“I’d be happy to abduct you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Whunk!
The chunk of wood split open as Cal brought it down on the chopping stump, pulling apart neatly into two halves and falling to the grass. He scooped them up and laid them on the pile. When Cal was a boy, his grandfather had warned him over and over against idle hands, and if you ever run out of useful things to do and you haven’t got a stick to whittle, boy, you can always chop wood for the pile.
Before he could pick up the next piece to split, he heard a familiar sharp whistle.
“Yessir,” he greeted his grandfather with surprise, burying the blade of the wood-chopping axe in the stump.
“Walk with me, boy.” Andrew Calhoun grabbed his much taller grandson by the elbow with his one arm and steered him into a stroll about the top of Calhoun Mountain.
Cal nodded and went along happily. They walked together along a broad dirt path beaten into the wiry grass among clusters of log cabins and small orange and yellow groves by generations of Calhoun feet.
“The Fair went well enough, I reckon,” Cal volunteered—he hadn’t had a chance yet to report on the outcome of the morning’s trip, and nor had any of its other participants, since the Elector had been holed up since their return with the little Cahokian monk.
“I heard.” The Elector’s tone of voice both praised Calvin and told him the Tobacco Fair was not to be the subject of this conversation. “I need you to do somethin’ for me, boy.”
“Sure.” Cal wondered what that might be. “Jest name it, and it’s done already.”
“Sarah’s a-goin’ on a journey,” the Elector told him as they passed beyond the cabins into a meadow of tall dry autumn grass. “She don’t know it yet, but she don’t really have a choice.”
“Has it got somethin’ to do with this monk?” Cal couldn’t think of any other reason why Sarah would need to go on a journey anywhere. Cal had traveled, stealing cattle more or less locally and driving the ones the family didn’t eat to markets as far away as possible, but Sarah had always stuck very close to Calhoun Mountain. They were alone now, and stopped walking. “That little feller tells strange stories, but they got a ring to ’em as makes ’em sound like they jest might be true. Sarah ain’t really my auntie, is she?”
“It has,” his grandfather confirmed, looking Cal in the face from the impenetrably deep wells of his eyes, “and she ain’t. This ain’t gonna be a safe journey for Sarah, you understand me?”
Cal’s heart jumped at the possibilities. “I reckon someone oughtta go with her, then, don’t you? Someone as has traveled and knows his way around.”
“Someone as can hunt and track and trap and trade and make shelter and git water and provide food,” Iron Andy Calhoun agreed. “Someone as can find his path in any weather and fight his way outta any scrape. Someone as is set to become a real hell of a feller, and someone I can trust.”
Cal blushed. “Jerusalem, grandpa. Mebbe you oughtta go yourself.”
“Damn straight I would, too,” the Elector said, “iffen I had two arms and I’s jest ten years younger. As it is, will you go in my place?” He gripped Calvin by the elbow and stared into his grandson’s soul.
“Yes, I will,” Cal said, as if he was swearing a solemn oath.
“Jest because she ain’t your aunt,” the Elector added with a hint of menace in his voice, “don’t mean I don’t feel about her like about my own daughters.”
“I’ll do right by her.” Cal blushed again and looked at his feet.
“I know you will,” his grandfather agreed. “That’s why I’m a-sendin’ you.” He tugged Cal’s elbow and turned them both back toward the cabins. “You got good morals, a good reputation. You’re sound in body and in mind, and ain’t nobody on this here mountain don’t love you. You ain’t e’er killed a man, I know. But I’m countin’ on you to do it iffen you have to.”
Cal nodded, flattered but also daunted. “When does this journey start?”
“Soon,” the Elector told him. “Stick close to Sarah, son. Stick real close. I got a feelin’ she might want to start even sooner’n I intend, and iffen she does, I don’t want her goin’ alone.”
“I’ll keep her close,” Cal promised.
“Do you believe in God?”
Cal hesitated. Did his grandfather want him to pray for Sarah? “You know I do, grandpa,” he finally said, with an awkward shrug. “I believe in God. I’m New Light, you know that. I’m as New Light as a man can be as ain’t plain crazy.”
The old man nodded. “You remember that. You and I are gonna be talking again tonight, Calvin. Jest remember the answer to the next question you git asked is ‘I do.’”
Calvin thought of wedding vows, and he gulped.
* * *
He needed to let her decide, Thalanes reminded himself. Sarah was a child of Adam like anyone else, and he had to respect her right to choose, no matter what.
Young Andy let her in from the dogtrot.
Thalanes sat in the Elector’s Whittlin’ House, or, as some of his family referred to it, the Thinkin’ Shed. Though he was long a widower and his children other than his daughter Sarah (foster daughter, Thalanes reminded himself—she seemed so at home here that even the monk had begun to think of her as a Calhoun) had all grown and moved out, the Elector was important enough to merit two rooms (and his own outhouse behind, discreetly veiled by stands of dogwood and maple), at the top of the long meadow on Calhoun Mountain, with a splendid view looking north upon Nashville and an infinity of green forested hills. The two rooms were two separate mud-chinked log cabins sharing one wide plank porch and a peaked roof. The roofed passage between the cabins was called a dogtrot. Sarah and the Elector shared one cabin as living quarters; in the other, the Elector whittled and thought, conducted serious interviews, planned battles, and handed down private judgment.
