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“These images are all quite barocco, Your Majesty.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Sorcerer Hooke spurred his horse on ahead and Angleton followed. Daniel Berkeley kept up with them as a point of honor, which was easy on the Andalusian gray, but he kept one hand near his pistols.

Hooke sniffed his little bird’s nest of hair and then the breeze over and over again. Berkeley didn’t trust the Lazars—he had only Hooke’s words and the word of the Martinite priest that the Lazars served Thomas Penn as he did, and besides, they seemed like the personification of the evil fortune that had overtaken Daniel Berkeley and threatened to sweep him away.

Also, he was unimpressed by the hairball. He didn’t need magic to tell him where the renegade Will Lee was taking the girl, it was obvious. They were making a beeline for the Serpent Mound.

The pre-morning gloom was dissipating into sunshine when the three men reined their mounts in on top of a low rise and looked down on a grove of weeping willows. The trees grew right down to the water’s edge on a shelf of land that was more than half surrounded by the Mississippi River.

Among the trees were low, snarled bushes and Berkeley saw a snatch of something, sheltered under a willow, that might be dirty white fabric.

There! Hooke jumped forward at a trot.

Berkeley grabbed Angleton’s arm and stopped him from doing the same.

The priest stared at him. He must not be sleeping well. He he was sweating far too much given the cool temperature of the morning and he had one ear blackened as if by soot. For that matter, the inside of his mouth was black, as if he’d eaten charcoal. Had the Martinite rolled too near the campfire in the night?

“Don’t touch me,” Angleton snarled.

“Patience, Father.” Berkeley adopted a conciliatory tone. He owed the dead man nothing, but Angleton was a fellow servant of the emperor, and Berkeley didn’t want to have to account to Thomas Penn for any mishaps.

Something about the situation smelled wrong.

“Don’t you see? She’s down there!” Angleton pointed frantically.

Berkeley wanted to cast his Tarock. “Then she’ll still be there in a minute, Father, and unless Robert Hooke plans to devour her whole, I’m sure you’ll be able to get a piece.”

“I hadn’t taken you for a coward,” the priest said.

“And I am not one,” Berkeley agreed. “Nor am I a fool.”

Ezekiel Angleton nodded slowly. “Yaas.”

Berkeley sent his men to set up a cordon around the low-lying grove, and then he and the Martinite rode down, the other two Lazars and the Philadelphia Blues at their backs.

Hooke’s horse splashed into shallow water yards ahead of them, an ankle-high flood submerging the little grove, and something caught Berkeley’s eye, something at the level of the animal’s hooves. Berkeley raised a hand to stop his men and this time the company’s chaplain cooperated without complaint. Black Tom Fairfax and the third Lazar also stopped to watch.

Berkeley dismounted to look at the ground with a soft splash.

It’s not her! Hooke shrieked in rage.

A chain of withies, each forked and splinted and wrapped to the next with strips of green bark, lay low in the water and the wild grass. The water moved; the ground was low enough and the river high enough that the willows stood in running water, in the river itself, though in a shallow edge.

Berkeley paced alongside the withies, to see how long the chain was. They formed a loop all around the landward side of the willow grove.

He looked up and called to Hooke. “You’d better come back out. I don’t know what this grove is, but something has been done here by craft, and the place isn’t what it appears.”

The Lazar stood over a log that lay underneath one of the willows. Curiously, the log wore a white dress. Also, it appeared to have black hair pasted to the head end of it, and it was spattered in something dark and brown that might have been blood.

They have thrown us off the track, Hooke called back in his crackling leaf voice. But we shall find her again.

He scraped a clump of the hair off the big, clumsy doll and sniffed it. Then he bent to the dressed log and picked something else up. Berkeley couldn’t see what the object was, but it was small and brown and shiny, like a river-polished bit of stone.

“Come back!” Berkeley took two steps back himself.

Stop that! Robert Hooke suddenly shouted, and slapped at the air.

His horse neighed and reared beside him, splashing down hard with its hooves in the shallow current.

“Get back!” Berkeley shouted to his men.

He didn’t care what the Lazars did at this point, but he sloshed through the water, grabbed the reins of Ezekiel Angleton’s horse, and dragged it with him a few paces out of the flood, to where the ground was higher and dry. Angleton didn’t stop staring at Hooke. Berkeley mounted his own horse, then drew and cocked one pistol. He scanned the higher ground around them for signs of an ambush, but saw nothing.

The other Lazars stared at Hooke too, but didn’t cross the withy chain.

Unhand me! Hooke danced a strange sort of jig, swatting at nothing with both his hands and kicking the air with his feet.

Berkeley withdrew another twenty feet, and the Blues with him.

Hooke’s horse whinnied again, reared back, and this time it fell into the water with its entire body.

Berkeley cared nothing for the Lazar Robert Hooke, but he did feel bad about the horse.

The wind picked up.

No, it wasn’t the wind. But something…something else…was moving through the air, following the current of running water from the sluggish primary mass of the Mississippi, over the grove of willows and back into the river again.

