Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  “I saw he was a terrible shot.” Sarah’s accent returned. “Pa, let me stay. I won’t go back to town, at least not for a spell, and that fool preacher’ll ne’er find his way up here.”

  The Elector looked racked by guilt and fear. “It isn’t wise, Sarah.”

  “Please,” Thalanes whispered.

  “I won’t do it.” She stood.

  “You must!” Thalanes yelled, leaping to his feet and closing in on her. His own voice sounded far away, and he tried to calm down, to keep his distance, to employ gentle persuasion, but he roared into the child’s face. “I will not have the blood of another Penn on my hands! You will come with me! You must! I order you!”

  She took one step back and looked at him, nostrils flared and the eyebrow over her good eye arched high and proud. “Must I?”

  He stopped himself. What had he done? Let no will be coerced, the first precept. It was so important that Thomas Penn not capture and kill this child. But could Thalanes coerce her will, even if he tried? “Please,” he said again simply.

  Sarah spun on her heel and left by the dogtrot door.

  * * *

  He forgave Obadiah for letting the girl go. It wasn’t easy, because she was such an abomination, but Ezekiel Angleton’s Savior had forgiven him his debts, so Ezekiel in turn forgave his own debtors.

  Even hard-hearted, unbelieving Obadiah.

  Besides, he hadn’t trusted Obadiah enough to tell him what they were after; if he had, Obadiah might have delivered the child to him, neat and tidy, earlier that morning. Ezekiel had reaped, and Ezekiel had sown. Perhaps he had erred because he was too tired—Ezekiel had not slept well on the journey down to Nashville, dreaming often, disturbed dreams of running through the forest.

  He considered the possibility that it might have been a mistake, also, not to have strengthened himself with magic before he had ever entered the tent. He dismissed that self-criticism immediately; he hadn’t the power to maintain decent battle magic even for a very long skirmish, much less employ it repeatedly throughout a single day, and he had had no idea when, or if at all, he might encounter the child. Entering the tent that morning, he had expected at most to get a glimpse of the girl, or get information about her.

  Besides, even to think that he could strengthen himself with magic was a childish and ridiculous contradiction in terms. Any physical strength he piled upon himself by means of gramarye would be torn from him in the form of exhaustion or sickness after. If he had cast combat magic, his favored ani gibbor incantation, for instance, and Thalanes had still managed to help the girl escape, Ezekiel would now be empty-handed still, and also drained.

  Magic was best in tiny, shaped applications. Combat spells were best reserved for actual battle.

  He also forced out of his mind the smug thought—the suggestion of a thought—that it served Obadiah right to get shot in the foot. The thought was not Christian. Ezekiel had already cast some simple magic to speed along the healing of Obadiah’s injured foot.

  Ezekiel didn’t like the fact that he himself had pointed a gun at the girl and pulled the trigger; he had been angry to have missed so badly, but also relieved. Killing the girl like that, unarmed, unjudged, wasn’t his intention. He was a man of God, he was a Christian knight, and he would do what he must do, absolutely anything that he must do, in order to remedy the blasphemy the girl represented, remove it from the face of the earth, but simply killing her was the crudest possible solution.

  He much preferred to capture her and take her back to Philadelphia, where the emperor himself, and the emperor’s magistrates, could judge her.

  “I fink this’ll do the trick, won’t it?” Obadiah asked. “Can’t you, er, wot you…? Wiff ’er ’air? An’ then it ben’t a total loss.”

  Ezekiel looked down again at the black hairs in the palm of his hand. “I’m pleased with your work, Obadiah.” He forced himself to smile. “It would have been very convenient if you had managed to keep hold of the child this morning, but you’re correct, this will do the trick very nicely. We’ve been blessed.”

  Obadiah grinned, like a stupid, vicious dog that fears a beating and is scratched behind the ears instead.

  They sat at a table in the low-ceilinged common room of a run-down Nashville inn, the John Paul Jones, its signboard featuring a chipped painting of the famous sea captain in his blue bicorn hat. Ezekiel had unstrapped his sword, a long, straight weapon inherited from his father (who had been a soldier in the Order of the Friends in Christ of Eugene of Savoy, and who had died in the dungeons of Turkish Vienna), from his belt and laid it across his lap. His black steeple hat sat beside him on the bench.

