“Call no man harmless until he is dead. My education
ended early, but I believe I remember that much of Aristotle.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Fire!” Bill yelled.
Chikaak, the scout with the head of a coyote, discharged his Paget carbine immediately. Several of the others fired with him. Then, in a ragged volley, the rest did the same, until every beastkind warrior capable of holding a firearm—eighteen, slightly more than half—had shot.
Of the row of bark targets Jacob Hop had propped up on the log at the far end of the meadow, only two had fallen.
Jake thought he’d have done better than the beastfolk, but he was very careful in how he handled guns around Bill. Captain Sir William Johnston Lee, as his full name and titles would call him, had agreed that Jake could be his aide, or squire, or sergeant. On the other hand, Jake knew from the sidelong glances Bill still threw at him that the Cavalier was not fully convinced Jake was now free of possession by the Heron King.
“Bill, dat is better than before, hey?” he called from where he stood to the side of the drilling warriors.
Chikaak yipped his enthusiasm.
Calvin Calhoun the Appalachee was cleaning up the pots from their bacon breakfast (the beastkind generally preferred to forage for themselves in the woods, though Chikaak had happily eaten several lightly cooked strips) and packing the horses. As he had promised Queen Sarah he would, Bill was taking this opportunity to train her troop of soldiers.
“Reload!” Bill removed his floppy black hat and slapped it against his thigh. Again, Chikaak and a few others promptly began reloading. When he saw the look of exasperation on Bill’s face, Chikaak barked—two high-pitched yips and a long, low yodeling sound—and the other beastkind carabineers grabbed their powderhorns.
The remaining beastfolk warriors, the ones who lacked the fingers or the proper eye placement to be able to effectively use firearms, crouched in a row in front of their fellows. They held carbines too, but they had bayonets fixed to their weapons, and they pointed the blades toward the mostly unharmed plates of bark.
Each of the beastkind wore a shoulder strap from which hung one of the cartridge boxes taken from the Imperial House Light Dragoons Sarah and her company had defeated two days earlier on Wisdom’s Bluff. The boxes were wooden blocks with holes drilled in them, and in each hole rested a paper cartridge containing powder and shot. Bill’s idea, which he had explained with delight to Jake the evening before, was that each beastkind carabineer could empty first the cartridge box of the fighter in front of him and then his own, giving each shooter access to a large supply of ammunition. The shooters now reached forward to snatch cartridges from the boxes in front of them, mostly successfully.
“Pikemen, stand!” Bill shouted.
Nothing.
Chikaak barked again, this time a tone in the middle of his range that peaked sharply in pitch at the end. Without meaning to, Jake found himself imitating the sound in his head, and humming it slightly under his breath.
Jake had been born deaf and mute in the Hudson River metropolis of New Amsterdam. His parents hadn’t wanted him, so he’d knocked about with a merchant uncle on voyages up and down the Empire’s shores until a bad night in New Orleans and a run-in with the gendarmerie had left him half-prisoner, half-employee on the chevalier’s prison hulks on the Pontchartrain Sea. He had some ability to read lips, if the speaker used Dutch or French—both languages he could puzzle out a bit in writing—but mostly Jacob Hop responded to gestures and kicks.
At least, that was the life Jake thought he remembered. If he focused on it, the threads of his past disappeared into chaos, but if he relaxed and thought about nothing, he remembered snatches of experience. Stitching those rags together over time, he more or less remembered his youth.
He also remembered fragments of a life that was clearly not the life of Jacob Hop. He remembered racing at the head of a horde of animal warriors to shatter walls and bring kingdoms to their knees. He remembered the blood sacrifice of thousands of men on an altar raised to him, and he remembered marriages—not one, but several, over millennia—to glittering serpentine goddesses. He remembered the births of sons, and the humiliation of having to either defeat or be routed by his own spawn.
Because, for a few weeks, Jake had had a god in his body.
Simon Sword, the wrecking and reaving incarnation of the Heron King of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, had filled Jake’s body with his enormous soul. The soul had been too big for Jake’s frame, and the sheer spiritual pressure had burst out Jake’s nostrils, his ears, and his mouth—he had no better way to describe it—giving him the sense of hearing and the gift of speech he’d never had.
Washed by a flood of new sounds, Jake had found himself imitating them. When birds sang, he whistled back to them. He groaned softly to imitate the creak of harness. As he heard others speak, he subvocalized their words, even when he didn’t know their meaning.
And then he found that, very quickly, he did know their meaning. The god in his body had spoken lots of English, with Bill and with Sarah and with others, and upon the god’s departure, Jake was able to speak. Within minutes, he had found he could construct simple English sentences, too.
