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“If I’d a knew it’d be such a blessin’ to you, I’d a beat you years ago.”

CHAPTER TEN

Sarah stumbled away from Calvin, her body crackling with fear.

“Calvin Calhoun!” she snapped. “What are you doin’?”

Calvin said nothing and swung the flaming log at her head. Sarah slipped on a straw pallet and fell as the great arc of fire whooshed over her. She hit the dirt floor hard, landing enough on her hands and backside that she was stung, but didn’t lose her breath.

She rolled away and he swung a second time, overhand, smashing his flaming club into the straw-stuffed pallet. Sparks showered from it, and the pallet, old and dry and oily, promptly began to smolder.

“Calvin, stop it!” she yelled.

He attacked again, she ducked, and he plowed a furrow of sparks out of the timber wall. Many of them fell glittering onto a second pallet, which also took flame.

She had to put the fire out. Cal raised his arm to swat at her again—

Sarah opened herself to the ley line and shouted, “ignem exstinguo!

Her body tingled painfully as the energy of the ley roared through her. She had no time to direct her will precisely, and all the fires in the room—fireplace, pallets, club—were snuffed out. Calvin hesitated, looking in surprise at the charred wood in his hand.

Sarah dove for the corner. Her knees wobbled, and she felt like vomiting. Too much, she realized, she hadn’t been careful enough, she had put out too many fires at once and poured out too much of her body’s own energy.

She grabbed the Elector’s staff, wheeling to keep Calvin at bay. Good against evil spirits, white ash, and Calvin stepped back warily, eyes impassive and searching.

Was he possessed?

Sarah’s hands shook, holding a staff that she had walked with all the way from Calhoun Mountain but that now felt like lead in her grip. She couldn’t fight him off, ash staff or not; he was bigger and heavier and had a longer reach. She groped into her mental drawer of Latin and tried to put together an attack spell. She didn’t have much strength left, but she figured it was all right if her spell knocked her unconscious, as long as it got Calvin, too.

Corporem—” she began, and Calvin threw his log weapon—

slamming her in the chest.

“Whooomph!” she gasped, and she lost the spell along with the air in her lungs.

She rocked back, slamming into the cabin wall.

Corporem—” she squeaked.

Calvin fell on her like a hammer on an anvil, pounding her in the mouth, in the cheek, knocking her to the ground. She couldn’t bring her will to bear under the onslaught, couldn’t think of a way to fight back, didn’t think she had the power to muster a decent magical counterattack, anyway.

Terror and pain gripped her, but she wouldn’t give in. Gripping the ash staff, she raised it to try to ward him off.

He punched her in her bad eye.

A flash of scorching agony and light flooded her mind and she rolled forward, facedown onto the hard dirt. She dropped the staff and buried her face in her hands.

Too much, too much pain, in her skin, in her chest, and especially in her head.

She felt something loose and moving inside her eye socket, the one that had never opened.

Was her skull shattered? Calvin punched her again in the back, and then stopped. She realized from the sound of his footsteps and the scrape of wood on packed earth that he was picking up his club again.

She was too hurt to care anymore. She touched her battered eye tenderly, wincing at the fresh pain. Something moved behind the always-closed eyelid, which then opened, and in a soft dribble of warm fluid, a small, hard object fell into her fingers.

Had she lost her eye?

She almost laughed at herself for caring. Any second now, Calvin—the thing that looked like Calvin—would bash her brains out with a hunk of firewood, and here she lay, worrying about whether she had lost, of all things, her bad eye.

Through split lips, she laughed defiantly.

Calvin yelled without words. She didn’t brace herself, just relaxed, closed her eyes, and prepared for her death.

But the blow didn’t fall on her.

Sarah heard a scuffle and looked up.

The world was different, wildly different from anything she had ever seen before, and she almost vomited at the suddenness and extremeness of the change. Two figures struggled in the center of the room, wrestling with arms on shoulders, and through her good eye they looked like two identical Calvin Calhouns.

Nearly identical, because one of them looked beat all to hell, was caked in yellow grime, and had a tomahawk and lariat on his belt.

Hammered yellow Calvin seemed to be attempting to slap a clenched fist to the other Calvin’s face, and the other Calvin, bad Calvin, the Calvin who had been attacking her moments earlier, fought to get his hands around battered Calvin’s neck.

What made the room suddenly alien, though, what disoriented her, were the images coming through her other eye, the eye through which she had never before seen. She saw two figures still, but neither one of them looked exactly like the Calvin Calhoun she was accustomed to seeing.

One of them was a column of warm, white light.

The other was a smoking, black, cold fire, sucking brilliance and heat out of the room.

With her witchy eye, too, she saw the light of the dog, barking madly from the doorway, and the wan light of Thalanes, slumped on the floor, and out the door, coursing through the stand’s yard like the Mississippi, a giant river of multicolored light.

The ley line of the Natchez Trace.

If she could see out her witchy eye, though, what was she holding in her hand?

“Git outta here! Sarah, git up and git on outta here!” It was column-of-light Calvin, hammered yellow Calvin…real Calvin.

The ash staff lay on the floor. Looking at it through her witchy eye Sarah saw that it, too, was a thin, hot line of light. She picked it up and levered herself to her feet, moving slowly and feeling that the wrestling Calvins moved even more slowly, lumbering back and forth across the room, each fighting to get at the other’s head and neck.

She took a deep breath. Then she readied the staff, rotating it to point its butt end at the struggling columns of light and darkness. She kept wrapped in her fingers, and held tight to the staff, the hard, rounded thing that had fallen out of her eye socket.

