Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  ~Eat what you kill. Kill not, unless you eat.~

  The buzz in Nathaniel’s head from the alcohol didn’t make the voices go away. It also didn’t dull the high-pitched whine he always heard in the background, behind the voices. His sudden understanding why Jenny was pleased to see George abused didn’t help, either. He rubbed his ear and managed not to whimper. “Kill,” he said.

  Charles shot him a pitying look.

  “Worse,” the young lieutenant said. “You’ll be fighting lawyers.”

  “Woden’s nine nights, that’s a fate worse than death.” George finished the alcohol, belched deeply, and tossed the bottle beyond Charles into the now-bare tobacco field. “You’d better hope I survive, little Landy.”

  Landon was the shorter of the two, but was muscular. He’d inherited the fine brown hair of his mother, whoever she was, rather than the rich, dark curls worn by George and—in his youth, if the paintings were to be believed—the earl himself. “I’ll protect you from the ferocious goose, George.” He smiled, maliciously. “And then maybe Jenny Farewell will tuck me into bed at night.”

  “Shall Jenny be the prize, then?” George wobbled on his feet, then leaned against the fence.

  “You might ask Jenny,” Nathaniel said softly. None of the others heard him.

  ~No! It is murder! I beg you!~

  “I beg you,” Nathaniel finished in a murmur.

  “The prize is the purse,” Charles said. He dug the small leather bag from the pocket of his coat and shook it, clinking the coins inside together to remind the others of their agreed stakes.

  Landon rode past the scaffold and turned his horse around, prepared to begin his run at the goose. The goose, perhaps sensing Landon’s intention, honked loudly.

  “Shall the prize be Jenny Farewell?” George laughed harshly. “So be it! I give her to you, my stubby little bastard brother, if you can pluck off the goose’s head!”

  “I won’t raise your whelp, of course!” Landon called.

  George shrugged. “We’ll call him Chapel and throw him in with the rest!”

  The shrug unbalanced the young nobleman and sent him lurching sideways. Charles reached over the fence and grabbed George’s arm, holding him upright.

  George pulled himself away and spat. “Hands off me!”

  “Relax, George.” But Charles inclined his head deferentially and released the earl’s legitimate son.

  George rolled from one foot to the other like a man standing on the deck of a ship, but didn’t fall.

  “Go on, then!” he bellowed. “For the purse, for the goose, and for Jenny!”

  Nathaniel held his breath, hoping Landon killed the goose. He didn’t want to take a turn.

  ~Kill me. Kill me.~

  “Kill me,” Nathaniel repeated. He felt dizzy. It wasn’t the gander whispering in his deformed ear, but in a way, it was.

  “Hee ya!” Landon spurred his mount into a charge. The horse was a long-legged hunter—Landon was a Chapel like Nathaniel, but he was the earl’s bastard, so he dressed in better castoffs and rode an expensive horse. The horse leaped into a blinding sprint and crashed toward the scaffold.

  At the last moment, Nathaniel looked away. When Landon’s hunter passed him, slowing, Landon was rubbing his right hand with his left and muttering.

  “Let me see that,” Charles called.

  “He’ll be fine. Where’s that other flask?” George rummaged through his horse’s saddlebags.

  Landon dismounted and showed Charles his hand. It was covered in blood.

  “You’ll lose this finger if you don’t get it treated,” Charles told him.

  “Fine.” Landon jerked his hand away. “Once I tear off this bird’s head, and swive Jenny Farewell senseless, I’ll have the cook stitch me up.”

  “Too late.” George found the flask, unstoppered it, and took a long drink. “She’s already senseless.”

  “She is if she puts up with you,” Charles said.

  It was a joke, but a joke with a point in it, and George was too drunk to take it well. “Shut up!” he roared.

  “George,” Charles pleaded.

  “You’re the son of a murderer!” George snapped. “You should have been cast out with him!”

  Charles looked George in the eye. “My father was a man of honor. I am not ashamed of him.”

  “And don’t you ever forget that I am your earl!”

