Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  “I was baptized Isaiah.”

  “But you are called Wobomagonda, no doubt.”

  “In the right times and places, I am called the Franklin.”

  Temple harrumphed. The actor Isaiah took no notice.

  “Head of Franklin’s Players,” Thomas said. “Clever.”

  Isaiah shrugged. “Your grandfather must have told Hannah.”

  “Told her what?” Now Thomas did stand, conscious of the fact that responding to provocation robbed him of a small margin of his dignity.

  “Your grandfather bore the name Onas. With that name, he was in an alliance that he knew must stand, from time to time, against the rising tide of the Mississippi and Ohio. He gave that name to Hannah, perhaps, but he didn’t give it to you.”

  “My patience is very close to gone,” Thomas warned. “What do you want?”

  “That isn’t the question,” the Franklin said. “The question is: what do you know? And another: given what you know, what are you willing to do?”

  “Enough. Temple—ask Gottlieb to call the guard, if you will.”

  “You could simply impale him,” Temple suggested, but he went to the door and poked his head out to talk to Gottlieb.

  “Peter Plowshare is dead,” Isaiah said. “Simon Sword is not coming, but is already come. You are Brother Onas, whether you know it or not. Where do you stand?”

  “I stand with Pennsland!” Thomas thumped his fist on the desk, knocking a bottle of ink over onto the floor. “I stand with my family! With my office! With St. Martin, and against the blasphemers of the Ohio! With the Electors! I stand with the Empire and its peoples! I stand alone if I must, but by the bones of William Penn himself, I will stand!”

  The Franklin shook his head sadly. “It is not enough.”

  “Go to hell!” Thomas bellowed. “Guards!”

  “One more time, I will come,” Isaiah said softly. And then he slipped through the door, easily ducking Gottlieb’s awkward attempt to grab him, and was gone.

  Thomas yanked his sword from its scabbard, raised it over his head, and swung it down, biting into the wood of his desk.

  “You’ll harm the blade,” Temple murmured. The spymaster set aside the news-paper, stood, and approached Thomas with his hands forward, palms up. It was a placatory stance, and it annoyed Thomas more.

  “You’d rather I cut you with it?”

  “I’d rather you took a deep breath and put the sword back.” Temple smiled. “My grandfather was surrounded with this palatine nonsense his entire life. He swam in it, loved it, encouraged it…maybe even created some of it. It means nothing.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “No one can ever be sure there aren’t conspiracies. That’s what makes imagining them so attractive. But I can tell you that I’m a brother of the ancient free and accepted order—”

  “As am I.” Thomas growled, but he lowered his sword.

  “—and neither of us knows anything about this Brother Onas nonsense. It’s invented, by a man who by his own account is a writer of operas.”

  Thomas growled.

  “Really, the only less trustworthy voice you could choose to listen to would be a novelist.”

  Thomas slammed his sword back into its sheath. “Thank God I was raised without that particular vice.”

  Temple nodded soothingly. “Your next visitors are two junior faculty members from the Imperial College of Magic. They’ve done you a signal service, and they’re here to collect their reward.”

  “Professors!” Thomas snorted. “And what signal service was that, then? Did they expound an exciting new theory of Pneumatology? Defend the Imperial honor in some Theurgistic debate? Raise graduation rates, for God’s sake?”

  Temple’s face was grave. “They faked the assassination attempt at the Walnut Street Theater.”

  “What?”

  “At my bidding. Their illusions convinced the crowd that an embittered Firstborn nobleman took a shot at you. The shot was also theirs, and you were never in any danger from the attack.”

  “There was the fire, though.”

  “Unrelated accident.”

  Thomas rubbed his eyes with the meaty parts of his palms. “Very well, then. What did you promise them from me?”

  “Promotion. Tenure. Endowed chairs. Inclusion on the Imperial Honors List. Don’t worry about the details. Only congratulate and thank them, and they will fall over themselves with gestures of gratitude and appreciation.”

  Thomas inhaled deeply, exhaled, then sat. Temple retreated to the corner of the room, where he busied himself at Thomas’s liquor cabinet. The faint sound of clinking glass was vaguely soothing to the raging headache Thomas suddenly noticed he had.