  Light streamed into the tavern’s common room, tinted green and amber, through rough bottle-glass windows. The noon crowd had come and gone while Ezekiel dealt with the town watch and the mess of the tent, and now he and his servant had the privacy of a corner booth. The tobacco smoke cloud left by the midday diners had mostly dissipated, but all the sour smells lingered.

  Ezekiel hated the Appalachee. He didn’t care much for their food (he ached for a bowl of pease porridge and a good hot huckleberry pie), or their lewd clothing with its exuberant colors, or their ceaseless liquor and tobacco, but what really bothered him was their constant mewling about freedom. About their liberties.

  As if the only true freedom were not the freedom to follow the will of God, to show your election by living his covenant. And by the grace of God, Ezekiel Angleton knew, the elect would find freedom also from death.

  “Get me your bowl, would you, Mr. Dogsbody?” Ezekiel ordered.

  He untied his purse and set it aside, as far away from himself on the table as he could, and then considered the hairs while Obadiah stumped upstairs for his kit. A minor lodestone-finding sort of spell should suffice, and wouldn’t exhaust him.

  He had aided and entertained his friend Thomas—His Imperial Majesty, he reminded himself—at Harvard many times with such trivial gramarye. He’d cast wakefulness cantrips on nights before examinations and sobering hexes on mornings after revelry for his gentleman room-mate, young Colonel Lord Thomas Penn. Thomas was older than Ezekiel, and was already then a veteran of the Spanish War, but, other than with respect to the minutia of ascendants and triplicities, and the bloody details of military history, he was an absent-minded student. Thomas perpetually lost books and needed Ezekiel’s help to find them. All those little magics, and Ezekiel had spent most of his time with Thomas at Harvard feeling sick and wasted.

  He’d had the hangover, without the drunken riot.

  Thomas had always been needy and always a drain, until the night when Ezekiel’s Lucy had died, young Lucy Winthrop. Ezekiel’s eyes swam in sudden hot tears as he thought of the lost love of his youth. He remembered whispering professions of faithfulness to her through the double-bell-ended courting stick across the great hearth of the Winthrop family home. He’d been a penniless young theology student, but the great man, Samuel Winthrop, had accepted Ezekiel’s love for his daughter. They had slept together in her parents’ home, separated by the bundling board and her feet bound together for chastity’s sake but holding hands and sharing dreams through the night, they had planned a home and children, they had published the banns in Boston’s Old North Church.

  Then Lucy had fallen from her mother’s calash on a bright Sunday morning in spring, on her way to a lecture on the Prophets by the great Bishop Franklin, one of Franklin’s very last.

  She had died suddenly and alone.

  Ezekiel had lain drunk in a Boston gutter for weeks, time he had never been able clearly to remember, other than that he recalled begging for pennies with which to buy liquor.

  Her family, the Winthrops, rejected him. His own family had never been any use, too few and, with his father gone, always too poor to help, so their failure in his moment of crisis had come as no surprise and cost him no pain.

  But Thomas had taken him in. Thomas had drunk with Ezekiel until the beasts within were well and truly insensate,
and then dried him out. Thomas had ordered the deans of Harvard—ordered them—not to expel Ezekiel, and had similarly instructed Ezekiel’s professors. Thomas had been the one to recommend Ezekiel to the Father-General of the Order of St. Martin (and had that also been phrased as a command?), and among the Martinites Ezekiel had thrived. Later, after Ezekiel had graduated from Harvard, Thomas had found him a series of posts and preferments, including, finally, the coveted position of chaplain to the emperor’s own Philadelphia Blues.

  Thomas had pulled Ezekiel up with him.

  So Ezekiel was glad that he had been able to help Thomas find lost objects now and then as a student, and for every assistance he had been able to render his master. He would retrieve this girl and return her to Thomas, just like any lost object, and then, somehow, he would learn where the other two were hidden.

  He was more than happy to serve—when he had heard Mad Hannah’s confession, and the location and description of the oldest child, he had sprinted from Penn’s Slate Roof House to run to Nashville and find the girl, stopping only long enough to get his warrant sworn out before a Philadelphia magistrate.

