Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  “We could eat him,” the Giant Necromancer added helpfully.

  “Wait,” the Giant Earl said. “I’ve got something here.”

  The giant grubbed about in his pocket and produced a stone. He held it up so they could all see it; in the firelight, the rock glinted white. It was a smooth piece of quartz, and it was in the shape of a perfect acorn.

  “Ah, lightning,” the Giant Emperor said.

  “That’ll make a good ear,” the Giant Stranger added.

  The Giant Necromancer crossed his arms and snorted, but eventually gave a curt nod.

  “Right then,” the Giant Earl said. “Here we go.”

  He slammed the stone against the side of Nathaniel’s head.

  The fist hurt.

  The stone, penetrating into Nathaniel’s new iron skull, hurt worse. He felt his brain splitting in two.

  And suddenly, the bones began to speak.

  He tried to turn his head to see the sources of the voices, but he still couldn’t move. Still, he saw them with his ear—no, he heard them and knew what they were.

  ~I have only taken a small misstep off the road. Take me back, O spirit guide!~ This was the refrain of a giant wrapped in furs and wearing a bull’s head for a mask. Nathaniel couldn’t see the giant, or his bones, but he heard the giant’s presence as well as his voice. He heard the lost, ancient sorcerer’s mask as well as he heard his terror. ~Take me back!~

  ~I have devoured my own child.~ A giant sat heavy on a rough-hewn stone chair. He slumped forward, his crown of wildflowers not falling from his head only because the stems were plaited into his long, gray hair. ~I can certainly eat you.~

  ~We didn’t ask to be a sacrifice!~ Two youths, covered in their own blood, holding hands.

  Spirits. Spirits of the dead, or of forces perhaps that had never lived. But not voices in Nathaniel’s own head.

  Never just voices.

  He wanted to weep, but couldn’t.

  “Does he hear?” This came from the Giant Earl, who held Nathaniel up and looked into his eyes. ~I think he hears.~

  “Does he move?” the Giant Necromancer asked.

  “Shake him,” the Giant Stranger suggested.

  The Earl shook Nathaniel. His limbs bounced and jiggled, but only as a puppet’s would, shaken by its operator. His muscles regained no life.

  “Another failure? How sad!” But the Giant Emperor didn’t sound sad at all. He sounded gleeful.

  “Not a failure at all. A great success!” The Giant Earl dropped Nathaniel to the ground. Nathaniel struck the side of the cauldron, narrowly avoided falling into the fire, and lay still. “The children of Adam are so fragile.”

  “I miss the Misaabe,” the Giant Necromancer rumbled. All four giants shuffled away from the cauldron and into the shadows.

  “Ah, we were mighty then,” the Giant Stranger agreed.

  “We’ll be mighty again,” the Giant Emperor said.

  “We’re always mighty,” the Giant Earl said, and then the giants squeezed through one of the windows into the star-filled space beyond and were gone.

  Time passed.

  * * *

  A cold, wet snout nuzzled Nathaniel awake.

  “I’m not asleep,” he said.

  Out loud.

  Had he been dreaming?

  He lay on his back and gazed at the stars overhead. The crane, the loon, the moose, the other stars directly above the flat earth spun in a slow circle. If the cauldron was still nearby, its fire had gone out; Nathaniel lay in near-darkness again.

  He tried to raise his arm and couldn’t.

  The cold nose again, in his ear.

  “I’m awake,” he said. “My eyes are open, and I can hear you. Who is that?”

  The answer came again in the form of a wet animal nose, this time behind Nathaniel’s ear. He flinched, but the beast didn’t stop. It was big, whatever it was, and it worked methodically, slowly pushing its muzzle beneath Nathaniel’s neck and then under his shoulders and then supporting his back.

  Unseen in the darkness, the large beast pushed Nathaniel into a sitting position.

  “Thank you,” Nathaniel said.

  ~You’re welcome.~

  The beast trundled away from Nathaniel, momentarily blocking out the stars overhead. Nathaniel heard scratching sounds in the darkness.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  ~Can you hear what I am?~ the beast called back.