  Charles looked down.

  “Will be,” Landon said. “Unless the goose breaks your neck.”

  George swung and took a punch at his half-brother. Landon being too far away, George only ended up lurching uselessly forward several steps. When he swayed and looked as if he might fall, Charles swung easily over the fence and caught him.

  “Hands off!” George staggered away, leaned against the fence, and took another drink.

  “My turn,” Nathaniel offered. He wanted to stop the bickering, wanted peace. Even if the other young men had been completely silent, Nathaniel would still have been tormented by the voices he heard, but if he could reduce the noise in the world to only those voices, he thought he could feel calm. “I’ll kill the bird, and happily take Jenny Farewell. She’d make a good wife for a fosterling like me.”

  He climbed onto his mount, which was a rugged hill pony of the sort the Irish ploughmen or house servants of Johnsland might ride. He hoped his words would disarm the others, but George and Landon both looked furious.

  ~Kill me. Kill me.~

  Was it the gander? The voice sounded like a gander’s voice, half-honk. “Kill me,” Nathaniel whispered, helpless not to repeat the words he heard.

  All his life, Nathaniel’s left ear had jutted out sideways from his head, a complete mismatch to his right ear. When he heard the voices, blood filled his strange ear, which heated up and itched. He reached up to massage the ear now, hoping the gesture was inconspicuous.

  “Well spoken, Nathaniel,” Charles said softly. “Jenny’s a good girl, and would be a good wife for any decent man.”

  “Oh?” George spun about, almost falling. “Any decent man? But I will not have her, so I must not be decent, is that it?”

  The earl’s son dropped his hand to the hilt of the saber on his belt.

  “Impudent,” Landon muttered.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Charles spoke slowly, and sounded tired. “We’re all a little drunk, and my words didn’t come out the way I intended them.”

  “Try again, then.” George’s voice was icy.

  Charles thought for a moment before speaking. “I meant that Nathaniel is a decent lad for thinking kindly of Jenny. You also, I know, think kindly of Jenny. Clearly, Jenny Farewell is far beneath your station and would not be a suitable bride for the future Earl of Johnsland. But she works hard, she’s bright enough to know her letters and a little Cherokee as well, and she’s a comely lass. For Nathaniel, I agree, she would be an excellent wife.”

  “Or for you,” George said.

  “Certainly.” Charles smiled. “Or for me. And I would try to do right by her, if she were mine.”

  “Because he’s a bastard, and you may as well be.”

  Charles’s breath hissed through his teeth. Nathaniel was afraid this confrontation was heading toward violence.

  “My turn!” He pulled his old coat on tighter. Urging his pony into a canter, he turned at the elbow of the lane and rushed back toward the goose, reins in his left hand and right hand held high. The landscape rushed past him, but it also seemed to revolve around him, and his head felt light.

  ~Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.~

  “Kill me!” he screamed, then bit his own tongue trying to force the words back into his throat.

  He didn’t want to kill the gander. But the bird seemed to be begging him. He rode hard, fighting to keep his eyes open against sudden tears that threatened to blind him.

  The goose honked one last time—

  it turned its neck to thrust its greased head into Nathaniel’s outstretched palm—
/>   crunch!

  Nathaniel slowed and then stopped his horse, looking down in shock at the bird’s head that lay twitching in his cupped hand.

  “Woden’s beard, I think he did it.” George walked away from Charles toward Nathaniel, reaching up to pull down the other young man’s hand to look inside.

  ~Thank you.~

  “Thank you,” Nathaniel repeated, feeling exhausted.

  “Publish the banns.” George snorted as he took the goose’s head. “Jenny’s yours, young Chapel.”

  “I guess I’ll be having goose for dinner tomorrow night.” Nathaniel tried to grin big, and affect the bravado the others seemed to feel. Charles smiled back at him. Nathaniel’s ear tingled, so he rubbed it.

  “You know, if you left your ear alone, it might not have swollen up to that ridiculous size,” Landon said.