The Thinkin’ Shed was full of carved animals, handmade chairs and stools, and above all, walking sticks. The Elector sat with his back to the low fire in a wood chair of his own manufacture, horn-handled clasp knife in his hand, shaping a six-foot length of ash into a staff. His eyes, set deep in the shadows of a craggy, weathered face under a shock of snow white hair, didn’t focus on the stick at all, but stared into a corner as the knife worked its magic without direction. Thalanes knew Andrew Calhoun well enough to recognize that he was distracted and troubled by the news the monk had brought and the errand on which he had come, but he carved wood effortlessly, the stick cradled against his neck as he turned it from a rough branch into a polished staff, with its top cut into the shape of a horse’s head, like a large wooden chess piece.
Sarah came in from the dogtrot and shut the door.
“Did I do right bringin’ this Unsouled monk up the mountain, then, Pa?” She settled into another of the Elector’s chairs.
“You did right to let him up, daughter,” Calhoun assured her, and then he grinned, his deep eyes twinkling. “You did right to make him work for it, too.”
She laughed. “I’d a brung him direct if I’d a knew he was tellin’ the truth about bein’ your friend.”
“Penn’s English, child,” the old man said to her, and his shoulders slumped a little. “Yes, he’s my friend. He’s your friend, too, and he’s come on an important mission, which I need to discuss with you.”
He deftly shut the locking knife with one hand, then slipped it into a pocket in his breeches and laid the staff aside.
“I’m here, Father,” Sarah said, and she sat on the edge of her seat to take the Elector’s gnarled and suntanned paw in her two smooth ivory hands. Poor girl. Can she handle my news? Will she make the right decisions on her hard road?
“Dear sweet child,” the Elector began after a pause. “I’ve kept something from you all your life. I’ve told you a lie, and I don’t regret it, because it was a necessary lie and a lie that saved your life, but I fear you’ll be hurt and angry with me. Before I tell you the truth, I want you to understand I love you very much, and I hope you’ll be able to forgive me.”
The tender words were incongruous coming from a face so cragged and careworn. Sarah’s lip trembled and her good eye looked a little glassy.
“Sarah, my child,” Elector Calhoun continued, and he squeezed her hands so tight his knuckles whitened. “I’m not your father.”
She sobbed, once, and then regained control. Thalanes bowed his head out of respect for her emotion.
There was a brief silence, and then Sarah spoke again, in a tremulous voice. “Who are my parents?”
Calhoun nodded. “Your parents were good friends of mine, friends and allies. I shed blood on the sands of Texia with your father in the Spanish War, and I served under your great-grandfather, your mother’s father, in the Ohio Forks War. I took you in, as my own child, out of love for all of them.”
He looked her in the eye. “I raised you out of love for you.”
“Who were they?” she repeated. “Were they Appalachee? Are they Appalachee? Are they dead?” She must know the answers to these questions, Thalanes thought, I’ve practically already told her. He would have liked to comfort her, but that was not his role now.
“Your father fought alongside me in the Spanish War,” the Elector repeated. “He was captain of the Cahokia volunteers, and he was only a prince at the time. Prince and not even heir.”
“Kyres Elytharias,” Sarah whispered. “The dead King of Cahokia.”
“Not just dead, child,” Thalanes said, “but murdered. You are his oldest child, and heir to his throne. You are the rightful Queen of Cahokia.”
“You’re the heir to two kingdoms, my dear daughter,” Calhoun told her. “Pennsland is also yours by right of inheritance.”
“Pennsland ain’t a kingdom,” Sarah said. She seemed to have an innate reflex that made her kick back against everyone and everything, even her foster father. “It’s private land, all owned by the Penn landholder in the name of the Penn family.”
“Yes,” Calhoun agreed calmly. “By right, you’re the Penn landholder.”
“Your fairy tale is true, then,” Sarah said to Thalanes. “At least, some of it is. I’m the daughter of Mad Hannah. But what do you mean, ‘murdered’? You said before that the Imperial Consort died in an accident.”
“She was never mad,” Thalanes murmured, remembering the fiery, willful empress. “She was wise and good and strong, and she suffered greatly at the hands of designing men.” He paused, his memories of the terrible night fifteen years earlier heavy on his soul. “It has generally been told that Kyres Elytharias died of a fall from his horse. That story is a lie; your father was murdered by one of his own guard, by one of the Philadelphia Blues, while they stood watch together.”
There was silence for a time.
“This changes nothing,” Sarah finally said, and her voice was fierce and a little bitter. “Why did you come, monk? Did you want to tell me my mother is dead? I read that in the Nashville Imperial Intelligencer this morning.”
“He came to take you with him,” Calhoun told her, “and, like it or not, you have to go.”
She sobbed again, sudden and hard, and her accent flooded back. “You’re gonna cast me out?”
Calhoun pulled his foster daughter into a crushing one-armed embrace, kissing her cheek and whispering into her ear. “You always have a place here. I would give anything to protect you. But I don’t have the strength to resist the emperor.”
She pulled away from her foster father and turned to face Thalanes, tears streaked down her face, her emotion-reddened complexion softening the stark horror of her bad eye. “The emperor wants me?”
