by D. J. Butler
“Legion,” murmured two of the deacons.
Jake wrote again. Margarida had good enough eyesight to see that he’d filled in the two blanks in the form with the names Jacob Hop and de Reigerkoning.
“En ik heb hem naar uw discipelen gebracht en zij hebben hem niet kunnen genezen.”
Ambroos shook his head. “Write ‘the devil.’”
“But he isn’t the devil,” Jake said.
“Isn’t he?”
Jake hesitated, and then in the white space above de Reigerkoning he added de Duivel.
“Jezus antwoordde en zeide: O ongelovig en verkeerd geslacht, hoelang zal Ik u nog verdragen? Breng hem Mij hier.”
“Hold the writ,” the old man said.
“I don’t need to burn it and eat it or anything, do I?” Jake had half a smile on his face.
“What do you take us for?” the old man chuckled. “Wizards?”
“En Jezus bestrafte hem en de boze geest ging van hem uit, en de knap was genezen van dat ogenblik af.”
“Now kneel,” Ambroos said. “Put a prayer in your heart.”
“What shall I pray for?” Jake asked.
“What do you want? That God cast out this demon.”
“Toen kwamen de discipelen bij Jezus en zeiden, toen zij met Hem alleen waren: Waaron hebben wij hem niet kunnen uitdrijven? Hij zeide tot hen: Venwege uw klein geloof.”
Jake nodded and closed his eyes, clutching the writ to his chest.
On the floor above her, Margarida thought she heard Nathaniel moan.
The deacons closed in around Jake, including Ambroos and the woman who was reading. Other than the reading woman, each put his or her left hand on the shoulder of the deacon next in the circle, and his or her right hand on Jake’s head.
“Want voorwat, Ik zeg u, indien gij een gleoof hebt al seen mosterdzaad, zult hij tot deze berg zeggen: Verplaats u vanhier daarheen en hij zal zich verplaatsen en niets zal u onmogelijk zijn. Maar dit geslacht vaart niet uit dan doorbidden en vasten.”
“Devil,” Ambroos intoned. His voice didn’t sound like a spell; it had the theatrical boom of a sermon. “By the authority of the priesthood of all true believers, and by our faith, though it be as small as a mustard seed, we command you to come out. Amen.”
“Amen,” all the deacons intoned.
Jake leaped to his feet, howling. The deacons staggered away, but Jake flung himself after them.
“Stop!” the old man warbled, just before Jake stuffed the writ of divorce into his mouth.
Jake grabbed the heavy bible from the hands of its reader and struck her on top of the head with it. Her bun exploded. She collapsed and lay twitching on the hardwood floor, yellow hair encircling her head like a halo.
Margarida cowered in the hall outside the study. In part, she was afraid of Jake, in his sudden madness. But also, he was her rescuer, and the thought of fighting him was surprising and unpleasant.
“What is happening?” Lotte rattled down the stairs, yelling.
“No, Jake!” Ambroos took decisive action, punching Jake in the jaw—
Jake didn’t slow down. He gripped Ambroos by the front of his shirt and hurled him into the next room.
Then he looked at Margarida and roared. Margarida’s heart leaped into her throat, cutting off her breath with its berserk pounding.
Behind Margarida, Lotte bellowed. “Get out, Jacob! What are you doing? I will kill you if you have hurt my Ambroos!”
She rushed toward the dining room.
Margarida felt her heart beat faster, and the tingling in her scalp told her her hair was standing on end.
“Lotte, no!” Ambroos shouted, struggling to rise from the floor.
Margarida ducked between two fleeing deacons and looked. In the dining room, a scattergun rested on long nails over the fireplace. Lotte grabbed the weapon and turned to face Jake, cocking the hammer.
“No!” Margarida yelled. She threw herself forward—
Jake jumped at Lotte, snarling—
Lotte squeezed the trigger—
click.
Jake was about to seize Lotte by the neck when Margarida bowled into him from behind. She didn’t want to hurt Jake—he had rescued her—but something was wrong with him and he was not himself. She knocked him into the fireplace.