Diabolum expello,” she muttered, running her fingers over the staff and channeling into it the energy torrent of the ley line outside the door. Her skin burned and she couldn’t breathe.

Light-Calvin was gaining the upper hand, pushing dark-Calvin’s throat with one forearm; he was within inches of clapping his balled fist to dark-Calvin’s face.

“Run, Sarah!” he shouted again. His expression was harrowed. How must she look, with her bad eye smashed open? Something awful.

Then dark-Calvin jerked light-Calvin sideways bodily—

light-Calvin gasped in pain—

and dark-Calvin grabbed his foe by the throat. The real Calvin Calhoun tried to shout again, but only choked and gagged.

Diabolum expello,” Sarah murmured again.

Stepping forward, she jammed the Elector’s white ash staff into the chest of dark-Calvin. The bruises on her chest and arms flared painfully and she gasped, but still she shoved with all her might, and the staff sank into the creature’s flesh, piercing it like a spear.

Sarah’s body exploded in heat and pain and she fell.

Immediately, dark-Calvin released his grip on light-Calvin’s neck. Light-Calvin—just plain Calvin—stepped back unsteadily, rocking on the balls of his feet.

The thing impaled on her walking stick howled and began to convulse. She watched it from the floor, wishing she’d been able to hold on to the staff, to keep the creature pinned. Instead, it jerked and spun wildly about with the wood sticking out of its body.

The black fire she saw through her witchy eye popped and jumped like water on a hot skillet, sometimes seeming to pull right out of the physical body that held it, only to snap back. Finally the black column gripped the staff to pull it out—

and Calvin slapped his open hand onto the thing’s chest.

Graaaaraaaraaaarghhhhh!

The scream pierced her brain, the convulsions redoubled, and bitter yellow brimstone filled the air in long plumes firing from the creature’s body. Calvin kept his fist pressed against the monster and grabbed Sarah’s ash staff with his other hand to pin it in place. It jerked, it tumbled, it spun like a pinwheel, throwing off yellow smoke thick mud. It shrank and melted as it spun, and then finally the ash staff fell through empty air to clatter on the hard floor and the black fire was gone.

Calvin fell to his knees. “Jerusalem, Sarah. Lord hates a whiner, but I b’lieved we’d had it for a minute there, you and I.”

Sarah closed her witchy eye, and found she could thereby shut out the strange images of Calvin as a figure of white light and Thalanes as a glowing blue puddle. “I b’lieve Iron Andy sent the right man on this here journey,” she said.

“Iffen he’d a knew about these mud fellers, I expect he might a sent more’n one.” His cheerfulness, weak and wry as it was, was almost shocking to her. She felt as if she’d been trampled by a herd of flaming mustangs. “You’re a sight, Sarah.”

She laughed. “I reckon I might prefer you not see me at this moment, Calvin Calhoun, iffen I look half as bad as you do.”

“Iffen you feel half as bad,” he replied, “you could use a barrel of cold beer and a week’s sleep. Mebbe we should ought to tell Thalanes about these here clay things now, do you reckon?”

“For that bump on his noggin, he deserves to know. And I still need a bath.”

She kept her witchy eye firmly shut so Calvin couldn’t see it—she wanted to examine herself in a mirror before she let anyone else look at her—and climbed gingerly to her feet. He helped her limp to the light of the doorway, where she shook him off.

She stood on the stand’s porch looking down at her clenched fingers. Did she dare open them?

“Sarah, what’s wrong?” Cal called over her shoulder. “Don’t be shy, you look jest fine in yeller!”

She slowly uncurled her fingers.

Lying in her palm, now caked in soggy yellow brimstone, was an acorn.

Through her good eye, Sarah saw it plain, brown, and ordinary, but through her witchy eye it burned with the brilliance and power of a lighthouse, blue and white.

* * *

Ezekiel Angleton dreamed, as he’d dreamed every night for weeks, of running through the forest. He was a tireless creature that followed its quarry along a narrow track through deciduous skeletons and clumps of bristling pine.

In the dreams, he ran south and west. He knew that from the sun that rose on his left shoulder and set before him by day, and by the sinking end of the zodiac into which he charged through the night.

His quarry ran ahead of him, and though he could not see it, he sensed it. He could taste it on the wind.

Since his dream of attacking Sarah…Sarah…he couldn’t bring himself to attach a surname to her anymore, connecting her either with the Imperial family or with these obstinate sniping hill-rat Calhouns…since he had dreamed of attacking Witchy Eye and battling the strange youth with fire in his hand, he’d passed all his sleeping moments running. He had not dreamed again of Calhoun Mountain, and though he didn’t doubt his God, or God’s servant St. Martin, he began to wonder whether, after all, he’d been correct to judge his dream a prophecy.

This time, again, he dreamed that he fought.

He dreamed of racing along the narrow track, following the scent—the taste—of his prey, a wet river crossing, a large stone- and timber-built waystation, a courtyard, a well, a long-eared dog that growled and yapped at him.

Suddenly he was looking at her, inside a chamber red with fire. The Witchy Eye, the abomination.

Also the traitor monk, Thalanes. He saw them tall and liquid in his dream, flowing before his eyes in flickering light, but he could not mistake their identities. They welcomed him; they didn’t know he was their enemy.

Ezekiel rejoiced in his heart when his dream-self struck down the priest with a sword of fire. He thrilled towering over the abomination, forcing her to cower as he prepared a killing blow.

But he was shaken by the dream’s end. He was surprised again, and the abomination was spared, by the appearance of the tall young man, the demonic angel with his fistful of fire. They fought, and Ezekiel struggled mightily to keep that fire from his face, and to wrestle down the young man, and he was on the cusp of winning, had his strong fingers wrapped around the fire-thrower’s throat—

when a spear was shoved into his side.