  Nathaniel listened. “You’re a bear. I can hear the berries and salmon in your belly, and the long claws with which you caught the fish, and the sharp teeth with which you ate it.”

  ~Well done, healer.~

  “I can also hear the tender heart within your mighty chest, bear.”

  The bear laughed in the darkness. ~Call me Makwa. And don’t be fooled by the tender heart. It’s the tender heart of the healer that moves him to kill, when killing becomes necessary.~

  Nathaniel considered. “I don’t see how that can be so.”

  Scritch. A Lucifer match flared into life, and Nathaniel saw that the match was held by a large, brown bear.

  “You can use a match,” Nathaniel said. “But you don’t have fingers.”

  Makwa leaned over the bone platform holding the cauldron and pushed together unburned leaf fragments and bone to make a pile of fresh fuel, then applied the match to it until the leaves caught, and a small fire again licked the underside of the cauldron. ~Yes I can.~

  “And light a fire. As if you were a man.”

  ~Here I can. On the flat earth, no.~

  “Who are you?”

  The bear sat back on its haunches and looked at Nathaniel solemnly.

  “You are me,” Nathaniel said.

  Makwa rose onto all fours and padded to within Nathaniel’s reach. ~Rise, healer.~

  “I cannot move,” Nathaniel said.

  ~You do not try.~

  Nathaniel willed his arm to reach out and grab the bear by its neck, knowing he was paralyzed—

  and his arm moved.

  ~Rise, healer,~ Makwa said again.

  Nathaniel reached with his other arm and wrapped both of them around the bear’s head. With an effort, he ground sideways and levered himself first onto one hip and then up onto both knees.

  ~Rise, healer.~ The bear stood.

  Nathaniel stood with him. The weariness, the weakness of his muscles fell away and he stood with energy, almost leaping from the ground. He looked about and saw that the darkness surrounding him had gone. From the flat plain on which he stood all the way up to the peak of heaven’s dome, the stars glittered without veil. He looked down at himself and saw his own naked body, but with more muscles than he was accustomed to seeing, and bearing no wounds.

  “I’m healed.”

  ~You’re a new person.~

  “We are a new person,” Nathaniel said. He grabbed Makwa by the ears and scratched the bear’s head. Patiently, the bear licked Nathaniel’s face.

  “A new person needs a new name.” This voice, the voice of Ma’iingan’s manidoo, came with a blaze of light. Nathaniel heard the light, and he also saw it, settling like blue-white fire on the dark fur and glittering eyes of the bear.

  Or rather, of his bear-self.

  Nathaniel faced the manidoo. “You left me here.”

  The manidoo nodded, its expression no less solemn for the fact of its wolf ears. “That was the only way it could be done.”

  Nathaniel cocked his head to one side. “You named Ma’iingan. Did you bring me here to name me, as well?”

  “That’s one reason for your coming to the Pit of Heaven. Mostly, you came here to be healed. But the bear is correct—in the healing, you’ve become a new person. A new person needs a new name. This is why kings and queens take throne names when they are crowned.”

  “Did Ma’iingan…” Nathaniel hesitated, then gestured at the plain of bones surrounding him. “Did Ma’iingan come to this place?”

  The manidoo shook its head. “Ma’iingan’s path is
different from yours. He has never come here, and as far as my vision carries, he won’t do so in the future. The trails of his people through the sky go elsewhere. But he needs you, as you needed him, so your paths crossed.”

  “And the god of the sky sent you to cross them.”

  The manidoo nodded.

  But which god was that?

  Nathaniel straightened his back, raised his chin, and took a deep breath. “You’ve brought me here to give me a name, manidoo. Give it to me now.”

  “You have it already. Can’t you guess what it is?”

  Nathaniel took his time to answer. “Makwa,” he said eventually. “Our name is Makwa.”

  “Come.” The manidoo turned and walked away.

  Following, Nathaniel found himself suddenly on a shining path that passed between the stars.

  “You have much to learn,” the manidoo said, without looking back.

  ~We will learn it.~ Makwa growled from behind Nathaniel.

  Abruptly, Nathaniel stood at the stop of the seven stairs. Looking down, he saw the interior of the barn, through a haze of tobacco smoke. He saw himself there, lying on the floor. Ma’iingan stood at the wall, peering through a crack between the boards. Landon stood with him.

