by D. J. Butler
“You were very quick to climb onto the shoulders of a strange girl,” she said.
“I know your sister,” Jake said. “This isn’t the strangest thing I’ve seen your family do, not by a long shot. How long can you run like this?”
“Not long. The strength fades when I don’t need it. When I don’t feel threatened anymore. When it’s over, I’m going to have to sleep. And I’ll wake up starving.”
“If that Lazar catches us, he’ll kill us. He wants your entire family dead.”
The Dutchman’s words shocked Margarida. She ran faster.
“And your hair,” the Dutchman asked. “Does it always stand up like this?”
“My hair stands up with my strength.”
“I wonder how much your father knew,” Jake murmured. “Turn left at this next crossroads.”
“Is this boy really my brother?”
“Yes,” Jake said instantly. “You should look into a mirror together, that would tell you instantly. But also, we found you with an enchantment created for us by your sister. I don’t think there can be any real doubt.”
Margarida looked down at the unconscious face. Was she really as homely as this young man? “My sister is the Queen of Cahokia, you say.”
“That is her claim. I don’t know how far she has advanced it yet; when I left, she was gathering allies about her and approaching the city. I know she is in the city now, and I understand she had quickened its Treewall. I also understand that she is under siege by more than one enemy. But I accept her claim of right, and I think she’ll prevail. You grew up among the Catalans?”
Margarida decided that she didn’t quite believe this story of an Eldritch witch who was her sister. “Jo sóc Catalana. My Tia Montse raised me. She’s a noblewoman and a pirate.” Her curiosity needled her. “What did Nathaniel mean, quite a bit more than a princess?”
“Maybe he was talking about the gift of your strength. Or maybe he was talking about your father and mother.”
“You said you wondered how much my father knew.” Margarida felt herself slowing. As her legs slowed, she also felt the cold air slapping her face and hands with more force.
“Your gift of strength comes from your father. Your brother has a gift of hearing and your sister a gift of sight. Your father…this is going to sound odd…when your father was dying, he blessed three acorns with his blood. His wife ate those acorns and conceived you three children. Each of you has a magical gift. They didn’t come from your mother—she was a powerful woman, but not a magician. I wonder how much your father knew of what he was giving you. Of what you would be.”
“That doesn’t sound odd.” Margarida’s breath was coming harder.
Nathaniel groaned.
“No?” Jake asked.
“It sounds insane.”
Jake laughed. “Okay, insane, then. Given my own experience, I sometimes have a hard time telling what sounds only strange from what sounds truly mad. Your hair is…ah, softening, by the way. Starting to lie flat.”
“How far away are we?”
“We’re halfway there.” His shifting weight on her back suggested that the Dutchman was turning to look behind them. “It’s mostly just straight on from here.”
“What’s your experience that so distorted your perception?”
“I had a god inside me. Not a nice god, either. Not Jesus. A wild and tricky and destructive god.”
“That sounds painful.”
“At the time, it wasn’t. It hurts now.”
“And who is my mother supposed to have been, who was so powerful, but not a witch?”
“Hannah Penn.”
“Mad Hannah?” This part of the story, somehow, rang true.
“She wasn’t mad. Your Tia Montse, as a young woman, was a friend of hers. I believe that when Hannah gave birth and three of her close servants and comrades took the infants and fled, your Tia Montse was the woman who took you. I don’t know her, so this is just a guess, but I wager that one reason she has lived as a pirate all your life, rather than in a castle on her family lands, is better to keep you out of sight.”
The farms gave way to houses around them, and boardwalks encircling the buildings began to appear.
Margarida’s legs faltered. The story was strange and new and foreign, but it made a kind of sense. It explained why she had lived a life in hiding. “Margarida Quintana the orphan pirate might have a safer life than Margaret Penn, daughter of the landholder. If someone powerful was trying to find her.”
“You may be the rightful landholder in your own right,” the Dutchman said. “I’m not sure which of you three is the oldest.”
“I can’t go much farther,” Margarida gasped.