Obey me, damn you! You cannot rebel against your lord and master! Hooke broke out of his dance and ran toward the other Lazars. He reached forward with his white hands—

Black Tom Fairfax and the third dead man stood impassive, watching—

and then Hooke ran into the withy.

He might as well have charged a stone wall. Without a sound, he collided into an invisible impediment, a force that threw him backward and into the water, stretched at full length.

The log, and everything on it, burst into flame. The handful of black hair Hooke held exploded into fire and smoke also, and he dropped it.

And then the Sorcerer Hooke’s body began to move through the grass.

He flailed and thrashed about him, but something unseen pulled him steadily away. Maybe it’s the running water, Berkeley told himself, knowing it wasn’t. Maybe it’s the strange current blowing through the air of the grove.

Berkeley drew his sword and held it defensively between his own body and the trees.

Smoke filled the grove. The log and the hair burned at an unnatural speed, not like wood at all, but like oil, evaporating into the flames.

Ezekiel Angleton gasped.

He slapped at his pockets, looking for something.

Hooke’s coat plucked out at points, as if there were hands dragging him.

No! he shrieked. Do as I tell you! You are my creatures, obey me!

The fires snuffed out, their fuel all consumed and nothing left behind but greasy circles of ash, drifting on the water.

Ani ozer!” Angleton babbled, turning his pockets inside out and coming up with nothing. “Ani matzil otakh! Qumi!

Whatever spell he was attempting, it had no effect. Berkeley snorted.

The unseen thing or things Hooke was talking to paid the sorcerer no heed. Berkeley, the Philadelphia Blues, Ezekiel Angleton, and the other Lazars stood and watched as the flailing dead man drifted through the grove—

and out into the waters of the Mississippi—

where he sank like a stone.

“Great God of Heaven,” Ezekiel murmured.

“He followed where the evidence conducted him,” Berkeley said.

They stood awhile without saying anything further, and then Berkeley sheathed his sword, put away his pistol, gathered up the Blues, and directed them northward again. He knew where the Witchy Eye was going.

He wanted to tell himself that whatever bad luck had been earned by the bishop’s death had been paid for in the destruction of the Lazar Hooke.

But he didn’t believe it.

* * *

After carefully setting her trap, spattering the mock-up of herself with as much of her own blood as Cathy Filmer was willing to shed, setting the bit of Grungle’s shell down in the center of the mess, and then tying the whole thing to the river’s current with gramarye, Sarah had taken a swim.

She had been exhausted to the point of trembling, her whole being emptied in the trap, so she hadn’t had the strength to do it alone. At her instruction, Cal had looped his lariat under her bare arms and had held her to his saddlehorn with it, riding his horse into the river until the animal was submerged to its shoulders.

Cal had turned upstream, paralleling Sir William and Cathy Filmer on the river’s bank, and ridden nearly a mile. Sarah had mostly just hung on the saddlehorn, trying to let the Mississippi hide and obliterate her aura in its mighty stream. From time to time, she’d dunked her own head under the water as well and held it as long as she could, feeling the strong legs of Calvin’s horse churn up water and mud beside her.

Finally she had staggered back onto the river’s bank, naked, exhausted, and chilled to the bone, wet and filthy as a sow.

The next morning she had held the other half of Grungle’s piece of shell and watched through the beastman’s eyes as he and the other soul-prisoners of the Sorcerer Hooke, empowered by the resistless flow of the Mississippi ley, had dragged him away screaming. She’d seen tortoiselike clawed fingers as if they were her own, grabbing fistfuls of Robert Hooke’s mold-eaten coat and plunging him into the cold, green depths of the Mississippi River.

Afterward, head throbbing and skin on fire, Sarah had lost contact with the trapped souls. She was disappointed her spell didn’t free the prisoners. She was even more disappointed it didn’t destroy the Lazar, but only swept him away, somewhere downriver.

But he was gone for the time being.

She said a short, mostly wordless, prayer over the other half of Grungle’s bit of shell and threw it into the river. She didn’t know whether the beastkind had either a psyche or a pneuma, but they had an aura. Grungle had done her good service, and he deserved whatever rest the river could give him.

Two days later, at evening, Sarah rode through a skeletal gazebo of cottonwood trees and swallowed hard against the feeling of her own smallness. Before her two mighty rivers oozed sluggishly together, brown waters mingling and crawling, bigger than any lake, big as an inland sea—the rivers pooled together and continued to flow.

“Behold, the Mississippi!” Sir William gestured grandly with one arm, sweeping at the westernmost of the two tributaries, flowing down from the north. Then he turned and pointed east, along the other inflowing river. “And her sister, Your Majesty, the Ohio!”

Cal whistled low.

West of the Mississippi, the Great Green Wood snarled in close to the shore, impenetrable and lightless. Beyond the wall of trees lay Missouri, where beastkind roamed and small farmers battled to carve fruitful fields and modest livings out of the wilderness. Sarah’s father had been called the Lion of Missouri. Could Sir William tell her, beyond the stories and the folk songs, what that name meant?

Across the Ohio from her, in the triangular elbow-crook of land where the rivers joined, rose a high stone bluff. Its gray cliffs loomed above her; it ought to look forbidding, but instead it called to her.