De gave van tongen, his preacher cousin Ambroos would have called it. The gift of tongues.
Though Ambroos might not have approved of the source of Jake’s gift.
Even Jake’s companions seemed to shift in and out of his memory, so that there were moments when he looked at Bill and couldn’t remember who the man was. The sole exception was Sarah. She was fixed and permanent, and she shone for Jacob Hop like a star.
Unevenly, the front row of beastkind lumbered to their feet.
“Hell’s Bells!” Bill roared. “Dismissed! We march in ten minutes!”
Most of the beastkind stood dully until Chikaak barked again.
Jake looked back to their camp in a stand of trees to see what Bill must have already seen; Sarah, Catherine, and Calvin were all mounted. Calvin led a string of horses—they couldn’t be entrusted to beastkind, either as mounts or to be led, because the presence of the beastfolk made the horses skittish. All the children of Adam in the party now wore blue coats, cloaks, and hats taken from the Imperial House Light Dragoons, other than Bill; Bill still wore red.
Bill stomped to join Jake, Chikaak slouching at his side.
“I’m sorry for our bad aim,” Chikaak yipped.
“But it’s improved, hey?” Jake pointed out.
“The aim is not my great concern.” Bill ground his teeth. “Naturally, I would be pleased as Punch if our soldiers were able to hit a man-sized target from twenty paces. Indeed, that is not an unreasonable requirement to impose on a musketeer. But even more pressing is the problem that only one of my warriors in five is even able to understand my commands when I give them. If we fight like barbarians, we lose half our strength!”
Chikaak growled low in his throat. “I could repeat your orders.”
“Yes, that’s what we are doing presently. And we may have to formalize that arrangement, if we can do no better. But if our soldiers cannot obey their captain’s shouted order until one of their number has shouted it a second time, we lose precious seconds at every step.”
“Ja,” Jake agreed. “And what if Chikaak is killed?”
“God forbid.” Bill nodded. “Or Peter Plowshare forbid, or whoever.” He rested one hand on the butt of a pistol tucked into his belt, and the other on Simon Sword’s horn, hanging at his waist from a shoulder strap.
“Peter Plowshare was a good god.” Chikaak bobbed his head and shoulders up and down enthusiastically. “I follow Sarah Elytharias Penn now.”
Bill sighed. “Well, Queen Sarah forbid, then. But now you’d better go find our trail. We ride in five minutes.”
“I found the trail this morning.” Chikaak grinned, exposing a row of yellow coyote teeth. “I don’t sleep much. Others are preparing to travel ahead.”
Jake abruptly remembered a massacre of Elfkind, under a star-bright sky, and an unrestrained dance of victory during which a thousand prisoners had been killed. He thought the memories were of the Ohio, which lay ahead of them on their journey.
They weren’t the memories of the deaf-mute Dutchman.
“I suppose,” Bill said, “I had better make you a sergeant as well. Jake, do you object?”
Jake shook his head.
“Very well, although I believe we are not quite following Freiherr von Steuben’s scheme, lacking both an officer and corporals. Allow me to consult Her Majesty as to the appointment. I think it’s unlikely she will disagree, but she is well-versed in a surprising range of subjects, and it is possible she has read the Freiherr’s blue book and has a view on the matter. Chikaak, please invite the…men to form up.”
Chikaak bounded away, tongue lolling out of his mouth, to carry out his instruction. He had a coyote’s head, and though he would have been a taller man than average if he stood straight, Chikaak never stood straight. He hunched forward, and every step was a leap, shoulders first. The reddish fur on his coyote head spread out along both shoulder and tapered down his back in a V-shape, before blooming again to cover his legs, which were also the (oversized) hind legs of a coyote. Bill sometimes described Chikaak as coyote-headed, but that wasn’t complete. Chikaak was a big, muscular coyote-satyr, but he had ten fingers, a quick wit, and the ability to speak English.
He’d be a good sergeant.
“May I join the scouts, Captain?” Jake asked Bill.
“You look contemplative, Jake,” Bill said. “I know you are a pond of much deeper water than I, and I’d be pleased to know what you’re thinking.”
Jake rubbed his chin. Bill’s jaw took only a day to go from clean-shaven to a full beard supporting his drooping mustaches, and even Calvin, who much younger than Jake, had stubble on his face. Jake was beardless. He always had been. “I’m not sure. Maybe my waters are deeper than even I know.”
Bill frowned and arched an eyebrow at him. “Keep an eye on those waters, Jake. We don’t want to be surprised.”
By a return of Simon Sword. Though Queen Sarah had said she could see when Simon Sword was present in another. Still, Jake nodded, then took to his horse.