The monk nodded. “The Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton is the emperor’s man. He is chaplain to the emperor’s own Imperial House Light Dragoons, the Philadelphia Blues, but their relationship goes far back, and he has always been your uncle’s servant.”
“My uncle,” Sarah whispered thoughtfully. “But you said he didn’t know about Hannah’s children. You said someone told him.”
With an effort, Thalanes forced the words out, nodding in acknowledgement of his shame. “He didn’t know. But I was your mother’s confessor in her confinement, as I had been your father’s before that. I was the servant who brought you here, a newborn infant, and hid you with the Elector and his family, and I was the fool who allowed your mother to talk me into telling her about you. What you were like, and where I had hidden you.”
Tears flowed down Sarah’s cheeks now, but her voice was firm. “So what?”
Thalanes steeled himself with a deep breath. “Two weeks ago, your uncle learned his sister had given birth to triplets, fifteen years earlier. He had her tortured. Put her on the rack like some medieval heretic, pulled her fingernails out, and did worse. He tortured her until she told him everything she knew about the children. Tortured her to death.”
Sarah was silent, stunned.
“I don’t believe your uncle learned where your brother and sister are located, because I don’t believe the Empress Hannah knew that information. I don’t know it, myself. I don’t think the empress knew who had hidden her other two children; I certainly didn’t tell her, though I could have. But I know that Thomas Penn learned where to find you. And I know he learned of my role…my treachery, as he and his servants have called it.”
“That’s what Angleton was talking about,” Sarah realized.
He nodded, wretched. And Angleton was right, too. Thalanes had committed treason against the emperor, and a jury of twelve good Pennslanders and true might very well sentence him to hang for it, if it ever came to a trial. Only his betrayal of the Empress Hannah had been much worse—he never should have told her about Sarah, no matter how much she had importuned. And he had betrayed Sarah’s father, too, in his turn—he never should have let the king take a turn standing watch, that dark night when he had been murdered.
“I narrowly escaped Philadelphia with my life,” he said. “I came here to take you with me, and to hide you again where Thomas cannot find you.”
“You must go with him, my daughter,” Calhoun urged her.
“What if I don’t want to go?” she asked.
Could she possibly be so stubborn? “Please,” Thalanes said, “I beg you, you must. Angleton had to have raced out of Philadelphia on my heels to have gotten here so soon, but the emperor has more powerful servants, and they’ll be after you soon, if they aren’t already on their way. And you saw that even the priest was willing to kill you.”
Thalanes felt a pang of guilt, realizing he was manipulating her, but he knew it was necessary. This girl was so strong-willed and rash, she might get it into her head to run off alone to try to inflict vengeance on the Martinite.
“I saw he was a terrible shot.” Sarah’s accent returned. “Pa, let me stay. I won’t go back to town, at least not for a spell, and that fool preacher’ll ne’er find his way up here.”
The Elector looked racked by guilt and fear. “It isn’t wise, Sarah.”
“Please,” Thalanes whispered.
“I won’t do it.” She stood.
“You must!” Thalanes yelled, leaping to his feet and closing in on her. His own voice sounded far away, and he tried to calm down, to keep his distance, to employ gentle persuasion, but he roared into the child’s face. “I will not have the blood of another Penn on my hands! You will come with me! You must! I order you!”
She took one step back and looked at him, nostrils flared and the eyebrow over her good eye arched high and proud. “Must I?”
He stopped himself. What had he done? Let no will be coerced, the first precept. It was so important that Thomas Penn not capture and kill this child. But could Thalanes coerce her will, even if he tried? “Please,” he said again simply.
Sarah spun on her heel and left by the dogtrot door.
* * *
He forgave Obadiah for letting the girl go. It wasn’t easy, because she was such an abomination, but Ezekiel Angleton’s Savior had forgiven him his debts, so Ezekiel in turn forgave his own debtors.
Even hard-hearted, unbelieving Obadiah.
Besides, he hadn’t trusted Obadiah enough to tell him what they were after; if he had, Obadiah might have delivered the child to him, neat and tidy, earlier that morning. Ezekiel had reaped, and Ezekiel had sown. Perhaps he had erred because he was too tired—Ezekiel had not slept well on the journey down to Nashville, dreaming often, disturbed dreams of running through the forest.
He considered the possibility that it might have been a mistake, also, not to have strengthened himself with magic before he had ever entered the tent. He dismissed that self-criticism immediately; he hadn’t the power to maintain decent battle magic even for a very long skirmish, much less employ it repeatedly throughout a single day, and he had had no idea when, or if at all, he might encounter the child. Entering the tent that morning, he had expected at most to get a glimpse of the girl, or get information about her.
Besides, even to think that he could strengthen himself with magic was a childish and ridiculous contradiction in terms. Any physical strength he piled upon himself by means of gramarye would be torn from him in the form of exhaustion or sickness after. If he had cast combat magic, his favored ani gibbor incantation, for instance, and Thalanes had still managed to help the girl escape, Ezekiel would now be empty-handed still, and also drained.
Magic was best in tiny, shaped applications. Combat spells were best reserved for actual battle.
He also forced out of his mind the smug thought—the suggestion of a thought—that it served Obadiah right to get shot in the foot. The thought was not Christian. Ezekiel had already cast some simple magic to speed along the healing of Obadiah’s injured foot.