Even as my Lord, he thought as he collapsed, shuddering, in his dream and awoke, shivering, in his tent. My cross alone is not enough, my enemies must pierce my side with the spear as well.

He lay still, recollecting where he was. It was late afternoon, and he sprawled on a blanket in his tent on the slopes of Calhoun Mountain. Lazy Appalachee birds chirruped their defiance and the air was just beginning to turn cold.

He had been dreaming.

It wasn’t a dream of his death. Not did it seem prophecy. But if not prophecy, what was it? The Lord helped his servants, and Ezekiel believed this dream must be of God, it must be telling him something.

But what?

The dreams ended in defeat. Not his defeat, though, if they were not prophetic, but the defeat of something else, some unknown ally. Some creature through whose eyes Ezekiel could see in his sleep. Not prophecy, but still a divine gift of vision.

Where his ally had failed, Ezekiel would triumph.

What were the dreams telling him?

They gave him a direction. South and west. In the dreams, some ally followed the Witchy Eye south and west on a narrow track through the wilderness. It was no Imperial road, it was some other trail, some well-traveled backcountry highway.

South and west.

He ruminated as he pulled on his boots and rolled to his feet. “Captain Berkeley!”

“In the tent, Mr. Angleton,” Berkeley drawled.

Ezekiel found Berkeley sitting at the table, laying out his cards. God curse the Crown Land Cavaliers! Either they were outright pagans or they were verminous with silly superstitions, always blathering on about horoscopes and fortune telling.

“Captain Berkeley,” he started again, “am I right to think that the north end of the Natchez Trace is near here? It’s a narrow road, isn’t it, cutting through the forest?” Ezekiel had traveled in the empire, but hadn’t often been this far south and west, and he generally rode on the emperor’s highways.

“I believe you’re correct,” Berkeley agreed, “though I’ve always had a preference for the speed of the Imperial Pikes.”

“That goes south and west, doesn’t it? Where does it end up?”

Berkeley raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Blazes.”

“What’s wrong with you, man?” Ezekiel snapped, in no mood for the captain’s pettishness.

Berkeley pointed at the table, where he had laid out three cards: the Highway, the River, and the City. “You’ll notice that my luck continues. I turn up the Major Arcana.”

“Damn your superstition, man,” Ezekiel growled. “Tell me about the Natchez Trace.”

“Damn yours, Parson,” Berkeley snapped back.

Ezekiel wanted to hit the man. “Is that what I must tell His Imperial Majesty, then? That the Captain of his dragoons damned the Lord God and refused to answer a simple question put to him by the emperor’s confessor?”

Berkeley sighed and looked down.

“The Natchez Trace does go south and west.” He picked up the Tarock identified as the Highway and showed it to Ezekiel. The painting was not of an Imperial Pike, of course, since Franklin had designed his Tarock before the signing of the Compact, but of an older, narrower highway, barely more than a dirt track, winding away from the viewer toward a distant river, between wooded hills.

Berkeley set aside the Highway and continued. “It runs from Nashville and it carries traffic toward the city of New Orleans.” He showed Ezekiel the City, a horizon of spires and a busy marketplace underneath.

“That’s the Lightning Cathedral,” Ezekiel said.

“Or the Cathedral of St. Louis on the Place d’Armes.”

“That’s a painting of Philadelphia,” Ezekiel snapped. “Stop imagining things. The cards do not talk to you, Captain.”

Berkeley shrugged and traded it for the River, the card showing a muddy brown expanse so wide it might have been a sea. Thick green forest bordered the river on the left side of the card, and the lights of houses twinkled in the darkness on the right. “New Orleans, of course, being the city at the mouth of the Mississippi River.”

“If I’d a knew it’d be such a blessin’ to you,” Calvin said, “I’d a beat you years ago.”

Sarah had not, after all, had a bath. When Thalanes had awakened, Calvin and Sarah had recounted to him their previous encounter with the clay not-men, and their battles with the ersatz Sarah by the riverside and Calvin in the cabin.

“Mockers,” he had said, holding his injured head. “There may be others with them, or something worse. We must flee.”

They had quickly tended wounds—Thalanes pronounced Calvin’s rib probably bruised, possibly cracked, but definitely not broken—and had gathered their packs again. Calvin had gone back to Mrs. Crowder’s pantry for a loaf of oat-flour bread and salt ham, and then they’d resumed their march, all three dusted yellow from crown to toe. They moved slowly, and Sarah knew it was because of her, but she didn’t object. She felt stretched and burned.

Thalanes led them under cover of trees off the road but parallel to it, keeping the Trace in sight and stopping to scrutinize every group of travelers they saw.

He had said nothing since they had left Crowder’s stand.

Sarah had torn a strip of fabric from her skirt and wrapped it around her head, covering her witchy eye with a makeshift patch—the visions of light and power made ordinary movement nauseating, so she shut them out.

She leaned on her staff, scorched and stained yellow but unbroken. After a couple of hours of silence from Thalanes, she had tried to draw him out of his shell by telling them both about her revelations of the afternoon. Sarah recounted that she’d been hit in the head by the not-Calvin Mocker, that it had opened her eye and that through her witchy eye she saw living things as columns of light, and that she could see the ley line through it.

She didn’t mention the acorn, which she had tucked hidden away inside her dress.

Thalanes hadn’t taken the bait, but Calvin had been impressed. Every few minutes, for the rest of the afternoon, he whistled in inarticulate amazement.

“I guess you’ve got a right to be grumpy,” she said to the monk.