  Outside the barn, obscured by the smoke, men on foot approached.

  Over Nathaniel’s prone body crouched a black bear. The animal wasn’t attacking Nathaniel, but protecting him.

  Nathaniel spun to look behind himself, and Makwa wasn’t there.

  “On the flat earth,” the manidoo said, “your nidji will light no fires. But he’ll watch your body when you leave it.”

  “When I leave my body?”

  “This is your first lesson.”

  “Will you teach me further lessons in the future?”

  The manidoo shook its head. “I’ve done my work.”

  “Then how will I learn?”

  The manidoo ignored the question. “You and your friends are surrounded by enemies. Are you ready to face them?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Nathaniel asked.

  “No.”

  Nathaniel descended the seven steps to reenter his body.

  “If he would haggle over this, he would haggle over anything.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Sarah sat up in bed, her heart racing.

  Sweat beaded on her forehead told her she’d had a dream. The sweat also meant that the dried sweet grasses that were piled on the stone slab to make her mattress stuck to her body. She peeled them off, rolling back her blanket and enjoying the early morning chill that set her thoughts racing and goose-pimpled her skin all over.

  She slept in a room alone, in Alzbieta Torias’s city home. The building was a low warren of a mound with half a dozen rooms burrowed into it, and then an above-ground structure of adobe brick, topped by a flat roof with crenellated edges that struck Sarah as Ferdinandian or Texian. Most of the neighboring houses had peaked and thatched roofs, and the buildings were generally of wood; when Sarah had asked about the roof, Alzbieta had said, “on certain nights, as Handmaid of Lady Wisdom, I am obligated to observe the heavens.”

  Sarah hadn’t pressed for more information.

  She had dreamed of two children. Her siblings?

  But the dream hadn’t been happy. She closed her eyes against the faint light of moon and stars filtering down through the slanted, barred light-shafts and tried to pierce the fog of waking.

  She’d dreamed she was a witch. A witch with red hair, a detail that struck her as odd. And in cleaning her home, in a room of bones, she had come across a boy with no bones in his body at all, a boy who lay like a sack of skin with his eyeballs on the floor. She’d started a fire and she had begun to boil the boy’s flesh.

  No, his bones.

  But why?

  And when she’d stooped to look closer at him, she’d seen that he had her face, except that his two eyes matched in color, and in place of one ear he had a cluster of oak leaves sprouting out of the side of his head.

  That could only be Nathaniel, her brother.

  Was it the real Nathaniel, in some way? Was it only her own mind’s image of the brother she’d never known?

  She’d left her hut—in her dream, she realized with a start, she’d been a crone, living alone in a house made of baked goods in the forest—and in the yard had found a girl. A Hansel and a Gretel of sorts, then, like the story the Germans told, and the boy had gone into her cauldron as Hansel went into the oven of the witch in the story.

  Why was Sarah the wicked witch?

  The girl worked in the forest outside Sarah’s cake-hut. Before Sarah saw her, she’d heard the thud-thud-thud of her labor, and when Sarah had come out into the yard, she’d found the child, knocking down trees.

  With her bare hands.

  This child, too, had had Sarah’s face, but for hair she’d had a thicket of oak saplings sprouting from her head.

  In her dream, Sarah wondered, sitting awake on her borrowed slab bed and scratching her scalp, what had her own eye looked like? An acorn? A scab of oak bark? A tree limb?

  But that was a silly question. She was the dreamer, and not having looked into a puddle or a mirror in the dream, her eye didn’t look like anything. Her eye couldn’t look like anything unless other dreamers had shared her dream, which was plainly nonsense.

  The girl with the hair forest had stopped her work and looked at Sarah with pleading eyes. “Help me.” Then she swung one fist and knocked down a tree whose trunk was five times larger around than her own body. The tree cracked in half at the blow and toppled to the ground, but it fell atop previously chopped trees.

  The girl had created a wide clearing, but every tree that fell had fallen into a circular wall that served to imprison the girl.

  “Can you break the wall?” Sarah had asked.

