Witchy Kingdom

by D. J. Butler

  Nathaniel slept without dreaming. Sometime later, he drifted nearly back to wakefulness because a light was shining on him. He heard two voices talking. He thought one of them sounded like Temple Franklin’s.

  * * *

  “Fort van Nassouwen.” Gert Visser offered his hand to Kinta Jane and she took it, stepping off on the trading town’s docks.

  The town was a busy hive of whistling, yelling, and the crunch of rolling cart wheels. Beyond the unpaved streets and tall, narrow houses, Kinta Jane saw rolling hills covered with forests. Some of the trees were scrub oaks, black and naked in the winter, but there were also green pines.

  “You might know it better as Fort Nassau.” Dockery stepped off the ship and spat onto the wood. “That’s the actual fort itself, on that island in the river. Been here near two hundred years. But they call the whole thing after the fort.”

  “This is the capital of the Republic?” Kinta Jane asked. She knew that it was, but the fact seemed extraordinary enough to bear repeating.

  “What you mean to say,” Dockery drawled, “is this looks a hell of a lot less important than New Amsterdam. What are those towheads thinking?”

  “I do not have a toe for a head,” Gert objected.

  Dockery laughed. “You’re about as towheaded as they come, Gert. Best I can guess, Kinta Jane, the line of logic pursued by those old meneers must have been something like this: government is the least important function of society, so let’s put it up at the most arse-end useless place we can find. Or else maybe, government’s the ugliest thing we do, let’s hide it and make believe it never happens. Kinda like how you put the jakes behind the house, and not out in front by the road.”

  “You should not talk this way to a lady, you know,” Gert said.

  “I beg your pardon.” Dockery doffed the badger he wore on his head in Gert’s direction. “I didn’t know you were a lady.”

  “You apologize.” Gert thrust forward his chest and stepped into Dockery’s personal space. The frontiersman didn’t back down, so they stood chest to chest and stared at each other. “You apologize for calling me a foot-head, and a lady. And also for speaking this way in front of a woman.”

  “Tow is T-O-W,” Isaiah Wilkes said.

  “I don’t care how it’s spelled,” Gert growled.

  “It doesn’t mean foot. It means a person with bright yellow hair. Which is true about you specifically, and often true of Dutch people.” Wilkes tugged at Gert’s elbow, and Gert retreated a few inches.

  “But if you want to go to knives over your inability to spell, Gert, let’s do it.” Dockery grinned, his teeth yellow, uneven, and vaguely canine.

  “You know, you shouldn’t behave this way in front of a lady.” Gert shook his head and backed away.

  “That’s your basic problem, Gert Visser. Thinking of women as ladies. If you thought of them as women, real people who wanted real things, and not ideal will o’ the wisps that a big dumb knight like you carries around to inspire him, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Gert stared, perplexed.

  Kinta Jane moved back from the men and placed her hand near her stiletto for easy grabbing.

  Isaiah Wilkes stepped into the middle. “Fort van Nassouwen is older than Nieuwe Amsterdam,” he said, picking up the explanation to Kinta Jane as if nothing had intervened. “It was located here as an important stop on the road up through Ticonderoga to Acadia, the way we’re bound, as a depot for gathering furs. Its location made all the sense in the world commercially. New Amsterdam at the time was nothing but a deep-water bay where Dutch ships anchored to trade with the people on shore. Later, other kinds of trades made New Amsterdam grow into the metropolis it is today, but the Dutch, with their conservative instincts, kept the seat of the Republic up here.”

  “I like my explanation better,” Dockery said.

  “Gert,” Isaiah suggested, “why don’t you sell the boat? The rest of us will go buy canoes.”

  Gert nodded efficiently and set about prowling the docks looking for a buyer. Isaiah prodded Dockery and got him moving up the hill.

  “We ain’t gonna buy canoes,” Dockery growled once they were out of Gert’s earshot. “What are you imagining, some old Mohican running his canoe shop will just knock us up a pair? No, we’re gonna make a couple, just like if the snow gets too deep, we’ll make shoes to walk across the top of it.”

  “Shoes to walk across the top of the snow?” Bizarre images filled Kinta Jane’s imagination, of slippers made of ice.

