Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  Bill swallowed back that irrelevant detail and continued.

  He told them of his life in New Orleans, hiding nothing and fearing condemnation for it, but no one spoke against him. He told them of his night at Bishopsbridge and the improbable message of the two beastfolk. He told them of his imprisonment on the Incroyable, of meeting Bayard, of their conversations, and of beating the Frenchman to death.

  “Thank you,” Sarah said simply, when she heard of the traitor’s end.

  Bill bowed his head and said nothing. He burned to tell Sarah that he’d find the mysterious other man as well, and beat him to death, and that he would ride into the throat of Hell itself, if he had to, to bring justice to Thomas Penn.

  “Have you seen this confession letter Bayard spoke of?” she asked. “In which he identified his co-conspirator, and hinted to the chevalier where he’d hidden the regalia?”

  Bill shook his head. “The chevalier must have it, I presume.”

  She nodded. “Go on.”

  He explained the letter Jacob Hop—Simon Sword—had helped him write, his strange release and dark errand, and finally his decision not to kill the Bishop of New Orleans.

  “Your letter must have provoked the chevalier,” Sarah thought out loud.

  “Might Bayard a wrote to the bishop?” Cal asked. “I didn’t git nothin’ from it at the time, but I recollect a conversation between Thalanes and the bishop about bees, and in hindsight it sounds an awful lot like Bayard might a wrote the bishop, and then the bishop might a confronted the chevalier…”

  “And then the chevalier commissioned me to kill the bishop,” Bill said. “Bayard may have, or maybe the little Dutchman…pardon me, ma’am, I mean Simon Sword, perhaps Simon Sword wrote a second letter without telling me.”

  “Why would the chevalier only give you a saber, though?” Cathy asked.

  Bill scratched his head. “I’m beginning to think it likely that the chevalier intended to have me killed after I had accomplished his errand, ma’am,” he said. “No blood would then be on anyone’s hands but mine, and I’m the sort of person the citizens of New Orleans are perfectly content to see executed by their chevalier. A sword would have been enough to kill the bishop, being a defenseless old man, but would have left me hard pressed to defend myself against the chevalier’s gendarmes. What puzzles me is why Daniel Berkeley should have killed the bishop instead.”

  Bill looked to the Englishman for an explanation, but the Martinite’s servant only shrugged. “’E be stayink at the Palais,” Obadiah offered. “Mayhap the chevalier put ’im up to it. Mayhap it were the price of the chevalier’s cooperation in lookink for Sarah.”

  “Speakin’ of the chevalier’s place,” Sarah said, “how do you reckon we can find that letter Bayard wrote?”

  Bill nodded. “I don’t know, Your Majesty, and I fear we may have to ask the chevalier himself. But I’m pleased to serve you in the distribution of long-overdue justice.” He nodded deferentially to Calvin. “Or revenge, if you prefer.”

  “Justice will come,” Sarah said, “but it’s not our errand today. We’re weak, Sir William, out of power and on the run. Our errand is to recover my regalia, so I can regain my throne. When we have wealth, power, and safety, we’ll be able to worry a little more about justice.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Bill acknowledged.

  “How do we find out where Bayard hid them?” she asked.

  Bill considered. “Bayard’s gone, so he can’t tell us anything helpful, and the only people he regularly consorted with to my knowledge are a gang of deaf-mutes who are all now dead at the bottom of the Pontchartrain, a Dutchman who turns out to be the Heron King, and a tongueless Choctaw whore. She may be alive, of course, but finding a particular whore in New Orleans is like finding a particular flea on a dog.”

  “Kinta Jane Embry,” Cathy said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Bill was caught off guard. “Do you know her?”

  “New Orleans is a large city,” she answered him with a look that might have been amused, “but not that large. If there were a tongueless Choctaw duelist in New Orleans, Sir William, do you imagine you wouldn’t know his name?”

  Bill blushed. Had he insulted Cathy? “Bayard claimed his…companion…was related to someone important in the chevalier’s house,” Bill said. “I suppose that makes some sense—the chevalier didn’t want anyone seeing his prisoner who couldn’t be trusted.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Cathy said coolly, “but I know where we can find Kinta Jane. Provided Your Majesty is willing to go to the rougher parts of New Orleans.”

