Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  By a return of Simon Sword. Though Queen Sarah had said she could see when Simon Sword was present in another. Still, Jake nodded, then took to his horse.

  He quickly found the scouts Chikaak had referred to, standing in trees to the side of the faint path they followed a few hundred yards ahead. One was a short man, with a man’s face but a bear’s arms. His paws didn’t let him squeeze a trigger effectively, so he was a pikeman, and his name was Oriot.

  Sliitch was the other’s name, and he was one of the stranger warriors in Queen Sarah’s retinue. Sliitch’s head looked like a horse’s, only covered with long fur. The beastman had a hand but only a single arm, so he couldn’t use a carbine effectively, either as a pike or as a musket. Sliitch wore a pair of bandoliers crossed over his chest, from which hung four pistols. His eyes being set on opposite sides of his head, though, meant that Sliitch had poor depth perception, and rarely hit the mark unless it was practically within reach. Also, he reloaded slowly. Beneath the bandoliers, his body branched into three legs, which caused him to run in an off-balanced fashion that was nevertheless very fast.

  Sliitch and Oriot grunted back and forth to each other as Jake approached. Unconsciously, Jake found himself once again imitating the hoots and whistles of the beastkind. They came in short bursts, and no matter what the method of vocalization—growl, bark, whine, roar, whistle—the sounds were melodic. They changed in pitch. The beastkind were singing short melodies back and forth to each other.

  Jake’s horse—acquired from the Imperial dragoons—had a carbine and a pair of long pistols holstered along its saddle. It had also come with a deck of cards in one of its saddlebags, and Jake now took these out to look at them.

  “Go on,” he said in answer to Oriot’s questioning look and short whimper. “I’ll follow.”

  The two beastmen jogged ahead, branches slapping them as they ran. Jake examined the cards. They were a Tarock deck; Jake had seen fortunetellers use such decks before, in many of the seaside towns he’d visited. He knew there was a Marseille Tarock some of the French liked, and a New World Tarock devised by old Bishop Franklin, and other decks. Jake had never handled any of them. Ambroos wasn’t the only preacher in the Hop family, and divinatory cards had been banned from his childhood home. This deck appeared to be Franklin’s Tarock, because the first card he turned over was Simon Sword. The Simon Sword in the miniature painting looked a little like Jake, young and blond, and he swung an enormous sword to behead three men simultaneously.

  Simon Sword was definitely a creature of the New World, and wouldn’t belong in a French deck.

  Jake hesitated at turning over the second card, fearing for a moment—unreasonably—that it too would bear the image of Simon Sword. It didn’t. On the face of the second card, Jake saw lightning bolts in the corners, a forest of saplings, and a man in a leather coat riding toward a sunrise.

  He quickly counted the cards. There were four suits: cups, lightning bolts, swords, and coins, and in each suit a sequence of cards numbered one through ten, with a king, queen, knight, and page. Fourteen cards multiplied by four suits made fifty-six. These were the Minor Arcana, and each card had its own unique painting on it.

  Beyond that there were twenty additional cards: the Major Arcana. These did not have suits, and around their edges the Major Arcana had interlocking cursive patterns almost like knots, each card with a unique motif. These cards had their own paintings too, and they were named at the bottom. Simon Sword was one of them. So were Peter Plowshare, and the Serpent, and the Horseman, and the Lovers. The Major Arcana were not numbered, or ordered in any other apparent way. Seventy-six cards in total.

  A whistle from ahead stopped Jake’s exploration. He pocketed the cards and found Oriot running toward him. The bear-man was grunting melodically. Did that mean he was trying to say something?

  When he reached Jake, he grabbed the Dutchman’s horse by its saddle and made a pained, thoughtful face.

  “Ja?” Jake asked.

  “Traaaaap,” Oriot finally said.

  * * *

  The queer little Dutchman galloped back toward Calvin, where he rode with Bill, Sarah, and Cathy Filmer. Jacob Hop wasn’t much of a horseman, it turned out; he bounced up and down above the saddle holding on for dear life, his blond hair bouncing with him.

  Bill drew and cocked one of the multiple pistols he kept on his body and on the horse, a big Andalusian gray.