He quickly found the scouts Chikaak had referred to, standing in trees to the side of the faint path they followed a few hundred yards ahead. One was a short man, with a man’s face but a bear’s arms. His paws didn’t let him squeeze a trigger effectively, so he was a pikeman, and his name was Oriot.
Sliitch was the other’s name, and he was one of the stranger warriors in Queen Sarah’s retinue. Sliitch’s head looked like a horse’s, only covered with long fur. The beastman had a hand but only a single arm, so he couldn’t use a carbine effectively, either as a pike or as a musket. Sliitch wore a pair of bandoliers crossed over his chest, from which hung four pistols. His eyes being set on opposite sides of his head, though, meant that Sliitch had poor depth perception, and rarely hit the mark unless it was practically within reach. Also, he reloaded slowly. Beneath the bandoliers, his body branched into three legs, which caused him to run in an off-balanced fashion that was nevertheless very fast.
Sliitch and Oriot grunted back and forth to each other as Jake approached. Unconsciously, Jake found himself once again imitating the hoots and whistles of the beastkind. They came in short bursts, and no matter what the method of vocalization—growl, bark, whine, roar, whistle—the sounds were melodic. They changed in pitch. The beastkind were singing short melodies back and forth to each other.
Jake’s horse—acquired from the Imperial dragoons—had a carbine and a pair of long pistols holstered along its saddle. It had also come with a deck of cards in one of its saddlebags, and Jake now took these out to look at them.
“Go on,” he said in answer to Oriot’s questioning look and short whimper. “I’ll follow.”
The two beastmen jogged ahead, branches slapping them as they ran. Jake examined the cards. They were a Tarock deck; Jake had seen fortunetellers use such decks before, in many of the seaside towns he’d visited. He knew there was a Marseille Tarock some of the French liked, and a New World Tarock devised by old Bishop Franklin, and other decks. Jake had never handled any of them. Ambroos wasn’t the only preacher in the Hop family, and divinatory cards had been banned from his childhood home. This deck appeared to be Franklin’s Tarock, because the first card he turned over was Simon Sword. The Simon Sword in the miniature painting looked a little like Jake, young and blond, and he swung an enormous sword to behead three men simultaneously.
Simon Sword was definitely a creature of the New World, and wouldn’t belong in a French deck.
Jake hesitated at turning over the second card, fearing for a moment—unreasonably—that it too would bear the image of Simon Sword. It didn’t. On the face of the second card, Jake saw lightning bolts in the corners, a forest of saplings, and a man in a leather coat riding toward a sunrise.
He quickly counted the cards. There were four suits: cups, lightning bolts, swords, and coins, and in each suit a sequence of cards numbered one through ten, with a king, queen, knight, and page. Fourteen cards multiplied by four suits made fifty-six. These were the Minor Arcana, and each card had its own unique painting on it.
Beyond that there were twenty additional cards: the Major Arcana. These did not have suits, and around their edges the Major Arcana had interlocking cursive patterns almost like knots, each card with a unique motif. These cards had their own paintings too, and they were named at the bottom. Simon Sword was one of them. So were Peter Plowshare, and the Serpent, and the Horseman, and the Lovers. The Major Arcana were not numbered, or ordered in any other apparent way. Seventy-six cards in total.
A whistle from ahead stopped Jake’s exploration. He pocketed the cards and found Oriot running toward him. The bear-man was grunting melodically. Did that mean he was trying to say something?
When he reached Jake, he grabbed the Dutchman’s horse by its saddle and made a pained, thoughtful face.
“Ja?” Jake asked.
“Traaaaap,” Oriot finally said.
* * *
The queer little Dutchman galloped back toward Calvin, where he rode with Bill, Sarah, and Cathy Filmer. Jacob Hop wasn’t much of a horseman, it turned out; he bounced up and down above the saddle holding on for dear life, his blond hair bouncing with him.
Bill drew and cocked one of the multiple pistols he kept on his body and on the horse, a big Andalusian gray.
Cal raised the Kentucky rifle he carried across the saddle bow. The weapon was too long for the carbine scabbards all the dragoons’ horses had come with, but Cal favored the hunting rifle over the shorter military weapon, for accuracy and for his own familiarity with it.
“Er is a problem!” Hop gasped as he reined in his animal.
“Air?” Cal asked.
“He means there,” Bill said gruffly. “There is a problem.”
“Natuurlijk,” Hop said.
“Sir William,” Cathy Filmer drawled. “You have become an able interpreter.”
“Unwillingly, Mrs. Filmer, and only by necessity.”