  The door opened, and Gottlieb ushered in two people. They wore matched orange frock coats, but there the resemblance ended: one was a square man with an elongated face and tiny nose who must have been sixty years old if he was a day, and the other was an attractive woman several decades younger, with bright red hair. On the breasts of their coats they wore the Imperial seal—it was the uniform for formal occasions of the faculty of the Imperial College.

  “Welcome.” Thomas smiled broadly, stood, and extended a hand. “And thank you.”

  “Your Imperial Majesty,” they said with one voice. After a short bow, they shook Thomas’s hand.

  “Please, sit,” he said, gesturing at the two chairs in front of his desk. Conscious of the fact that he’d met the actor Isaiah three times before learned the man’s name, he added, “tell me your names.”

  Come to think of it, he still didn’t know the actor’s family name. Unless it was Franklin, but that didn’t seem right.

  The professors of magic sat.

  “Magister-subordinate Lancaster,” the woman said.

  “Magister-ordinary Hurlbut,” the man said.

  Temple Franklin shuffled slowly to the space behind and between the two magicians and handed each of them a large glass tumbler. Thomas smelled the warm fruity aroma of a fine peach brandy, with maybe a hint of almond. The wizards scarcely noticed Temple at all, they were so fixated on Thomas; you’d have thought the glasses of alcohol had simply materialized, unaided.

  Perhaps that was how they did it at the Imperial College.

  Magister-subordinate Lancaster sipped her drink and smiled; Magister-ordinary Hurlbut swallowed two-thirds of his and gasped.

  “Thank you so much for your service.” Thomas also sat, and now Temple handed him a tumbler, too. “I appreciate that your actions must seem…extraordinary, but given the circumstances—”

  “We understand completely!” Magister-subordinate Lancaster gulped the rest of her drink, eyes wide. “My own family, you may know, has long been aligned with Martinite doctrines and practices. You don’t need to tell me about the threat the Firstborn pose to the Empire! Corrupting law and custom, and directly violating God’s command that the children of Eve should have all dominion!”

  “Nor me.” Hurlbut grinned, a greasy smile that lacked two prominent teeth and made Thomas sick to his stomach. “Though mostly, I’m happy to serve Your Imperial Majesty against any foes, foreign or domestic, child of Eve or otherwise. Only I’d like a small share of that dominion, myself.”

  A fanatic and a climber. These were the wizards Temple had found to help him.

  “If that particular Firstborn hadn’t attacked you,” Lancaster said, “and we have no way of knowing but that maybe he intended that very thing and indeed on that very evening, then some other Ophidian would have.”

  Hurlbut chuckled. “As when the preacher leavens a sermon with a story that isn’t factually accurate, but tells an important spiritual truth. We’ve simply told a beautiful political truth…by means of fiction. An illusion that will point everyone in the right direction.”

  Thomas emptied the last of his tumbler for strength.

  Hurlbut drained his.

  Lancaster raised hers to her lips, found it empty, lowered it again to her lap, and smiled.


  “I am thrilled to see loyal believers advance within the ranks of the Imperial College,” Thomas said. “Forgive me, but never having attended myself, I forget some of the details. To what titles are we advancing you?”

  “Magister-superior.” Lancaster rubbed her temples.

  “With tenure and a pension to continue to the end of one life within a life in being,” Hurlbut added. “Meaning a child can inherit.”

  “I see the lawyers have got at the Imperial College as well.” Thomas laughed. “Theirs is the strongest magic.”

  “No!” Magister-superior-to-be Lancaster objected. “Your Imperial Majesty—” She stopped and pounded a fist against her own sternum. “Your Imperial Majesty…” She coughed.

  Hurlbut turned and stared at his colleague. “What is it, girl?” Without warning, foam bubbled from his lips. Still staring at the other wizard, he fell over sideways to the floor.

  “Your Imperial Majesty!” Lancaster stood, alarm on her face. “Poison!”

