“You get outside Appalachee, folks believe all kinds of nonsense.”
—
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cathy was enjoying a quiet ride with Bill. Though she had done her best with his injuries and Sarah had augmented his body’s healing processes with gramarye, he couldn’t walk without support. Cal had dutifully hacked him a sturdy crutch out of a dogwood branch, but Bill’s injuries gave Cathy an additional reason to stay close.
Leaving Wisdom’s Bluff and entering the Ohio proper had stirred up memories Cathy wasn’t ready to face. The man—a husband, of sorts, an escort, a gaoler—dead at her hands had been a trauma at the time, but Cathy had seen so much death since, in New Orleans as an infrequent matter of course but especially on the trail with Sarah and her company, that the once-vivid memory of his pallid flesh and dying gasps, though it hadn’t faded, had lost its power to impress.
But the young queen’s quest to save her unknown siblings had dredged up other memories, more painful still, more riddled with guilt. A liaison with a powerful man—her first, and her greatest mistake. Telling that same man of the birth of their child—her second error. The child, as she had expected, would be cared for, because his father was wealthy and, after the fashion his culture expected, generous.
Her own banishment had been a surprise.
And the final act, after the murder, had played out in a beguine cloister not far from the path she rode now. When the local sheriff came to investigate, she had found herself faced with two unpleasant possibilities: that the beguines would believe her accusers and take action against her, or that they would believe Cathy’s own defense, half-lies and half-shaded truths, and put themselves at risk for her sake.
She had chosen the third path, and fled.
That flight, years ago, had taken her downriver to New Orleans. She’d tried teaching, but there were too many schoolmarms whose native language was French. She’d tried the practice of medicine, until the first threat of legal action against her terrified her into stopping.
Finally, she’d drifted to rest at Grissot’s.
They pulled to a stop beside a knee-high stone to the side of the path. By agreement, Alzbieta Torias’s Firstborn spearmen marched at the front, followed by Alzbieta and her party, and then Sarah and hers—though, after the events of the night before in the Wallenstein, Alzbieta and her Firstborn companions might properly be said to comprise a portion of Sarah’s party.
Not a portion that should be trusted. Cathy kept a close eye on the Handmaid of Lady Wisdom.
Sarah and her friends rode slowly, because the Firstborn went on foot.
The beastkind brought up the rear.
Uris leaned on the spear he had taken to using as a walking staff and nodded at the stone. Looking at it more closely, Cathy saw that it was vaguely humanoid in form. At least, the stone looked like the top half of a person, carved with very general features. It had a head, with a small protrusion where a nose should be and two shallow depressions representing eyes. It also had sloping shoulders, and possibly faintly incised lines distinguishing an arm on each side from a chest in the center.
“Stones such as these mark most boundaries in the seven kingdoms,” Uris said. “You might have remarked them around the Serpent Mound.”
Sarah nodded. “I see.”
Despite her mutual oath with the Firstborn, then, she was following Cathy’s advice to play her cards slowly and keep her own counsel. Good. She, like Cathy herself, had seen no such stones on Wisdom’s Bluff.
“Looks like a little man,” Calvin Calhoun said. Then he blushed. “Or woman, I reckon.”
“You’re right,” oathbound Yedera said. She smiled at Calvin in a way that made him blush even more. Cathy thought she saw a flash of irritation in Sarah’s unbandaged eye. “What it definitely doesn’t resemble is beastkind. These are Adam-stones, and they mark the places of mankind.”
“Are there Eve-stones as well?” Cathy asked.
“Shhh.” Alzbieta looked slightly offended.
Cathy resisted the impulse to slap the other woman.
“Is the Adam-stones’ purpose to mark the Ohio as different from the Great Green Wood, and the lands of the Heron King?” Sarah asked.
“If you mean to ask whether our people adopted these stones upon coming here,” Alzbieta said, a breeze blowing the silk veil of her sedan as if the fabric was moved by her words, “or whether they brought them from the Old World…perhaps that isn’t a question to be discussed in this place.”
What was she hiding?
The Polite mage Sherem had recovered consciousness, but not his wits. He lay curled up at Alzbieta’s feet, muttering to himself.
Sarah nodded and removed the bandage from her head, revealing her powerful eye. She scanned the Adam-stone at length, and the path on either side of it.
“What you seein’, Sarah?” Cal blushed again, perhaps thinking he was speaking too familiarly.
“I see that the world is more complex and interesting then ever I knew.” Sarah replaced her patch. “I take it we now enter Cahokia?”
Uris nodded.
“Thank you, Uris, Yedera, Alzbieta. Let us continue.”