Sarah straightened in the saddle, but said nothing. Instead, she removed the dirty gray strip of cloth that covered her gifted eye. Then she pulled the plain iron sphere that was one of the regalia of Cahokia, her father’s kingdom, from her shoulder bag, and looked into it.
Sarah had one normal eye, and one—so blue it was almost white—that had only opened recently. Through her witchy eye, she saw…things. Cal wasn’t even sure. She saw people’s spirits, and she saw ley lines, and he didn’t know what else.
Sarah sat proudly on her horse, and her jaw was set with determination. The strangeness of her witchy eye, the stubble growing on her skull—she’d shaved all her own hair off in an act of defensive magic only a few days earlier—and the orb in her hands gave her an unearthly look.
“A trap,” she said.
Cal couldn’t see what she was gazing at, and he wanted to know more. “What kinda trap?”
“Cahokians, Oriot says.” Hop smiled. “Though it was hard for him to say it. It is much easier to speak with Chikaak.”
As he said the coyote-headed beastman’s name, Chikaak jogged to join them. “I have run ahead to look. It is a trap.” He bounded from side to side with irrepressible energy as he spoke; Cal had half an idea that if he were standing instead of mounted, the beastman might throw himself on Cal’s knee and dry-hump his leg.
“You told me you had scouted this morning.” Bill frowned.
“The trap has been set since. Cahokians, Oriot is right.”
Jacob Hop nodded. “Er is a woman there, in a…carry-chair, what do you call it?”
“A sedan?” Bill asked.
“A sedan.” Hop nodded again. “She doesn’t touch the ground. And she has others with her, and they mostly look harmless.”
“Call no man harmless until he is dead,” Bill said. “My education ended early, but I believe I remember that much of Aristotle.”
“Aristotle, or perhaps Attila the Hun.” Cathy smiled and she leaned over to pat Bill’s thigh. She was too old for Calvin—who was in love with Sarah, anyway—but she wasn’t too old to notice, especially when she smiled.
“I’ll take good advice where I can get it,” Bill growled.
“In the trees, there are men hidden,” Hop said. “Dat is the trap.”
“How many?” Bill asked.
“They outnumber us.” Chikaak yipped low, a mournful sound. “Spears, swords, longbows, guns.”
“We can ride around,” Hop suggested.
Sarah returned the orb to her shoulder bag. “We’ll ride into the ambush,” she announced.
Bill inclined his head deeply. “Your Majesty. Perhaps the snare is not intended for us, and we can merely ride through.”
“Oh, this offer is meant for me,” Sarah said. “Only the buyer has no idea how much she’s going to get for her bargain.”
“At least let us git around behind these men,” Cal suggested. “Git the drop on ’em, iffen they feel like ambushin’ you anyway.”
Sarah nodded once, sharply. “Take some who can shoot with you. Sir William, I’ll need you at my side.”
“He’s jest about the only body as can shoot.” Cal laughed. “Jake, you want to come with me? I reckon you got a better chance of hitting anythin’ than that feller with bull hooves.”
“Agreed.” Hop turned his horse around.
“I’ll come, too.” Chikaak pointed with his carbine at the end of a long, narrow meadow. “If we go that way, we should come up behind these ambushers unseen.”
Cal followed Chikaak. The beastmen didn’t seem any faster in a sprint than an ordinary man, most of them, but they could run all day and not look tired. Now Chikaak paced out ahead of Calvin and Jacob Hop, leading the way.
Cal took one last look back at Sarah before he plunged into the trees and was separated.
“You know how to load those pistols, Jake?” he asked.
“I keep the pistols and the carbine loaded and primed,” Hop said. “I try to be discreet about it so as not to unsettle Bill’s mind.”
“He ain’t yet o’er the fact that you were Simon Sword.”
“I was not Simon Sword.” Jake spat the words, but then looked thoughtful. “I was Simon Sword’s prisoner.”
“I reckon I don’t quite understand what he wanted with you.” Cal and Jacob Hop followed Chikaak up a rocky defile. Here the beastman sergeant ran doubled over, sniffing the ground.
“I think dat he wanted to free Bill. I think dat he wanted to help Sarah recover the Cahokian regalia. I think dat he wanted exactly what happened on top of that mountain to happen. And dat, Calvin Calhoun, should give you pause.”
“Jerusalem, but it does,” Cal admitted. “And how do you think that should make Bill feel about you?”
Hop laughed. “Ja, exactly. And so I do not touch my guns in his sight, and I give him respect and obedience. Also, he is a good teacher, even though he does not quite trust me.”
“Well, I trust you,” Cal offered.
“You trust me? Or you trust Sarah, and what she says about me?”
“Shhh!” Chikaak turned and urged the two men to silence. The sight of a man’s finger shushing him in front of a coyote’s mouth, twisted into an imitation that almost looked like pursed lips, struck Cal as hilarious.