  And then she had awoken.

  Left with the feeling that somehow, her dream had been real.

  She touched her witchy eye. It smarted as if from strain, and it felt hot to the touch.

  She heard a rapping at the entrance to the room. It wasn’t a knock on the door, since it turned out that the Firstborn didn’t so much like interior doors inside a house. Her privacy in this guest bedroom was only protected by strings of beads, mostly of black glass, though some were glazed and fired clay, hanging from the ceiling down to the height of her knees.

  The rapping was made on the wall outside.

  “I’m awake,” she said. “But I woke up hard, so enter at your own risk.”

  “It’s me.” The voice was Calvin’s. “Should I come back later?”

  Sarah sighed. Calvin would sleep on hot coals without complaint rather than disturb Sarah, so there must be something he really thought needed her attention. “Confound it, Cal, I said come in.”

  Calvin entered, stooping slightly and brushing aside the beads with one hand. He was dressed and held a Kentucky rifle. It wasn’t his grandpa’s—he’d left that weapon behind in New Orleans, when they’d fled in the form of birds—but a very similar gun he’d found among the plundered equipment of the Imperial House Light Dragoons.

  “You also allowed as it might be dangerous to enter,” he said.

  “I ne’er knew you for a coward, Calvin Calhoun.” She looked him up and down. “You look like you’s a-goin’ somewhere.”

  Cal blushed. “I was. Only they’s somethin’ you oughtta see.”

  “Fixin’ to leave, and you ain’t planned on tellin’ me first?”

  “I’d a told you, Jerusalem. Lord hates a man as don’t say his proper goodbyes. Only I’s lettin’ you sleep. You’re so tired and thin these days, I figure you could use all the shut-eye you can git.”

  Sarah raised a hand in surrender. “Alright, Cal, I’ll show mercy. You can tell me later why you’s escapin’. First I reckon you better tell me why you’re wakin’ me up.”

  “They’s Imperials come to town.”

  “They was Imperials afore we got here, Cal. Ohio is under the Pacif
ication, remember? All the Imperial troops my uncle can spare, plus the Ohio Company, and bounties posted, and worse.”

  “These Imperials are askin’ to meet you. That regent feller said he’s happy to arrange it. He said it in a way as made me think mebbe he already had arranged it.”

  Sarah sucked on her lower lip. “Dammit,” she finally said.

  * * *

  Luman tried not to envy the Ophidians.

  It wasn’t their architecture, not as such. Luman had spent years in Memphis, where the pyramids as well as the mausolea were of stone, so even the tallest and most angular of Cahokia’s conical dirt-piles left him cold. He didn’t envy their land, either, though the Cahokian Bottom was supposed to be the most fertile land between Ferdinandia and New Muscovy, the place where the Mississippi and the Ohio had both dumped rich alluvial soil for millennia. Luman was happy there were farmers in the world, growing grain and raising hogs and cattle so Luman could eat, but he didn’t care to think much about the details of their work.

  It was the Cahokians’ magic.

  Something about old Adam’s first wife, apparently, had left her children gifted. Not all of them, but a shockingly large number. And when they had the gift, they had it in spades.

  He felt the gift for magic buzzing in the air around him as he rode through the gates on a horse stolen by the Emperor’s raiders from some Cahokian rancher. He saw it in the palisade of trees surrounding the city—the palisade might be inert, but it was definitely the product of gramarye. He suspected it even in the tall mounds—they were primitive and garish, with grass on their steep slopes, but how else had they been built, if not by wizardry?

  He bit back sour resentment of his own mediocrity.

  “You’re disappointed, my Balaam.”

  Notwithstanding Schmidt rode at Luman’s side on another appropriated horse. The animals had been rebranded with a mark manufactured by a Company smith for the purpose, a mark that covered the original brand and hid the fact that they were stolen. The Cahokian crowds through which the two of them rode, preceded by an Ophidian herald and followed by ten Company men with rifles and pistols, were ragged and thin, slave and free. At a square where eight streets intersected—at perfect angles to each other, and to most of the city’s mounds—and where food should have been for sale, Luman saw mostly piles of dirty snow.