As they passed the Adam-stone, Jacob Hop brought his horse parallel to Bill’s, opposite Cathy. Cal and the string of horses fell slightly behind; Sarah rode ahead, beside Alzbieta’s palanquin.
“I have an observation, Captain,” the blond man said. “It’s of a military nature. I fear Mrs. Filmer may find it boring, but I think it’s a good idea to discuss it as soon as possible.”
“Fear not.” Cathy kept an eye on Sarah as she spoke. “I am easily entertained.”
Jacob Hop laughed. He was an odd one. He seemed perpetually delighted with the world, curious about everything, and imperturbable. Just a few days earlier he had been the flesh and blood vessel of a violent god, and all his life before that he’d been deaf and mute. What was going on in Jacob Hop’s brain?
“It is to do with the beastkind, and how to talk to them,” Jake said.
“Chikaak may interpret for us,” Bill rumbled. “I suppose that is no worse than passing orders through any other sergeant.”
“Until the day when Chikaak becomes unavailable,” Jake said. “If he is dead, or badly wounded, or on an errand, we may find ourselves unable to communicate with many of our warriors.”
“You’re thinking we should choose an additional sergeant?”
“I’m thinking about your horn.” Jake pointed at the instrument swinging at Bill’s side. It was made of yellowing ivory, trimmed with bands of gold. “Why did Simon Sword give that to you?”
Bill growled. “The Heron King did a number of things I do not yet understand, Jake. I am not certain I ever will understand them. But what he said was: ‘You are my friend, Bill, like it or not. These warriors are my Household Guard, and not ordinary soldiers. I rejoice at giving them to you because they have not had a more able commander. You will, however, want this.’ Those aren’t exactly the words, you understand, but that was the gist of it. And he handed me the horn.”
“You remember his words quite distinctly,” Cathy said.
“It isn’t often one converses with a god,” Bill said. “Or a twelve-foot-tall bird-headed monster, as the case may be.”
Jake nodded vigorously. “The horn goes with the beastkind. Do you see? Because their language is purely tonal.”
Bill sighed. “What?”
Jake considered. “I think I’m speaking good English, ja?”
“Try explaining a different way,” Cathy suggested.
Jake cocked his head to one side. “Ja, I do that. Have you noticed that when the beastkind communicate with each other, they used different…kinds of sound? Voices? What I mean, Ferpa will make a sound like a cow lowing, and then Chikaak will answer with barks like a coyote, and they still understand each other?”
“This hardly helps me, Jake,” Bill said, “since I understand neither of them, and if I place my hands into my armpits, flap my elbows like a bird’s wings, and hoot like a baboon, neither of them will understand me.”
“Yes, but it’s the…toonhoogte.”
“Bless you,” Bill said. “Or rather, gesundheit, as they say among your people.”
Jake shook his head. “No, listen, it’s like this.” He whistled two notes, one high and one low. “You hear the different toonhoogten, yes?”
“He means pitch, Bill,” Cathy said.
Bill turned in the saddle to stare at Jacob Hop, the movement making him wince. “Pitch? As in music?”
Jake nodded. “Ja, dat’s what I mean. Music.”
“I chose pistols over the parlor arts many years ago, Jake. You’ll have to spell it out for me more clearly.”
“Think of it this way. For you, this animal is a horse.” Jake leaned forward to pat his mount’s shoulder. “When you say it, it’s like that, horse. When you write it, you write H-O-R-S-E.”
“You mean horsey, Jake. Horse does not need an E on the end of it. Too many letters in writing are an extravagance, especially for a military man.”
Cathy refrained from comment.
Jake persevered. “But maybe for Chikaak, if he wants to communicate horse to Ferpa, horse is this.” He whistled, two high notes, then a note of lower pitch.
“Chikaak doesn’t whistle,” Bill said.
Cathy could no longer restrain herself. “Bill, you are being perverse. Jake’s saying that if Chikaak wants to communicate the idea of a horse, he makes those notes by barking. And then if Ferpa wants to signify a horse, she does so by mooing the same melody. They understand each other, though they cannot produce the same sounds.”
“Hell’s Bells,” Bill said. “You mean they are singing to each other, all the time.”
“The ideas they share with each other this way must be simple,” Jake said. “But ja, dat’s exactly what I think.”
Bill fairly bounced in his saddle. “Have you asked Chikaak to confirm this notion of yours?”
“No,” Jake said. “But last night, when he and I worried there might be treachery planned, we agreed a signal. I suggested a whistle of three tones, because it was a sound any beastkind could hear and understand, even from far away, and he agreed.”