He bit his tongue to keep from laughing.
They tied the two horses to a tree and followed Chikaak up the next slope on foot. Cal was by long habit a silent walker—he’d been a rustler by trade at home, and wore high moccasins—and he was impressed now how quietly Jacob Hop moved, though he wore hard-soled leather shoes. All three held their long guns in one hand and a pistol in the other, and near the crest of the slope, Chikaak motioned to them to lie on their bellies.
They inched forward a few feet on their elbows and looked down.
The path they had been riding for two days now passed beneath them through a bowl. The circular valley had stands of white oak on two sides; one stand was at the bottom of the slope beneath Cal and his companions, and the other stood opposite.
Among the trees beneath them, some twenty men lay on their bellies. Half of them had long rifles pointed out into the bowl, and the other half lay with palms pressed to the earth, as if ready to spring to their feet at a moment’s notice. They wore small steel helmets and blue cloaks, and their spears, bows, and muskets lay on the ground beside them.
“Bit of an oversight of these soldiers not to post a guard up here on the ridge behind ’em,” Cal muttered.
“They had a guard,” Chikaak whispered.
Cal looked at the scout, whose only answer was a long, knowing grin.
If Chikaak had killed the guard he referred to, he’d hidden the body as well.
“More men under those other trees?” Cal whispered to the beastman.
Chikaak nodded, panting like a dog.
In the center of the bowl was a sedan chair, just as Chikaak had told them. It was in use, and held an occupant, though from here Calvin couldn’t see any detail. Eight burly men held the sedan on their shoulders by two long poles, two bearers to each corner.
Two men and a woman stood beside the sedan.
“How much time we got?” Cal asked.
“Not long,” Hop told him.
Cal sighted along the barrel of his rifle, first at the nearer trees and then at the farther stand. “How good are your eyes?”
“Not as good as my nose,” Chikaak said.
“Ja, good,” Hop said. “Better than when I was a boy, even.”
That was an odd answer, but Cal didn’t press it. “Am I right to think there are wasps’ nests o’er in those trees?”
The morning sun was at their backs, but Hop shaded his eyes anyway and squinted. “Ja, I think you have it right, friend Calvin. Or bees, maybe.”
“You can call me Cal.”
“Ja, and you call me Jake. You have a plan, Cal?”
“Mebbe,” Cal allowed.
“We’re badly outnumbered,” Chikaak said. “I didn’t think you were the sort of man to crave a hero’s death.”
“I ain’t, but Lord hates a man as ain’t willin’ to risk a hero’s death. We do nothin’, until the moment when we have to, to help Sarah. And when that time comes, I’ll think about those fellers o’er on the far side, iffen you two can manage the ones here on our doorstep.”
“Ja. You give me your pistol, and you can have my carbine.”
* * *
Sarah removed the bandage from her eldritch eye. She would ride into this meeting seeing everything, seeing more than the other side could see. And if she also discomfited the ambushing party with the sight of her one eye white as ice, so much the better.
Sarah was determined to take her father’s kingdom, at almost any cost. She needed her father’s kingdom and its power to rescue her sister and her brother, whom she had never met.
Acquainted or not, kin was kin.
She pushed her shoulders back and her chin up, conscious that no matter what she did, she’d still look like a scarecrow-filthy, twig-thin, dirt-faced ragamuffin, with all the hair scraped off her skull. So be it.
She fixed her face into a cold stare.
“Your Majesty,” Cathy Filmer and Captain Sir William Johnston Lee said together.
“Ride beside me,” Sarah said. “Sir William, I hope not to need your pistols.”
“They are here in any case, Your Majesty, loaded and ready.”
“As are mine,” Cathy added.
“Please form my guard up behind us. I would like the beastmen to look potentially threatening, though not poised immediately to attack. I hope that’s a reasonably clear distinction.”
“I have read some philosophy, Your Majesty.” Sir William turned to one of the beastkind, who now clustered around. “You, there. You understand me when I speak English? No? You? Nothing?”
One of the beastkind warriors, a seven-foot-tall woman with the head of a long-horned cow, raised a hand. The gesture was almost shy.
“Your name?” Sir William asked.
“Ferpa.”
“Two abreast, double file!” he snapped.
The ox-woman looked lost. “Double what?”
“One, two,” Sir William counted, pointing. “One, two. One, two. Yes?”
Ferpa nodded. “Muskets?” She faltered. “Pikes?”
Sir William shook his head. “Not today. If we fight, charge them like animals and give them hell. Understood?”
“Give them hell.” Ferpa laughed, delighted. Then she let out a series of mooing and squealing noises, at which all the beastkind laughed.