  He looked at the dried blood and the wiry black strands. Not a beautiful child. Cursed by its Serpentborn blood, or she would have been handsome, like her mother.

  He remembered Mad Hannah—mad to have taken a soulless Eldritch king as a lover—as she had been at the end. She had had blood in her hair, too, and on her ruined fingers and on her face, but she hadn’t confessed or asked forgiveness. Ezekiel had given her absolution, anyway. It was in his power, and it was the Christian thing to do, even though she was a heretic and an Ophidian, and even though at his master’s bidding Ezekiel had participated in the interrogation that had ended in her death.

  Thomas had prepared the announcement to the news-papers of her death in advance. He had shown them to his sister after she had broken.

  Obadiah returned with his simple wooden bowl.

  “Let us contrive a tool.” Ezekiel laid the hairs into the bottom of the bowl and then poured some of his drink, a little light-colored beer, over them. From his pocket he produced a vial of quicksilver and let a small drop fall into the bowl. It rolled to the bottom, coming to rest on the thick hairs.

  Obadiah looked as if he was holding his breath.

  Ezekiel cleared his mind and then let it fill with an image of the girl, as he had seen her that morning. Pasty white skin, angry red eye, ragged black hair, sluttish dress. He thought of her essence, of the blasphemy that she was, the Unsouled blood staining the holy escutcheon of the House of Penn, and he willed all those images into the bowl, into the beer, into the hair and mercury.

  He took the wooden bowl in his two hands and leaned in close, the exhalations from his nostrils on the beer like the breath of God on the waters of the First Day. He felt his will gathering in his throat, and, closing his eyes, he formed it into words.

  “Ani mechapes yaldah,” he muttered in Hebrew, and he felt his power moving through the words of the ancient, sacred language into the bowl, “ani mechapes yaldah.”

  As he finished speaking, he opened his eyes. The drop of quicksilver trembled, rolled steadily up through the beer, moving along the hairs and turning them with it, and then stopped, quivering, dragging the tail of hairs out behind it like a comet.

  Ezekiel sagged in his seat, weary.

  “Wayland’s ’ammer,” Obadiah muttered.

  “This will take you straight to her tonight,” Ezekiel said. “Go to the market and gather three or four big men; I’ll wait here for you. Take my purse, offer them a crown each for a few hours’ work. If they’re reluctant, go as high as a pound. Take the warrant to show them, in case any of them worries about law.”

  Obadiah stood gingerly, adjusting his belt under his paunch. “Aye, Father.”

  “If any of them worries about sin,” Ezekiel told his servant, “assure them that I’ll give them absolution, in advance.” He smiled, an expression that he meant to be wise, calm and fatherly. “After all, this is the Lord’s work.”

  Obadiah trundled out the door on his errand, and Ezekiel raised a hand to get the attention of the tavern’s girl. He couldn’t get the huckleberry pie he wanted, but he’d make do with another beer.

  * * *

  “I’d be happy to abduct you,” Cal offered around a mouthful of boiled pork and griddle cake. “We could move right away from here. There’s plenty of empty land in Appalachee, and you know I can hunt, skin, trade, and build a cabin. And the Elector has always said he’d set me up with my own herd—I reckon he’d do that even if I abducted you. Or I could rustle someone else’s. Those Donelsons up Knoxville way’ve always got more cows’n they know how to count.”

  “You’re sweet, Calvin,” Sarah told him, “but then you’d have to be married to me, and that’d jest be me out the fryin’ pan, you in the fire.”

  Cal sipped water from his jar and scuffed the dirt with his feet. “Aw, Sarah, you ain’t all that bad.”

  “I reckon not,” Sarah agreed bitterly, “to a stone drunk feller, so long as he could only see the one half of my face.” She set her tin plate aside, food untouched, and drew her knees up under her chin.

  They sat on a wooden bench of the Elector’s making in the late afternoon. The long meadow, copses of trees and scattered cabins on top of Calhoun Mountain were accented all around with benches and seats like this one—Andrew Calhoun had been a carver and improver all his life.

  Sarah had needed to talk to someone, someone who was neither the Elector nor the odd little monk. And she needed someone who was old enough to understand, but she didn’t want to discuss her day’s revelations with any of her brothers and sisters. Calvin was the natural choice.

