Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  Johannes had laboriously made it clear that the Stolze Marie, of which his uncle was one-fourth owner, was turning around and immediately going back downstream, hoping to get at least one more trip in before the winter made it impracticable. As it happened, there were no boats scheduled to head upstream for a couple of weeks.

  Kinta Jane could station herself on the single rickety dock jutting out into the river and wave at passing boats, hoping one would pick her up, or she could find another way.

  The Meekses at the General Store & Dried Goods hadn’t exactly taken her in, but when Mrs. Meeks learned, through reciprocal pantomiming that Kinta Jane knew how to use a needle—it taking Mrs. Meeks several days to understand that Kinta Jane could hear perfectly, and was only unable to speak—she put the Choctaw to work making dresses to a pattern, giving her two meals a day and an old blanket on the floor beside the Franklin Stove. That device’s presence, more than anything else, told Kinta Jane she was getting closer to Philadelphia.

  The Meekses bathed every night in well-water heated on the Franklin Stove. Kinta Jane washed herself every morning in a torrent behind the store. Initially she thought Mr. Meeks had some grudge against the stream, until she overheard him giving directions to a traveling customer and realized that the body of water was in fact named the Goddamn River.

  Kinta Jane considered the presence of the Franklin Stove a cheerful omen. It almost made up for the fact that she was awoken each morning by Mr. Meeks, unlocking the shop door and announcing his presence to his neighbors by shouting “Meeks shall inherit the earth!” at the top of his lungs.

  The squirrel-faced shopmistress had also promised three pennies a day, payable at the end of a week, by which time Kinta Jane would have stitched enough dresses for herself and her four gangly daughters for a year. Kinta Jane accepted, planning to pay her eventual fare upstream with cash.

  The town had a small subscription Bibliothek, a board-built building over stone foundations, in the style the locals referred to as Klappholz. Kinta Jane thought if she earned enough pennies, she might even spend one to borrow a little reading material, maybe a little poetry by that mad English godi, Blake.

  Kinta Jane chose the Meekses’ store because she understood spoken English, and because Mr. Meeks hadn’t been aboard the Stolze Marie. The German keelboatmen generally didn’t buy from the Meekses, but from German-speaking merchants in town.

  Kinta Jane had felt immense pride when Mrs. Meeks had taken the first dress she’d sewn and hung it on her wall. She’d taken Kinta Jane by the hand and led her into the Meeks family’s rectangular living space behind the store, a single large room under a loft. There, Kinta Jane had seen Mrs. Meeks’s finest dresses, what she kept referring to as “Sunday best,” as well as the Sunday best of her daughters, hanging on the wall as decoration. And telling Kinta Jane how pleased she was with her craft, Mrs. Meeks had taken down her old Sunday dress from where it hung pinned to the wall over the dining table, and carefully pinned into its place a new striped blue gingham frock.

  The week was not yet up when one of the keelboatmen, Karl, had come into the store. Karl was broad-shouldered and also broad-bellied, a widower and a heavy drinker, and he’d had more than a beer or two before coming into the Meekses’. After purchasing several yards of cloth and a sack of dried beans, he’d seen Kinta Jane, sitting beside the Franklin Stove and stitching away. Karl had done as he would have aboard the Stolze Marie, pantomiming the services he would like from Kinta Jane.

  Kinta Jane looked away as if she didn’t know the German, but Mrs. Meeks and two of her daughters saw it all. When Mr. Meeks came roaring out of the back room demanding satisfaction from his ill-mannered customer, his rage quickly metamorphosed into a short conversation in German with Karl, after which Kinta Jane’s time with the Meekses came to an abrupt end.

  “We’re New Light,” Mrs. Meeks had said, pantomiming something wiggling over her head that might have been intended to be the sun. “New Light, you understand? We greet our brothers and sisters with the holy kiss. And besides, you know how it is…we got to maintain appearances. Be respectable, as the community sees us.”

  Kinta Jane shrugged and held out her hand, palm up, asking for payment.

  Mrs. Meeks shook her head. “I don’t understand, dear.”

  Kinta Jane showed three fingers and slapped them into her palm six times. Three pennies times six days.