“You have delighted them, Sir William,” Cathy said.
“I wish I knew how,” he muttered. “But perhaps I have found my corporal. Freiherr von Steuben would be so pleased.”
Ferpa made further lowing noises and the beastkind lined up as Sir William had commanded.
“Two by two, Your Majesty,” Sir William said.
“Like the ark.” She smiled at him.
“Yes,” he agreed, “if Noah entered the ark protected by his goats and hippopotamuses, prepared to fight off an ambush on two fronts.”
“We’ll be fine,” she said.
“Your Majesty.” Sir William nodded.
“I recognize the improvements you’ve already made, Sir William. Don’t distress yourself for the progress you have yet to make.”
“I am not distressed,” he said. “A general goes to war with the army he has, not the army he hopes he may one day create.”
“That is true philosophy. Let’s hope that what we ride to isn’t war.” Sarah started her horse forward.
It might be war, though. She had gazed through the Orb of Etyles and along the ley line of the Mississippi. The river was out of sight now, but close enough that, with the Orb, she could touch it and use its power. She had seen what was waiting.
Firstborn.
The ambush was set by Cahokians, Chikaak had said. Cahokia was a kingdom, and any sort of person might wear its livery. What Sarah knew from gazing through the Mississippi was that the people waiting in hiding were her people, the Eldritch or Ophidian descendants of Adam and his first wife, sometimes called Wisdom.
She knew they were mostly men.
She knew they expected not a battle, but a lesser confrontation. An arrest, maybe, or something similar. They didn’t have the will to die written across their souls; instead, they had a demand to make.
And she knew that the leaders they followed included a woman borne on a litter by eight slaves.
The color of that woman’s aura, the timbre of it, if it had been music, the smell and feel of it, were familiar. The aura was close—not identical, but similar—to the aura that had once shone from the acorn that had fallen from Sarah’s own eye. It was like the aura that shone from the tree atop Wisdom’s Bluff that had sprouted from that acorn, close to the aura of the Orb of Etyles and the Sevenfold Crown.
Close to the aura of the father Sarah had never met.
Close to Sarah’s own aura.
Somehow, the woman in the palanquin was family.
One of her siblings? Her sister, Margaret? She didn’t think so. The woman felt too old to be Sarah’s triplet. Did her father have a living sister? Sarah had no idea.
How could this Firstborn woman, whoever she was, know to expect Sarah? Or did she? Were she and her men waiting in ambush for someone else?
It took an effort of will to neither speed up nor turn and run.
Sarah passed through two small valleys at a stately pace and entered a broad natural bowl. Wild grass grew tall all through it, and sturdy oak trees sheltered it on the east and west.
She saw the ambush immediately, through her talented eye. She saw it as a luminescent line of blue trying hard to flatten itself to the ground beneath each stand of trees.
“Under the oaks,” she said to her companions.
“I do not see the scoundrels,” Sir William said. “But that’s where I would hide my men.”
“They cannot mean to kill us, Your Majesty,” Cathy Filmer said. “They’re so far away, if they sprang their ambush, we could ride from the valley before they reached us.”
“I see our three friends, too,” Sarah said. “Don’t look, but they’re on the hilltop to the east, behind that line of Cahokians.”
“Perhaps the Cahokians are only here as bodyguards, Your Majesty,” Sir William suggested. “The woman we approach appears to be someone of importance.”
“Because she’s rich?”
“Because the man beside her holds a banner. And because she isn’t touching the ground, Your Majesty. I do not pretend to understand it, but there are members of Cahokia’s priestly caste—forgive me for using the term if it is offensive, Your Majesty, but these are your people.”
“My people—you mean Cahokians? The Firstborn?”
Sir William shook his head. “I mean the priests of Cahokia. The royal family is one line of a larger clan from which many of the hierophants, prognosticators, and entrail-gazers of the kingdom are drawn. And some of them, at certain times and for reasons I do not understand, insist upon not touching the ground.”
“You know this because you rode with my father?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. And there were periods—whole weeks at a time, though not corresponding to any calendar I could recognize—when he would eat in the saddle and sleep in a tree.”
“In a tree?” Sarah could hear the smile in Cathy Filmer’s voice. “Somehow, this detail didn’t make it into any of the songs about the Lion of Missouri.”
“He was a pious man,” Sir William said. “Though I did not understand his piety.”
“That woman is a priestess?”
“Likely,” Sir William said. “Or a very, very delicate flower, indeed.”
Sarah slowed her horse further and gazed at the stands of oak, trying to appear casual. The blue auras of the soldiers were agitated, and she reminded herself that she rode with a pack of monstrous warriors at her heels.