Ashes and embers scattered across the kitchen floor. Lotte leaped aside but didn’t manage to avoid the cloud of soot that billowed into the air. She rushed to the kitchen.
Ambroos tried to stand, but couldn’t.
Jake arose from the fireplace, smeared in ash. Great black blotches distorted his face and live embers glowed, tangled in his blond hair. Margarida smelled burning skin, and the Dutchman who had rescued her from captivity picked up an iron poker.
He launched himself at Margarida, swinging the iron.
Lotte returned from the kitchen with a broom. Seeing Jake’s attack, she rushed forward, reaching with the broom to intercept him, but she was too far away.
“Jacob, stop!” Ambroos cried.
Jake swung at Margarida’s head—
Margarida caught the poker in her left hand.
If it had taken her by surprise in her normal state, the blow would have shattered all the bones in her hand. As it was, she felt the impact, but without pain.
She yanked the poker from Jake’s hand.
He roared and leaped forward—
she slapped him in the face, knocking him to the floor and sending him skidding across the dining room.
Lotte adjusted course quickly and began to beat Jake with a broom.
“Zoete Jezus,” Ambroos cursed.
Margarida’s limbs trembled with strength. Her Tia Montse had told her that this was the result of an old witch’s blessing, bestowed on Margarida in the cradle. Now she had been told by strangers that instead it came from her father, a powerful wizard and king.
Sometimes, when her strength was upon her, Margarida lost control. The strength didn’t cause her to lose control. It only came upon her in moments of fear, excitement, anger, and danger, and those were moments when she was already close to losing control. When she lost control, she could really hurt people.
She didn’t want to hurt Jake.
She tossed the iron to one side. She didn’t mean to throw it with force, but it struck the wall and knocked a head-sized chunk of plaster and brick to the floor.
Jake scrambled to his feet and grabbed Lotte.
Margarida seized Jake by both wrists and yanked his hands from Ambroos’s wife. Jake gasped in pain—had she broken his wrist?—and she threw him into the corner of the room, farthest from everyone else.
“Calm down, Jake!” she yelled, in a voice that was anything but calm.
Jake hesitated. “Am I Jake?”
Margarida wished Nathaniel were conscious. This seemed like the sort of thing he could handle well. She grabbed Jake by both arms and pinned him, lifting him and pounding him against the wall. Plaster sifted down into her face.
“You’re Jake,” she growled.
“Am I?” He slammed his knee into her chin. Some other time, the blow would have cracked her jaw. Now, she didn’t even blink.
She punched him in the belly with her free hand. It was reflexive, an act of anger.
“You’re Jacob Hop,” she said.
He kicked her again and she tossed him across the room. Jake bounced off the top of the dining room table and rolled on the floor.
Calm down. Calm down.
She didn’t want to kill her rescuer.
“Do you have a brig?” she called to Ambroos. “A dungeon?”
“What kind of house do you take this for?” Ambroos had picked up the poker, but he held it without confidence. “We have a root cellar in the yard.”
Jake staggered to his feet. Blood poured down his chin from his nose, and his eyes rolled wildly in his head.
“You’re Jacob Hop,” Margarida said again.
Jake jumped for Ambroos’s poker.
Margarida dove
and managed to grab Jake by the ankle. Both of them hit the floor and rolled—she pushed herself to be up on her feet first. Grabbing Jake by the back of his shirt, she hauled him in her wake.
“Back door!” she hollered.
Lotte led the way, throwing wide a door that led from the kitchen into the rectangular yard behind the house. Outside, snowflakes hung nearly suspended in the air. They sizzled as they touched Margarida’s skin, melting into frigid streams that ran into her orange flannel dress, soaking it instantly.
She threw Jake into a snowbank.
He leaped to his feet and she knocked him down again. Part of her raged, wanting to grab the Dutchman in both hands and break his neck. She struggled against that desire as much as she struggled against Jacob Hop.
“Are you Jake?” she yelled.
He tried to stand back up a second time and she jumped on him, knocking him prone. Scooping up a big handful of snow, she shoved it into his face. “Are you Jake?”