  Dockery nodded. “Or bone skates for a frozen lake. I know my way around. There’s a reason old Stuyvesant sent me off with you folks, and it’s got nothing to do with his daughter Julia.”

  It was Isaiah’s turn to confront Dockery, pushing in close and jabbing the other man in the chest. “What do you know?”

  Dockery looked away and frowned. “None of your business, Wilkes.”

  “Everything that happens on this trip is my business, Dockery,” Isaiah snarled. “Everything. I am the Franklin. Tell me what you know.”

  Dockery took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Old Gert down there is being sent out of the way. Adriaan doesn’t want him around to scotch a wedding with little Tommy Penn.”

  “How did you know that?” Isaiah’s eyes narrowed. Was he going to stab his guide right here on a busy street?

  “It’s not a secret, man!” Dockery yelled, then collected himself and started again, more softly. “I’m around the house all the time, do you understand? It’s no secret what’s going on.”

  “Does Gert know?” Kinta Jane asked. She wasn’t sure which she preferred—a fiancé who knew he was being sent away and cooperated out of some sense of chivalry, or a fool who could be manipulated.

  “That ox?” Dockery’s face clouded. “No. Nor does Thomas know that what he’s getting ain’t exactly what he asked for.”

  Wilkes frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Dockery spat again. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Is Adriaan going to substitute a different daughter?” Isaiah asked. “Is Julia a foster child?”

  Dockery shook his head again and again. “None of that fairy tale shit, no. Come back to the real world, Your Franklinity.”

  Kinta Jane almost laughed at Dockery’s mocking of Wilkes’s title. Then she tried to guess what the trapper might mean. “Julia isn’t a maid. She’s known a man.”

  Dockery sighed. “She’s known a man, and she’s kept a little bit of him too.”

  “Good hell,” Isaiah Wilkes said. “She’s pregnant. That will rip the marriage deal asunder. If it humiliates Thomas enough, it might do worse. We’ll get the Pacification of the Hudson next.”

  “It will if they don’t take care of the thing.” Dockery’s voice was low and pained. He looked away.

  “No wonder Adriaan Stuyvesant wanted him sent away.” Isaiah looked back down the hill at Gert Visser, enthusiastically engaged in back and forth with a man in a long canvas jacket.

  “And is willing to have him killed,” Kinta Jane added.

  Dockery looked up, surprise showing in his face along with…something else.

  Isaiah Wilkes sighed. “Look, Dockery. We may have to kill Gert Visser. Needling him as you do will only make him more ready for the blow when it comes.”

  “You’re asking me to lay off.”

  “I’m ordering you. Why didn’t you tell me that you knew before now?”

  Dockery shrugged. “You didn’t ask. And with all due respect…Wilkes…it still ain’t none of your business.”

  They stayed one night in a nameless inn on the northern edge of Fort Nassau. Gert, who had immediately reverted to his bluff good cheer, bought furs and wools with the proceeds of the ship. Dockery, whose soured mood remained sour the rest of the day, disappeared into the forest in his wool pullover frock and badger-pelt hat and didn’t reappear until morning. When he did show up, as the others were drinking hot coffee and eating a plate of cold cheese and sausage in the common room
, he looked exhausted. His face was pale, his eyes bloodshot, and his hands skinned from work and red from cold.

  “We’ve got two canoes,” he said. “I’ve hidden them by the river.”

  “Shall we rent a sledge to take our things there?” Gert asked.

  Dockery’s eyes flashed, but his voice was measured. “We only take what we can carry from here. We’re going to have to portage these canoes over a couple of spots, and too much will sink the canoes.”

  “Thank you.” Kinta Jane touched Dockery’s hand and smiled. His skin was cold as ice. The Pennslander scooped up two sausages and huddled beside the fire, alone.

  Gert sold a few last things—items he had apparently expected to trade in Acadia, and on which he instead took a loss. Dockery bound all their things into large fur-wrapped bundles, and they carried them to the canoes.

  “The water’s cold as ice,” Dockery warned them all. “Don’t fall in.”

  Kinta Jane shivered. “It’s winter, and we’re traveling north.”