Like Herne in English belief, whose Wild Hunt rode the night sky once a year and destroyed anyone who witnessed the event, either by tearing them to pieces or by driving them mad.
“These people are my subjects,” she said gently, “let’s try not to kill them.”
“I can always try, Your Majesty,” Sir William said.
“Shall I act the herald again, Your Majesty?” Cathy asked.
Sarah considered the possibility. “No. Let’s meet them incognito.”
Sarah brought her horse to a stop. The beast was a big, fearsome animal, a mount more fit for a soldier than for a young woman, but it was obedient. The litter fifty feet away was made of silk and filled inside with cushions. The eight men who carried it were muscular and brutish-looking; they wore wool trousers and cotton shirts, and all wore a thin band of iron around their necks. The slaves, by their auras, were children of Eve.
Standing on the ground to one side were two men and a woman; she could tell these three were Firstborn even without the gift of her witchy eye, from the pallor of their skin, their slender eyebrows, and their long fingers. They looked a bit like Thalanes. They looked like Sarah herself.
The older of the two men had a weathered face, deep-set eyes, and hair sprouting from his ears. He wore a long gray tunic and gray leggings under his blue cloak and he looked on Sarah and her party coolly, probably counting the beastfolk and noting their weapons. A military man, or a counselor, or a spy. He was the man holding the banner on a ten-foot pole—when the breeze unfurled it, Sarah saw a horizontal gray bar across a royal blue field, and in the very center of the banner, the black silhouette of a flower blossom.
Beside the standard-bearer stood a much shorter man in Polite red. A wizard, then, and honest enough to announce himself as such. She looked more closely at him and saw several sharp points of light about his body—those would be enchanted objects, mana reservoirs, or the like. The wizard smiled blandly and held his hands in front of himself, fingers laced together. He didn’t seem young either, but he had the smooth-skinned look of a man who had aged indoors, rather than on the trail; his eyes were oddly far apart.
The third person was a woman. She wore a mail shirt of bronze scales that fell halfway down her thighs; a long scimitar hung at her belt, its scabbarded tip grazing the earth. Her black hair was cut nearly as short as Sarah’s. Her thin lips were set into a frown that showed a hint of white teeth.
The woman inside the sedan chair drew aside the curtain to reveal herself. She was middle-aged—definitely not Margaret—and she looked taut and polished, like a well-used and well-maintained bow, with its string pulled back to shoot. Her eyes were large and her lips full, and when she spoke she leaned forward ear-first, as if she were hearing Sarah rather than looking at her. The woman wore a simple blue robe and her feet were bare.
“Travelers!” the woman called. “You come from the Serpent Mound!”
Sir William shifted uneasily in his saddle.
“We’ve come from farther than that,” Sarah answered. She rode closer, prompting the mail-clad woman to put her hand on the hilt of her sword and hiss. From close up, she saw lines of age around the priestess’s face. “We’ve come from Nashville, some of us. Though I was born in Pennsland. And now I’m coming home.”
The priestess smiled. “A riddle?”
“If you will.”
The priestess nodded. “Then riddle me this: three things lay buried with a dead king, and no one could unearth them. What power would bring those sacred objects to light again?”
“What power but the king’s own?” Sarah was enjoying this veiled mutual provocation. In part, she liked it because she felt safe with Cathy and Sir William at her side. “But then what power would part those three objects?”
The priestess’s eyes opened wide. “Who are you?”
“My name is Sarah.”
“Are you a thief?”
“I only take what belongs to me.”
“Are you carrying those objects now?”
“Who are you to ask me?” Sarah asked. The questions were getting a little too personal.
The priestess raised her chin, which made her seem to be looking down at Sarah, though the two were at about the same height. “I am Alzbieta Torias. I am Handmaid to Lady Wisdom, and the rightful Queen of Cahokia.”
Sarah laughed once, from surprise. Then she thought about what the Firstborn woman had said and laughed again, this time at herself. Of course! Who else would be so interested in the regalia? Who else might have a sense of where they would be found, but Sarah’s unknown Ophidian relatives…who might think they had claims to Sarah’s father’s throne. Sarah bit back more laughs.
“You’re traveling pretty light, for a queen,” she called.
Torias didn’t answer.
“So,” Sarah said, getting control of herself, “this Polite over here, somehow he hexed up Wisdom’s Bluff in a way that would tell you when someone had found the…three objects, as you say. Two days ago, he comes running into your chapel, only you don’t have a chapel, do you? What do you have, a treehouse? Platform on a pole, like old St. Simeon Stylites? Never mind, you can tell me later.