“What is that place, Sir William?”

“That, Your Majesty,” he told her, “is the beginning of your kingdom. That is the southernmost point of Cahokia, called the Serpent’s Mound or Wisdom’s Bluff…”

He hesitated.

“It’s where my father died, isn’t it?” she asked.

He nodded.

Sarah slipped her eye patch off her head and looked at it all again. The rivers were immense glimmering ribbons, green and iridescent with light and life. The vast gray cliffs still stared without expression, but the hill was now in her vision crowned with light, blue and white and astral, as if the mountain had reached up to the heavens and brought down stars.

Was her father up there, in all that blue and white?

She missed him, which was odd, since she had never known him, and she found that sensation mingled in with a feeling of missing the Elector, and of missing Thalanes, and a pang of guilt shook her. Not an hour passed that she hadn’t thought about the little monk who had trained her to do effective magic, and remembered the moment of his death at her own hands. The Elector had saved her life, had hidden her for fifteen years from a vengeful and murderous emperor, and taught her almost everything she knew.

What could the Lion of the Missouri give her that would compare?

She looked at her companions, and saw from their auras they were as tired as she felt. “Come on, let’s boil water for a cup of coffee. We’re all exhausted, but if we cross the river tonight we’ll gain at least that much protection from Ezekiel Angleton and his boys.”

Cal grinned. “I’ve always had an idea as it might be kind of fun to walk on water.”

“That’s hilarious, Calvin,” she answered, “’cause I always thought you were jest the feller as had enough faith to try it.”

* * *

They crossed the river swimming alongside their horses, with their belongings tied down on a raft Calvin lashed together. They spent the night at the foot of Wisdom’s Bluff, huddling around a small fire screened all about by tall red oaks.

By morning, they had all dried out and they climbed the hill.

The bluff was wedge-shaped and climbed to a high, flat, narrow plateau above the junction of the rivers. On two sides, the bluff rose from muddy water in sheer gray rock faces that Calvin judged could be climbed, but only slowly, in small numbers, and by unburdened climbers. Practically speaking, defenders of a position on top of the bluff would only have to worry about the third side, the side sloping inland, between the two rivers.

He thought it possible they might be overtaken while they were up on the bluff, looking for the Cahokian regalia, and Calvin judged it prudent to consider in advance how a battle might go. Lord hates a man as doesn’t look after his own interests, and didn’t the Savior himself tell his disciples to be wise as serpents?

The sloping approach up the bluff was by no means easy. There was a road, and though it looked old—old and alien, made of rounded stones perfectly flat and smooth, like river rocks sawn in half—it was solid, clear, and easy on the feet. To ascend the bluff, though, it zigged and zagged up the steep slope, among red oaks and gnawed, fanglike columns that might have been boulders or might have been ruins older than time itself, and through the cheerfully splashing rivulets of a small stream that trickled down from above. The climb looked easy on the feet, but hell on the legs, and Cal patted the neck of his big white horse in gratitude.

They left their camp before the sun peeked over the horizon, for once foregoing the shot of hot coffee that was becoming habitual for Calvin. In less than an hour they were cresting the hill and Cal saw the tail of the Serpent herself.

At first, the Serpent just looked like a low, grass-overgrown ridge, three feet high, in a long narrow clearing surrounded by leafless red oaks. The road paralleled the low ridge, though, and Cal soon realized the ridge and its clearing were long and narrow and stretched to the tip of the bluff, twisting like a snake.

The road ended in a paved square, a courtyard surrounded by the oak trees, in which were embedded long stones, above knee height, worn smooth like the pavers beneath them so that they resembled nothing so much as benches. Cal turned to look back over his shoulder—from the edge of the plaza he could still see down the length of the slope.

“I suggest we dismount,” Bill said, leading by example. “Heaven knows I have no art in sacred things, but I think it would be a sign of respect to Lady Wisdom if we were to enter her temple on foot. Kyres, at least, always did so. We might also remove our hats,” he grumbled, running fingers through the short white hair that grew close to the back of his skull. “That is, if we had any.”

They all followed him in dismounting.

“That ridge over there.” Cal pointed, though he felt pointing was impolite, or maybe irreverent, as if the ridge were not only a person, but a person who merited special respect. “It’s a serpent, ain’t it? When they call this place the Serpent Mound, they really mean it, don’t they?”

Bill nodded, gravely. “The Serpent is a quarter mile long. Its head and its…eye…lie up at the tip of the bluff.”

Sarah said nothing and avoided Calvin’s gaze.

“Where did you bury the king?” Cal asked. “In the Serpent?”

Bill shook his head. “I wanted to, but Thalanes objected.”

“Why?” Sarah asked.

Bill sighed. “As I recall, he said that would be both sacrilege, burying a dead body in a holy place, and also impiety, burying a dead body where there was already a burial. He could be pedantic at times, and I say that with affection for the little fellow. I deferred to the professional in the matter, but I did persuade him that we could bury Kyres elsewhere on the bluff. Would you like to see your father’s grave, Your Majesty? It overlooks the Mississippi.”