  “Spring’s coming,” Dockery said. “I’d like to beat it to Montreal.”

  “Is that unlikely?” she asked, getting into the front of a canoe while Dockery held it. Isaiah Wilkes and Gert Visser climbed into the other. The canoes were neatly made, wooden frames with birch bark wrapped around them.

  “We ain’t that far,” Dockery told her. “I make it four days to where the river turns west at Baker Falls. From there we portage to Lac du Saint-Sacrement—that’s the hard part, but it’s short. One hard day, maybe two if the snow is deep and we have to wear shoes. If we get weather of any kind other than sunny, we’ll hole up, eat pemmican, and wait for it to blow over. From Saint-Sacrement it’s easy, down La Chute and on to Montreal, canoes all the way.”

  “I suppose a ship would have been faster,” Kinta Jane said.

  Isaiah Wilkes nodded as both canoes pushed out into the river. “But ships’ manifests are easy for Imperial customs agents to read. The lonely road is sometimes a safer road.”

  “Except when there are road agents,” Gert added cheerfully.

  “That’s why I’m grateful to have you and Dockery along,” Wilkes said. “Any down-on-his-luck farmer with a scattergun will think twice before beginning his career as a bandit by shooting me in the back.”

  They paddled north, up the slow-moving current. Kinta Jane thought the trees on the river’s banks moved by more slowly than if they’d been walking on solid ground, but there was at least three feet of snow piled up between their trunks. Likely the river was the faster road.

  When Gert Visser wasn’t singing, he whistled.

  Everyone paddled, but Gert and Dockery did most of the work. Gert had the larger muscles, but Dockery’s wiry arms were tireless, and at no point did he fall behind. In the afternoon, they chewed on pemmican and boiled water for coffee on a large rock in the river, melted clean of ice by the sun.

  Kinta Jane missed the fish, onions, and peppers of New Orleans, but she didn’t say anything.

  The sun was low in the west, and Kinta Jane’s arms were numb, when Gert abruptly stopped singing and began talking to Dockery. The canoes were close, an arm’s length apart.

  “I think I know what a woman wants,” Gert said. “Beauty. Respect, you know. A man who will treat her well.”

  “You’d be surprised how many women want a man who’ll treat them badly,” Dockery shot back.

  “Are you saying that about my Julia? Are you saying that about me, that I treat her badly?”

  “She ain’t your Julia!” Dockery hesitated. “She’s her own Julia. I reckon she’s proved that, if nothing else.”

  “She and I are betrothed, ranger-man. If she will not be my Julia, then I will be her Gert.”

  “What some women want,” Dockery said, “is just to get away from their fathers. No matter what price they have to pay to do that.”

  “Marriage to me would be a grievous price, eh?”

  Dockery laughed. “You don’t know what you’re in for, any more than Thomas Penn does!”

  Gert stopped paddling for a moment. “Thomas Penn!”

  “Shut up, Dockery!” Wilkes barked. “Gert, he’s just talking. He doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Right.” Dockery’s voice was bitter. “I never mean anything. I don’t tell the truth, and if I open my heart, it’s just a trick to get under a girl’s bedsheets. Ignore me. I’ll just do the work and bite my tongue.”

  Gert paddled fiercely to catch up.

  “Everyone relax.” Wilkes raised his hands in a calming gesture.

  Gert’s canoe caught up. He was red in the face and his nostrils flared like an angry bull’s. “So, now we get to the truth!”

  “Gert!” Wilkes shouted. “Dockery! Shut up right now, both of you!”

  “The child is yours!” Gert shouted.

  “You knew she had another man’s child and you asked her to marry you?” Dockery yelled.

  “To take care of her! To take care of both of them!”

  “Did it occur to you, you log-headed nitwit, that the other man might want to care for them?”

  “Don’t call me a nitwit!” Gert brandished his paddle like an ax. “Is Julia going to marry Thomas Penn? Am I being sent away?”

  Bang!

  Wilkes had fired a pistol into the air. He held a second in his other hand, pointed it at the space between the quarreling men so he might shoot either one of them with minimal effort. He was twisted around to face backward.

  Everyone had stopped paddling. The canoes drifted with the river.

