Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  Cal’s temples throbbed. “Was he Firstborn, St. Peter of the Plow?”

  “The stories don’t say,” Hylia told him. “But as you’re familiar with my order, you know that we travel, and I can tell you that St. Peter of the Plow is famous throughout the Ohio and in Pennsland.”

  “Well, I ain’t heard of him in Appalachee,” Cal said. “On the other hand, I weren’t e’er much of one for saints.”

  “You have a good heart, Calvin. Who knows? Perhaps one day a humble Cetean like me will stand here and tell passing visitors the story of St. Calvin.”

  “Patron of cattle rustlers and doomed love.”

  “No true love is doomed, Calvin. Love transforms and refreshes, whether it ever attains its object or not. Love is the great gift.”

  Cal laughed, his chest feeling hollow. “Is it? Or is it the great curse? Ain’t that what the Eden story tells us, Adam and Eve fell in love and it led them to eat the forbidden fruit and then they got thrown out?”

  Mother Hylia smiled. “As you’ve seen, there’s more than one way to tell that story.”

  * * *

  The Phaeton was fast, even carrying the three of them. It wasn’t going to be able to leave the roads, though, and Ma’iingan was afraid that at the first sight of a soldier, George would cry for help.

  He couldn’t release George, for a similar reason.

  He wasn’t sure he could let Landon out of his sight, either. Ultimately, the ferocious envy and pecking order that connected the boys and defined their relationships meant he had to keep George and Landon with him until he was positive he could outrun them all.

  He needed a canoe, and a long stretch of fast river to take him somewhere he could see to Nathaniel’s injury.

  Instead, he found a curing barn.

  He found it as the sun had set, and he found it by sense of smell. The dried, aromatic curl of asemaa reached out to him across two harvested fields, and led him to turn the Phaeton across the trampled furrows, forcing George and Landon to remove and replace fence slats to let the coach through.

  The barn was big enough to drive the Phaeton and four horses into, and shut the doors behind, even with the tall, airy drying racks for the asemaa taking up half the floor space. The horses snorted in protest—perhaps at the strong smell of asemaa—and Ma’iingan assigned Landon the task of calming them. The boy did this with reasonable success, and Ma’iingan set about tying George up.

  He used the harness of the Phaeton, cutting up the leather into thin cord and then strapping George to the central pillar in the curing barn, sitting, with his hands behind him.

  “My God, Old One Eye will eat you alive,” George said. Then he looked away, as if he had humiliated himself.

  “Henh. Your father might, too,” Ma’iingan shot back. “Though I think vultures generally prefer carrion.”

  George bared his teeth and kicked his heels at the wooden floor of the barn, but said nothing.

  With Landon’s help, Ma’iingan lowered Nathaniel from the Phaeton. He looked bad. His wounds had reopened and he was pallid, but worse, he thrashed and shouted out the strange non sequiturs he generally did, only now he did so without pause. He slapped and clawed at his large ear as he did, until the ear was red and bled in many long scratches.

  Ma’iingan would bind his wounds. Maybe he could save the boy’s life. But that still left Ma’iingan with a healer laid low, it still left his son Giimoodaapi with no people and no doodem, not one of the Anishinaabe, and maybe doomed to starve to death. At best, it left Ma’iingan the father of one son, and one changeling, one spiritually outcast creature that must lurk forever in darkness, and never truly come forward into the light.

  “Get water,” he said to Landon. He didn’t like trusting the boy, but he had no choice. He considered threatening him with another Crazy Indian act, but decided against it. “Quickly.”

  Landon took a bucket from the corner of the drying barn and slipped out the back door into the dark forest.

  “Gichi-Manidoo,” Ma’iingan said aloud. “Help me help this boy. Help me help my son.”

  On the wooden floor, surrounded by the thick scent of sacred asemaa, he began to build a sweat lodge.

  “I see the lawyers have got at the Imperial College as well.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Ezekiel followed the smell of blood until he reached a clearing. His mouth watered as he ran through snow and between trees.

  In the center of the clearing stood a pile of rough stones, uncut by chisel as the English tradition required. Standing on the other side of the pile of rock was a heavy-torsoed, bow-legged, bearded man in black breeches, shirt, and cloak. His head was bare and he looked up to the clouded heavens. A godi, by the long knife in his right hand and the horn in his left.