  Cal raised the Kentucky rifle he carried across the saddle bow. The weapon was too long for the carbine scabbards all the dragoons’ horses had come with, but Cal favored the hunting rifle over the shorter military weapon, for accuracy and for his own familiarity with it.

  “Er is a problem!” Hop gasped as he reined in his animal.

  “Air?” Cal asked.

  “He means there,” Bill said gruffly. “There is a problem.”

  “Natuurlijk,” Hop said.

  “Sir William,” Cathy Filmer drawled. “You have become an able interpreter.”

  “Unwillingly, Mrs. Filmer, and only by necessity.”

  Sarah straightened in the saddle, but said nothing. Instead, she removed the dirty gray strip of cloth that covered her gifted eye. Then she pulled the plain iron sphere that was one of the regalia of Cahokia, her father’s kingdom, from her shoulder bag, and looked into it.

  Sarah had one normal eye, and one—so blue it was almost white—that had only opened recently. Through her witchy eye, she saw…things. Cal wasn’t even sure. She saw people’s spirits, and she saw ley lines, and he didn’t know what else.

  Sarah sat proudly on her horse, and her jaw was set with determination. The strangeness of her witchy eye, the stubble growing on her skull—she’d shaved all her own hair off in an act of defensive magic only a few days earlier—and the orb in her hands gave her an unearthly look.

  “A trap,” she said.

  Cal couldn’t see what she was gazing at, and he wanted to know more. “What kinda trap?”

  “Cahokians, Oriot says.” Hop smiled. “Though it was hard for him to say it. It is much easier to speak with Chikaak.”

  As he said the coyote-headed beastman’s name, Chikaak jogged to join them. “I have run ahead to look. It is a trap.” He bounded from side to side with irrepressible energy as he spoke; Cal had half an idea that if he were standing instead of mounted, the beastman might throw himself on Cal’s knee and dry-hump his leg.

  “You told me you had scouted this morning.” Bill frowned.

  “The trap has been set since. Cahokians, Oriot is right.”

  Jacob Hop nodded. “Er is a woman there, in a…carry-chair, what do you call it?”

  “A sedan?” Bill asked.

  “A sedan.” Hop nodded again. “She doesn’t touch the ground. And she has others with her, and they mostly look harmless.”

  “Call no man harmless until he is dead,” Bill said. “My education ended early, but I believe I remember that much of Aristotle.”

  “Aristotle, or perhaps Attila the Hun.” Cathy smiled and she leaned over to pat Bill’s thigh. She was too old for Calvin—who was in love with Sarah, anyway—but she wasn’t too old to notice, especially when she smiled.

  “I’ll take good advice where I can get it,” Bill growled.

  “In the trees, there are men hidden,” Hop said. “Dat is the trap.”

  “How many?” Bill asked.

  “They outnumber us.” Chikaak yipped low, a mournful sound. “Spears, swords, longbows, guns.”

  “We can ride around,” Hop suggested.

  Sarah returned the orb to her shoulder bag. “We’ll ride into the ambush,” she announced.

  Bill inclined his head deeply. “Your Majesty. Perhaps the snare is not intended for us, and we can merely ride through.”

  “Oh, this offer is meant for me,” Sarah said. “Only the buyer has no idea how much she’s going to get for her bargain.”

  “At least let us git around behind these men,” Cal suggested. “Git the drop on ’em, iff
en they feel like ambushin’ you anyway.”

  Sarah nodded once, sharply. “Take some who can shoot with you. Sir William, I’ll need you at my side.”

  “He’s jest about the only body as can shoot.” Cal laughed. “Jake, you want to come with me? I reckon you got a better chance of hitting anythin’ than that feller with bull hooves.”

  “Agreed.” Hop turned his horse around.

  “I’ll come, too.” Chikaak pointed with his carbine at the end of a long, narrow meadow. “If we go that way, we should come up behind these ambushers unseen.”

  Cal followed Chikaak. The beastmen didn’t seem any faster in a sprint than an ordinary man, most of them, but they could run all day and not look tired. Now Chikaak paced out ahead of Calvin and Jacob Hop, leading the way.

  Cal took one last look back at Sarah before he plunged into the trees and was separated.

  “You know how to load those pistols, Jake?” he asked.