  “We couldn’t possibly,” Mrs. Meeks said. “For starters, I’m mighty concerned as to how the money would git used. Once a woman has fallen, you know, she takes to liquor and wild dance and worse. I couldn’t in good conscience give you that money, dear. It might could make your life worse!”

  “Meeks shall inherit the earth!” Mr. Meeks shouted by way of ratification.

  So Kinta Jane had stolen the mule, along with a ham, the basket of sewing supplies she’d been using, and a short carbine Mr. Meeks had kept after his militia service as a young man. Whether it was shock at her brazen theft, lack of imagination to see that she’d been the perpetrator, or guilt at the knowledge they’d cheated her, the Meekses didn’t follow, and sent no one in pursuit.

  Maybe they just didn’t care. The mule was old, and the gun older.

  The ham was the most valuable thing she’d stolen. It would last her a week, if she was careful. There was more flesh on the ham than on the mule.

  Kinta Jane rode north, asking for directions to Free Imperial Youngstown. Though Youngstown lay more east than north, she kept north, and kept asking directions. She wanted to get away from German Ohio, which lay along the river, and away from Appalachee, which lay beyond it to the south. She feared getting caught, but more than that she enjoyed the feel of land she’d never seen before, unencumbered by the distasteful memories of life with the Meekses.

  She soon crossed into one of the Moundbuilder kingdoms. No wall or even sign that Kinta Jane noticed marked the change—under the Compact, travel among the various powers of the Empire was supposed to be free, so other than those put up by the Imperials, there were generally no toll-gates or walls. But in the course of a single day’s ride, the buildings moved from the high-peaked half-timber buildings the Germans favored, second and third stories cantilevered out to add floor space, giving the largest houses the appearance of being upside-down, to the simpler, older style the Ophidians built. Thatched and plastered stables and public houses. Wooden palisades on raised banks surrounded by ditches. Low mounds with doors and windows indicating that they were buildings, sometimes with more ordinary-looking buildings on top.

  The people she passed changed, too. Each day she saw fewer Appalachee and Germans, and more Eldritch. The Firstborn wore long tunics and generally had long dark hair bound behind their heads. Spears and long swords replaced the long knives and sabers of the southern Empire, and the coins she saw veered sharply away from silver toward other metals, including iron as well as gold.

  Kinta Jane made money as she could along the track, generally as she had done in New Orleans, and with a similarly grubby mob of clients. She made a great deal more copper than gold, but also a few coins of bronze and iron. She avoided plying her trade in public houses, where it would have been easiest to attract men, and instead eyed travelers on the road to assess them. A man who looked tired, travel-weary, rich, and not-too-dangerous, got an invitation from Kinta Jane Embry in the form of an outthrust hip slapped with her own hand.

  Twice she found work as a seamstress, in roadside ordinaries.

  She kept the carbine loaded and near to hand, just in case.

  She’d lost track of the date, but knew it must be November. The evening wind was bitter, and she rode a broad track that had gone from a single rut to two ruts to covered with gravel, when she saw fire ahead.

  Not a campfire. A town on fire.

  Kinta Jane hid.

  The mule was a placid old jenny she’d named Mrs. Meeks, and it was happy to plod after Kinta Jane into a grove of trees and lie down. Kinta Jane crept to a fin of cold rock an
d lay across it with the carbine, listening and looking for anything that would tell her what was happening.

  The burning buildings illuminated a small town that squatted where two roads crossed at a river. The absence of a ferry suggested a ford instead, a stretch where the river’s width made it shallow enough to cross on foot or on one’s horse. The town had no ditch and bank and no mound, and its palisade wall was low enough that Kinta Jane thought she could probably scramble over it, if necessary.

  The town looked peaceful, other than the fact that it was on fire.

  Of the ten or so buildings Kinta Jane could see over the log curtain surrounding the town, at least two were burning.

  Hands grabbed Kinta Jane from behind and hauled her to her feet. Surprised, she dropped the carbine, which landed on a bed of crisp autumn leaf-fall beneath her.

  That left her the stiletto sheathed on her forearm. It wouldn’t be enough, not against three men.