  Blood ran down the knife and dripped onto the sheep carcass lying on the stones.

  Ezekiel was hungry.

  He hesitated, thinking he’d wait, and after the godi had finished, he’d take the sheep’s carcass. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself biting into the fresh throat of the sheep, savoring its blood.

  No! No, that wasn’t right. Roasting it, and then eating it.

  “You!” the godi shouted. He met Ezekiel’s gaze with anger in his eyes. “This is a sacred site, and you are trespassing. Did you not see the markers?”

  He meant the horned skulls nailed to tree trunks, another well-known pagan practice. Ezekiel hadn’t seen any such, but he’d been running fast, following the scent. He burned with hunger from the inside out. He needed flesh.

  Cooked or raw, he didn’t care.

  “I am hungry, sir,” he began meekly. “Could you spare…”

  “Christian!” the godi snapped. “Get away! You are in Johnsland, and the College rules here!”

  “I only want a bite,” Ezekiel said, trying again.

  The godi reversed the knife in his hand, pointing it at Ezekiel. “Leave now, Yankee, or I’ll have you crucified like your effeminate god!”

  Ezekiel was across the clearing in a single bound. His father’s long sword sprang from its sheath into his hand, and swung down overhand at the pagan priest.

  The godi raised his horn hand—

  and Ezekiel sliced down, cleaving the horn in two, shearing off all the godi’s fingers, and sinking his blade six inches into the priest’s shoulder.

  The godi screamed.

  “So…effeminate,” Ezekiel rumbled, his voice dropping an octave. He stepped forward.

  Weaving back and forth on his feet, the godi stabbed Ezekiel. Ezekiel looked down at the blade sticking into his belly and noted dispassionately that the wound didn’t bleed. Another divine gift.

  He grabbed the other man by the knife arm and broke it, forcing the elbow to bend contrary to the natural direction until it snapped, and the godi’s scream jumped up in pitch.

  Ezekiel found he had no interest in the sheep.

  The godi was still screaming when Ezekiel leaned forward and took a bite from the man’s neck.

  He thought he saw a man standing at the edge of the clearing as he ate. The man wore black plate mail and a white neck cloth like the Lord Protector, but when Ezekiel raised his head for a better look, the stranger was gone.

  Ezekiel’s coat tugged him onward.

  * * *

  “I admit I’d expected better pay than this.” Josep stared down into the coins in his palm, shaking his hand slightly to make them clink together.

  Montse looked yet again into the wooden crate bouncing beside her in the wagon. Onions. “It isn’t your pay. Your pay is a share of all booty, and La Verge when I die. Now eat them.”

  Miquel did as Montse bid, slipping the tarnished silver coins between his lips and swallowing them, one at a time.

  “Will there be much booty, then?”

  “Not today.”

  “But I’m so fond of gold.”

  “Gold will do nothing for you in your belly, you fool. Eat.”

  “Or larger silver coins, at least? An E
nglish groat, for instance. Something larger than these Pennslander shillings.”

  “You would choke on a groat, you fat bastard.”

  “You could cut the groats into bits, and I could swallow the bits. If I’m going to swallow money, I would really like it to be a lot of money.”

  “Sharp-edged bits would perforate that gut of yours, already lacerated by years of cheap rum. I have no time today to stop and watch you bleed to death from your backside, Josep Portell i Boria.”

  “You say the sweetest things, Capità.”

  “Shut up and eat my money. We arrive.”

  Josep, having had his fill of flirtatious objection, threw the coins into his mouth and swallowed them in a mass. Montse had swallowed hers first; she imagined she could feel them, a solid lump of specie in her belly. Would an unborn child feel like that, growing with the berserker aim of expanding its mother’s hips and dragging at her like a too-large anchor on a nine months’ voyage until finally she could drop it overboard?

  No, that was nonsense. And anyway, Montse was not the kind of woman who was ever likely to have a child.

  The closest child to her own was Margarida—Margaret—Hannah’s daughter. Whom the soulless, conniving, coin-grasping, murderous Chevalier of New Orleans had taken from her care.