Ezekiel didn’t like the fact that he himself had pointed a gun at the girl and pulled the trigger; he had been angry to have missed so badly, but also relieved. Killing the girl like that, unarmed, unjudged, wasn’t his intention. He was a man of God, he was a Christian knight, and he would do what he must do, absolutely anything that he must do, in order to remedy the blasphemy the girl represented, remove it from the face of the earth, but simply killing her was the crudest possible solution.
He much preferred to capture her and take her back to Philadelphia, where the emperor himself, and the emperor’s magistrates, could judge her.
“I fink this’ll do the trick, won’t it?” Obadiah asked. “Can’t you, er, wot you…? Wiff ’er ’air? An’ then it ben’t a total loss.”
Ezekiel looked down again at the black hairs in the palm of his hand. “I’m pleased with your work, Obadiah.” He forced himself to smile. “It would have been very convenient if you had managed to keep hold of the child this morning, but you’re correct, this will do the trick very nicely. We’ve been blessed.”
Obadiah grinned, like a stupid, vicious dog that fears a beating and is scratched behind the ears instead.
They sat at a table in the low-ceilinged common room of a run-down Nashville inn, the John Paul Jones, its signboard featuring a chipped painting of the famous sea captain in his blue bicorn hat. Ezekiel had unstrapped his sword, a long, straight weapon inherited from his father (who had been a soldier in the Order of the Friends in Christ of Eugene of Savoy, and who had died in the dungeons of Turkish Vienna), from his belt and laid it across his lap. His black steeple hat sat beside him on the bench.
Light streamed into the tavern’s common room, tinted green and amber, through rough bottle-glass windows. The noon crowd had come and gone while Ezekiel dealt with the town watch and the mess of the tent, and now he and his servant had the privacy of a corner booth. The tobacco smoke cloud left by the midday diners had mostly dissipated, but all the sour smells lingered.
Ezekiel hated the Appalachee. He didn’t care much for their food (he ached for a bowl of pease porridge and a good hot huckleberry pie), or their lewd clothing with its exuberant colors, or their ceaseless liquor and tobacco, but what really bothered him was their constant mewling about freedom. About their liberties.
As if the only true freedom were not the freedom to follow the will of God, to show your election by living his covenant. And by the grace of God, Ezekiel Angleton knew, the elect would find freedom also from death.
“Get me your bowl, would you, Mr. Dogsbody?” Ezekiel ordered.
He untied his purse and set it aside, as far away from himself on the table as he could, and then considered the hairs while Obadiah stumped upstairs for his kit. A minor lodestone-finding sort of spell should suffice, and wouldn’t exhaust him.
He had aided and entertained his friend Thomas—His Imperial Majesty, he reminded himself—at Harvard many times with such trivial gramarye. He’d cast wakefulness cantrips on nights before examinations and sobering hexes on mornings after revelry for his gentleman room-mate, young Colonel Lord Thomas Penn. Thomas was older than Ezekiel, and was already then a veteran of the Spanish War, but, other than with respect to the minutia of ascendants and triplicities, and the bloody details of military history, he was an absent-minded student. Thomas perpetually lost books and needed Ezekiel’s help to find them. All those little magics, and Ezekiel had spent most of his time with Thomas at Harvard feeling sick and wasted.
He’d had the hangover, without the drunken riot.
Thomas had always been needy and always a drain, until the night when Ezekiel’s Lucy had died, young Lucy Winthrop. Ezekiel’s eyes swam in sudden hot tears as he thought of the lost love of his youth. He remembered whispering professions of faithfulness to her through the double-bell-ended courting stick across the great hearth of the Winthrop family home. He’d been a penniless young theology student, but the great man, Samuel Winthrop, had accepted Ezekiel’s love for his daughter. They had slept together in her parents’ home, separated by the bundling board and her feet bound together for chastity’s sake but holding hands and sharing dreams through the night, they had planned a home and children, they had published the banns in Boston’s Old North Church.
Then Lucy had fallen from her mother’s calash on a bright Sunday morning in spring, on her way to a lecture on the Prophets by the great Bishop Franklin, one of Franklin’s very last.
She had died suddenly and alone.
Ezekiel had lain drunk in a Boston gutter for weeks, time he had never been able clearly to remember, other than that he recalled begging for pennies with which to buy liquor.
Her family, the Winthrops, rejected him. His own family had never been any use, too few and, with his father gone, always too poor to help, so their failure in his moment of crisis had come as no surprise and cost him no pain.
But Thomas had taken him in. Thomas had drunk with Ezekiel until the beasts within were well and truly insensate, and then dried him out. Thomas had ordered the deans of Harvard—ordered them—not to expel Ezekiel, and had similarly instructed Ezekiel’s professors. Thomas had been the one to recommend Ezekiel to the Father-General of the Order of St. Martin (and had that also been phrased as a command?), and among the Martinites Ezekiel had thrived. Later, after Ezekiel had graduated from Harvard, Thomas had found him a series of posts and preferments, including, finally, the coveted position of chaplain to the emperor’s own Philadelphia Blues.
Thomas had pulled Ezekiel up with him.