“Heaven’s curtain, friend Jake. What you’re telling me is that not only have you discovered how to send military signals to the beastkind, but you’ve already put the new system into practice.”
“I would not say it’s a system, not yet.”
Bill stared off into the woods ahead, eyes blazing. “We must make a list of all the commands we’ll commonly need. The simpler the list, the better, friend Jake. Let’s try to get it down to a dozen, to start with. Twenty at the absolute most. We’ll drill them tonight.”
“Ja,” Jake agreed. “And we should involve Chikaak. He can help us choose words the beastkind already know.”
“Melodies, friend Jake.” Bill leaned over to clap the Dutchman across the back. “Melodies.”
* * *
“Tell me how you came to have contacts among the Hansa.” Jake had dismounted and now led his horse, so they could talk. He smiled amiably at the old man Uris. The Firstborn walked almost stepping on Jake’s feet, he was so close. Jake didn’t understand quite how the man’s oath to Sarah worked, but he found he was extremely uncomfortable with the thought that Uris might be compelled to help him.
He’d rely on that in a pinch, for Sarah’s sake.
For his own sake, he wanted to make friends with the man.
“You mean, how did I manage to hire a gang of Hansard dockworkers to attempt to kidnap Her Majesty?” For a moment, the Firstborn looked like a much younger man, holding a golden sword in both hands. Jake blinked and the image disappeared, and once again the man was…
What was his name?
Uris.
“I was trying to be more tactful than that, but ja.” Jake nodded. “Are you a Hansard yourself? Is it secret lore, or can you share it?”
“There are League passwords and countersigns,” Uris said. “I don’t know them. But I have a great deal of experience working with the Hansa, as anyone must do who advises the nobles of the seven kingdoms.”
“Ah,” Jake said. “Tell me more. I sailed with my uncle as a boy, but only on the Atlantic coast and in the gulf.” He thought, having puzzled through his shattered memory. Also, when he’d sailed as a young man, he’d been walled off from the rest of mankind by a combination of his being a deaf-mute with his uncle’s bitter resentment toward him.
“Out of New Amsterdam?”
Jake nodded.
“The Hansa towns are scattered up and down the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers,” Uris said. “German Hansards on both rivers. Dutch Hansards on the Ohio, especially the upper Ohio and around the Forks, though you may know that already. That’s Haudenosaunee territory, but you Dutch have always got along well with them. The odd English Hansa town here and there. Really, Hansa is a nickname, and it’s borrowed from the Old World. The Hansa towns are the towns that join the Trading League by signing the Trading League Charter.”
“The Charter has a longer name?”
“Yes, Hanseatic something. It probably has the names Mississippi and Ohio in it, as everything else does. I forget.”
Jake considered this. “Members of this League agree to trade with each other on favorable terms.”
Uris snorted. “Yes. Also, they share a list of League enemies, and banned persons, who may not stay the night in a Hansa town or trade with a Hansard. A true Hansard, of course, being a League Trader, and the Charter specifies qualifications for advancement to the status of League Trader. The requirements are onerous.”
As he spoke, Uris seemed to grow taller, and then seat himself on a throne, and then assume the head of a bird. He was Jake’s father, explaining the world to Jake and urging him to choose to renounce his nature and seek the paths of peace.
Only Jake knew that the man he was talking with was not his father, not Peter Plowshare, but Uris, counselor to Alzbieta Torias.
He was the Hanged Man.
As if looking through the card, Jake saw a frame of knots about Peter Plowshare, and then Peter was suddenly gone, transformed again into the man Uris.
Curious.
“A certain amount of wealth?” Jake asked. “Years of experience? Number of employees? Committed capital?”
Uris shot him a sidelong look. “You are Dutch. Yes, I suppose all those things. I don’t know the details, not being a Hansard myself. I’ve been told that there are unwritten qualifications and traditions regarding admission as well, that are passed on verbally and memorized by League Traders.”
“That sounds like a lot of work to maintain,” Jake said.
“I suppose. But they band together for mutual defense, and the Hansa towns collectively are as strong as any of the seven kingdoms. Maybe as strong as any two, or as strong as the three or four weakest. And the trust between any two Hansards allows fast and quick trading, as well as the ability to move quickly and hide, when necessary.”
“They send no Electors.”
Uris broke into a grin. “Some would say that’s only fair, given how little support they give the Empire. You’ve heard the saying, paying taxes like a Hansard?”
“Meaning, avoiding taxes entirely?” Jake guessed.
Uris touched his own nose, a gesture of understanding. As they walked, the counselor moved closer and closer to Jake, until they were practically standing in each others’ shoes. Jake resisted the urge to jump away.