  Whom she was now coming to rescue.

  “You know you shit your pants when you die,” Josep said to Miquel.

  Miquel shrugged. “At that point, I will no longer care.”

  Josep slapped his cousin on the shoulder. “But you should! We’ll be legends, you and I! We’ll be those two Catalan pirates who shat silver when bayoneted by the gendarmes.”

  “The gendarmes will bayonet no one.” The wagon stopped, at a narrow rear gate piercing the outer wall of the Palais du Chevalier, and Montse hopped down. “Also, we’re grocers. Think like a grocer.”

  “Like a grocer, trying to rescue a kidnap victim?” Miquel grinned, an easy, confident smile that hid no secrets. Someday soon, the boy would find out how attractive he could be to women, and then he would be dangerous. Would he stay with La Verge? Or would be give up sailing, robbery, and trade to do something safer in town?

  Josep snorted. “You make us sound noble with all your rescuing talk, Miqui. We’re pirates. We’re here to spring our fellow pirate from prison.”

  “Our fellow grocer,” Montse said. She dropped the back gate of the wagon and grabbed a crate. Peppers and garlic, by the smell of it. Say what you would of the chevalier, his table wasn’t bland.

  The driver of the wagon, having hitched his horses to a post, knocked at the door in the wall. Montse shuffled to his side, trying to walk with the prideless shuffle of a city dweller and an employee. She switched to French, but kept her voice low to deliver a final warning.

  “Just get us inside,” she said. “Your wife will live, and you’ll have enough money to open a second grocery.”

  The grocer muttered through clenched teeth. “I’ll have enough money to flee Louisiana. Which I will have to do, because I’ll be blamed for whatever mischief you intend to accomplish inside the Palais.”

  “Your choice.” Montse chuckled. She heard the grocery-laden footfalls of Josep and Miquel as the two men fell in behind her. “Only don’t forget that you’re also choosing for your family.”

  “Merde.”

  Montse and her crew had broken into the grocer’s house before dawn. Several of her men were sitting with his wife and children while she, Josep, and Miquel accompanied him on this delivery. She hated threatening the grocer and his family, but Montse’s own family—her daughter, in her heart—was in danger, and she saw no other way.

  “Oui,” Montse agreed. “Merde indeed. Merde for me as well, in this life. Merde for all of us.”

  The gate opened, revealing a thin man with large hands, knees, and feet, wearing a simple blue livery, with a short gray perruque covering his head. “Nouveaux employés?”

  The wagon driver spat and answered, also in French. “The other lazy bastards quit.”

  The chevalier’s man nodded. “We lost two footmen today. Drunkards.”

  “I wish I could hire drunkards, but I’m not so lucky. I’m stuck with these Dagoes I found practically begging on the Place d’Armes. Look at them, they barely fit their uniforms.”

  It was true. Josep only accommodated his belly in the white smock the grocer’s employees wore by leaving the bottom three buttons undone, and Montse’s height meant she had two inches of wrist showing at the end of her sleeves.

  Montse had told the wagon driver they were Spaniards. Fortunately, he seemed not to have noticed any better.

  “Let’s unload this quickly,” the chevalier’s man said. “The butcher arrives in fifteen minutes.”

  Crossing the yard, Montse heard shouting to her left. She looked casually, and saw gendarmes drilling on the broad lawn that was part of the chevalier’s garden. They had the sloppiness of recent recruits.

  And there were hundreds of them.

  “Un…deux…trois…” their drillmaster shouted as they advanced across the short-cropped grass, wooden training rifles over their shoulders.

  Montse and her crewmen walked into the open door of the Palais. This was an extrance for tradesmen, and it led into a hall adjoining kitchens, pantries, and other working rooms. The swarm of servants barely gave Montse and Josep a second glance. This was the first part of Montse’s gamble, and it paid off; in such a large house, the servants were used to vendors coming and going, and paid the Catalans no mind.

  The three of them deposited their crates onto a table nodded at by a thin woman in chef’s whites with scarred hands. When she turned her back, Miquel turned and duly trooped outside, while Josep and Montserrat scurried around the corner, found a narrow staircase, and climbed to an upper story.