  The fire behind Kinta Jane cast watery orange light on the man holding her and the two men at his shoulders. She saw their faces clearly; the fire must be closer than she realized. The men all wore some kind of Imperial uniform, blue and gold, but Kinta Jane didn’t know it. She didn’t think they were Foresters, because their shoes were heavy soldiers’ shoes beneath painted canvas gaiters, rather than the lighter moccasins the Foresters had adopted from the Indians.

  “I reckon,” the man holding her said slowly, “we found ourselves another bit of contraband here.” He smelled of cheap wine and old urine. Then he belched, adding in the pungent aroma of raw onion mixed with some kind of rotting meat.

  “Naw, Joss,” said the one on the right, “if it’s contraband, we gotta burn it. That what you wanna do with this little morsel, light it on fire?”

  Mrs. Meeks brayed a complaint.

  “In a manner of speaking.” Joss’s voice was slurred.

  “Henrik’s right,” said the man on the left. “But they ain’t nothin’ stoppin’ us from enjoyin’ a little friendly intercourse with the natives. Firstborn are fair game in every case, them’s the orders.”

  “That’s right, Pete,” Henrik said. “And she looks like a Fairy to me.”

  Kinta Jane couldn’t contradict them. She didn’t think they would care, even if they believed her. She was the least Firstborn-looking person she knew.

  Had she been standing, she would have cocked her hip to the side and slapped it; the gesture had never failed to communicate what she wanted it to. Hanging by two fists knotted in the front of her blouse, she had to try a different tactic.

  She slowly licked her lips.

  “She wants it,” Pete said.

  “She wants me.” Joss dropped Kinta Jane.

  She allowed herself to tumble all the way to the ground. The leaves padded her fall, and she bounced left, avoiding the gun on the ground.

  “That’s it,” Henrik said.

  Lying on her back with her knees up, Kinta Jane licked her lips again, looking from one brutish face to the next.

  And spread her knees. Slowly. Teasingly.

  As they stared where she knew they would, she snaked a hand through the leaf pile, unseen in the darkness, and found the gun.

  “She wants all of us,” Henrik said.

  “She’s gonna get me first.” Joss grunted, fumbling with his hands to unknot the length of rope holding up his trousers. They hit the ground only a second before his knees did, and he thrust himself forward, prepared to assault Kinta Jane.

  She let him begin, egging him on with soft moans of encouragement. Henrik and Pete similarly dropped their trousers, though Pete looked around as if fearing discovery. The stink of her rapist clogged Kinta Jane’s nostrils; she breathed through her mouth and tried not to think about his stench. She’d smelled worse, in the Faubourg Marigny. When she thought Joss had gone far enough to be distracted, Kinta Jane swung the carbine up to rest it on his shoulder, right against his cheek, pulling back the hammer in the process. Fear gave her the strength to do it.

  “What?” He grunted, rising up slightly on his knees, though not pulling back.

  Bang!

  Kinta Jane shot Henrik square in the center of his chest and he dropped without a word. Pete shrieked and rushed off into the darkness, nearly tripping over his breeches.

  Mrs. Meeks yanked up her picket and bolted.

  Joss bellowed, burned by the shower of sparks against his cheek. He punched Kinta Jane in the face and tried to back away, rising to his haunches—

  but Kinta Jane locked her heels together behind his ponderous backside and held him.

  “Ophidian cow!” Joss punched her again, missing her face this time in the dark and striking her repeatedly in the chest. He had rings on his fingers; Kinta Jane felt the skin of her shoulder tear as he struck it.

  She answered by dropping the carbine and drawing the stiletto. She plunged the blade deep into Joss’s head, entering neatly behind his ear. His hot blood poured down on her, he jerked spastically, and then he slumped over, dead.

  Kinta Jane rolled Joss’s body off and into the leaves. In the light of the burning village, she dug through the clothing of her attackers and found a pair of pistols.

  She checked the priming on the guns.

  Then she went looking for Pete.

  Her surviving attacker had missed the track by which he’d come and run right into forest again. Kinta Jane heard him thrashing about in the trees and stopped on the trail. She held a pistol in each hand, pointed downward.