Thalanes sighed. “I’m not grumpy.” He paused for several long seconds. “I’m a little grumpy. But much more than that, I’m terrified. Also, I’m trying to concentrate, to be sure that we’re not being followed by further Mockers, or by other foes. The effort drains me.”

“I find it a mite unsettlin’ that the Mockers leave you feelin’ scairt, too,” Cal commented. “I’s hopin’ you’d be more…nonchalant.”

“They do scare me,” Thalanes admitted. “But what scares me more is that I’m quite certain that Ezekiel Angleton didn’t send those things. He’s a strict man, and a dangerous one, and he can work a bit of gramarye, but Mockers are black magic. I’ve known Angleton for years, and I’m confident that’s something he would never knowingly touch.”

“So I have another enemy.” Sarah feigned indifference. “So what? It was the emperor, or someone in his service.”

“How’d those things take our shapes?” Cal asked. “The first time, they weren’t nothin’ but faceless clay.”

“They must have got hold of a piece of you—skin, or hair, or blood, or something similar—the first time you met them. That’s also how they were following us, I expect.” Thalanes considered. “As for who sent the Mockers…I wonder.”

“What do you mean, black magic?” Sarah felt relief that the monk was talking to her again.

Thalanes frowned. “The Mocker’s body is common clay. It’s animated by a devil that is summoned and bound into it. Christian wizards argue about what kind of magic is appropriate, but this is definitely infernal gramarye, the sort of thing no Christian wizard will touch.”

“Stinks of Oliver Cromwell to me,” Cal said, “the New Model Army.”

Sarah shivered at his mention of the Necromancer and almost turned to spit over her shoulder, to ward off the name’s bad luck.

“The New Model Army were wood, weren’t they?” she asked. “I always imagined them like big wooden puppets without strings, marching off to fight for the Commonwealth.”

“Yes,” the monk murmured, “you have it pretty much right. And yes, Cal, it does stink of Oliver Cromwell.”

They walked in ominous silence for a few minutes, and then Calvin offered his considered view, “I can’t see as this changes much of anything.”

“It doesn’t,” Thalanes agreed. “We’re still bound for New Orleans to find Will. This is only a reminder that we must take great care.”

“Is there any chance those Mockers we left back at Crowder’s might follow us?” Sarah was a hexer, but such creatures were outside her experience. “Any chance they’re not destroyed after all?”

“No chance,” the monk said. “I doubt the demons are destroyed, but the bodies are, and you cast the demons out quite nicely. I wish you’d told me about them sooner, but I congratulate both of you for handling them as you did. Mockers have dragged many a watchful man down to an early death. You did very well.”

“Thank you.” Cal accepted the compliment with good humor. “I do feel as I’m collectin’ some interestin’ stories to tell my grandkids one day…iffen I survive to have any.”

Thalanes lapsed again into silence. They walked into the night, until the monk declared himself satisfied they had not been followed, whereupon Cal located a spring in a sheltered hollow masked by a stand of pine, and made camp.

“I’ll take the first watch. After all, I had a nap this afternoon.” Thalanes grinned and rubbed the contusion on his head. “Sarah, will you join me for a few minutes?”

Calvin looked as if he might object, but Sarah shot pleading eyes at him and he shut his mouth, bundling himself into his bedroll and falling quickly into regular snores. Sarah followed the monk to the top of the hollow and they sat, shaded from the light of the half moon by a pair of bent old pine trees.

He sat very close, but she found it didn’t bother her as much as it used to.

“Let me look at your eye,” he said to her gently.

She balked, but loosed her eye patch and turned her face to him. He no longer trembled, but glowed a bright white, with a tinge of blue. She found, looking at him directly, that she could make out his features with her witchy eye’s sight, and they were not quite the same. He was recognizably Thalanes, but he looked younger, and nobler, and less worn.

“The eye is open,” Thalanes said. Sarah bit back the impulse to congratulate him on stating the obvious. “Is this the first time it’s ever opened?” She nodded, and he continued his inspection. “It doesn’t look infected,” the monk told her. “It looks like whatever was bothering it has gone away. The tissue is inflamed, but it should heal now.”

Sarah thought of the acorn and felt she had to say something. She owed it to the little monk.

“Your irises are not the same color,” he observed. “This eye’s iris looks white, or perhaps very pale blue. And the pupil is much larger.”

“Like I said, I see different out of this one.” She again explained seeing the ley line, and the Mocker, and the dog, and her companions.

“What do I look like?” he asked her.

“White. Kind of blue. Shiny. Handsome.”

He chuckled gently. “That’s a change. And can you see the ley line still?”

She pointed down into the valley below them. “It follows the road pretty close, though not exactly. It’s huge. It’s a big river of fire, white and blue and all sorts of colors.”

“What about other creatures? What can you see around us now?”

Sarah looked around. In the moonlight, her natural eye strained to see anything, but living, moving things jumped out at her in blazes of light through her witchy eye. “Owl,” she said. “Mockingbird. Woodpecker. Two deer, down along the ridge—one’s a fawn. Raccoon.” She saw several large bright smudges, further away but moving closer, hugging the ley line. “Two people, both mounted.”

“Do they seem out of the ordinary?” he asked her.

“That’s a stupid question,” she snapped, and immediately regretted it. “Sorry. I mean, everything seems out of the ordinary. I ain’t used…I’m not used to seeing people glow like this. But those folks glow just like Calvin does, just plain white.”

“Just like Calvin, but not like me?” he clarified.

“Exactly,” she said. “You’re sort of blue.”

“You’re seeing the life energies of things. Their auras, a practitioner of gramarye should say. Our auras. Fascinating.”