“Your pet Polite comes rushing in and he says ‘Your Holiness,’ or ‘Your Worship,’ or whatever it is he has to call you, ‘someone has taken the…objects.’ So you gather up the family retainers—that’s who these people are, right, servants? I mean, some of them are flat-out wearing slave collars, and the ones hiding in the trees, well, they’re a little too nervous to be real professionals, aren’t they?
“But you figured it was all you’d need, or maybe it was all you could scrape together, so you gather them up and come rushing down here, to sit in this place and wait to meet me.” Sarah threw back her head and laughed again. “So either you marched really fast, or you weren’t in Cahokia, right? Because that must be, what, four days north? Family estates, is that it?”
The Polite looked disconcerted. The counselor held an expressionless look, but his eyes darted back and forth violently. The woman with the sword definitely wanted to attack Sarah.
“You look as if you might be Firstborn,” the priestess said slowly.
“About time you scored a point, Alzbieta,” Sarah said.
“Most people don’t address me by that name.”
“Yeah?” Sarah slipped into Appalachee before she could help it. “I ain’t most people.”
“You could be the right age,” Alzbieta Torias said.
“I could be,” Sarah agreed. “If that age was about fifteen-sixteen.”
“Barely,” the priestess said.
Sarah raised her eyebrows. “Barely means exactly right. The right age to be the daughter you never heard of, the daughter nobody ever heard of.”
“Whose daughter?”
“Oh no you don’t, Alzbieta.” Sarah waggled a finger at the priestess. “You want a score another point, you have to tell me.”
“The Lion,” Alzbieta Torias said.
“Of Missouri,” Sarah agreed.
“Not only of Missouri.”
Curious. But Sarah wasn’t about to ask a question now. “That make us cousins, Alzbieta?”
“Why?” Alzbieta’s face broke into a self-satisfied grin. “Are you hoping to marry me, Nashville child?”
“Don’t mistake my willingness to banter for the toothlessness of a cub, Alzbieta Torias,” Sarah snarled. “I am every bit the lion my father was.”
“Being the lion got your father killed.”
“Being the lion got my father an empress for a bride, and fame that will not die.”
“And yet his daughter is a vagrant and a thief.”
“I found and took what was mine. And I found and took what you sought and failed to find. Are you ready to name the three objects you believe I have, Alzbieta Torias?”
The priestess lurched forward to the edge of her palanquin, catching herself on the pole but forcing her slave bearers to stagger sideways. “The Orb of Etyles! The Sevenfold Crown! And the Heronsword!”
Sarah chuckled slowly. “Close, Alzbieta, but wrong. Now are you and your servants—my family’s servants—ready to accompany me and my guard to our family lands, so we can discuss preparations for my enthronement?”
“Take her!” the priestess gasped.
The warrior in scale mail drew her scimitar, but at the same moment two pistols jumped into Sir William’s fists and she froze, sword raised over her head. Cathy Filmer pulled a pistol and pointed it at the counselor leaning on his standard. Sarah jammed her hand into the satchel hanging from her shoulder to grab the Orb of Etyles. Somewhat restored after two days of no gramarye, she shouted “dormi!” and channeled the green fire of the Mississippi River into the mind of the Polite—
knocking down several invisible wardings in the process—
and the wizard fell to the ground like a chopped tree, unconscious.
With a cry, the Firstborn lying in wait on either side of the clearing rose to their feet. They wore blue cloaks over gray tunics, like their standard-bearer. Bang! Bang! Bang! Sarah heard three gunshots off to her right, in the east, and then the warriors on the west side of the valley began to scream.
“I believe someone has dropped a bee’s nest on your servants, Lady Torias,” Cathy Filmer said. “That, or some sinister spell is causing them to slap themselves and run about in circles.”
“Don’t look at me,” Sarah said. “Might a been your Polite.”
“My cousin Kyres was a renowned magician.” Alzbieta Torias lay back against her cushions, looking more like a snake coiling to strike a second time than a person resigned to her fate.
“I ain’t renowned,” Sarah said. “But I am my father’s daughter, I’m the rightful Queen of Cahokia, and I’m determined as hell. Now you can make nice or we can be enemies, but whatever you decide to do, remember this…the bees are on my side.”
“Tell me your full name,” Alzbieta said.
“You know it. I’m Sarah Elytharias Penn. What you don’t know is that I’ve been raised as a Calhoun these fifteen years, and I’ve got a streak of pure Appalachee piss-off-and-die that runs all the way down to the marrow of my bones.”
“I can see that for myself.” Alzbieta Torias sighed. “Very well, then. Someone wake up the wizard. Cousin Sarah, I don’t think you know quite what you’ve gotten yourself into.”