  “Rougher than we already been?” Cal muttered. “Jerusalem.”

  “I’m the Prince of Shreveport, damn your eyes!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The war was coming, but Kinta Jane Embry still had to eat. She had had to hand the Heron King’s coin over to René, because there were important people who needed more to convince them than just Kinta Jane’s word at second hand. But would she have been able to spend such a coin, in any case?

  On evenings like this, when she had no standing client appointments, she walked the street. The rain didn’t deter her, but it did keep her close to her rented room, slowly circling her own block on the edge of the Faubourg Marigny.

  Deeper into the shabby maze of the Faubourg, closer to the Franklin Gate on the east side of the city, were the strange fires, the dark alleys where chickens and cats lost their lives to houngans seeking to know the future or to mambos who wished to placate the mystères. If rumor was true, the loa themselves sometimes crawled the alleys deep in the Faubourg Marigny, in search of entertainment, worship, or blood.

  The mystères didn’t generally walk Kinta Jane’s neighborhood, which made it not nearly so spiritually powerful, though also considerably less dangerous. She was close enough to the trees of the Esplanade that decent clients came her way, and when the clients weren’t so decent, well, she didn’t mind the occasional Irishman or Portugee, especially if he was clean.

  The tall red-headed man looked clean enough. He also looked like a chawbacon, a total Reuben, a hick, with his hair long and loosely tied back on his neck and his frayed wool coat with the long-sleeved hunter’s shirt beneath. He had a bony Appalachee face that could be charitably described as homely, but the look in his clear eyes was gentle, and even nervous.

  “Evenin’, ma’am,” he squeaked in a thick mountain twang, shaking water onto the boardwalk.

  Kinta Jane smiled her best sultry smile and twisted her shoulders in a way that emphasized her curves. She slapped her thigh, pumped her hip in his direction and winked.

  He chuckled. “I reckon I know what that means. Might could I git jest an hour of your time?”

  She smiled and took his elbow, leading the bony young man around the corner and up the iron steps to the third floor of the boarding house. He smiled at her and kept looking around, nervous as a cat. The young man’s uncomfortable innocence was refreshing; in this town, she’d become used to men who were too hard, too worn, or too cold to feel any embarrassment at all.

  Kinta Jane turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Suddenly, the Appalachee shoved her into her bedroom. She stumbled, reaching as she fell for a stiletto in her long sleeve. Before she could draw it, other hands were seizing her wrists and pinning her, and then the door slammed.

  Others were in her room. How many?

  She couldn’t see in the dark. She bucked and twisted but could not escape, realizing that there were at least two men, two large, strong men, holding her down. This might be an assault, which was horrifying enough, since her pander, Elbows Pritchard, was a useless drunkard and as likely to beat her for the cash deficit as to take any meaningful action against her assailants, but they could also be black magic men, after her hair or her heart or other parts for some wicked ceremony.

  Worse still—they could be servants of the Heron King.

  Had the Appalachee had some beastkind feature, and she had m
issed it?

  A Lucifer scritched and sputtered into flame, and then the oil lantern beside her bed was carefully lit and replaced on the cheap three-legged table, and Kinta Jane could finally see her attackers.

  The Appalachee stood in the door, and he twisted open the wooden slats of the blinds with their control rod ever so slightly to peer out. “They ain’t nobody followin’.”

  The two men pinning Kinta Jane were rougher than the Appalachee, with none of his backcountry innocence. One was heavy, with a thick head, neck, and torso, but bony legs; he wore a ratty black coat, smelled sour and badly needed a shave. The other was tall and more muscular, though showing his age in the iron gray of his long mustache; he wore a red coat, and a black perruque under a battered, broad-brimmed hat. This last man seemed vaguely familiar.

  All three men were armed, with swords, pistols, and, in the case of the redhead, a tomahawk and a lariat that he now picked up from Kinta Jane’s own bed.

  There were two women, too; so this was not a simple assault. They didn’t look like Vodun people, either—mostly, they gave the impression of being from out of town.