Sarah huddled deeper into her coat. She didn’t feel fascinating, she felt like a monster. Like a monster that had been very stupid, several times, and was now extremely lucky even to be alive.

What did her own aura look like? As discreetly as she could, she gazed down through her witchy eye at her bare hands. She shouldn’t have been, but in the moment, she was shocked to see that her own aura was blue-tinged, more like Thalanes’s than Calvin’s.

Like the acorn that had fallen from her eye.

She pulled the acorn from its hiding place and held it out to Thalanes with a trembling hand.

He looked puzzled. “What’s that?”

“This is what was troubling my eye,” she said quietly. “This was inside my eye, under my eyelid.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

She tried again. “It’s always been inside my eye, without my knowing it, and today it popped out.”

He was quiet for several long moments. “Thank you,” he said. His voice sounded almost reverent. “I suggest you put that away, and keep it a secret.”

“What is it?” she asked him.

The monk shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, beyond what I’ve already told you. Your father blessed three acorns with his dying breath, your mother ate them, she conceived and bore three children who were all born wounded. Now it turns out your wound held an acorn all along.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what it means, but keep the acorn, and keep it secret. It may turn out to be a thing of power.”

“Like the Cahokian regalia?”

“Yes.” He chuckled. “And I see I owe you more explanation. Here again, I regret that I don’t know much. The origins and uses of the regalia are unknown to me, and would have been given to you in the right time and place by your father.” He looked down into the hollow where Calvin lay. “I can tell you that the regalia consist of three things, and each bears a different sort of power.”

“The crown, the orb, and the sword,” Sarah said. “Those are famous.”

“Correct. The iron crown of Cahokia, called the Sevenfold Crown for its seven iron points, is its ultimate symbol of political power. The nobles of Cahokia swear all their important oaths upon it and its presence provides the legitimate seal of any occasion of royal action. Without it, the king or queen of Cahokia is no ruler. Its absence is one reason the nobles of Cahokia have been unable to unite behind any one candidate for the throne for the last fifteen years.”

“If there’s no Sevenfold Crown, there’s no monarchy and no kingdom,” she said meditatively. “The decision to choose a king without the crown would be a decision to remake the kingdom entirely from scratch, to throw away all tradition and heritage.”

“Yes,” the monk said, surprise in his face. “That’s a very perceptive comment.”

“I tried to make sure Iron Andy wasn’t wasting his time.” She felt shy.

“The iron orb,” Thalanes continued, “is named the Orb of Etyles, and it’s a thing of magical power. I don’t know any more than that, except to say that in my years with your father, he never allowed himself to be without the Orb of Etyles, and he cast all his mightiest spells with it in his hand.”

“Etyles was a prophet,” she said. “You were quoting him to us the other day, about Adam’s first wife.”

Thalanes nodded. “The sword is the only item of the regalia not made of iron. The metal of which it’s forged is unknown, at least to me, but it has the appearance of gold. It is a weapon for heroes, and I understand from your father that it bestows great martial prowess. Your father carried it into the Spanish War, and against highwaymen and beastkind in the borders of the Ohio, and was a renowned warrior.”

“The Lion of Missouri.” She’d heard the songs.

“I’m afraid I don’t know the sword’s name,” Thalanes continued, “but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one. I was your father’s confessor, but I wasn’t privy to all his secrets, especially to his royal secrets.”

“What do you mean, royal secrets?”

“I mean that the Kings of Cahokia passed down things to their heirs besides the regalia. Information, secrets, ancient alliances, and obligations. I am ignorant of all of it.”

Sarah let the information sink in. She was glad she’d come from Calhoun Mountain with Thalanes, and she was beginning to trust him, but she didn’t understand the man at all.

“Why are you helping me, Father?” she asked.

“Once you raise your banner,” he said slowly, “you’ll find that many people will flock to it. Even, I think, without the Sevenfold Crown. You’re the rightful Queen of Cahokia, my queen, as you are rightfully the head of the Penn family, and those things make you very special.”

“That ain’t it, though, is it? I mean, that isn’t it.”

“In part, it is.” He was quiet for a long time. “I’ve served your father and your mother for many years. They were my earthly lord and lady as they were my friends, and I serve you now because I remain in their service. All I can do for you, I will.”

“Can you tell me how to be queen?” she asked. “I don’t know anything about being a leader.”

“Don’t you?”

She considered. “I suppose a leader should be a really good person,” she said after a few moments. “I mean, like Jesus. Noble and self-sacrificing.”

Thalanes laughed. “That’s an answer for Sunday School.” She thought he was mocking her. “But really, Sarah, I’m the wrong person to ask. I’ve never been a leader—I’m a solitary person and I belong to an order of solitary people. All I know of leadership is that the leader is the person who has to make all the hard choices. That will be one of your roles as queen, the maker of difficult decisions. I don’t envy you; no sane person would.”

She was disappointed. “Can’t you tell me anything more helpful than that?”

“I can tell you men will follow a leader who is good to them,” he said, frowning slightly, “whether that leader is personally righteous or not.”

“Thank you,” Sarah said. “That gives me a lot to work on.”

“Is that sarcasm?” he asked after a moment.

“It was meant to be humility.”

He patted her shoulder. “It’s good that you’re improving your gramarye and learning to use the leys. You must be very careful with that, of course—if you open up your soul too far to a ley line, it can suck you dry or burn you to a cinder. You should also accustom yourself to the new vision your eye is giving you, learn to understand and use it.”

“Any particular advice to give me on that?”

“None.” He shook his head. “I don’t have that gift myself, though I’ve heard of it. Some call it ‘Second Sight.’ Do you know how to speak in Court Speech? If not, you should learn.”

