Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

“He’s a priest, Shadrach,” Sarah added. “Claims he’s a friend of the Elector.”

  “I don’t know if I can let him up, bein’ a priest.” Shadrach eyed Thalanes with suspicion.

  “I’m unarmed.” The monk spread his arms wide.

  “Arms ain’t the issue. I’m New Light,” Shadrach explained, a mocking edge to his voice, “and so’s the Elector. So’s James over there, and especially Red Charlie, that feller up the canyon, he’s really New Light.”

  “I admire New Light Christians.” Thalanes was far too soft, too gentle. These rough Calhoun boys would tear the monk to bits like a tissue paper doll. Sarah had mixed feelings about that prospect. “I respect the choices of all God’s children, and I especially respect any choice of spiritual commitment.”

  “I thank you, Father,” Shadrach said, executing an ironic little bow, “but our commitment ain’t the issue. The issue is that we like hard preachers up here in the hills, and we don’t much care for churches and priests.”

  “I see,” the monk said.

  “So I might could let you up the mountain, but only if you can convince me that you’re a hard preacher…” Shadrach raised his eyebrows, “who just happens to be a priest.”

  “You want a sermon?” Thalanes clarified doubtfully. He was so mild in his manner, Sarah thought it had to be a trick. She half-expected him to raise his hand at any second and turn Shadrach into a toad.

  “Hellfire and brimstone, Father.” The Calhoun sentinel spat a third time into the carpet of fallen leaves. “You give us a hellfire and brimstone sermon, and I’ll send you up. Otherwise, I don’t see as I can let you past, and I certainly can’t be responsible for the actions of Red Charlie. I consider myself a man of principle, but he has strong feelin’s.”

  Thalanes smiled at Charlie and James. Sarah thought it was about even odds between the monk’s getting turned away and his getting outright shot. Either way, she’d be rid of him.

  “Are you listening, Charlie?” Thalanes called up the canyon in a voice that surprised Sarah with its booming volume. “Here’s my sermon. ‘Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’”

  Shadrach seemed caught off-guard and puzzled. “I told you hellfire and brimstone, monk.”

  “Or else you go to hell.” The Ohioan snarled the last few words, then brushed past Shadrach and started up the canyon.

  The Calhoun guards looked at each other, at a loss. Red Charlie Calhoun, face colored like a lobster and his copper hair down to his shoulders, took a half-hearted step to block the priest’s way.

  “Did—did you jest tell me to go to hell, old man?” Shadrach hollered.

  “Let him up!” yelled a voice from the top of the draw, and Charlie backed away. The Elector, Andrew Calhoun himself, towered at the end of the track, collar to toe in his customary black, waving with his one arm to call off the guards. Sarah and Cal stared from the bottom of the canyon.

  “This absolutely has to be the strangest Tobacco Fair day I ever seen, Sarah,” Cal said to her as Father Thalanes disappeared up the top of the canyon. “What’s goin’ on?”

  “I dunno,” she said, “but I think I jest saw my pa invite a priest up onto Calhoun Mountain. I b’lieve the whole world is about to turn upside down.”

  “I’d be happy to abduct you.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Whunk!

  The chunk of wood split open as Cal brought it down on the chopping stump, pulling apart neatly into two halves and falling to the grass. He scooped them up and laid them on the pile. When Cal was a boy, his grandfather had warned him over and over against idle hands, and if you ever run out of useful things to do and you haven’t got a stick to whittle, boy, you can always chop wood for the pile.

  Before he could pick up the next piece to split, he heard a familiar sharp whistle.

  “Yessir,” he greeted his grandfather with surprise, burying the blade of the wood-chopping axe in the stump.

  “Walk with me, boy.” Andrew Calhoun grabbed his much taller grandson by the elbow with his one arm and steered him into a stroll about the top of Calhoun Mountain.

  Cal nodded and went along happily. They walked together along a broad dirt path beaten into the wiry grass among clusters of log cabins and small orange and yellow groves by generations of Calhoun feet.

  “The Fair went well enough, I reckon,” Cal volunteered—he hadn’t had a chance yet to report on the outcome of the morning’s trip, and nor had any of its other participants, since the Elector had been holed up since their return with the little Cahokian monk.

