piss-off-and-die that runs all the way down to the marrow of my bones.”

  “I can see that for myself.” Alzbieta Torias sighed. “Very well, then. Someone wake up the wizard. Cousin Sarah, I don’t think you know quite what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  “The Company is going to extract an extraordinary dividend.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nathaniel pawed at his ear, trying to silence the riotous noises of the world. His horse sounded a plaintive whinny. Landon Chapel and Charles Lee, also mounted, hooted and cheered loudly.

  The goose honked. Its legs were tied to the upper crossbar in a simple frame that stretched across one of the plantation’s lanes and the bird flapped its wings in vain, trying to escape. The young men had greased it thoroughly, not to increase the chances of the goose’s survival, which were nil, but to make the game more competitive, and the grease now gave the goose a surreally slick look, its feathers lying stubbornly flat against its body and neck.

  Naked fields stretched to either side of the lane. Beyond the fields lay the log homes of Irish field-workers, and beyond those lay forested hills. The earl’s manor stood out of sight on the other side of a low ridge. A thread of smoke rose from the site of the manor, suggesting that the house’s ever-skulking godi Wickens was offering sheep to Woden.

  George Randolph Isham galloped hard beneath the honking goose, made his grab, and missed.

  “Herne’s bloody horn!” The earl’s son shook his hand. “I’m bit!”

  “Careful, George!” Charles Lee called. Charles was the oldest of the young men, old enough to be married, though he wasn’t, and old enough to have a commission in the earl’s cavalry, which he did. He was a lieutenant, and on leave, and spending his time with the younger men of the plantation. His greater years showed in the superiority of his facial hair, which consisted of a long drooping mustache. Under his faded purple coat, he wore brown breeches and a white shirt.

  ~Cut the throat in one motion. Collect the blood in the stone’s groove.~

  “Collect the blood.” Nathaniel shook his head. He had hoped George would pull off the goose’s head. A victory by the earl’s son was the best outcome for everyone. Nathaniel burrowed deeper into the old coat he wore, patched at the elbows, and pulled the oversized tricorner hat down tight. The coat and hat had both once belonged to one of the earl’s footmen, a kind old man named Barlow who had taken special care of Nathaniel when he’d been a boy; on Barlow’s death, Nathaniel had taken to wearing the footman’s clothing, hat and coat both long since faded to a dull blue. No one had stopped him.

  George, by contrast, wore a gloriously tailored coat dyed the earl’s color purple. Gold stitching on the outside of both sleeves and up the front traced out branches of the great world-tree, Yggdrasil, and he wore a gold hammer of Thunor on a gold chain around his neck. When he wore a hat, which he didn’t at the moment, it was of the same brilliance as his coat.

  Landon wore old cast-offs once worn by George, faded to a duller violet, and the hammer on his breast was pewter.

  “Still trying to nursemaid me, are you?” George laughed out loud. “Don’t worry your pr
etty head, Miss Lee! Even if the goose bites off my thumb, I can still be earl after my father is gone!”

  “True!” Charles stroked his long mustachios. They made him look Texian, or maybe Ferdinandian. “If you fall and break your neck in a ganderpull, though, I am less optimistic of your chances. And you should be pleased you still have your father with you, and do your best not to disappoint him.”

  “And therefore I am doing my best to plump up every serving maid in Johnsland with a baby Isham…or rather, Chapel.” George sneered at his half-brother, who now swung into the saddle of his own horse to take his turn.

  Foster children and orphans were given good-luck names when their true family name was unknown, or could not be admitted in public. Chapel was such a name, and it was Landon’s name as well, though he and Nathaniel were no relations, as far as Nathaniel knew. Temple was another such name, as were Godsbless, Wodensson, Christborne, and Farewell. As such names went, Chapel was vaguely Christian, and it only made Landon and Nathaniel stick out more on the earl’s lands.

  “My name is Landon Chapel,” Landon said, “but everyone knows who my father is.”

  “Just not your mother,” George shot back.

  “I heard a surprising Elector Song in a tavern in Raleigh this week,” Landon said. He burst into sudden melody:

  Johnsland has two Electors, my word

  One slaughters sheep and the other’s a bird

  It was a parody of the Elector Song for Louisiana. Not a very good one.

  “Say what you like about Old One Eye, but the earl is father to both of us,” George growled, “and I’ll gladly kill you for his honor’s sake.”

  “Easy, George,” Charles murmured.

  Landon shrugged. “If you die pulling the gander, it won’t be your get on poor Jenny Farewell who inherits. It’ll be me.”

  ~His get on Jenny Farewell. Get on Jenny Farewell.~ Nathaniel felt punched in the stomach.

  “If I fall and break my neck,” George shot back, “our father’s twenty other bastards will come crawling out of the woods and swamps of Johnsland to make their claims. You’ll be fighting duels the rest of your life.” He took a swig from the bottle of wine. All four of them were slightly drunk. “Or maybe the Chief Godi will just take the earldom for the College.”