The back of her neck felt unprotected. What if the tongueless dead sorcerer was waiting in the yard and attacked her now? The fear raised goosepimples on her flesh, fueled her strength, and added urgency to her question to the Dutchman.
He punched her in the eye, and she ignored it. Standing, she picked him up and threw him headfirst into a deeper drift of snow. His feet kicked aimlessly. He tried to stand, and she held him down.
“Jake!” she roared. “Are you Jake? Are you Jacob Hop?”
“Murmph! Murmple!” His words were trapped by the snow, but his tone had changed.
Shivering suddenly from the cold, Margarida stepped back to let him climb out of the snow. He was bloody and bedraggled, but he wore a rueful smile. “Ja,” he said. “I’m Jake. I’m Jacob Hop.”
She scrutinized his face. He seemed to be in control of himself again. Her own heartbeat began to slow, and the strength coiled in her limbs faded.
“Are you sure?” she asked. If this was a trick, if her strength left her entirely and she passed out again, she worried he would easily kill Ambroos and Lotte.
Jake nodded. “I don’t know what that was, but I’m sorry. And I tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I won’t be asking for an exorcism again.”
* * *
Sarah knelt and looked toward the Serpent Throne.
To her side, Alzbieta Torias also knelt.
In Sarah’s mortal eye, the throne loomed large and treelike over the floor of the temple below. In her Eye of Eve, she saw…
Smoke.
Beneath the smoke, light, but the smoke was thick and oily, clinging to the Serpent Throne, the walls, and the floor of the apse.
She didn’t see the goddess sitting in the throne.
She also didn’t see the Heron King.
“Something is wrong,” she said.
Alzbieta sighed. “You haven’t forgotten that Calvin killed a man on the Serpent Throne?”
“I haven’t. But that’s not what I mean. I can see Eërthes’s blood like a pool on the seat itself, like no one ever cleaned it up.”
“No one did clean it up,” Alzbieta said. “They’re afraid to. We’re afraid to.”
“Afraid of the goddess? I thought the blood was a desecration. Wouldn’t She want Her throne cleaned?”
“Afraid of the Throne. Onandagos had the throne brought from the Drowned Lands. It sailed on its own ship crewed entirely by priestesses and unprofaned by the presence of any weapons.”
“This would have been long before cannons, or muskets.”
“The priestesses didn’t carry so much as a bow.”
“Good thing no one tried to capture it.”
“But they did. When the fleet was anchored within sight of the New World, a party of raiders came aboard at night. They killed every priestess, slitting their throats and dropping them in the water. Then they weighed anchor and sailed away.
“In the morning, Onandagos and the rest of the fleet began to search for the missing ship and the Throne. It took a week, but they found it. It had been brought ashore and taken to the village of the people who had taken it. They were an Algonk people, a small nation whose name is now forgotten.”
“How did Onandagos get the Throne back?” Sarah asked.
“Everyone in that village was dead,” Alzbieta told her.
“The Serpent Throne killed them?”
“Holiness is not some label that means a certain object or place is nice,” Alzbieta said. “Holiness is not beauty, or fine craftsmanship. Holiness is a power that kills. It requires special people with special preparation to handle holy objects, because a person who is not prepared dies from contact.”
Sarah was silent for a moment. “This is part of why I have to be the Beloved before I can become queen? I am prepared by steps for contact with what is most holy, or in other words, contact with what is most lethal?”
Alzbieta nodded. “In fact, not only did the village where the stolen Throne was housed die, but every pirate who had participated in the theft died, too. As did every person who had come into contact with one of those pirates. And so did every person who had come into contact with one of those people, and so on, to the seventh degree.”
Sarah whistled low. “No wonder no one remembers that nation’s name.”
“So no one dares clean the Serpent Throne.”
“Maybe that’s why my father never closed the curtain. He didn’t dare sit on the throne.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, good. That’s just what I want. I want a big dose of power that can kill people seven degrees removed, and I want to dump it on those Imperials out there. Hell, I’d wheel the Serpent Throne out there myself and let it do the job, even if it meant my own death, only I’m afraid Cromwell might actually have the means to turn it to his own ends.”