So Ezekiel was glad that he had been able to help Thomas find lost objects now and then as a student, and for every assistance he had been able to render his master. He would retrieve this girl and return her to Thomas, just like any lost object, and then, somehow, he would learn where the other two were hidden.
He was more than happy to serve—when he had heard Mad Hannah’s confession, and the location and description of the oldest child, he had sprinted from Penn’s Slate Roof House to run to Nashville and find the girl, stopping only long enough to get his warrant sworn out before a Philadelphia magistrate.
He looked at the dried blood and the wiry black strands. Not a beautiful child. Cursed by its Serpentborn blood, or she would have been handsome, like her mother.
He remembered Mad Hannah—mad to have taken a soulless Eldritch king as a lover—as she had been at the end. She had had blood in her hair, too, and on her ruined fingers and on her face, but she hadn’t confessed or asked forgiveness. Ezekiel had given her absolution, anyway. It was in his power, and it was the Christian thing to do, even though she was a heretic and an Ophidian, and even though at his master’s bidding Ezekiel had participated in the interrogation that had ended in her death.
Thomas had prepared the announcement to the news-papers of her death in advance. He had shown them to his sister after she had broken.
Obadiah returned with his simple wooden bowl.
“Let us contrive a tool.” Ezekiel laid the hairs into the bottom of the bowl and then poured some of his drink, a little light-colored beer, over them. From his pocket he produced a vial of quicksilver and let a small drop fall into the bowl. It rolled to the bottom, coming to rest on the thick hairs.
Obadiah looked as if he was holding his breath.
Ezekiel cleared his mind and then let it fill with an image of the girl, as he had seen her that morning. Pasty white skin, angry red eye, ragged black hair, sluttish dress. He thought of her essence, of the blasphemy that she was, the Unsouled blood staining the holy escutcheon of the House of Penn, and he willed all those images into the bowl, into the beer, into the hair and mercury.
He took the wooden bowl in his two hands and leaned in close, the exhalations from his nostrils on the beer like the breath of God on the waters of the First Day. He felt his will gathering in his throat, and, closing his eyes, he formed it into words.
“Ani mechapes yaldah,” he muttered in Hebrew, and he felt his power moving through the words of the ancient, sacred language into the bowl, “ani mechapes yaldah.”
As he finished speaking, he opened his eyes. The drop of quicksilver trembled, rolled steadily up through the beer, moving along the hairs and turning them with it, and then stopped, quivering, dragging the tail of hairs out behind it like a comet.
Ezekiel sagged in his seat, weary.
“Wayland’s ’ammer,” Obadiah muttered.
“This will take you straight to her tonight,” Ezekiel said. “Go to the market and gather three or four big men; I’ll wait here for you. Take my purse, offer them a crown each for a few hours’ work. If they’re reluctant, go as high as a pound. Take the warrant to show them, in case any of them worries about law.”
Obadiah stood gingerly, adjusting his belt under his paunch. “Aye, Father.”
“If any of them worries about sin,” Ezekiel told his servant, “assure them that I’ll give them absolution, in advance.” He smiled, an expression that he meant to be wise, calm and fatherly. “After all, this is the Lord’s work.”
Obadiah trundled out the door on his errand, and Ezekiel raised a hand to get the attention of the tavern’s girl. He couldn’t get the huckleberry pie he wanted, but he’d make do with another beer.
* * *
“I’d be happy to abduct you,” Cal offered around a mouthful of boiled pork and griddle cake. “We could move right away from here. There’s plenty of empty land in Appalachee, and you know I can hunt, skin, trade, and build a cabin. And the Elector has always said he’d set me up with my own herd—I reckon he’d do that even if I abducted you. Or I could rustle someone else’s. Those Donelsons up Knoxville way’ve always got more cows’n they know how to count.”
“You’re sweet, Calvin,” Sarah told him, “but then you’d have to be married to me, and that’d jest be me out the fryin’ pan, you in the fire.”
Cal sipped water from his jar and scuffed the dirt with his feet. “Aw, Sarah, you ain’t all that bad.”
“I reckon not,” Sarah agreed bitterly, “to a stone drunk feller, so long as he could only see the one half of my face.” She set her tin plate aside, food untouched, and drew her knees up under her chin.
They sat on a wooden bench of the Elector’s making in the late afternoon. The long meadow, copses of trees and scattered cabins on top of Calhoun Mountain were accented all around with benches and seats like this one—Andrew Calhoun had been a carver and improver all his life.
Sarah had needed to talk to someone, someone who was neither the Elector nor the odd little monk. And she needed someone who was old enough to understand, but she didn’t want to discuss her day’s revelations with any of her brothers and sisters. Calvin was the natural choice.
Sarah couldn’t hate the Elector, because she looked into his eyes and saw that he loved her and had only done what he thought he’d had to. Besides, he still felt like her father…more or less. The Eldritch warrior of the Ohio, the musketeer swordsman hero of both Battles of the Ouachita and also of the Siege of Mobile, was a figure of history to her, and not someone she could understand. She didn’t really feel like she had a father at all—the one had rejected her and the other felt cold and foreign.
With poor Mad Hannah, on the other hand, she had instantly felt a kinship. Loathed and feared by everyone, locked away by her brother, the Empress Hannah fascinated Sarah. She felt close to the cloistered and betrayed woman.