“I think I’ll manage with Court Speech,” she said. “I’ve read my Bible, and a fair amount of Shakespeare. I wouldn’t want to have to talk like that all the time, though.”

“No,” he agreed, “well, you won’t have to. The beauty of Court Speech is that every Power determines how it’s used in its own court. Usually, nobles and Electors speak to each other without it, and save the Court Speech for when they address inferiors and ambassadors. It serves them as a sort of insulation against familiarity.”

He paused.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m talking a lot.” Thalanes buried his face in his hands a moment. “Sarah, you shouldn’t lean on me more than you absolutely have to—not on anyone, really, but especially not on me—I am a broken reed, at best.”

Sarah laughed out loud. “If you’re a broken reed, Father, I’m stubble.”

“I’ve already failed you. I told your mother about you, and when she was tortured, she told the emperor.” Thalanes’s face was flat, but his voice quivered.

Sarah felt sick. She had known, more or less, that something of that nature must have happened, but it hurt her to hear the events recounted so baldly. She should have been there; she felt she had failed her mother, which she knew was a completely unreasonable response, and then she saw what the monk must be feeling. “You told her at her request.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I should have been wiser. Also, I should have been wiser than to leave your father alone with the man who betrayed him.”

“Did you know he was going to be betrayed?”

“No.” Thalanes shook his head. “But I knew the storms of envy and hatred that surrounded him. I should have been stronger than my friendships, and wiser than my precepts.”

The quiet sorrow in his voice corresponded with a changed tone to the color she saw in him through her witchy eye, nothing she could describe, but a nuance that pierced Sarah’s heart. She could see his emotional turmoil. She felt like weeping; with an effort, she restrained herself. She needed this man’s help, and he was one of her greatest protectors. “Didn’t you also take the acorns that my father blessed with his dying breath to my mother?”

He nodded, slightly.

“And you hid me with Elector Calhoun?”

He nodded again.

“And you raced from Philadelphia ahead of the emperor’s chaplain, to rescue me from a mortal threat.”

“So I haven’t led a completely useless life,” he said wryly.

“I owe you my very existence,” she said to him. “Three times, at least. As your queen, I order you to remember that.”

Fearing that if she stayed any longer she would do something to undercut the authority she’d just assumed, Sarah stood and descended into the hollow. She crawled into the bedroll Cal had arranged and stretched herself out gratefully for sleep.

Her body ached. Bread must feel like this, kneaded and baked. It eased her pain a little bit to hear Cal’s regular breathing in the darkness. It reminded her of Calhoun Mountain and the Elector and home, and she smiled.

Before replacing the patch over her eye, she looked up at the little monk, still sitting his vigil on the hill above them. She could tell by the subtle shift in the tone of his aura that he was less grieved, calmer.

He felt better.

That made her happy, and she let herself fall asleep.

* * *

In the morning they washed in the spring and beat the dust out of their clothing. It wasn’t perfect—they all looked jaundiced—but it would do.

Sarah still ached, but as the morning progressed she began to unkink. Her skin was still too warm to the touch and felt like old paper, and she was exhausted, but that was an improvement.

That afternoon, Thalanes and Cal left her in a grove of trees and went down together to a creek flowing across the main path of the Trace to fill their waterskins. Sarah sat, grateful to rest her legs and feet, and closed her eye to try to catch a few minutes’ nap.

Click.

“Come along quick and quiet, miss, and don’t nobody have to git her brains blowed out today.”

Sarah opened her eyes.

The man standing before her was of middling height and heavy, with a slack face not too different from the Crowder’s Bassett, and he wore the dirtiest orange cape Sarah had ever seen, over a ragged brown shirt and reddish corte-du-roi trousers. In any other season, the outfit would have been a beacon that made him impossible to miss. In the autumn, it just might make him invisible.

He pointed a pistol at Sarah, with the hammer cocked.

“Poacher?” she asked.

“Git up and let’s go,” he ordered her.

She stood.

“Smuggler?” she guessed again.

“Yer friends’re too far away to hear you even iffen you shout,” the heavy man snarled. “So don’t try it.” He waggled his pistol. “Besides, Mr. Bullet here’d git to you afore them fellers could git back.”

“What do you want?” Sarah needed to buy a minute or two, to think of what to do or maybe to give Cal and Thalanes time to return.

She felt so tired.

“Shut yer mouth and git on that mule.” Orange Cape gestured with his pistol. Sarah saw a lean gray horse tethered in the trees and behind it a pack mule, saddled with a ragged blanket.

“You gonna kill me?” She took slow steps toward the pack animal.

“If yer dead, I won’t git any money outta you from the Memphites.” He grinned, showing yellow teeth with big gaps.

Sarah was to be sold into slavery. She’d pull a wagon, or worse.

“You won’t git nothing for me,” she warned him. “I’m ugly.”

“You’ll do jest fine.” Orange Cape ran a shivering gaze up and down Sarah’s body. “Don’t you worry, I’ll teach you everythin’ you need to know to make the Memphites happy.”

Sarah spat. She wanted to cast a spell, but she was weak and tired. She had to do something quick, easy, and effective.

“Git movin’,” he ground out through his rotting teeth, and gestured again with the pistol.

Sarah walked slowly toward the mule. “My husband and my father git back here and catch you,” she said, “you’re a dead man. On the other hand, I got a bit of cash in my pack, and iffen you want it, you can jest take it and go.”

She stopped, standing deliberately a couple of paces to the side of the pack mule.