  In a nook bulging from the wall, two padded chairs sat illuminated by an arc of tall windows. A room only for what—sitting? On a small table between the two chairs, Montse spied a book and almost laughed out loud. What kind of insane wealth must a man have to build a room into his house—even if the house was a palace, and even if the room was small—whose sole purpose was to read in?

  She and Josep both shrugged out of their grocer’s clothing, shoving the smocks and baggy canvas pants underneath one of the two reading chairs. Then they squeezed into the corners of the nook, sheltered from the view of anyone passing in the hall behind them, and watched the yard.

  Here came the second gamble. The chevalier’s people mustn’t suspect any of the grocer’s staff had stayed behind.

  Miquel sauntered into the yard and approached the chevalier’s man watching the gate. He walked past the man in blue, pulling two hand-rolled cigarillos from his pocket as he did so. The chevalier’s man turned, reaching out to take a cigarillo and as he did so turning his back to the gate.

  “Look at that little fotut.” Josep’s tone was appreciative. “Even the men can’t resist him.”

  “That sounds like envy. Would you like to be able to seduce men, Josep?”

  “Only you, my light.”

  “Shhh.”

  Miquel grinned, shrugged, and talked as he and the chevalier’s man lit their cigarillos and took a few puffs.

  Miquel then nodded at the man in blue and passed through the gate—

  just in time to pass two more of the crew of La Verge Caníbal, coming in with sacks of wheat over their shoulders.

  The two additional crewmembers, who also wore whites stolen from the grocer, were Beatriu and Guifré. Guifré was a vicious fighter with a knife and had a reputation for cheating at dice, but he was fearless and, in approximate size, shape, and coloring, he could pass for Josep. Beatriu was not a consistent member of La Verge’s crew, but served as a guide and pilot when the ship sailed along the Igbo coast that she knew so well, or needed to contact a fence in Jackson or Montgomery. She was part Igbo herself, and her rich complexion was darker than Montse’s, her hair more brown than red. Would the chevalier’s man at the
gate notice that Beatriu and Guifré had replaced Josep and Montse?

  Anyone else might realize they were different, and simply assume there were six workers unloading groceries. The man at the gate had counted four entering, and must also count four leaving.

  Beatriu and Guifré had arrived at the Palais hiding underneath piles of food. Now they walked right under the nose of the chevalier’s man, and he didn’t bat an eye.

  “The chevalier spends too much money on his house,” Josep muttered. “He should spend more on his servants, and employ people who can actually see.”

  “Better for us that he doesn’t. But now we need a guide.”

  “The chevalier will know what he has done with the girl.” Josep smiled and rested his hand on the dagger at his belt. “Let’s ask him.”

  “But the chevalier won’t be taking her food or emptying her chamber pots,” Montse said. “What I really want is a maid.”

  “You’re very saucy, do you know that? Talking about how much you want maids, right here in front of me.”

  “Josep, I can hit you with a throwing knife from here.”

  “Very well. You want a serving girl, I’ll get one. Wait here.”

  Montse leaned against the window to watch. With the last of the cabbages and collard greens unloaded, Miquel stubbed out his cigarillo with his heel on the ground and tried to shake the hand of the chevalier’s man. The chevalier’s servant looked perplexed or perhaps offended, but bowed slightly, hands behind his back.

  Miqui climbed into the wagon with Beatriu, Guifré, and the driver, and the four of them turned back toward the Vieux Carré from whence they’d come.

  A truly ruthless pirate—like Anne Bonny, or Grace O’Malley before her—would have ordered Miquel to slit the grocer’s throat. In more desperate straits, Montse liked to imagine she’d do the same. Instead, she’d instructed the boy to take him to a cheap hostel in the Vieux Carré and hold him there until Montse rejoined them.

  The chevalier’s man waved to another wagon rolling up to the gate, this one loaded with bloody paper parcels and a stack of hams.

  “The maid you wanted.” Josep reentered the reading room. With one arm casually around her throat and the other hand holding a knife pressed to her side, he held a young woman in a dress of white and the chevalier’s blue, with just a hint of gold in a small bit of embroidery on her breast. “You see how I’m your slave.”