Betrayed, that was how Sarah felt.
“A pretty face ain’t the only thing a man values in a wife,” Cal offered.
“Which is to say I ain’t pretty, but don’t worry my ugly little head about it. Thank you very much, Calvin Calhoun, I shan’t forget it. I shall feel mightily comforted in my dark hours knowin’ that you’re the kind of feller’s willin’ to marry hisself a deformed woman.”
“Sarah Calhoun,” Cal objected, “that ain’t fair!”
“No,” she conceded, “it ain’t fair. And I ain’t Sarah Calhoun, neither. I’m…” She trailed off as she realized she wasn’t sure just what her name was. “Well, you can call me Sarah for the time bein’. Jest plain Sarah, iffen you please.”
“Old Andy don’t want you to leave,” Cal insisted. “You’re his favorite, Sarah.”
“I ain’t even his,” she muttered.
“You can’t really mean that,” Cal pressed. “When all his natural-born granddaughters were out plowin’ and cookin’ and stitchin’ shirts, he never let you leave his side, and it was always ‘remember me the year of the Peace of Augsberg,’ and ‘by what hilarious name did the Emperor Ferdinand call the execution of his wife Queen Adela Podebradas’ and ‘gimme your amo-amas-amat backward this time,’ like he wanted you to be ready to go be a schoolmarm, like he thought you needed to be as smart as him. That old man loves you!”
“Not a schoolmarm,” Sarah said, thinking out loud. “He wanted me ready to be a queen.” She felt lonely and tired.
“The Elector wouldn’t cast you out for love or money, Sarah,” Cal finished his pitch. “He must b’lieve it ain’t safe here for you.”
Sarah thought of the cruel-eyed Roundhead preacher who had shot at her. She shook her head, embarrassed to think how foolish she had been, standing to face that man and daring him to shoot her. “I reckon he’s right, too, Cal. I gotta leave tonight.”
Calvin looked uncertain. “You’re gonna go with the little priest.”
Sarah sighed. She didn’t yet trust the monk. Her feelings about the Elector, her father…her foster father…had become unexpectedly complicated. This morning, she had loved him devotedly. Now she felt tricked and rejected, but at the same time she still loved him as the only father she had ever known, and didn’t wish him hurt in any way.
“No, Cal,” she said slowly. “I b’lieve I gotta escape from him, too.” She turned her face to Calvin and smiled.
“Jest don’t go escapin’ without me,” Cal said. “I wouldn’t regard that as fair.”
“Iffen I did, Calvin Calhoun,” she said, “who’d sing me to sleep on the road?”
“Nobody, and you’d be thankful.” He laughed. “Besides, I know how to get off the mountain.”
“How’s that then, fall? I reckon I’ll just do a bit of hexin’, trick my way out the door without Red Charlie or Caleb e’er bein’ the wiser.”
“I can save you the trouble,” he offered, “iffen you know how to climb a tree.”
“I can climb,” she hesitated. “I jest don’t know iffen it’s such a good idea for you to come along, Calvin.”
“It’s easy enough,” Cal persisted. “Black Charlie and Abe and a couple of those fellers got a cave on the west slope where they like to get drunk and dance to the Crooked Man. I caught ’em sneakin’ back in once, when I’s out doin’ a bit of rustlin’. Nothin’ to it, they’s this tree as grows close to the cliff on the west side, and any halfway decent climber can use it jest like a ladder, up and down. We could even sleep the night in their cave, if we wanted, get a start walkin’ in the mornin’.”
Sarah feigned astonishment. “Calvin Calhoun, are you tellin’ me that they’s folks on this mountain still worship the Crooked Man, and you don’t have principles as make you put a stop to it?”
Cal shrugged. “Sure, I got principles. And I also got friends. And while I reckon that fillin’ their bellies with corn liquor, strippin’ off their clothes and howlin’ at the moon in the name of some crazy old hill god makes ’em gone gumps, I don’t reckon it means they’re goin’ to Hell for it. Besides, I think it’s mostly a place they keep for takin’ girls to.”
“Shockin’.”
“That’s life, I reckon.”
“Tree sure sounds easier.” Sarah considered. “All right.”
She didn’t really think Cal would show up, and if he did, he could be helpful to her in making an escape without actually marrying her. And if he insisted, well…no, he wouldn’t persist with this foolish notion of marrying Sarah. It was pure Appalachee gallantry, and she loved him for it, but it would pass.
“It’s a plan, then,” he said. “In the cattle market we might spit and shake hands, but I know you’re as good as your word.”
“I won’t hold you to your offer, Calvin Calhoun,” Sarah said, “and I won’t think less of you iffen you change your mind. But iffen you still want to abduct me, I reckon I’ll be out here on this bench tonight with a bundle of necessaries, as soon as the Elector falls asleep.”
* * *
Cal was on his way to put together a pack.
He stepped around the corner of Azariah Calhoun’s cabin, nodding to old Granny Clay. Granny sat sucking her gums on the porch in a rocking chair the Elector had made for her twenty years earlier and which she had scarcely left since. She wore the same red shawl, year in and year out, and only ever looked any different if she had a plate of food on her lap, or if it was winter and one of her grandchildren had spread a blanket over her.