  Sarah couldn’t hate the Elector, because she looked into his eyes and saw that he loved her and had only done what he thought he’d had to. Besides, he still felt like her father…more or less. The Eldritch warrior of the Ohio, the musketeer swordsman hero of both Battles of the Ouachita and also of the Siege of Mobile, was a figure of history to her, and not someone she could understand. She didn’t really feel like she had a father at all—the one had rejected her and the other felt cold and foreign.

  With poor Mad Hannah, on the other hand, she had instantly felt a kinship. Loathed and feared by everyone, locked away by her brother, the Empress Hannah fascinated Sarah. She felt close to the cloistered and betrayed woman.

  Betrayed, that was how Sarah felt.

  “A pretty face ain’t the only thing a man values in a wife,” Cal offered.

  “Which is to say I ain’t pretty, but don’t worry my ugly little head about it. Thank you very much, Calvin Calhoun, I shan’t forget it. I shall feel mightily comforted in my dark hours knowin’ that you’re the kind of feller’s willin’ to marry hisself a deformed woman.”

  “Sarah Calhoun,” Cal objected, “that ain’t fair!”

  “No,” she conceded, “it ain’t fair. And I ain’t Sarah Calhoun, neither. I’m…” She trailed off as she realized she wasn’t sure just what her name was. “Well, you can call me Sarah for the time bein’. Jest plain Sarah, iffen you please.”

  “Old Andy don’t want you to leave,” Cal insisted. “You’re his favorite, Sarah.”

  “I ain’t even his,” she muttered.

  “You can’t really mean that,” Cal pressed. “When all his natural-born granddaughters were out plowin’ and cookin’ and stitchin’ shirts, he never let you leave his side, and it was always ‘remember me the year of the Peace of Augsberg,’ and ‘by what hilarious name did the Emperor Ferdinand call the execution of his wife Queen Adela Podebradas’ and ‘gimme your amo-amas-amat backward this time,’ like he wanted you to be ready to go be a schoolmarm, like he thought you needed to be as smart as him. That old man loves you!”

  “Not a schoolmarm,” Sarah said, thinking out loud. “He wanted me ready to be a queen.” She felt lonely and tired.

  “The Elector wouldn’t cast you out for love or money, Sarah,” Cal
finished his pitch. “He must b’lieve it ain’t safe here for you.”

  Sarah thought of the cruel-eyed Roundhead preacher who had shot at her. She shook her head, embarrassed to think how foolish she had been, standing to face that man and daring him to shoot her. “I reckon he’s right, too, Cal. I gotta leave tonight.”

  Calvin looked uncertain. “You’re gonna go with the little priest.”

  Sarah sighed. She didn’t yet trust the monk. Her feelings about the Elector, her father…her foster father…had become unexpectedly complicated. This morning, she had loved him devotedly. Now she felt tricked and rejected, but at the same time she still loved him as the only father she had ever known, and didn’t wish him hurt in any way.

  “No, Cal,” she said slowly. “I b’lieve I gotta escape from him, too.” She turned her face to Calvin and smiled.

  “Jest don’t go escapin’ without me,” Cal said. “I wouldn’t regard that as fair.”

  “Iffen I did, Calvin Calhoun,” she said, “who’d sing me to sleep on the road?”

  “Nobody, and you’d be thankful.” He laughed. “Besides, I know how to get off the mountain.”

  “How’s that then, fall? I reckon I’ll just do a bit of hexin’, trick my way out the door without Red Charlie or Caleb e’er bein’ the wiser.”

  “I can save you the trouble,” he offered, “iffen you know how to climb a tree.”

  “I can climb,” she hesitated. “I jest don’t know iffen it’s such a good idea for you to come along, Calvin.”

  “It’s easy enough,” Cal persisted. “Black Charlie and Abe and a couple of those fellers got a cave on the west slope where they like to get drunk and dance to the Crooked Man. I caught ’em sneakin’ back in once, when I’s out doin’ a bit of rustlin’. Nothin’ to it, they’s this tree as grows close to the cliff on the west side, and any halfway decent climber can use it jest like a ladder, up and down. We could even sleep the night in their cave, if we wanted, get a start walkin’ in the mornin’.”