“Take me to the eye,” Sarah told him. “We can walk.”

Bill led them through the oaks to the edge of the clearing, and then they followed the line of the Serpent itself, to the side. Halfway along its length, the forest ended and they walked forward along the height of the bluff, only sixty or seventy feet wide. To either side of the grassy shelf, the ground fell away sheerly into the great waters below.

“They’s some cover to hide behind back in the trees,” Cal observed to Bill, feeling an uncomfortable prickling between his shoulder blades, “but iffen we git surprised out here, we’re gonna have to lie down behind the Serpent itself or git shot to pieces.”

Bill nodded. “Good eye, Calvin.”

The wiggling body of the Serpent Mound ended in the point of a long triangle, the other two points of which curved forward and slightly in. Within those points of the triangle was another mound, three feet high and ring-shaped, with a depression in its center. Beyond the ring lay a third low mound, a semicircle that did not quite touch either of the other two shapes, but enclosed the great ring between it and the triangle. Beyond the semicircle, the ground disappeared, and Cal saw muddy water and forest, hundreds of feet below. He felt an electric tingle, the kind of sensation he only felt occasionally, in a tent where tongues were being spoken, or during the hymns at a riverside baptism.

Bill called them to a halt at the edge of this exotic geometry.

“I am uncomfortably out of my depth, Your Majesty,” the Cavalier admitted, “but Thalanes and your father told me this was a place of visions, hallowed secrets, and mighty miracles, very sacred to the…your father’s people. The ring is generally thought to represent the eye of the Serpent, and thus you have the visionary connection.”

“It’s very abstract, isn’t it?” Cathy observed. “It could just as easily be a serpent swallowing something.”

“Or a serpent disgorging something from its head.” Sarah stared, lost in some secret reverie.

Bill looked perplexed. “These images are all quite barocco, Your Majesty, and I don’t pretend to be able to choose among them. Nevertheless, that ring is known as the Serpent’s eye, and I believe it must be the eye of the moon beneath which the murderer Prideux buried your father’s…buried your regalia.”

Sarah nodded.

“With your permission,” Bill continued, “Mr. Calhoun and I will enter the ring and dig, as it were, for buried treasure.”

Sarah nodded her agreement again.

What must she be thinking?

“I don’t know how to measure the piety of digging into Lady Wisdom’s head with a pair of long-handled shovels,” Bill said. “Given the possibility that lightning may strike us down for temerity, perhaps you ladies should remove yourselves further down the mound and wait for us. You may easily find the spring in the trees; its waters are sweet, and you may rest at the plaza.”

“You might should oughtta keep an eye on the road,” Cal offered. “Lessen they fly, anybody as is gonna catch us up’ll have to git themselves up that hill.”

Sarah nodded. Her eyes were unfocused.

“A wise suggestion, Calvin.” Cathy took Sarah gently by the hand and led her, horses both following on short lead ropes, back the way they had come.

“Check the priming on your pistols, Mrs. Filmer,” Bill called. “And if you see anyone in an Imperial uniform, shoot first!”

Cathy waved acknowledgement and the ladies disappeared into the trees.

“Well, Calvin,” Bill said, grabbing the two shovels off the pack horse, “I know from personal observation that you can fight, hunt, trap, shoot, throw, trade, cook, and fly, and I suppose that makes you, as they say in Appalachee, a hell of a fellow. Are you also able to dig?”

* * *

From the very first push of his shovel Bill was grateful for the touch of his wizardly queen that had closed his wounds, and for the week’s ride during which his former aches and pains had had time to heal.

Without any further discussion of the fact, both he and Calvin treated the site as sacred. They cut up the turf with their shovels and laid it out in careful squares on the ring, and then began to dig into the dark soil beneath.

“You see any signs of diggin’ in the Serpent’s eye that night?” Cal asked the older man. “I mean, the night of the murder?”

Bill threw a shovelful of dirt up onto the mound. “Not on the ring itself, no, and I believe I would have, if he’d buried anything in the ring. But it was raining hard, and this depression we’re standing in now was quite muddy. Bayard could easily have dug a shallow hole to hide the regalia, expecting no one else would ever dare dig here to look, and planning to return.”

“Dirty thief,” Cal said.

“Amen.” Bill looked at the dirt beneath his feet and snorted. “It’s been a long time since I farmed, and I confess I was never much good at it to begin with, but does this earth look like highland dirt to you, Calvin?”

Cal shook his head. “No, it don’t. I’m a cattle man and no sodbuster, but it looks like pure river bottom to me, rich and dark. Queer.” He kept digging.

“This is a strange place all together,” Bill agreed. “Full of wonders.”

They dug awhile in silence.

“Do you love Cathy?” Cal asked.

Bill laughed. “Do I have a rival in you, Calvin?” They had dug the depression about a foot deeper, all around.

Cal blushed. “No, I…I’s jest makin’ conversation. She’s smart and elegant and pretty. Jerusalem, Bill, I reckon iffen you don’t love her, they might be somethin’ wrong with you. She sure has her eye on you.”