Granny Clay smiled at Cal, toothless and slow, and he smiled back.
Then someone threw a sack over his head.
He was caught by surprise, but Lord hates a man as leaves his pants down after he’s been walked in on, so Cal laid about him with his fists. He pounded his knuckles into flesh and bone more than once before he heard the voice of his grandfather whisper in his ear, “be still, Calvin.”
“Yessir,” he answered, and obeyed.
His moccasined feet felt solid earth under their soles and he heard breathing around him for several minutes, but the winding route he was led along defied his sense of direction, and when his captors finally stopped, Cal had no idea where he was. He could feel the heat on his skin and smell the burning wood of a fire, but the bag was too thick to let through any light stronger than glimmers.
A voice spoke. Cal recognized it as belonging to his Uncle David.
“Calvin Calhoun,” David intoned gravely, “do you declare, upon your honor afore these here gentlemen, as how you freely and voluntarily offer yourself a candidate for the mysteries of Masonry?”
Masonry?
Then Cal remembered what his grandpa had told him. He’d half expected a wedding, and was more than a little disappointed to find out his grandfather had something different in mind.
Still, he knew what to say. “I do.”
“Do you sincerely declare, upon your honor afore these here gentlemen, as how you solicit the privileges of Masonry because of a favorable opinion conceived of the institution, a desire of knowledge, and a sincere wish of bein’ serviceable to your fellow-creatures?” Still David.
“I do.” Cal gulped. What did this have to do with Sarah?
“Do you sincerely declare, upon your honor afore these here gentlemen, as how you will cheerfully conform to all the ancient established usages and customs of the fraternity?”
“I do.” He had no idea what those usages and customs might be.
The bag was yanked off Cal’s head. He stood in a clearing, and around him in a circle ranged roughly twenty of the senior men of his family, uncles, older cousins, and of course his grandfather. His uncle David held an open Bible. A third of the men held burning torches. Before Calvin on the ground lay a white sheet embroidered with many colors of thread. In his quick look at the patterns, Calvin spotted two stylized pillars, a cross and a square and compass. There was a boxy shape that might have been an altar, and above it, dominating the scene, a capital letter G.
Two of his older cousins started to pull off Calvin’s clothes. Following a nod from the Elector, he helped them, and stripped down to just his long hunting shirt. The night was chilly, even with the torches and the trees to break the wind.
David spoke again. “Brethren, at the request of Mr. Andrew Calhoun, Mr. Calvin Calhoun has been proposed and accepted in the regular form. I therefore recommend him as a proper candidate for the Mysteries of Masonry, and worthy to partake of the privileges of the fraternity.”
“Amen,” rumbled Cal’s assembled male relatives.
One of his cousins handed Cal an unfamiliar pair of breeches, and he stepped into them. His cousins put one of his feet in a slipper, pulled one arm out of its sleeve, and the last thing they did before wrapping a blindfold over his eyes was hang a knotted noose and short rope around his neck.
Cal resisted the urge to laugh as a means to calm his nerves; the Calhoun men around him didn’t look to be in a jovial mood.
Blind and shivering, Calvin heard a noise like rapping at a door.
Knock, knock, knock.
“Who comes there?” The voice was his cousin Shadrach’s. “Who comes there? Who comes there?”
* * *
It was very important not to drink the compass. This was harder than it sounded, because Obadiah was thirsty.
He’d done as the Right Reverend Father had directed him, and it had been easy. Four men, heavy and scarred, had been happy to join up with Obadiah for the promised crown. None of them had asked to see the warrant, and two of them had laughed out loud when Obadiah mentioned the promised absolution of their sins. Fair enough; he would have done the same.
Father Angleton had ridden with Obadiah and the four hired men out of town—in the afternoon, before the sun had set and Nashville’s town watch had dropped the portcullis—but he’d waited behind, in a forest clearing in the valley, not far from the Charlotte Pike, while Obadiah had taken his posse comitatus, duly authorized if not particularly interested in its own authority, and crept up the hill in the dark.
The clear night sky gave enough glow that Obadiah could look into the bowl by its light and see the mercury blob. He couldn’t walk and read the compass, but he trod carefully through the autumnal leaf fall from one clearing to the next (extra carefully, as, even with the accelerating effects of the Right Reverend Father’s spell upon its healing process, his foot was still sore), stopping whenever he was under open sky to check his bearing.
The men didn’t complain, and Obadiah wondered what sort of men they must be, to follow around a foreigner with his face in a bowl in the hills at night. Desperate men, no doubt. Might they be desperate enough to cut Obadiah’s throat for whatever might be in his purse?
Obadiah loosened his pistols in his belt and checked that his sword was still on his hip.
They had come across a path, early, that seemed to lead up the hill where the compass was directing them, but Obadiah had eschewed it in favor of creeping through the trees. His mission was to make a lawful arrest, if convenient, but he had heard enough stories about the crazed bushwhacker clans of Appalachee that he preferred to make this lawful arrest as quietly and as secretly as he possibly could. Preferably the inbred mountain men would all be drunk and snuggling their sisters, and Obadiah could sneak in unnoticed, grab the witchy-eyed girl the Right Reverend Father was so interested in, and get out again.