Jacob Hop leaped from her back. After skidding and nearly falling down in the snow, he regained his balance and ran at her side. “Just a few more streets.” He pointed, but Margarida couldn’t make out any detail ahead. Window lights stretched out ahead of her in a thick swarm, like a cloud of fireflies descending all the way to the Hudson.
“I’ll go with you,” Margarida said, “but only on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“Tia Montse is in prison. The Chevalier of New Orleans has captured her. We have to help her escape.” Margarida was not entirely sure, on balance, that she believed the story she was hearing about acorns and gifted children and Hannah Penn. But if these two strangers could rescue her, perhaps they could also rescue Tia Montse.
Jake laughed. “As it happens, I have experience helping people escape the hulks of New Orleans. At least, the god once within me does, and I remember the experience. More or less. Agreed.”
Margarida missed a step and fell face-down in the snow. Nathaniel cried out and they tumbled together, rolling to a stop.
“Ambroos!” She heard the Dutchman’s feet racing away through the snow as she faded into unconsciousness. “Ambroos, come quick!”
* * *
Churchill zieht aus zum Kriege
Die Fahne läßt er wehn
Da reicht zum Kampf und Siege
Die Hand ihm Prinz Eugen
Gert Visser didn’t strike Isaiah as a hothead. He seemed like a big, cheerful ox, who wouldn’t stop singing dance tunes in German, Dutch, and English, even as he carried on the work of sailing their borrowed craft up the Hudson, work that would have left any two normal men together breathless. He was as broad across the shoulders as any two men, and nearly a hand taller than Isaiah, who was himself a tall man. He was also blond and bearded, with a clear complexion and sparkling blue eyes. His natural facial expression seemed to be a friendly grin.
Adriaan had understated the size and physical presence of his daughter’s suitor. No wonder he had been reluctant to notify him of his terminated engagement, or allow his daughter to do so.
Adriaan’s letter to Gert was heavy in Isaiah’s pocket.
Could he use Kinta Jane Embry’s professional skills to defuse the situation? He imagined scenarios in which the Choctaw woman seduced Gert, and Isaiah tricked Gert into breaking off the engagement himself, out of guilt or fear of revelation. Isaiah didn’t like the idea of ordering Kinta Jane to do that, but she’d done that much and more already for Franklin and the Conventicle.
And so, for that matter, had he.
And which was really worse—a little professional seduction, or the possibility that Gert, informed of the breakup, would go berserk and have to be put down like a rabid animal?
Isaiah thought, and said nothing. He’d promised he’d tell Gert at Ticonderoga.
Gert was not a fisherman, despite his name, but a merchant. He regularly brought goods up the river to Fort Nassau, so this was the pretext of their journey they’d offer to any casual inquiry. Beneath that lay the real motive, which was that Isaiah and Kinta Jane needed to get to Montreal, and the secondary objective, which was to get Gert Visser out of the way.
At Fort Nassau, they’d switch to canoes that they could portage overland. In the meantime, the Hudson was deep enough
to accommodate a small sailing vessel. Isaiah was glad for the rest.
Dockery accompanied them. Adriaan Stuyvesant had insisted, and the Pennslander had nodded and accepted without a word.
English was the language they all had in common, so they spoke English.
“You don’t work for Adriaan, then?” Isaiah asked.
Gert shook his head. “Not a Company man. Too much of the old Frisian in me, I guess. I just want to be on my own, in a little coracle out on the sea, you know. Be my own man.”
“Not a hansard, either?”
“You know, independent merchants are still the rule in the empire. For one thing, the Hansa towns are strictly river traders. And the Imperial Ohio Company and the Dutch Ohio Company are both, you know, in the Ohio. Here on the Hudson, no one is in charge. You’ve just got lots of little traders, like me. And in Acadia, Champlain controls trade. You buy a license or you don’t sell goods.”
Isaiah nodded. He’d been trying to calculate what other loyalties Gert might have. He was tempted to ask whether the big man was a Freemason, but that seemed too obvious. “How did you come to be a brother?”
Gert blushed, his pale skin turning a bright red from the neck up. “That’s a little complicated.”