  “It’s not that young Nathaniel’s ear is large.” George grunted, climbing onto his own horse, where he swayed back and forth during the pause in his speech. “It’s that it sticks out sideways. Poor bastard looks like a windmill on his left side.”

  “I’d have said an elephant,” Landon suggested.

  “Master Nathaniel, you should take up merchant sailing,” George said. “If you were pursued by pirates and needed to acquire that extra bit of speed to escape, you could simply turn your nose aft and gather wind in your ear.”

  “I’ll cut down the bird and have it sent to the kitchens,” Charles offered. “Why don’t you three retire for the evening?”

  “To a cold, unjennied bed?” George harrumphed. “I suppose I could find another girl. Or there’s one of our tenant’s daughters who’s beginning to look ripe enough. The man can hardly object, we’ve just given him ten extra acres to work.”

  The earl’s two sons rode back toward the big house.

  Nathaniel waited a moment before speaking. “Thank you,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve nothing to be sorry for.” Charles grabbed Nathaniel by the shoulder and squeezed, a grip that made Nathaniel feel respected and trusted. “A man gets dealt good cards and bad in this life, and he doesn’t get to choose which. All he gets to decide is how to play them. And tonight, Master Nathaniel Chapel, I believe you played your cards quite well.”

  Nathaniel rode alone to the servants’ building where he slept, trying not to slap his ear every time he heard one of the voices.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night Nathaniel awoke. The fire was low and the unmarried male servants with whom he shared the room tossed and turned, each on his plank bed.

  Jenny Farewell sat on the edge of Nathaniel’s plank. She was wearing the dress she always wore, but she had tied a pink ribbon in her hair. She was crying, and her lip was split and puffy; nevertheless, she was a beautiful girl. Charles Lee is right, I’ll count myself lucky if I marry a girl this fine. Jenny sat at such an angle to the fire that Nathaniel could see, and notice for the first time, the swell of her belly that hid her unborn child.

  “Are you mad, Nathaniel?” she whispered.

  ~The wind here never stops.~

  “Never stops,” Nathaniel murmured. The ambient whine raised in pitch. His vision began dissolving into smears of white light.

  Jenny caught her breath and her eyes grew wide. “I was…I was told you wished to see me.”

  Nathaniel shook his head slowly; the motion aggravated the lights and his oncoming vertigo. He took her hand in his and squeezed it. “I think there’s been a mistake, Jenny,” he whispered. “You should go to sleep. But thank you for looking in on me.”

  She nodded, silent tears in her eyes, and left.

  As she stepped out of the room, his seizure began.

  * * *

  Luman Walters took his time and worked with a prayer in his heart. An efficacious himmelsbrief required not only the proper words, but beauty worthy of heaven in the execution, and the concentration of a focused soul in the crafting. He alternately looked over and through the round glass lenses perched on his nose, he held the pen firmly, and his hand was slow.

  Really, an efficacious himmelsbrief could only be drawn by a righteous hexenmeister. Luman Walters wasn’t perfect, but he was trying.

  On the other side of the office they were sharing, Director Schmidt looked up from the post’s book of accounts and snorted. “Another one, my Balaam?”

  “You insist on traveling by boat, Madam Director.”

  “It’s not a boat. It’s a canoe.”

  “The Joe Duncan is far too large to be a mere canoe.”

  “Oh, yes? Is this one of the arcane facts you learned from that old braucher you cheated, the maximum permissible size of canoes? Or have you also done some apprenticeship among the Haudenosaunee? You didn’t seem like you were an honored apprentice when I rescued you from the Seneca six months ago; you seemed more like a man fleeing justice.”

  “I didn’t cheat the braucher. I paid him well, and I also paid his granddaughter. I only…played fast and loose with some of their tradition’s rules.”

  Notwithstanding Schmidt laughed. “You damned sophist, that’s why I like you.”

  The old man had been a great hexenmeister, a braucher in the Ohio German Christian tradition in a farming village outside Youngstown. Luman, then a young man, had been passing through and had asked to be taken as the hexenmeister’s apprentice. He spoke enough German, and a little Latin, he’d said, and he knew scripture.