  “Yeah,” Dockery said quietly. “You’ve been sent away. You and me both. I ain’t the right kind of fellow to stand in Adriaan Stuyvesant’s parlor, and however good your poems might be, they don’t weigh nothing in the balance against the coal mines of Pennsland.”

  Gert roared without word and stabbed with his paddle. Dockery raised his own paddle to parry, but Gert wasn’t aiming for the frontiersman—

  he slashed a great hole in the bottom of Dockery’s canoe.

  Icy water flooded Kinta Jane’s legs.

  Dockery sprang from the canoe, hurling himself through the air at Gert—

  bang! Isaiah Wilkes fired—

  Dockery slammed into the Dutchman. Gert, Dockery, and Wilkes all tipped over and went into the Hudson.

  Kinta Jane gasped as the icy water took her. She didn’t know how to swim. She kicked down with her feet, hoping to find solid ground.

  She sank.

  Away to her left, she was aware of thrashing men. She heard their movements as loud SWOOSH sounds that seemed very far away. That struck her ear and the side of her face as physical force just as much as noise. The world lost all sense of smell, and time disappeared.

  “Dockery!” she thought she heard.

  Flailing with her arms, she came to the surface for a moment. She coughed out freezing water. Already, her body was numb. She had to make it to shore, but she had no way to move that direction.

  She sank again.

  Thrashing, her hand struck something solid. For a moment, she thought the fur meant a bear was attacking her in the river, but then her cooling brain remembered the bundles of gear. She lashed out at it again—

  and caught hold of a leather thong.

  The bundle was buoyant.

  She kicked and moved herself toward the shore. An eddy in the water worked in her favor, and she found herself standing in water that was only waist-deep.

  Shaking uncontrollably.

  She scanned the river. Both canoes were gone. Three bundles bobbed away down the river. There was no sign of any of the men.

  She scanned the shore. No buildings. No smoke.

  She lurched away from the river, dragging the bundle. Dry, she had easily carried it on her shoulder. Wet, she could barely move it. The snow was up to her knees. Casting about for any shelter, she saw a stand of pine trees growing close together, a few steps from the water. In their center, beneath their lower boughs, she could see needle-covered
ground.

  She forced her way into the knot of pine trees with the last of the day’s light. Her teeth chattered and she couldn’t make them stop. She tried to untie the leather thong binding together the gear, but her fingers were too stiff. Her stiletto, happily, was still in its sheath on her forearm. She cut the strap and pulled the bundle open.

  Fur and wool. Fur and wool should retain heat even if they were wet. But her body had lost too much of its warmth already, even if she bundled up, she thought she’d freeze to death.

  And then Dockery was there. He bled from a wound in his side and his badger-fur cap was gone. His own skin was the color of a boiled lobster.

  “Fire,” he muttered. His rattling teeth made the word sound as if it had multiple Ts in it. “I’ll light a fire.”

  The inside of the bundle was mostly dry. Kinta Jane laid a wool blanket on top of the pine needles, then a second blanket, and the fur on top. It was all the covering they had.

  Dockery, meanwhile, smashed the dead lower branches from the pine trees and piled them beside the bed Kinta Jane was building. Though his hands shook and his fingers must have been frozen, his stack was impeccable. He added bark he tore from the trunk of a dead pine with his patch knife, and then he shook water off his powder horn and poured a neat pile of powder at the bottom of his fire.

  Kinta Jane climbed onto the bed and prepared to burrow into it.

  “Your clothes are wet,” Dockery mumbled. He handed her the powder horn.

  Kinta Jane hesitated, befuddled. “What?”

  “Those wet clothes’ll kill you. Take ’em off.”

  Kinta Jane stripped off her wet clothing and flung it onto pine branches, then shoved herself into the wool and fur. She felt no warmer inside.

  Dockery fell to his knees and fumbled a small pouch from around his neck. He took a bit of flint from the pouch—a spare for his rifle, perhaps—and struck it on the blade of his knife.

  On the third try, he got a spark that ignited the powder.

  “Get in here,” Kinta Jane called.

  Dockery nodded. Instead of complying, though, he staggered away into the snow.

  “Where are you going?” Kinta Jane called.