Bill leaned on his shovel. “I’m a married man, Calvin. Or at least, I was a married man, when I was thrown out of my home fifteen years ago by the earl. But I haven’t heard from my wife since. I don’t know whether she’s alive, or what happened to Charles—my boy, my oldest—and the other children.”

“That’s hard,” Cal said.

They both slung dirt for a minute.

Bill stopped digging and drew a deep breath. “Hell’s Bells, Calvin, yes!” he bellowed. “Yes, I do love Cathy Filmer! I love her, and I have no damn idea what I’m going to do about it.” He returned to digging, feeling like a fool.

“You’re lucky,” Cal said.

Bill laughed. He laughed hard, and once he started, he couldn’t stop, laughing until he dropped his shovel and had to throw himself down on the ring-shaped mound and let the guffaws roll out so he could regain control.

Calvin looked self-conscious and dug faster. “What you laughin’ about?”

“Calvin Calhoun, you’re an honest man, and no doubt God loves you for it. I only laugh because I haven’t been called ‘lucky’ in a long, long time.” The last of Bill’s laughter gusted out as a heavy sigh. “On the other hand, I must say that I believe you’re right.”

Cal stopped digging as Bill stood up. The trench was two feet deep.

“You reckon the women’re all right?” the younger man asked.

Bill struggled to regain his composure.

“Believe me,” Bill reassured him, “if anyone had tried to join us on this hill, we’d have heard the sound of Catherine Filmer shooting him by now.” The two men laughed together now, and then Bill looked uneasily at his shovel. “On the other hand,” he said, “I have a hard time imagining that Bayard can possibly have dug this deep. We should rejoin the ladies and discuss how to proceed.”

* * *

“I don’t know how to be queen,” Sarah said.

Cathy sat with the girl on a stone at the top of the slope, watching the road. The horses were hidden in the trees and Cathy had refilled all the waterskins and made sure the Lafitte pistols were loaded and primed before perching in this natural vantage point.

Sarah had been mostly silent, and Cathy didn’t begrudge her the time with her own thoughts. It seemed to her that they were all in a pivotal moment of their lives, but especially the Appalachee girl, all tangled up in thrones and destiny. When Sarah finally broke her silence, she sounded lonely and afraid.

“You seem to be doing very well to me.” Cathy answered.

Having located Bill, she had also burned her bridges pretty thoroughly in New Orleans, and she would have liked nothing better than to leave alone with him, go somewhere quiet and become Mrs. Catherine Lee. Become Mrs. Lee and find my child, she thought, and the stitched leather shoulder bag against her body burned.

But Bill still thought of himself as married to another woman, and his first loyalty was to this girl-queen. Cathy would stay with him and continue to be patient.

Patient and calm.

“Thalanes told me I had to become the one to make all the decisions,” Sarah said, looking down at her feet, “and right or wrong, I’m makin’ ’em. It’s one thing for me to call the shots and have Cal go along—he’s been doin’ that all his life, b’lievin’ I’s his auntie, and besides, he more or less promised the Elector he would—and I don’t rightly know why Sir William follows me, but he does. I guess because he loved my father. But if I’m really gonna go try to convince a bunch of Cahokians I’m their queen, I reckon I’m gonna need a sight more’n an old crown and the claim that I’m Kyres’s daughter. They’re gonna git one look at me and laugh me out of town for the scared little girl I am.”

Cathy let the cool silence of the oak trees settle on Sarah’s words a while before she said anything.

“Anybody,” she finally began, “any child of Adam who had suffered what you’ve gone through in the last three weeks would feel tired, frightened, and inadequate, Your Majesty. But if I may be so bold, I would like to offer a small piece of counsel.”

“Tell me.”

“When you ride into Cahokia wearing its crown,” Cathy continued, “you ride in as the returning and triumphant queen. No one will know you feel like a scared little girl—though I would have said young woman, rather than girl—unless you tell them. So don’t. Keep your feelings to yourself generally, but always, always keep hidden any feelings you have of weakness or inadequacy.”

Sarah shot her a curious look.

“May I offer you further unsolicited advice, Your Majesty?” Cathy asked.

Sarah nodded.

Do nothing unless and until you have to. Say nothing unless and until you must. You keep your hand free thus, you protect your dignity, and you preserve your image as queen. People around you will assume you’re deeply thinking, planning, and waiting for the proper moment. They’ll judge you calculating and wise. Nothing will lower people’s opinion of you so fast as unconsidered speech or rash action.”

“Do nothing?” Sarah asked.

Cathy saw that it was not the advice she had been expecting. “Ask questions. Make comments, if they commit you to nothing. Engage, entertain, discuss, flirt. But take no action until you must, and until you’re sure that you’re doing the right thing for the right reason with the right likely consequence. Think of it as taking your time. Cultivate mystery. Master your eyes, Your Majesty, and your hands. They are the parts that will give away your uncertainty. Cool eyes and steady hands will make inaction seem like mastery, rather than hesitation.”

Sarah gazed out over the oak forest below. “I’m told my father was a good king, a warrior brave and true, and loved by his people. I wish I had those gifts.”