  “I heard.” The Elector’s tone of voice both praised Calvin and told him the Tobacco Fair was not to be the subject of this conversation. “I need you to do somethin’ for me, boy.”

  “Sure.” Cal wondered what that might be. “Jest name it, and it’s done already.”

  “Sarah’s a-goin’ on a journey,” the Elector told him as they passed beyond the cabins into a meadow of tall dry autumn grass. “She don’t know it yet, but she don’t really have a choice.”

  “Has it got somethin’ to do with this monk?” Cal couldn’t think of any other reason why Sarah would need to go on a journey anywhere. Cal had traveled, stealing cattle more or less locally and driving the ones the family didn’t eat to markets as far away as possible, but Sarah had always stuck very close to Calhoun Mountain. They were alone now, and stopped walking. “That little feller tells strange stories, but they got a ring to ’em as makes ’em sound like they jest might be true. Sarah ain’t really my auntie, is she?”

  “It has,” his grandfather confirmed, looking Cal in the face from the impenetrably deep wells of his eyes, “and she ain’t. This ain’t gonna be a safe journey for Sarah, you understand me?”

  Cal’s heart jumped at the possibilities. “I reckon someone oughtta go with her, then, don’t you? Someone as has traveled and knows his way around.”

  “Someone as can hunt and track and trap and trade and make shelter and git water and provide food,” Iron Andy Calhoun agreed. “Someone as can find his path in any weather and fight his way outta any scrape. Someone as is set to become a real hell of a feller, and someone I can trust.”

  Cal blushed. “Jerusalem, grandpa. Mebbe you oughtta go yourself.”

  “Damn straight I would, too,” the Elector said, “iffen I had two arms and I’s jest ten years younger. As it is, will you go in my place?” He gripped Calvin by the elbow and stared into his grandson’s soul.

  “Yes, I will,” Cal said, as if he was swearing a solemn oath.

  “Jest because she ain’t your aunt,” the Elector added with a hint of menace in his voice, “don’t mean I don’t feel about her like about my own daughters.”

  “I’ll do right by her.” Cal blushed again and looked at his feet.

  “I know you will,” his grandfather agreed. “That’s why I’m a-sendin’ you.” He tugged Cal’s elbow and turned them both back toward the cabins. “You got good morals, a good reputation. You’re sound in body and in mind, and ain’t nobody on this here mountain don’t love you. You ain’t e’er killed a man, I know. But I’m countin’ on you to do it iffen you have to.”

  Cal nodded, flattered but also daunted. “When does this journey start?”

  “Soon,” the Elector told him. “Stick close to Sarah, son. Stick real close. I got a feelin’ she might want to start even sooner’n I intend, and iffen she does, I don’t want her goin’ alone.”

  “I’ll keep her close,” Cal promised.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  Cal hesitated. Did his grandfather want him to pray for Sarah? “You know I do, grandpa,” he finally said, with an awkward shrug. “I believe in God. I’m New Light, you know
that. I’m as New Light as a man can be as ain’t plain crazy.”

  The old man nodded. “You remember that. You and I are gonna be talking again tonight, Calvin. Jest remember the answer to the next question you git asked is ‘I do.’”

  Calvin thought of wedding vows, and he gulped.

  * * *

  He needed to let her decide, Thalanes reminded himself. Sarah was a child of Adam like anyone else, and he had to respect her right to choose, no matter what.

  Young Andy let her in from the dogtrot.

  Thalanes sat in the Elector’s Whittlin’ House, or, as some of his family referred to it, the Thinkin’ Shed. Though he was long a widower and his children other than his daughter Sarah (foster daughter, Thalanes reminded himself—she seemed so at home here that even the monk had begun to think of her as a Calhoun) had all grown and moved out, the Elector was important enough to merit two rooms (and his own outhouse behind, discreetly veiled by stands of dogwood and maple), at the top of the long meadow on Calhoun Mountain, with a splendid view looking north upon Nashville and an infinity of green forested hills. The two rooms were two separate mud-chinked log cabins sharing one wide plank porch and a peaked roof. The roofed passage between the cabins was called a dogtrot. Sarah and the Elector shared one cabin as living quarters; in the other, the Elector whittled and thought, conducted serious interviews, planned battles, and handed down private judgment.