“With the Tappan Zee behind us, I gather we still have two days of sailing ahead. I could stand the complication. Kinta Jane?”
“Anything that can make a man the size of an ox embarrassed must be a fascinating story,” the Choctaw said.
“Not that fascinating,” Gert said. “I’m a simple man, really. But I’m a simple man in love.”
Dockery snorted. It was the first sound he’d made in hours. Mostly, he’d stood out of the way, scanning the forested banks with one hand shading his eyes. He still dressed as a frontiersman, with a wool pullover frock thrown over his fringed jacket. A straight Missouri war ax hung at his belt.
“Tell us about that.” Kinta Jane’s face showed no indication that she knew this already.
“And worse, I’m a poet.”
“Dammit.” Isaiah grinned. “I thought we had a rule. No artists.”
Gert Visser blushed more. “So, I was calling on Miss Julia Stuyvesant.”
Dockery spat in the water.
“Any relation to Adriaan?” Isaiah asked mildly.
Gert nodded. “His daughter. She’s a brave girl, quite funny, and much smarter than I am. And lovely, of course.”
“I may have met her,” Isaiah said. “When you say calling, you mean…?”
Gert blushed a still deeper shade, looking more like a lobster than a man. “No! I mean, her father made the same mistake. He found us in her room, and he assumed—”
“You sneaked into her room?” Kinta Jane smiled and clicked her tongue. It was a gesture she had recently relearned, and apparently enjoyed.
“I’m not very good at sneaking. You can’t be as big as I am and be hard to notice, you know. But I’m a good climber, and there’s a trellis under Julia’s window.”
“You climbed into Julia’s room.” Isaiah smiled. “Which action her father completely misunderstood, as you had no amorous intention at all.”
Was Dockery actually growling?
Gert Visser’s blush faded and his face grew serious. “No, I didn’t say that. My intentions were very amorous. But they were honorable.”
“I can’t imagine how Adriaan Stuyvesant detected your presence in his daughter’s room,” Kinta Jane said. “Unless it was possibly the fact that his house shook with your weight on the second story.”
“I am almost seven feet tall,” Gert said. “But I’m not ten feet tall. I stoop to pass under doors, but I can stand under most ceilings. Not Julia’s, as it happens, since her room is on the corner of the house, and has a low, sloped roof. I was sitting, and the only place to sit in her room is on her bed.”
“I am scandalized already,” Kinta Jane said. “I’m afraid any more detail might cause me to faint.”
“I’m sorry,” Gert said, and fell silent.
“She jests,” Isaiah said. “Kinta Jane Embry is such a woman of the world that I don’t believe you are even capable of making her faint. Or even feel scandalized.”
“It’s true, Gert,” Kinta Jane said. “Men have sat on my bed before, too.”
Gert furrowed his brow and continued. “I don’t believe Julia betrayed me. I believe it was her sister Elena. I climbed into Elena’s room by mistake the first time, so she knew I was visiting Julia.”
“She was jealous?”
“She didn’t approve. Maybe because I wasn’t rich enough. Maybe because she was the older sister, and believed she should be the one receiving a suitor, before her sister. Maybe because she dislikes poetry.”
Kinta Jane’s smiled turned down at the corners with wry compassion. “Maybe she saw the seven-foot-tall blond man and wanted you for herself.”
Gert shrugged. “I think Elena told her father. Perhaps she told him that we, you know, neuken.”
“No, tell me.” Kinta Jane smiled like an imp.
Isaiah intervened. “I think we know. Adriaan walked in one night, you were sitting on Julia’s bed, he thought more was going on, and he brought you into the Conventicle.”
“Don’t mistake me,” Gert said earnestly. “More was going on than he thought. But all the action was here.” He clapped a hand over his sternum. “I love Julia Stuyvesant very much, and I would never do anything to hurt her or make her lose standing with her family. I was reciting poems to her.”
Dockery hawked a ball of phlegm from deep in his throat. From the length of time it took and the volume of the sound, the phlegm must have been big enough to play a game of Boston town ball with. When Dockery spat, he somehow missed the water and spat right on the boat, phlegm and brown tobacco juices mixed together in a vile blot.