  “I keep the pistols and the carbine loaded and primed,” Hop said. “I try to be discreet about it so as not to unsettle Bill’s mind.”

  “He ain’t yet o’er the fact that you were Simon Sword.”

  “I was not Simon Sword.” Jake spat the words, but then looked thoughtful. “I was Simon Sword’s prisoner.”

  “I reckon I don’t quite understand what he wanted with you.” Cal and Jacob Hop followed Chikaak up a rocky defile. Here the beastman sergeant ran doubled over, sniffing the ground.

  “I think dat he wanted to free Bill. I think dat he wanted to help Sarah recover the Cahokian regalia. I think dat he wanted exactly what happened on top of that mountain to happen. And dat, Calvin Calhoun, should give you pause.”

  “Jerusalem, but it does,” Cal admitted. “And how do you think that should make Bill feel about you?”

  Hop laughed. “Ja, exactly. And so I do not touch my guns in his sight, and I give him respect and obedience. Also, he is a good teacher, even though he does not quite trust me.”

  “Well, I trust you,” Cal offered.

  “You trust me? Or you trust Sarah, and what she says about me?”

  “Shhh!” Chikaak turned and urged the two men to silence. The sight of a man’s finger shushing him in front of a coyote’s mouth, twisted into an imitation that almost looked like pursed lips, struck Cal as hilarious.

  He bit his tongue to keep from laughing.

  They tied the two horses to a tree and followed Chikaak up the next slope on foot. Cal was by long habit a silent walker—he’d been a rustler by trade at home, and wore high moccasins—and he was impressed now how quietly Jacob Hop moved, though he wore hard-soled leather shoes. All three held their long guns in one hand and a pistol in the other, and near the crest of the slope, Chikaak motioned to them to lie on their bellies.

  They inched forward a few feet on their elbows and looked down.

  The path they had been riding for two days now passed beneath them through a bowl. The circular valley had stands of white oak on two sides; one stand was at the bottom of the slope beneath Cal and his companions, and the other stood opposite.

  Among the trees beneath them, some twenty men lay on their bellies. Half of them had long rifles pointed out into the bowl, and the other half lay with palms pressed to the earth, as if ready to spring to their feet at a moment’s notice. They wore small steel helmets and blue cloaks, and their spears, bows, and muskets lay on the ground beside them.

  “Bit of an oversight of these soldiers not to post a guard up here on the ridge behind ’em,” Cal muttered.

  “They had a guard,” Chikaak whispered.

  Cal looked at the scout, whose only answer was a long, knowing grin.

  If Chikaak had killed the guard he referred to, he’d hidden the body as well.

  “More men under those other trees?” Cal whispered to the beastman.

  Chikaak nodded, panting like a dog.

  In the center of the bowl was a sedan chair, just as Chikaak had told them. It was in use, and held an occupant, though from here Calvin couldn’t see any detail. Eight burly men held the sedan on their shoulders by two long poles, two bearers to each corner.

  Two men and a woman stood beside the sedan.

  “How much time we got?” Cal asked.

  “Not long,” Hop told him.

  Cal sighted along the barrel of his rifle, first at the nearer trees and then at the farther stand. “How good are your eyes?”

  “Not as good as my nose,” Chikaak said.

  “Ja, good,” Hop said. “Better than when I was a boy, even.”

  That was an odd answer, but Cal didn’t press it. “Am I right to think there are wasps’ nests o’er in those trees?”

  The morning sun was at their backs, but Hop shaded his eyes anyway and squinted. “Ja, I think you have it right, friend Calvin. Or bees, maybe.”

  “You can call me Cal.”

  “Ja, and you call me Jake. You have a plan, Cal?”

  “Mebbe,” Cal allowed.

  “We’re badly outnumbered,” Chikaak said. “I didn’t think you were the sort of man to crave a hero’s death.”

  “I ain’t, but Lord hates a man as ain’t willin’ to risk a hero’s death. We do nothin’, until the moment when we have to, to help Sarah. And when that time comes, I’ll think about those fellers o’er on the far side, iffen you two can manage the ones here on our doorstep.”

  “Ja. You give me your pistol, and you can have my carbine.”