  Kinta Jane steeled herself to say nothing to the Heron King’s agents, but then she had another shock—she recognized one of the women. It was Long Cathy, a very high-class girl who worked in a French tavern called Grissot’s in the Quarter and tended to see rich men. Cathy sat on a stool to one side holding two pistols, not exactly aimed at Kinta Jane, but nearly enough and with hammers cocked so that she could effortlessly shoot the Choctaw if she wanted.

  The last person in the room was another woman, and she now shoved herself into Kinta Jane’s view. She was young and thin, with dark hair, pale skin, and a bandage hanging loose over one eye. She looked Kinta Jane in the face, studying her for long moments while the two big men hoisted her and flung her onto the bed, never letting go of her arms.

  This was to be her interrogator, then. Kinta Jane wondered whether they would torture her, and began taking slow, deep breaths to prepare.

  “I know you ain’t got no tongue,” the eye-patched girl said, “but I reckon you can still tell us yes and no by noddin’, can’t you?”

  Kinta Jane refused to answer even this question. Every question she answered would make the question following it harder to duck.

  Instead, she smiled coldly, slapped one thigh and cocked her hip to the side.

  The redhead laughed, in an embarrassed-sounding way, but the scrawny girl didn’t look amused.

  Instead, she removed her bandage.

  Kinta Jane shivered, profoundly unsettled by the sight of the girl’s unmasked face. She had one eye that was a normal, human blue, and the other that was the color of ice, like a bird’s eye, or the eye of some other proud animal. What beastkind was this? The girl blinked, and Kinta Jane felt drawn in and known by her piercing gaze.

  “Can you read and write?” the girl asked.

  Kinta Jane only smiled, controlling her breathing. Of course she could write. And of course she wasn’t going to tell this beastwife witch. Answer no questions at all, she told herself.

  “She can,” the beast-eyed girl said to her companions, and Kinta Jane’s heart sank.

  That might be a bluff.

  Calm. Breathe.

  “Is it true you’re sister, or half-sister, to the chevalier’s man, René du Plessis?” the witch continued.

  Kinta Jane tried to force from her mind all thoughts of René and his kindness to her over the years, how he’d fed her when she couldn’t feed herself, or given her clothing discarded by ladies of the chevalier’s household, or even arranged clients for her when the chevalier needed services such as she provided. René had told her of Franklin’s vision, too, and brought her into the Conventicle, and trained her in the ways of secrecy, patience, and watchfulness.

  Good René, kind René, she would not betray him.

  “Yes, she is,” the witchy-eyed girl said.

  The beastwife was reading her mind!

  Kinta Jane felt despair. She knew now that she would give up all her secrets and then be killed, killed and not missed by this cold city. At least she couldn’t give away anyone else in the Conventicle beyond her little cell. Thank Heaven for the wisdom of old Ben Franklin.

  “Now,” the girl said, and her ice-white eye pounded into Kinta Jane’s soul like a sledgehammer, “you’re going to help us meet your brother.”

  Kinta Jane’s mind spun.

  Who were these captors? Was the Conventicle already betrayed, and was the Heron King hunting down its servants? Did they already know René was her cell leader? She looked again to Cathy, but the other woman sat calm and impassive, with loaded pistols ready.

  Kinta Jane wouldn’t betray René. Nor would she even shake her head to dignify the order with a response. She couldn’t bear to meet the gaze of those eyes any longer, and just stared at the dirty white ceiling, trying to calm her racing heart.

  “Ought I ’it ’er?” asked the thick-headed man, and Kinta Jane recognized his accent as London English.

  “A gentleman doesn’t hit a woman, suh,” the mustached man told his companion, “even if she’s a whore.”

  “Why, Sir William,” Long Cathy drawled, teeth of steel audible in her voice, “you are a true cavalier.”

  The tall man blanched and fell silent. What kind of interrogation was this? Kinta Jane expected to be tortured or beaten or at least shouted at. And could the witch not read her mind after all?

  “You’re gonna take us to your brother,” the cracker witch insisted, “or you’re gonna write us how to find him.” She shoved a scrap of paper and a bit of charcoal in Kinta Jane’s face, and the Choctaw turned away.