Visser didn’t notice, and Isaiah didn’t call it to his attention.
“But Adriaan thought you were…neuken…and brought you into the Conventicle.”
Gert nodded. “He forced the issue of the engagement. Demanded I either propose marriage or leave. Of course, I proposed.”
This was not the story Adriaan Stuyvesant had told.
And it felt as if there was still something missing from the tale. But looking at Gert’s face, he thought it might be something the big trader didn’t himself know.
Isaiah suddenly regretted the entire conversation. He couldn’t afford to like Gert—it would make the big man’s death too painful, if it ever came to that.
“How far to the Wappinger trading post?” he asked.
“U-puku-ipi-sing? We’ll be there tomorrow. We’ll buy and sell a few things, in case anyone is watching us. Don’t worry, they’re wild Algonks, but that only means they don’t send Electors. They’re honest people.” Gert grinned. “You see, I’m a poet, but I’m a man of the world, too. I am a trader, and I can be a good follower of the great Franklin.”
Isaiah grunted and pulled his tricorn hat down over his eyes so he could pretend to sleep.
Suddenly, Dockery broke into song:
A parson preached to his flock one day
On the sins of the mortal race
And the clerk, “Amen,” aloud did say,
With the solemnest tone and face
And the pious clerk, on the quiet though
Did venture a bit of remark
“Sin is sweet,” said the parson,
“Then sin for me,” said the clerk
Amen
“Sin for me,” said the clerk
* * *
“Wouldn’t it be easier to summon a storm and chase all the patrol boats back to shore?” Monsieur Bondí suggested.
“And then cross the water ourselves in a storm?” Etienne asked. “Then I would indeed sleep in the Pontchartrain, as your ditty has it.”
“I can’t help it if the song is catchy. Besides, you’re the hero of the song.”
“And that is a mistake,” Etienne said. “I’m not the hero. I’m the man who w
ants revenge.”
Bondí shrugged. “What other kind of man do you think can be a hero in a city where everyone believes there is no justice?”
They waited in a fast yacht named La Bonne Chance on the far side of the Pontchartrain. The Bonne Chance had belonged to August Planchet, and Etienne had seized it for the bishopric, or at least to put to the ends of avenging the bishop’s death. It seemed like a reasonable use of the wealth the former beadle had stolen. It was night, and late enough that the moon had sunk. It was only by the gift of Papa Legba that Etienne’s sharpened eyes could see the chevalier’s guard boats, sailing without lights around the hulks to contain their prisoners and prevent escape by water.
Etienne had considered bribery, but so far, the chevalier appeared to be keeping up with payroll. He’d have to do something about that, and soon. Tax receipts were dwindling, but not fast enough, and the ranks of the chevalier’s men were swelling fast. How was the chevalier to keep up with payments? He must have more wealth than Etienne had realized. Perhaps from this secret payment from Thomas Penn.
The growing number of gendarmes ruled out direct assault upon the hulks.
Despite Monsieur Bondí’s enthusiasm for the idea of weather magic, the thought exhausted Etienne. He didn’t know whether Maitre Carrefour would accomplish such a work for him, and he didn’t have any other arcane means of doing it. Weather wasn’t the sort of thing the Brides tampered with, for instance.
That left trickery. Etienne had chosen a combination of a distraction and a quick snatch operation.
“We’ll do this like a team of pickpockets,” he murmured.
“I know the plan, boss,” Monsieur Bondí said.
The sailors were Igbo, provided by Onyinye Diokpo. The men worked cheerfully and efficiently, and they bowed deeply to Etienne. This seemed odd at first, since he wore his black and white waistcoat and red sash rather than any episcopal finery, but then he heard one of the men mutter the words Eze-Nri.
Priest-king, the words meant, but he didn’t know much more than that. His father had been an urban man and a Christian, like his father before him, and his knowledge of what kind of worship happened in the farms and forests of the Free Cities of the Igbo was very little.