  The old man had explained that he would only pass his knowledge down within his own family, and moreover that tradition required that his braucherei alternate sexes from one practitioner to the next. The old man had many daughters and granddaughters, and was waiting for one of them to feel the spirit and come to him.

  Luman almost accepted the dismissal. But the old man’s brusqueness had offended him, and besides, the braucher was blind and nearly deaf. It had been a simple task to help one of the old man’s granddaughters, Helga, feel the spirit. She had been stitching coats in an Imperial factory in Youngstown, which was a long day’s work that left her fingers pricked and bleeding, so the spirit required very little enticement to come to her.

  Then it had been a matter of sitting by Helga’s side during her months of lessons. The wooden-headed little fraülein had never been able to retain a single charm longer than an afternoon, but Luman had soaked up all the old man’s craft.

  He’d given Helga the money to pay her grandfather the purely optional but traditional honoraria, and paid her double what her wages had been in the factory. He earned the money at night, using his seeing stone or dowsing rods to help farmers place wells, and sometimes helping parties of money-diggers look for buried treasure. As often as not, the money-digging expeditions failed, generally because buried treasures are cursed by those who bury them, and tend to move away from the diggers. When they succeeded, it was because Luman had the wit to pin the treasure down within a circle of witch hazel withies, an astuteness for which he had not been praised. Once, he’d employed his arts to help a clan of German mystics find a cave within which to await the Second Coming of Christ. Despite his pointing out that his clients would have no need of money following the return of their Lord and may as well give it all to Luman, the mystics had insisted on paying him strictly by the hour.

  Studying by day and working by night, Luman had drunk a lot of coffee.

  The old man’s heart had given out just as he finished the course of instruction, convinced his granddaughter Helga was a coffee addict, but at least she was on her way to becoming a skilled hexenmeistres, capable of passing on the family’s tradition of god-fearing braucherei.

  Since Helga so clearly wasn’t developing magical abilities, Luman had offered her a deal: she could keep all her grandfather’s money, and he would take the old man’s grimoires and other tools.

  Helga, bored and by then convinced that Luman was rich, countered with a different deal: Luman could run if he liked, and she would call the constabulary.

  He’d run immed
iately, but he’d taken the old man’s books with him. A man who moved as much as Luman couldn’t carry a library with him, so he’d pored over the books and extracted all their best for his vademecum. Unable to lug the books around and unwilling to destroy them, Luman had deposited them with the doorkeeper of a masonic lodge in Pittsburgh. He’d avoided Youngstown for a decade thereafter.

  The Haudenosaunee…well, that was another story.

  “You speak as if you don’t value my learning,” he said, affecting an injured tone.

  “It is as St. Adam says. The ploughman is not as efficient as the man who only makes pins, but he is a much more interesting person.”

  “St. Adam Weishaupt?” He was teasing her, of course. “Adam of the Garden? He was a ploughman.”

  She snorted. “St. Adam the philosopher.”

  “Someday I shall read his Lives of Wealthy Men and discover what excites you so.”

  She said nothing, not even rising to the bait of his deliberately mangling the book title.

  “I’m not certain you’ve answered my question,” he reminded her. “I’ve worked hard to learn from so many traditions. Don’t you value my knowledge?” Luman valued his own knowledge very much.

  He lived for its further acquisition.

  “I don’t mind you sleeping with a loaded pistol beside your pillow,” she said.

  “That discourages hostile spirits.”

  “So you’ve said. Though I believe you’ve also told me that hostile spirits can be driven out with a writ of divorce.”

  “That is an exorcism technique,” Luman said patiently. “The loaded pistol keeps the spirits away in the first instance.”

  “I’m not bothered by any of the other odd things you do, because I value what you can accomplish, my Balaam,” she continued. “In all its variety and macaronick glory. Inasmuch as your Faculty of Abrac comes by education, then yes, it is what I value most about you.”