“Like Hell,” Orange Cape said. “But you got somethin’ else I’d like to have very much, and I reckon I’ll jest go ahead and take it from you, soon as we get safely outta here and away from your menfolk. And when I’m finished, I reckon they’ll be enough left over to sell to the Memphites.” His face hardened. “Now git on my damn mule—”

He gestured with his pistol again, pointing at the mule.

Ignem mitto,” Sarah muttered, and she sent a tiny spark into the firing pan of his pistol.

Bang! Orange Cape’s gun fired—

the horse and mule both jumped, jerking the tether away—

and Sarah ran.

“Damn you!” Orange Cape shouted.

Sarah didn’t look back. She heard the whinnying of the man’s horse and the braying of his mule and the crashing sounds of both animals plunging into the thick trees, but she couldn’t tell whether Orange Cape was dealing with his animals or chasing her.

She’d had a head start, but she was exhausted and the few extra yards would never be enough to save her. She counted on him to need the horse more than he wanted her, and to be afraid of tangling with Calvin and Thalanes.

She staggered and fell into a crinkling bed of leaves. When a man’s hands picked her up moments later, she was enormously relieved to find they belonged to Calvin.

* * *

They continued to follow the ley line south and west. They stayed away from inns except when they all went into a stand or a village together to buy food. They stayed off the Trace, though parallel to it, and avoided people. When they could, they ate off the land—berries, apples, hickory nuts, birds, small game.

The little monk was uncomplaining, could walk forever, slept on the ground and ate anything, but it was Calvin who had the skills that fed and sheltered them, building lean-tos tight under the bases of large pines when it rained, shooting and preparing game, and keeping them out of sight of the Trace but always close. He was even more than usually solicitous of Sarah’s comfort, which made her feel ill at ease. On the one hand, it made her think it might be nice to be married to Calvin Calhoun. On the other, she felt guilty for having hexed him.

At least she ought to let him in on some of her secrets.

Sarah didn’t feel comfortable showing Cal her eye directly, but she let him see it, as if casually, while she had her patch off and was using her Second Sight—she didn’t want him to feel as if she was hiding from him. She practiced her Second Sight several times a day, and found that if she tried to use it more than that, she became exhausted and her head hurt. She learned to see increasingly subtle changes in the aural tones of Thalanes and Calvin, and found she could guess their feelings very well, along with such things as, for instance, whether they were lying.

She also found, over the course of a couple of days, that she could read the ley line. The energy flowing through it was disrupted by things traveling on it, and she found that she could thereby predict the size of an approaching party miles before it rolled into view.

Sitting up during her turn at watch through the night, Sarah watched the ley line and wondered whether she’d be able to tell from the disturbance of the line that an approaching party was, for instance, a Mocker—could the line somehow tell her that?

As she felt better, she practiced her gramarye, trying to make it second nature to undertake such simple tasks as firestarting and locating plants. With practice, the short Latin sentences came easier. Sentences and gestures she practiced a lot almost became rote spells, like wizards in stories cast.

She also took guidance from the little monk on tending to the wounds they had each received, gathering herbs and binding them by gramarye into healing compounds that were ingested or made into poultices. After a few days, all their bruises had disappeared, Calvin declared he felt as whole as new, and even her eye had lost the soreness, redness, and inflammation she’d lived with her entire life.

She worked all this magic using the energy of the Natchez Trace ley in carefully controlled amounts. She could only channel a small amount of it through herself at once, and when she took in too much it burned her; also, the ley resisted, it wanted to give her only a little bit of itself, and she had to wrestle with it to draw power from it for larger spells. Could the ley be depleted, say, by a natural disaster? And if it were, would it then draw the life energy out of people and other creatures along its length to replenish itself?

She also learned and practiced various kinds of arcane concealment. She erased their physical tracks from time to time, and made them personally invisible, and cloaked their auras, and created illusions of them walking the other way up the Trace to Nashville just in time to pass New Orleans-bound travelers, and cast spells to lay blankets of forgetfulness on the creatures watching them as they passed. It was too much of an effort to cast any of the spells together, or to sustain any of them for very long, but the hope driving the strategy, devised by the three of them together over a campfire on the second day out from Crowder’s stand, was that constant rotation through the various tricks would baffle anyone tracking them.

On the third night after the encounter at Crowder’s stand, Sarah sat watch, alternately chanting her way through Latin paradigms and talking to herself in the Biblical-Shakespearean cadences of Court Speech, as Thalanes had hinted she should. They camped without a fire in a small hollow above the Trace, and she gazed on the multicolored strand of power flow beneath her. The moon was nearing full and the sky was clear, so out her normal eye she had a ghostly-silver view of the valley, with its skeletal trees and occasional rail fences. Out the other she saw a landscape alive with crawling, creeping, and hopping things.

She watched the Trace, and she also watched the two travelers.

They had trudged to a halt and laid down their bedrolls late, after Calvin and Thalanes had fallen asleep. They made their camp at the bottom of the hill on the other side of the Trace, by a spring of fresh water that also been the reason Calvin had settled on the campsite he’d chosen. Sarah knew they were Firstborn by the blue of their auras—through her normal eye, they were undistinguished, just a couple of men with broad-brimmed hats and long coats.

She had seen Eldritch before, in Nashville with some frequency and more occasionally traveling through the countryside on the Imperial Pikes, about perfectly ordinary business. But she had not before had occasion to watch the Firstborn secretly, knowing she herself was one of them.

After the excitement of watching people with blue auras wore off, Sarah realized that once again she was watching the Eldritch do completely mundane things: they ate bread, they drank water, they stashed their food in a tree away from their bedrolls, they lay down and—she could tell by the tone of their glow—went to sleep. She felt kinship for them the warmth of which surprised her. Was that despite their ordinariness, or because of it?