  Thomas stared in surprise at his own glass. Poison? But that would mean…

  Lancaster raised her arms, fingers twisted into some arcane gesture. “Contra—”

  Temple Franklin slapped a hand to her shoulder and stabbed her in the back of the neck. The knife was long and gleamed like silver, and he pushed it in so deep it cut off her speech entirely and the tip burst out the front of her throat in a shower of blood, just above her Adam’s apple.

  She sank forward, her weight pulling her off the blade.

  Thomas leaped to his feet. “Temple!”

  Temple Franklin turned his left hand to reveal a silver medallion marked with the Franklin Seal. “From my grandfather. To stop whatever spell she had been about to cast, and to force down her defenses.” He wiped off his blade with a white napkin from the drinks cabinet. “Explain myself, you’ll say. But you met them, Lord Thomas. They would have talked. They would have demanded more. Now they can’t, and their illusion is complete.”

  Thomas found to his surprise that he had no more objections. “I’ll need another drink.”

  “The children of Adam are so fragile.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The ground beneath Nathaniel shifted, and he opened his eyes.

  Above him he saw the starry sky. He recognized the stars, though he was no sailor. But somehow, the stars of the ordinary night sky lay tangled and stretched into patterns he had never seen before.

  A moose strode along in the path of the sun and moon. A loon drifted in the far north. A bather climbed into a sweat lodge. A crane soared, and a crouching hunter stalked a mountain lion.

  Clouds obscured his vision.

  “Rise, God-Has-Given. Time is short.”

  Nathaniel blinked. The clouds weren’t rainclouds, but billows of sweet tobacco-smoke. He lay on the flat floor of a barn, beside a central pillar. Pine boughs were woven together to form an evergreen booth around the base of the pillar, and within the booth smoldered a small fire—the tobacco burned on that fire. Overhead were no shining stars, but the rafters of the barn and drying lofts that two months earlier would have been laden with dried leaf.

  Ma’iingan knelt over Nathaniel and looked down into his face. The light of the small fire left the Indian’s eyes dark pits, but the lines of his face were drawn into a tight mask of concern.

  But the voice wasn’t his.

  Nathaniel blinked, and the floor beneath him shifted.

  The strangely drawn stars reappeared. The path of the sun and moon circled around him like a level belt, and the ground he lay on, flat as a sheet of glass, lay at an angle to it.

  Ma’iingan was gone. In his place crouched a wolf. The beast had long ears, a wide face, and an expression on its muzzle that on a man would have been a sly grin. It rested, watching Nathaniel with its tongue hanging out of its mouth.

  “Rise, God-Has-Given. Your enemy is at the door.”

  The voice came from a personage standing behind the wolf. Nathaniel levered himself onto his elbows to see better. The personage shone and it stood several feet off the ground. The light coming from its body sounded the same as the light coming from the stars.

  No, that wasn’t right. The two light sources shone with the same color.

  The personage wore only a breechclout. He had a wolf’s paws, for hands and feet both, and a wolf’s ears—long ears, like the ears of the wolf hunched over Nathaniel. And he had wings; the wings were in motion, and they seemed to Nathaniel to number more than two. Six wings, perhaps? So many?

  A beastkind angel?

  A devil?

  “Help him, Waawoono,” the personage said.

  The wolf howled, and somehow the howl sounded supportive to Nathaniel, and maybe even nurturing. “Ma’iingan?”

  Hadn’t the Anishinaabe said his name meant wolf?

  The wolf Waawoono howled again and pressed its muzzle against Nathaniel’s side, wedging itself underneath his shoulder. The animal’s nose was cold and wet, and tickled.

  Nathaniel was naked. When had that happened? And where were Landon and George and the earl?

  Someone had struck him, he remembered.

  He climbed to his feet, leaning on the wolf. “Thank you.”

  The wolf pushed at the back of Nathaniel’s bare calves with its forehead and nipped them gently with its teeth, pushing him toward a blazing fire a few yards away. Smoke rose from the fire in solid steps.

  “What’s that?” he asked the personage, who hovered beside the stairs.