“What makes you believe you don’t?” Cathy asked. “Do you really think Calvin Calhoun ever followed you just because he thought you were his aunt, or because he promised his grandfather? Do you believe Sir William would have given you his loyalty, whatever his feelings for your father, if he found you inconstant, a coward, or a fool? What do you think I’m doing here, Your Majesty?”

The implication of this last question was mildly dishonest, but it was true that Cathy found the girl impressive and compelling, and thought she would someday be as good a queen as anyone else could.

“You’re very kind,” Sarah answered, looking down at her feet, “too kind. You attribute to me the virtues of others.”

“That’s exactly what it is to be queen.” Cathy paused to let her words sink in. “You have many gifts from your father, Sarah Elytharias Penn. I’m sure you have more gifts from him than you know.”

Sarah thought quietly, fidgeting with the satchel that hung on her shoulder, and eventually smiled. “I’m glad to have you with me, Catherine Filmer.”

“The pleasure’s mine, Your Majesty.” Cathy smiled. “I grew tired of New Orleans in any case, and without Sir William, I believe I would have found it completely intolerable.”

With a slow swish of legs cutting through tall grass, the two men rejoined them.

“The regalia?” Sarah asked.

After a moment’s wait, Bill spoke up. “They’re not there, Your Majesty. I believe we’ve dug as deep as Bayard possibly could have buried anything, and we’ve seen no sign.”

* * *

As they walked back along the bluff to the Serpent’s eye, Sarah pondered. She thought of the acorn in her satchel, anointed with her father’s blood and blessed with his final breath. The acorn was her father’s gift. It was a witness and a wanderer, it had given Sarah life and traveled the land with her, and now she’d brought it back, carrying it in her eyesocket itself, on her body, and in her pouch of magical spell components, to where it had participated in the terrible events of fifteen years earlier.

Sarah took the eyepatch from her head and the acorn from her satchel. It lay in her palm and she gazed on it as she walked, seeing it gleam blue, a color similar to that of her own aura. Acorns and other plants didn’t generally have a blue aura, so the light of this acorn must be her father’s own light.

Would his regalia be similarly imbued with his aura? Or would they have their own, being things of power, things handed down and wielded by great thaumaturges since time immemorial?

She closed her fingers around the acorn and left the patch off her eye. The Serpent Mound thundered and crackled an electric blue beside her, so vivid and alive that she half-expected it to move. On impulse, she stepped up onto the Serpent’s back. She could feel its power thrum though her feet, tight and tingling like a ley line.

And the Serpent welcomed her.

No one spoke, and Sarah walked all along the length of the Serpent to its head. Again she looked at the triangular head with the ring in its prongs. Was it a great serpent’s head, with its single eye showing? Was it a serpent—a woman—swallowing an acorn? Was it rather a serpent, a woman, ejecting that acorn from her eye socket?

Her whole life seemed carved into the earth atop this ancient bluff, and Sarah suddenly felt tiny and thoroughly known to the universe.

She stepped to the top of the ring—the acorn eye of the Serpent, beside the downturned flaps of turf and piles of excavated soil. The hole was an open wound in the Serpent’s eye. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and then she looked down into the earth.

And saw them.

“They’re here,” she announced.

Calvin and Sir William scrambled to pick up their shovels again and joined her, dropping into the depression. “Where should we oughtta dig?” Cal asked, and Sarah pointed to the center of the ring, where she could clearly see, blazing through the dark dirt like a bonfire shining through smoke, the glorious blue light of a crown and orb, and a bright green brilliance in the shape of a sword.

“Old Bayard must have dug deeper than I’d given him credit,” Sir William said as they attacked the earth with their shovels.

“Or dirt might a filled in these fifteen years,” Cal suggested.

They dug another foot, and then another, and then a third, piling the dirt about them in the depression.

“You sure you can see ’em, Sarah?” Cal asked.

She nodded, and they dug more.

Sarah focused her vision on the aural regalia as Cal and Sir William dug. The regalia never moved or disappeared, but at every new shovelful of earth dragged out of the pit, the crown, orb, and sword seemed to be just one more shovelful away, just out of reach.

“Stop,” she finally told them, and they did, straightening their backs and setting shovels aside. They were dirty and sweat-streaked, standing in the pit up to their shoulders, and both men looked as if they were fighting to keep doubt from their faces.

Sarah considered. There was magic here. Someone or something was protecting the regalia. Who?

Bayard? That seemed impossible on its face.

The Serpent? Was the Serpent somehow, for some reason, keeping the Cahokian regalia hidden in the grip of its jaws? But she had felt it welcome her, and if it welcomed her, why would it not give her what was, after all, supposed to be her own?

Was it perhaps her father who was protecting the regalia? Had he in his dying moments sealed them into the earth for safekeeping? Bayard had stolen them and buried them, but maybe her father saw the burial, or knew it had happened, and acted to keep Bayard from ever enjoying the fruits of his theft. But why would he want to keep his regalia from her?

Or had he locked them away, and given her a key?