  “All right, then,” the witch said, retracting the writing implements, “we’re gonna have to do this the hard way. Cal—”

  The redhead pulled a knife.

  Kinta Jane braced herself. Would it be an eye or an ear, or maybe her nose?

  The Appalachee Cal stooped and cut off a lock of her hair. Without a word, he handed it to the beastwife sorceress and resheathed his knife.

  “Tarnation, Cal,” she said. “You cut me enough to braid a rope.”

  “Jerusalem, Sarah,” he answered, “how’m I supposed to know how much you need? I couldn’t hex away a wart iffen my life depended on it and I had a whole forest of stumps full of rain water.”

  “Where’s my little Dutchman when I need him?” the mustached man asked, then looked suddenly crestfallen.

  The witch, Sarah, laughed, but in a surprisingly kindly way. “I think we can do this without the help of Simon Sword. Best tie up the Choctaw, though.”

  Simon Sword!

  The two big men tore her carefully laundered sheet to strips and then proceeded to bind Kinta Jane hand and foot. Without the help of Simon Sword, she had said, and for Kinta Jane the mystery of the encounter deepened and became more ominous.

  “Are you sure this will work?” Cathy asked.

  “No,” Sarah answered, “and I sure as shootin’ wish youins could git a better magician than me to give it a try, and one as wasn’t already tuckered out, but I reckon it ought to do the trick, and I’m all we got.”

  “You can do it, Sarah,” Cal told her.

  “Huh,” she answered. “We got anything else, anything…stringy, like a bit of ribbon, mebbe?”

  Kinta Jane watched helplessly as the invaders of her very small private space ransacked her drawers and cracked armoire and came up with a faux pearl necklace. The witch Sarah knotted the long hank of Kinta Jane’s hair around the pearls and then balled the necklace up into her two hands and closed her eyes in concentration.

  “Fratrem quaeso,” she said. Kinta Jane didn’t know what it meant. Was it Latin? This might be no hedge witch, then, this but a classically trained wizard, and dangerous.

  She wasn’t wearing Polite red, though, and New Orleans didn’t have another college for gramarye. Philadelphia did, and New Amsterdam and Memphis, and Kinta Jane wondered which of them had a
ccepted this whippet of an Appalachee girl.

  Maybe the girl maybe wasn’t what she seemed. Maybe her appearance was an illusion. The mystères, the loa, did that sort of thing all the time.

  Did the Heron King appear in disguise?

  She still had no idea who these people were.

  Sarah then opened her hand and let the pearls dangle from her fingers, the hair knot at the bottom. For a moment nothing happened, the necklace hanging perfectly still, and then the hair knot twitched and rose, dragging the pearls a few degrees to one side, looking like a tiny hairball dog straining on a very expensive leash.

  “Thank you, Miss Kinta Jane Embry,” the witch Sarah said. “I reckon that’ll do.”

  * * *

  “A bit more of the amo, amas, amat might could be in order here,” Cal volunteered. Cal’s Latin litany reminded Sarah of every incantation she’d ever heard Thalanes say. She was barely able to choke back tears.

  Mercifully, the rain had stopped. Sarah had handed the pearl-and-hairball compass off to Cathy, who had calmly accepted it and then led them with long, confident strides through the darkening evening and the thickening crowd in whichever direction the hairball indicated.

  That had turned out to be back across the Quarter, and Sarah wanted to disguise their faces. She was just too conscious of the low level of her remaining reserves of energy to expend any of it unnecessarily. Instead, she suffered with the uneasy foreboding that the Sorcerer Hooke must inevitably catch up to her, and that when he did, he would know her from a mile away.

  “Keep an eye out for gendarmes and Imperials both,” she’d reminded her friends, huddling deeper into her shawl. She was cold and wet, and part of her wanted to just run away, burrow into the warm earth somewhere, and hide.

  But she couldn’t give up. It wasn’t just her life, it was the lives of her brother and sister she didn’t know, and justice for her murdered parents, that kept her marching through the storm, into the teeth of her almost-paralyzing fear of the Sorcerer Hooke.