When the six riders appeared, coming from the direction of Nashville, Sarah thought nothing of them. There were dressed in long blue coats and blue tricorner hats, reminding Sarah of the soldiers who had besieged Calhoun Mountain, but their auras were white.

They were riding very fast, for such a small road at night.

The riders saw the Eldritch travelers and stopped. Sarah couldn’t hear what was said, but there was some conversation, and the riders lingered. What were they talking about? The tones of both parties’ auras changed.

The riders looked angrier.

The Eldritch looked fearful.

Pop!

She heard the gunshot like the explosion of a toy gun’s cork, perfectly audible in the still night air. And suddenly there answered a volley of pops that sounded enormous in the small valley, but that could not have lasted more than a dozen shots. She couldn’t see the guns or the smoke or even, with her good eye, the physical bodies of any of the people, but she saw the Eldritch die.

One moment, their auras glowed healthy blue, with a fear-tinged note to them, and the next, almost simultaneously, the auras exploded, dissipating into rings of light that washed Sarah, the voiceless, fear-clenched witness on the hill above, with a wave of energy.

She felt their deaths in a way she had never before felt any death. Sarah knew that if she had wanted to, if she had been sufficiently self-possessed, she could have harnessed that energy. She felt sick at the thought, it was vile to imagine someone could do such a thing, but Sarah knew that with her Second Sight, she’d be able to see and feel when the rings of such energy struck her, and that the energy could be used just like the power in any ley line.

The battle was over, and Calvin and Thalanes were up. She couldn’t talk, stunned by the violence as well as by the strangeness of experiencing the Ophidians’ deaths, but she gestured down at the valley, and her companions saw the horsemen ride away.

Five days of magic-coffee-fueled marching after they left Crowder’s stand, in the silver light of a moon that was just shy of full, they arrived at Natchez.

Natchez proper sat on a bluff, huddled behind a palisade of sharpened logs like the fierce wooden teeth of some guard dog set to fend off the forest and the river. It looked like a trading town of maybe a thousand people in houses mostly made of rough logs, squatting at the great junction of the long highway and the Mississippi River, fiercely trying to mind its own business and jealously guarding its privileges.

The forest gave way to planted fields a few miles outside the town walls, and they found themselves compelled to travel again directly on the Natchez Trace. Sarah felt exposed as she walked under the most open sky she’d seen in nearly two weeks. She slipped off her patch to sneak a glimpse of the ley line and was reassured that the traffic behind them seemed ordinarily sparse and showed no signs of being…unusual.

Thalanes cloaked their faces with his gramarye.

They followed the Trace to the gates of Natchez, which were shut and watched by four helmet- and cuirass-clad guardsmen. The Trace continued around the town and steeply down to the base of the bluff, where Sarah saw in yellow torchlight a long line of wooden wharves insulating the impossibly wide river from its bank, and jammed up against the wharves a wide planked road and an even longer line of ramshackle buildings. The place swarmed with traffic, humans and boats, carts and dogs alike.

It was as if the town of Natchez above had let down its hair, and that hair jumped and crawled with vermin.

“Natchez-under-the-Hill,” Cal said to them. “I been here once or twice to sell cattle, and I’s always glad to escape with my skin.”

“We can get a boat ride from here to New Orleans,” Thalanes asserted blandly.

“Likely,” Cal agreed. “Also, we can git knifed or shot. These Hansa towns are tough iffen you ain’t Hansa yourself.”

Sarah stared at the river as they descended into Natchez-under-the-Hill. It was like a sea, it was so far to the other side. She could see the opposite shore—it lay thick with tangled forest, and there were no lights. On an impulse, she slipped her patch up and turned her Second Sight upon the Mississippi River.

It almost blinded her. It pulsed and throbbed like a sleeping dragon, a gigantic strand of energy dwarfing the Natchez Trace ley as the river itself physically dwarfed the Trace. An immense ley line coursed up and down the Mississippi, in the water and above it, and she wondered what mighty spells could be cast using its power, and how powerful a magician would have to be to draw from it, and what a cinder that vast channel of power would reduce her to if the entire thing were turned to flow through her body. Its color, too, was distinctive. It was multicolored like the Natchez Trace ley line, but the Trace ley was predominantly white, whereas the river ley luxuriated in shimmering deep green. Was that…river energy? The spiritual tracks of thousands of years of catfish?

Sarah looked down at the wharf town before replacing her patch, and was reassured by the more human glow of white, like a phosphorescent anthill swarming on the riverbank. Between them and the town, though, stood two figures.

Two figures whose auras were green, like the Mississippi’s.

She snapped her patch back into place and they stopped.

“Evenin’,” Cal said affably. “We ain’t lookin’ for trouble.”

Looking through her good eye—not her good eye, Sarah reminded herself, but her normal eye, her mundane eye—she saw that the two figures both wore hooded robes, and had their faces deep in shadow. The figures both pulled back the hoods and Sarah was shocked to see emerge from those shadows a tortoise’s head and the head of a lovely woman with a duck’s bill incongruously sprouting out of the middle of her face.

Beastmen! No, beastkind, since at least one of them seemed to be a female. She had never seen one close up before, and only rarely from a distance, in Nashville.

“Your Majesty,” they said together, the tortoise’s bass croak undergirding the melodious flute-like voice of the duckfaced woman. They bowed low.

They were bowing to her.

“Please,” she said, “that’s enough.” She scrambled to regain her composure and protect her dignity. Had anyone else noticed? “Please rise.”

They straightened out of their bows.

“Your Majesty,” Tortoise-Head repeated in its (his?) low, throaty rumble. “Peter Plowshare is dead.”


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