  “Asemaa is a sacred plant,” the personage said. “It’s the gift you children of earth make to the earth and to other powers. Today it builds the road you will climb into the sky.”

  Nathaniel took a deep breath and looked up again into the familiar-unfamiliar sky. “Yes.”

  “Waawoono,” the personage said. “The healer needs horses to take him where he must go.”

  Nathaniel looked around and saw four horses. They stood as if at cardinal points around him, neighing softly with anticipation.

  Waawoono the wolf leaped at the horse that stood beneath the moose. Was that east? The wolf tore out the horse’s throat in a single motion, and the horse sank to the ground, emitting a single nicker that sounded joyous.

  Nathaniel heard the sudden rush of blood and blinked.

  He smelled blood, rich and sweet. The personage and the stars were gone and the barn was back; Ma’iingan eased a dying horse to the floor, whispering softly to it as it sank into a puddle of its own gore.

  Landon stood against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest. George lay trussed beside him. Both stared, mouths open.

  Ma’iingan crossed the barn toward where a second horse stood, whimpering nervously. In his hand, he held his stone knife, dripping blood onto the planks of the floor.

  Nathaniel blinked, and watched as the wolf dispatched the second horse, in the west.

  Then the horse of the south.

  Then finally the horse of the north, beneath the hovering loon. The loon who, it seemed to Nathaniel, smiled down in approval.

  But as each horse sank to the ground, each horse also stepped forward, moving to canter in a slow circle around the asemaa-fire and the heavenly stairs. As the horse of the east began its rotation, Nathaniel felt an inflow of strength. He straightened his back and brushed hair and blood from his face. The horse of the west brought more strength, and by the time the horse of the north joined them, Nathaniel had gone beyond vigorous and felt mighty, breath rushing in and out of his lungs like wind, blood coursing through his veins like a river, thoughts racing from his fingertips to the top of his head and back down to the ends of his toes like bolts of lightning.

  “Come.” The personage held out a hand of invitation.

  Nathaniel stepped as close to the bonfire as he could bear. It smelled of incense, antiquity, other worlds, the soul.

  He blinked, and found himself slumped over, balanced precariously on his own knees. His face dripped sweat downward into a tiny pile of burning tobacco leav
es, and the sweet smells of tobacco and pine sap strove for attention.

  He blinked, and saw the personage again.

  “Who are you?” Nathaniel asked.

  “I am Waawoono’s manidoo,” the personage said. “The great god of the sky has sent him and me to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “Before you can heal anyone else, God-Has-Given, you must first be healed yourself.”

  Nathaniel had been struck on the head, been cut, and had broken ribs, but at the manidoo’s words he touched none of those injuries. Instead, he put his hand on the one ear that protruded more than the other, on the ear through which he constantly heard voices, some of which were in so much distress that it reduced him to seizures.

  He found there something small and hard. Plucking it from the side of his head, he looked at the object, and saw it was a glittering, star-blue acorn.

  “An acorn!”

  “Yes,” the manidoo agreed.

  “How can I be healed?” Nathaniel asked.

  For answer, the manidoo looked up the stairs at the glittering sky.

  “I’m ready,” Nathaniel said.

  “Bebezhigooganzhii of the rising sun, carry this man!” the manidoo cried.

  One of the circling horses swerved without warning, and leaped into Nathaniel’s arms—

  where it became a drum.

  The drum was a simple instrument, hide stretched over a wooden cylinder that bowed out in the center. Nathaniel turned it in his hands and saw that the drum was incomplete, consisting only of the wood and a single piece of hide covering one end.

  “You must also ask the horse,” the manidoo said softly.

  Nathaniel raised the drum over its head and spoke to it. “Bebezhigooganzhii, I ask you to carry me!”

  “I will carry you,” said the drum.

  “Bebezhigooganzhii of the setting sun, carry this man!”

  A second horse leaped into Nathaniel’s arms and became a hide that covered the other end of the drum.

  Nathaniel turned the drum in his hands; at just the right angle, he saw a horse’s head made of starlight reflected in each of the skins. “Bebezhigooganzhii, I ask you to carry me!”