  The Thinkin’ Shed was full of carved animals, handmade chairs and stools, and above all, walking sticks. The Elector sat with his back to the low fire in a wood chair of his own manufacture, horn-handled clasp knife in his hand, shaping a six-foot length of ash into a staff. His eyes, set deep in the shadows of a craggy, weathered face under a shock of snow white hair, didn’t focus on the stick at all, but stared into a corner as the knife worked its magic without direction. Thalanes knew Andrew Calhoun well enough to recognize that he was distracted and troubled by the news the monk had brought and the errand on which he had come, but he carved wood effortlessly, the stick cradled against his neck as he turned it from a rough branch into a polished staff, with its top cut into the shape of a horse’s head, like a large wooden chess piece.

  Sarah came in from the dogtrot and shut the door.

  “Did I do right bringin’ this Unsouled monk up the mountain, then, Pa?” She settled into another of the Elector’s chairs.

  “You did right to let him up, daughter,” Calhoun assured her, and then he grinned, his deep eyes twinkling. “You did right to make him work for it, too.”

  She laughed. “I’d a brung him direct if I’d a knew he was tellin’ the truth about bein’ your friend.”

  “Penn’s English, child,” the old man said to her, and his shoulders slumped a little. “Yes, he’s my friend. He’s your friend, too, and he’s come on an important mission, which I need to discuss with you.”

  He deftly shut the locking knife with one hand, then slipped it into a pocket in his breeches and laid the staff aside.

  “I’m here, Father,” Sarah said, and she sat on the edge of her seat to take the Elector’s gnarled and suntanned paw in her two smooth ivory hands. Poor girl. Can she handle my news? Will she make the right decisions on her hard road?

  “Dear sweet child,” the Elector began after a pause. “I’ve kept something from you all your life. I’ve told you a lie, and I don’t regret it, because it was a necessary lie and a lie that saved your life, but I fear you’ll be hurt and angry with me. Before I tell you the truth, I want you to understand I love you very much, and I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.”

  The tender words were incongruous coming from a face so cragged and careworn. Sarah’s lip trembled and her good eye looked a little glassy.

  “Sarah, my child,” Elector Calhoun continued, and he squeezed her hands so tight his knuckles whitened. “I’m not your father.”

  She sobbed, once, and then regained control. Thalanes bowed his head out of respect for her emotion.

  There was a brief silence, and then Sarah spoke again, in a tremulous voice. “Who are my parents?”

  Calhoun nodded. “Your parents were good friends of mine, friends and allies. I shed blood on the sands of Texia with your father in the Spanish War, and I served under your great-grandfather, your mother’s father, in the Ohio Forks War. I took you in, as my own child, out of love for all of them.”

  He looked her in the eye. “I raised you out of love for you.”

  “Who were they?” she repeated. “Were they Appalachee? Are they Appalachee? Are they dead?” She must know the answers to these questions, Thalanes thought, I’ve practically already told her. He would have liked to comfort her, but that was not his role now.

  “Your father fought alongside me in the Spanish War,” the Elector repeated. “He was captain of the Cahokia volunteers, and he was only a prince at the time. Prince and not even heir.”

  “Kyres Elytharias,” Sarah whispered. “The dead King of Cahokia.”

  “Not just dead, child,” Thalanes said, “but murdered. You are his oldest child, and heir to his throne. You are the rightful Queen of Cahokia.”

  “You’re the heir to two kingdoms, my dear daughter,” Calhoun told her. “Pennsland is also yours by right of inheritance.”

  “Pennsland ain’t a kingdom,” Sarah said. She seemed to have an innate reflex that made her kick back against everyone and everything, even her foster father. “It’s private land, all owned by the Penn landholder in the name of the Penn family.”

  “Yes,” Calhoun agreed calmly. “By right, you’re the Penn landholder.”