She opened her fist and looked again at the acorn, and at the regalia. The blue of the acorn and the blue of the crown and orb were exactly identical—the three auras might have belonged to one body.

“We’re going about it the wrong way,” she said. “I know what to do now. Please replace the dirt.”

She would not have begrudged resistance by either man, but was pleased when they only nodded, clambered out of the hole, and began shoveling dirt back into it. Within a few minutes, they had filled the pit, leaving the turves where they lay.

“I think you’d best step back,” Sarah suggested.

They did so, and she entered the depression.

The acorn pulsed in her palm, winking blue light at her. The crown and orb pulsed at the same moment, and then pulsed again, and then the three objects began to beat together like a single, three-part heart. She knelt, scooped aside a handful of cool, loose earth from the refilled pit, kissed the acorn, and laid it in the ground.

“I need a knife.” She had Father Chigozie’s silver letter opener in her belt, but didn’t want to risk it interfering with the magic she hoped was about to happen. When Cal handed her the hunter’s knife from his boot, she gave him the silver blade in return. “Step out of the ring,” she ordered her companions, and they complied.

With a swift motion, she cut the palm of her hand.

Bright red blood welled up and she let it flow, warm and sticky, down onto the acorn. With the same bleeding hand, she pulled dirt over the acorn and patted it down, then laid her hand on the earth over the acorn, palm down and gently pressing.

She thought of her father dying, his murderer fleeing, his regalia hidden, delivered unwittingly into the custody of the great Serpent, his blood sent to her, sent to become her, in the little acorn of the red oak tree. She willed her blood back to her father now, she willed him a message of gratitude, and she willed the Serpent to open its jaws and deliver to her what was hers.

“Arborem crescere facio.” Strength flowed from her into the acorn.

Shoots leapt from the rich earth under her hand, rising skyward between her fingers. The shoots swelled, quickly gaining finger-thickness themselves, then the thickness of Sarah’s wrist. She stumbled to her feet and backward to avoid the sapling that strained and wrestled as it broke from the soil.

The air crackled with power and the ground hummed; some of the energy came from her, and she felt her limbs grow weak. She scrambled up to the top of the ring, suddenly fearing the drain on her might be too much. She turned to look again at the sapling, and it was a tree ten feet tall and as big around as her leg.

Branches arched up and out from its trees, sprouting before her eyes into a treetop even as the trunk continued to expand and to shoot up. Soon it was as thick as both her legs, and then as big around as her waist, then bigger. Bark coagulated like a gray scab, roughened, swirled into knots and bumps under Sarah’s gaze. Buds popped into view all along the tree’s branches, buds that extended and unfurled like green banners into scallop-edged leaves.

It was an oak tree, of course.

She staggered. The tree towered above her now, twenty feet tall, thirty feet, and its branches spread wide, casting a pool of shade all over the ring from the center of which it sprouted, as well as the triangular serpent’s head and the semicircle containing the ring. The bright green leaves were incongruous enough in the autumn air, a vivid splash of spring at the top of a hill of autumn, but then blossoms—three barrel-sized blossoms, pale blue and orchid-like, alien to the tree from which they sprang—exploded on limbs high over Sarah’s head, their brilliant blue outdoing even the surprising green of the leaves.

The tree had stopped growing; its leaves rustled in the breeze. She looked at the tree with her Second Sight and saw, unsurprised, that it had the same aura as the acorn, the same exact hue to its blue glow as the crown’s and orb’s auras she had seen through the earth.

Sarah’s heart pounded in her chest as she stumbled back down inside the ring. Trembling, she wrapped her arms around the tree. “Father,” she whispered softly into its bark. She held the tree in a tight embrace and felt tears run down her cheeks to water it, feeling, beyond all reason or self-consciousness, that the tree embraced her as well, and kept her from collapsing.

“Jumpin’ Jerusalem.” Calvin’s mild oath brought her back to herself, and she stepped away from the tree, tottering out of the depression and looking to see what he saw.

The three great blossoms had opened into long blue flowers. Within their petals, high in the branches of the tree, were nestled the Sevenfold Crown, the Orb of Etyles, and the golden sword of Kyres Elytharias.

All her strength was gone, but Sarah felt triumphant. She had recovered the regalia of her father’s kingdom.

As, she knew, her father had intended.

* * *

Calvin climbed the tree for her, plucked the regalia from its branches one at a time, and brought the three items back down. She didn’t tell him she felt that her father was somehow inside the tree, but it warmed her heart, as she lay on the triangle of the Serpent’s head, to see Cal climbing among her father’s branches.

It felt like the symbol of a family scene she would like to have seen, but never would.

She was exhausted of all her magical power.

As Cal climbed down to hand her the second of the three items of her inheritance, the Orb of Etyles (the Sevenfold Crown had been first), she touched Thalanes’s moon-shaped brooch experimentally, and found it also inert. She didn’t feel burned, dried out, and sick the way she had casting other large spells, but she felt drained.

Sarah set aside the crown and orb and sat up in the grass while Cal went shinning his way up the oak tree a third time. She had dealt with the Sorcerer Hooke, at least for the time being. But if Ezekiel Angleton and the Imperial House Light Dragoons came upon her now, she would be defenseless.