  * * *

  Sarah removed the bandage from her eldritch eye. She would ride into this meeting seeing everything, seeing more than the other side could see. And if she also discomfited the ambushing party with the sight of her one eye white as ice, so much the better.

  Sarah was determined to take her father’s kingdom, at almost any cost. She needed her father’s kingdom and its power to rescue her sister and her brother, whom she had never met.

  Acquainted or not, kin was kin.

  She pushed her shoulders back and her chin up, conscious that no matter what she did, she’d still look like a scarecrow-filthy, twig-thin, dirt-faced ragamuffin, with all the hair scraped off her skull. So be it.

  She fixed her face into a cold stare.

  “Your Majesty,” Cathy Filmer and Captain Sir William Johnston Lee said together.

  “Ride beside me,” Sarah said. “Sir William, I hope not to need your pistols.”

  “They are here in any case, Your Majesty, loaded and ready.”

  “As are mine,” Cathy added.

  “Please form my guard up behind us. I would like the beastmen to look potentially threatening, though not poised immediately to attack. I hope that’s a reasonably clear distinction.”

  “I have read some philosophy, Your Majesty.” Sir William turned to one of the beastkind, who now clustered around. “You, there. You understand me when I speak English? No? You? Nothing?”

  One of the beastkind warriors, a seven-foot-tall woman with the head of a long-horned cow, raised a hand. The gesture was almost shy.

  “Your name?” Sir William asked.

  “Ferpa.”

  “Two abreast, double file!” he snapped.

  The ox-woman looked lost. “Double what?”

  “One, two,” Sir William counted, pointing. “One, two. One, two. Yes?”

  Ferpa nodded. “Muskets?” She faltered. “Pikes?”

  Sir William shook his head. “Not today. If we fight, charge them like animals and give them hell. Understood?”

  “Give them hell.” Ferpa laughed, delighted. Then she let out a series of mooing and squealing noises, at which all the beastkind laughed.

  “You have delighted them, Sir William,” Cathy said.

  “I wish I knew how,” he muttered. “But perhaps I have found my corporal. Freiherr von Steuben would be so pleased.”

  Ferpa made further lowing noises and the beastkind lined up as Sir William had commanded.

  “Two by two, Your Majesty,” Sir William said.

  “
Like the ark.” She smiled at him.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “if Noah entered the ark protected by his goats and hippopotamuses, prepared to fight off an ambush on two fronts.”

  “We’ll be fine,” she said.

  “Your Majesty.” Sir William nodded.

  “I recognize the improvements you’ve already made, Sir William. Don’t distress yourself for the progress you have yet to make.”

  “I am not distressed,” he said. “A general goes to war with the army he has, not the army he hopes he may one day create.”

  “That is true philosophy. Let’s hope that what we ride to isn’t war.” Sarah started her horse forward.

  It might be war, though. She had gazed through the Orb of Etyles and along the ley line of the Mississippi. The river was out of sight now, but close enough that, with the Orb, she could touch it and use its power. She had seen what was waiting.

  Firstborn.

  The ambush was set by Cahokians, Chikaak had said. Cahokia was a kingdom, and any sort of person might wear its livery. What Sarah knew from gazing through the Mississippi was that the people waiting in hiding were her people, the Eldritch or Ophidian descendants of Adam and his first wife, sometimes called Wisdom.

  She knew they were mostly men.

  She knew they expected not a battle, but a lesser confrontation. An arrest, maybe, or something similar. They didn’t have the will to die written across their souls; instead, they had a demand to make.

  And she knew that the leaders they followed included a woman borne on a litter by eight slaves.

  The color of that woman’s aura, the timbre of it, if it had been music, the smell and feel of it, were familiar. The aura was close—not identical, but similar—to the aura that had once shone from the acorn that had fallen from Sarah’s own eye. It was like the aura that shone from the tree atop Wisdom’s Bluff that had sprouted from that acorn, close to the aura of the Orb of Etyles and the Sevenfold Crown.

  Close to the aura of the father Sarah had never met.

  Close to Sarah’s own aura.

  Somehow, the woman in the palanquin was family.

  One of her siblings? Her sister, Margaret? She didn’t think so. The woman felt too old to be Sarah’s triplet. Did her father have a living sister? Sarah had no idea.