  “Your fairy tale is true, then,” Sarah said to Thalanes. “At least, some of it is. I’m the daughter of Mad Hannah. But what do you mean, ‘murdered’? You said before that the Imperial Consort died in an accident.”

  “She was never mad,” Thalanes murmured, remembering the fiery, willful empress. “She was wise and good and strong, and she suffered greatly at the hands of designing men.” He paused, his memories of the terrible night fifteen years earlier heavy on his soul. “It has generally been told that Kyres Elytharias died of a fall from his horse. That story is a lie; your father was murdered by one of his own guard, by one of the Philadelphia Blues, while they stood watch together.”

  There was silence for a time.

  “This changes nothing,” Sarah finally said, and her voice was fierce and a little bitter. “Why did you come, monk? Did you want to tell me my mother is dead? I read that in the Nashville Imperial Intelligencer this morning.”

  “He came to take you with him,” Calhoun told her, “and, like it or not, you have to go.”

  She sobbed again, sudden and hard, and her accent flooded back. “You’re gonna cast me out?”

  Calhoun pulled his foster daughter into a crushing one-armed embrace, kissing her cheek and whispering into her ear. “You always have a place here. I would give anything to protect you. But I don’t have the strength to resist the emperor.”

  She pulled away from her foster father and turned to face Thalanes, tears streaked down her face, her emotion-reddened complexion softening the stark horror of her bad eye. “The emperor wants me?”

  The monk nodded. “The Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton is the emperor’s man. He is chaplain to the emperor’s own Imperial House Light Dragoons, the Philadelphia Blues, but their relationship goes far back, and he has always been your uncle’s servant.”

  “My uncle,” Sarah whispered thoughtfully. “But you said he didn’t know about Hannah’s children. You said someone told him.”

  With an effort, Thalanes forced the words out, nodding in acknowledgement of his shame. “He didn’t know. But I was your mother’s confessor in her confinement, as I had been your father’s before that. I was the servant who brought you here, a newborn infant, and hid you with the Elector and his family, and I was the fool who allowed your mother to talk me into telling her about you. What you were like, and where I had hidden you.”

  Tears flow
ed down Sarah’s cheeks now, but her voice was firm. “So what?”

  Thalanes steeled himself with a deep breath. “Two weeks ago, your uncle learned his sister had given birth to triplets, fifteen years earlier. He had her tortured. Put her on the rack like some medieval heretic, pulled her fingernails out, and did worse. He tortured her until she told him everything she knew about the children. Tortured her to death.”

  Sarah was silent, stunned.

  “I don’t believe your uncle learned where your brother and sister are located, because I don’t believe the Empress Hannah knew that information. I don’t know it, myself. I don’t think the empress knew who had hidden her other two children; I certainly didn’t tell her, though I could have. But I know that Thomas Penn learned where to find you. And I know he learned of my role…my treachery, as he and his servants have called it.”

  “That’s what Angleton was talking about,” Sarah realized.

  He nodded, wretched. And Angleton was right, too. Thalanes had committed treason against the emperor, and a jury of twelve good Pennslanders and true might very well sentence him to hang for it, if it ever came to a trial. Only his betrayal of the Empress Hannah had been much worse—he never should have told her about Sarah, no matter how much she had importuned. And he had betrayed Sarah’s father, too, in his turn—he never should have let the king take a turn standing watch, that dark night when he had been murdered.

  “I narrowly escaped Philadelphia with my life,” he said. “I came here to take you with me, and to hide you again where Thomas cannot find you.”

  “You must go with him, my daughter,” Calhoun urged her.

  “What if I don’t want to go?” she asked.

  Could she possibly be so stubborn? “Please,” Thalanes said, “I beg you, you must. Angleton had to have raced out of Philadelphia on my heels to have gotten here so soon, but the emperor has more powerful servants, and they’ll be after you soon, if they aren’t already on their way. And you saw that even the priest was willing to kill you.”

  Thalanes felt a pang of guilt, realizing he was manipulating her, but he knew it was necessary. This girl was so strong-willed and rash, she might get it into her head to run off alone to try to inflict vengeance on the Martinite.