The Serpent glowed and felt like a ley line, blue and sizzling beneath her—could she draw energy from it? She relaxed, closed her eyes, and reached out. She could feel the Serpent’s aura just as she could see it, but when she tried to reach into it and draw from it, she found she couldn’t. When she tried to take the Serpent’s energy, it no longer felt like a ley. It felt like…like…

It felt like a soul. Like a person.

She shivered in the excitement of discovery and veiled mystery at the same time. Whatever the Serpent was, it wasn’t a ley line. She didn’t let herself wonder; she urgently needed to refresh her reservoirs.

How far behind were her enemies?

The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers flowed beneath her, only a few hundred feet away. She strained her spirit to reach out to the rivers, to dip into their green well of energy and fill the tired, aching void within her.

Nothing. She was too far and couldn’t reach.

“Your Majesty!” Sir William’s voice cut into the disappointed fog shrouding her will. “We must flee!”

Cal dropped to the earth. When he straightened from his landing crouch, he handed her the third and last item of the regalia, a glittering golden-hued sword. She stood, gathering all three objects in her arms as Sir William and Cathy ran around the great ring, waving and shouting.

“Is it the Blues?” Sarah asked.

Cathy and Sir William both shook their heads. “The chevalier’s men,” Cathy explained.

Sir William rushed past Sarah and dragged her along in his wake, back toward to the horses and the slope down. “Two small vessels are moored below, Your Majesty, flying the chevalier’s colors and disembarking gendarmes. If we run, we may yet descend the bluff and escape before they have a chance to organize themselves.”

They pelted through the Serpent’s clearing without talking, and Sarah looked as closely as she could at the three precious objects in her hands. The crown was unlike any crown she had ever imagined; it bore no gems, no inscriptions, no elaborate inlay or fine filigree. It was a gray iron circlet with seven spikes rising from its brow, the center spike being the tallest and the others decreasing in height progressively to the right and left. The orb was even simpler; it was a perfect gray iron sphere, without mark.

The Sevenfold Crown and the Orb of Etyles were mates, sharing also the blue aura of the acorn and the oak tree, while the sword looked utterly foreign. It had the appearance of gold, but its edge was sharp, to a degree impossible in true gold. The whole thing was of one piece, with no visible seams or joints, as if it had been cast in a single perfect mold. Carved into the side of the hilt nearest Sarah’s face was a blocky image, somewhat abstract, and it took her a few moments to realize that it was a simple picture of a plowshare.

As the clearing ended, she twisted the sword in her grip to get a look at the other side of the hilt; she expected to see the mirror image on the reverse, and was surprised to see instead that the other side bore the carved image of the head of a crested bird. The weapon’s aura glowed green like the Mississippi River’s.

Sarah bounced to a stop at the tethered horses, the stone courtyard, and the top of the long slope. She looked past her companions and felt her heart sink; there were no gendarmes at the bottom of the slope yet, but instead she saw two other clots of massed soldiers.

The first group was the Philadelphia Blues. They were mounted and mustered in two lines behind Captain Berkeley and Ezekiel Angleton.

Two Lazars sat astride horses to one side, and Sarah’s heart skipped a beat. Even after she realized that they were Black Tom Fairfax and another, and not Robert Hooke, she was still reluctant to let her gaze linger on them.

Angleton and Berkeley faced a contingent of warriors as numerous as the Blues, and maybe even slightly more so—it was hard to count from this distance, and the men shifted and moved about as she tried to count them. These were men she had never seen before—creatures she had not seen before, beastfolk—their auras the green beast-and-man double auras Picaw and Grungle had possessed. They were dressed and armored like medieval warriors, in chainmail, greaves, and helmets, and they carried long spears and swords. A few had bows or crossbows slung across their shoulders. They stood on their own feet—or, in many cases, hooves or paws—in all manner of body shapes; Sarah saw goat-men, horse-men, lion-men, wolf-men, and more. She could hear a low, growling, snuffling animal rumble rising from the beastkind mob.

At their head, also unmounted and calmly conversing with the Imperial officers, stood a little blond man she recognized immediately, the man whose white aura’s mouth was bound with green and who stood under the shadow of an immense being of shimmering green light, a monster with the head of a gigantic crested bird.

“The calendar is with us, at least, Your Majesty,” Sir William observed mysteriously.

“Oh?” Was this some astrological point?

“It’s St. Crispin’s day, ma’am,” he explained. “Patron of those who fight against long odds. And, I believe, shoemakers.”

Sarah would have liked to hear the conversation that was being had at the foot of the bluff. “Sir William, what tactical options do you see?”

As she asked the question, the gendarmes arrived from the Ohio below. They rode on horseback in double file, with pistols, rifles, and swords, all in blue-stained leather and marked with the chevalier’s fleur-de-lis. She guessed their number at fifty, and at their head rode the Creole René du Plessis, and the chevalier himself.

“Hell’s Bells,” Sir William muttered.

“Yes,” Sarah agreed. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”


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Framed