Obadiah found the thought of the drunk cracker varmints cuddling up to their filthy sisters so distracting he almost walked headlong into a stone wall, and kept from spilling the beer compass only by a combination of fierce concentration and good luck.
His posse laughed.
“Shut it, ye!” Obadiah hissed.
He looked up. The wall was a natural cliff of stone, a sudden rise creating a gray limestone crown on the top of the mountain. He looked closely at the rock—it was pocked and dimpled and cut through with crevices such that a smaller, more limber man might have been tempted to climb it.
Not Obadiah.
He considered his options. The trail he had foregone would hit this wall to his left, if it didn’t circle around it entirely, but, again, he didn’t want to try formally to serve notice of his Warrant on some gap-toothed, hatchet-wielding Appalachee brawler at the gate. He needed a hidden way up this stone, so he decided to turn right and follow the cliff around.
He was about to inform his crew when he chanced to look down and saw, in the silvery-amber puddle of moon-illuminated beer, a moving shadow. He put his eye closer to the compass and squinted. The quicksilver was moving visibly. It was moving fast.
Obadiah was no surveyor, but he knew enough about direction and distance to realize that if the girl was moving rapidly enough to make the compass needle move with her, visibly to his unaided eye, then either she was moving very quickly indeed, or she was very close.
The quicksilver rolled around the rim of the bowl and stopped, pointing right.
“This direction,” Obadiah whispered. “Guns ready, she ben’t far now.”
He pulled his pistol and led the way, beer compass now a little more precarious in his left hand alone, but it shouldn’t matter if he spilled it, once he had the little witch. He fought his way through a wiry octopus of briar and followed the limestone cliff around a sharp corner, and then stopped abruptly when he saw the boy.
The wheezing, tiptoeing ruffian immediately behind Obadiah did not stop, and when he bumped Obadiah it wasn’t hard, but it was enough to knock the bowl compass from his grasp, spilling the beer, hair, and mercury into the dirt. Obadiah muttered a curse and pushed the man back with his elbow, but the boy hadn’t reacted, and Obadiah could see the girl now, too.
Obadiah looked over his shoulder. For just a moment, in the shadow of the cliff, he thought he saw not four, but six men following him, six hulking silhouettes with their faces hidden in the darkness. Bloody grifting freeloaders, some Nashville scum heard there was easy money to be had and decided to tag along. But then he blinked, and the number of men in the posse returned to the expected four. Trick of the light, and Obadiah looked forward again to focus on his quarry.
A skeletal maple tree climbed up the limestone, all its branches growing out away in the other direction, right where the cliff dipped in a little notch. At the foot of the tree stood the tall, gangly lad from the Fair, long red hair tied behind his neck and hanging over a much-patched wool coat. Two packs lay on the ground by his feet, as well as a musket—an ancient matchlock, fitting for these impoverished dirt-scratchers—and a tomahawk hung from his belt. He stood with his back to Obadiah, looking up into the maple and coaxing along the girl.
She wore a similar heavy coat, no doubt over the revealing clothing Obadiah remembered from the Fair (he smiled, remembering the purple shawl with the golden suns on it, and in his memory he plumped the witch up to a more reasonable and ripe womanhood), and she picked her way from branch to branch, slowly clambering down the natural ladder of the tree’s limbs. How could this route be unguarded by the bushwhackers? But they probably had a guard at the top, death to any attacker fool enough to climb a tree in the face of defending gunfire.
Fine. They were coming down the mountain on their own, so he didn’t need to go creeping into the Appalachee stronghold. It was good to have luck on his side.
He turned back and whispered to the nearest hired man. “If you see anyffink movink at the top of that tree, shoot it.”
The thug nodded.
The boy’s back was turned and the girl was concentrating on her hands and feet, so Obadiah crept up easily. When the girl had almost reached the ground, he smashed the boy across the back of the head with a pistol butt. The young man fell like a slaughtered pig, hit the leaves, and lay still.
“No!” the girl shrieked. She looked up and saw that there was a twenty-foot climb between her and the notch in the cliff, but only inches between her and Obadiah Dogsbody.
“Mind the clifftop, lads.” Obadiah thumbed back the hammer of his pistol and pointed it at the boy. “My name be Obadiah Dogsbody, poppet. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“What do you want from me?” the scrawny thing asked, pulling herself back up a branch.
“Me? ’Erne’s ’oofs, I don’t want nuffink,” Obadiah said truthfully. “My master, the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton, would mickle like to ’ave a conversation wiff you. I regret that I didn’t wot that this mornink, or I’d ’ave nicked you then, an’ saved us all this bother.”
She hitched herself up another branch. “Your master tried to shoot me!” Her bad eye was goblin purple in the moonlight.
“Now see ’ere, I trow that was a misunderstandink,” Obadiah lied. “But do not misunderstand me now, you filffy wee beggar. I’m goink to start countink, an’ when I ’it five, I’m goink to blow your friend’s brains out into the autumn leaves. I ought to warn you that I ’ad but little schoolink as a child, an’ I ’ave been known to skip numbers. One!”
“Stop, that’s murder!” she begged, and he ground his teeth.
“Four!”
Witchy Eye jumped to the ground, suddenly docile. Grunting in satisfaction, Obadiah gripped her by the arm and aimed his pistol at her belly.