“Tell me how you think you can become mistress of that power, and I will serve you.”
Sarah looked sharply at her cousin. “Alzbieta, it’s time you told me what you know of coronation rites.”
The priestess said nothing.
“I saw the goddess on the Serpent Mound. She was a beacon of living power. I saw Her again on the Sunrise Mound and again She was mighty, but once She had chosen me, She disappeared. I can tell, looking at the Serpent Throne, that it is a source of a great power. I believe that I am supposed to sit on it, and that its power will give me the strength to free this city from the trap of Robert Hooke.”
Alzbieta said nothing.
“If I do not do that, I fear that Hooke’s spell—Cromwell’s spell, because now we know he’s here, and I suspect his presence is what enables Hooke to cast so large a net—will kill us all. Every death we suffer fuels the net that has us trapped. That black flame out there is a reservoir of energy that belongs to our enemy. When enough of us have died, who can say what he’ll do with it?”
Alzbieta looked at the floor. Sarah examined her closely.
“We don’t know the procedures for cleaning the Serpent Throne,” the priestess said. “Or at least, we’re uncertain and we’re afraid that, if we do it wrong, She’ll be angry. Or we’ll be killed by the throne.”
“Good God,” Sarah finally said. “You don’t know the coronation rites.”
“I told you early on there were things I didn’t know. I always told you that.”
“I sort of imagined those would be just the deepest, darkest secrets. What were you thinking, that I’d just figure these things out for myself? What about your oath, Alzbieta? To help me?”
“I have helped,” Alzbieta protested. “I have tried to give you good hints. And tell you what I know, and what I think is relevant.”
“In other words, these are riddles that you haven’t solved yourself, and you were hoping I could do it for you. But you weren’t willing to tell me that you were just ignorant. And what, you were hoping I would figure all these things out, and then you could steal the information and make yourself Queen?”
“No!” Alzbieta looke
d genuinely shocked. “I have tried to be faithful. I have served your interests from the moment of my vow.”
She means it. Sarah inhaled deeply and sighed. What she had taken for oathbound decorum and sacred reticence had been ignorance and pride and fear. “Very well. We do this my way.”
“What’s your way?” Alzbieta asked.
“Heart full of fear, and making it up as I go along.” Sarah nodded in the direction of the Throne. “But I have a clue. Or a theory. I need lamp oil.”
Alzbieta bowed. “I’ll have the sept of priestesses with today’s tendance duties fill the bowls.”
“No,” Sarah said. “Bring the oil. I’ll do it. If anyone’s going to die, let it be me.”
Alzbieta’s back stiffened. “The people, I am sure, would rather someone else died instead.”
“Too damn bad.” Sarah stood. “Bring the oil. If you’re so hell-bent on putting yourself at risk, you can sit here with me.”
Alzbieta Torias herself brought the oil in a simple clay pot from storerooms beneath the temple.
Something, or a series of somethings, had defiled the Temple of the Sun. It didn’t shine like the Serpent Mound; it didn’t have the palpable presence of the Sunrise Mound. What had happened? Alzbieta might know. So might Zadok, although what the priestess condemned as a defilement, the priest might celebrate as an act of heroism. That history might be useful to her, and she should try to learn it.
But what she really wanted was to activate—or reactivate—the power of the Throne. And if she could do that without sorting through the half-remembered battles of prior generations, so much the better.
She stepped out of her shoes, took the oil, and approached the Serpent Throne.
The smoke she saw through her Eye of Eve grew thicker as she approached. Beneath, she thought she saw blue light, but it was obscured by the black fumes. At the foot of the stairs entering the shrine’s apse, she resisted an urge to look back.
Taking another steadying breath, she climbed.
There was a ritual way to do this, and she didn’t know it.
But there was a divinity to be honored as well, and she could at least show respect.
At the top of the stairs she knelt, pressing her forearms to the floor. She deliberately held the position for a long time and tried to clear her heart of hesitation and fear, malice and hatred.