  She wished she could call to him. Instead, she just stood in the track and tried to look innocuous.

  She waited patiently.

  Pete emerged. He shook; that might be the November night chill combined with his lack of trousers, or it might be fear.

  “I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  That was clearly a lie. Kinta Jane nodded toward the burning town and shrugged, making a grunt that she hoped sounded like a question.

  Pete frowned. “What do you care?”

  Kinta Jane raised one pistol, not pointing it at Pete but making it clearly visible in the firelight. She repeated her grunt.

  “I reckon you ain’t much of a talker, are you? So I tell you, and you let me go?”

  Kinta Jane nodded.

  “Look, we’re Ohio Company Regulars.”

  Kinta Jane frowned.

  “Imperial Ohio Company soldiers.” Pete spat. “Not Dutch. We was all prisoners, just weeks ago. I was in Pittsburgh, I think Joss there was in Philadelphia, Henrik might have been in a dungeon up in New Amsterdam. And we got let out.”

  Kinta shrugged and grunted.

  “We didn’t escape, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Pete shook his head. “There’s a word for it. Furloughed? Paroled? I don’t remember. But some director of the Ohio Company cut a deal with the Emperor that he’d give us his pardon if we did a six-month tour of duty with the company.”

  Kinta Jane nodded at the fire. She could hear yelling from the town, and occasional gunshots.

  “They ain’t innocent villages, though, are they?” Pete grinned slyly. “If they’ve got anything as was supposed to be stamped by the Company and ain’t, then they’re smugglers. They got contraband, and our orders are to burn all contraband.”

  It was winter. They Imperial Ohio Company was burning the Adenans’ food in the winter. Kinta Jane trembled with rage.

  This wasn’t her affair, though. The Conventicle didn’t exist to thwart Thomas Penn in his struggle against the Electors of the Ohio. The Conventicle existed because of Benjamin Franklin and his Vision, and because of Simon Sword.

  Kinta Jane should let Pete go and continue to Philadelphia.

  “That’s the Pacification of the Ohio, ain’t it?” Pete continued. “If these Wigglies learn they’re completely dependent on the Emperor for food, they’re gonna calm right down and cooperate.”

  Kinta Jane Embry shot Pete in the chest.

  He dropped, and for good measure she
stepped closer and shot him in the head as well. Then she took her knife and stabbed it repeatedly into his neck, face, and belly.

  When she finished, he was a disfigured wreck and she was sobbing.

  Who had she really wanted to stab to death? Joss? Elbows Pritchard?

  The weird-eyed beastwitch who had invaded her room in the Faubourg and taken her dignity?

  René’s murderer?

  Kinta Jane took a deep breath. She could bury the bodies, but there seemed to be little point. Anyone who found them would think they’d been killed in the raid. Or maybe they’d killed each other in the fight over raping priority of some Ophidian captive, given that two of them had their trousers down.

  That was just fine with Kinta Jane.

  She tore the cluster of beybey medallions from around her neck and threw them to the ground. The gods of New Orleans had been no use to her. Kinta Jane Embry had saved herself.

  She turned to find she was observed.

  Six men stood in the road. They were shorter than the company men, and in the firelight Kinta Jane could see that their foreheads were pale, their hair long and dark. Their mouths were hidden by neckerchiefs, like outlaws might wear. Over their shoulders they wore Ohioan cloaks, and in their hands they held long, straight swords.

  Firstborn. Eldritch, resisting the Ohio Company.

  She nodded slowly, pointed at Pete’s corpse. She wished she could speak, but the Firstborn seemed to understand. They nodded back, turned, and disappeared into the night.

  Kinta threw the two pistols deep into the woods, then retraced her steps. As the adrenalin in her blood subsided, she realized that her clavicle and her ribs on one side hurt acutely, especially when she breathed.

  Before she left, she took Joss’s rings. To get all of them, she had to cut off two of his fingers.

  She never found the mule.

  * * *

  In the Walnut Street Theater lobby, just as he stepped onto the bottom of the marble staircase that would take him up to his private box, Thomas Penn got the message.