“But if their trading is successful, it can only be because they bring new trade goods, or higher-quality goods, or cheaper goods to those who buy from them,” Jake said. “That benefits the people of the Empire.”
“Ah, you Dutch,” Uris groaned. “You’re as bad the Scots. Who doesn’t benefit from this trade is Thomas Penn, don’t you see? Who cares that people in Chester have cheap shoes and people in Youngstown can afford to eat pecan pie?”
“You don’t know any passwords,” Jake said. “You just walked out and asked where you could hire kidnappers?”
“I walked to the docks,” Uris said. “I’d have paid less were I Hansard myself, no doubt, or maybe I’d even have had the assistance for free. But the worst of it isn’t the cash I paid.”
“Your friend Sherem,” Jake guessed.
Uris sighed heavily. “It’s too much to call him my friend. But he is my fellow servant. He was the most brilliant of Her Holiness’s servants, learned in history, geography, languages, and music, as well as in a wide range of arcane arts. And now he’s an idiot.”
“Calvin did not mean to, I’m certain.”
“I am to blame.”
“Surely not.”
“Consider,” Uris said. “This is what I do with my years of experience, the dust accumulated on my boots from all my travel, and the dried blood of men under my nails, is it not? I consider. I consider and I advise. Consider then with me. First, I said I had gone to seek a doctor for Sherem, who was still stunned from Her Majesty’s sleep spell.”
“I thought perhaps he was feigning his dizziness.”
“He wasn’t. Her Majesty, he told me, more than makes up in raw power what she may lack in finesse or training. But rather than seek the physician my friend needed, I hired men to attack you.”
“Did you counsel with him first? Did he agree?” Jake imagined throwing the witless Polite across a wooden altar and ripping his heart out with his bare, feathered hand.
“Yes and yes, and irrelevant,” Uris growled. “I should have known better. Second, my plan required the already dazed and wounded man to exert himself beyond the bounds of reason.”
“His sleep spell. He must have felt he was getting a just revenge.”
“Yes. But it was my idea. And I regret it. And third, after the Appalachee had—quite within in his rights—bludgeoned Sherem over the head, I delayed. I let my friend lie untreated while I tried to bluff, lie, and cajole our way out of the predicament in which my plan had landed us.”
On an impulse, Jake put an arm around Uris’s shoulder. They both stopped walking, and the older man didn’t pull away. “Listen, counselor. You served your lady to the best of your ability. Your fellow-servant knew the risks, approved your plan, and had been injured. It could just as easily have been you who took a blow to the head, and you would now be lying in the palanquin, talking to yourself.”
“Hard truths provide hard comfort,” Uris said.
“Is that a saying as well?”
“It is now.” Uris sighed.
“Hard comfort is better than no comfort,” Jake said. “That can be a saying, too. And consider this: Sherem isn’t dead, and may yet recover. Cathy Filmer is a healer of some skill, once a devotee of St. William Harvey. And my queen is a great magician.”
“Our queen,” Uris said.
Jake smiled and hugged the other man again.
* * *
Calvin tried to decline Bill’s invitation to join the military discussions in the afternoon in order to be closer to Sarah—he told himself he didn’t quite trust the Firstborn, but that wasn’t really it. But Sarah was having none of it, and sent Calvin and Uris both down to participate in the planning. The two ended up watching from the trees, between the beastkind fighters on the one side and the tethered herd of horses on the other, a few paces away from each.
“We’ll work out further signals over time,” Bill said to Chikaak, whose tongue hung out of his head and dripped on the dark earth of the trail. “For now, we only want to experiment with three signals. Three tones each, three short melodies, if you understand my meaning.”
“Three words,” Jake explained.
“Given the weather,” Uris said, “something not involving loading or firing muskets.”
Late in the morning, it had begun to rain. The water was cold and came down in a miserly drizzle, but it was enough to confound marksmanship. Cal had been drafted into the effort to show the beastkind musketeers how to wrap the locks of their guns and plug the bores against the rain.
“We shall begin with advance, retreat, and halt,” Bill said.
Chikaak barked several times. “That will do for advance.” Then he barked differently. “And that is halt, or nearly enough, as I would say it to my kind.” A third time: “retreat.”
It took multiple attempts, but Bill found a combination of notes on the Heron King’s horn that came close to Chikaak’s sounds for advance, retreat, and halt, and he did it using only three notes: high, middle, and low. Then he explained the sequences to Jacob Hop, who took the horn to try and got them right the first time.
Uris leaned to whisper to Cal. “Your Dutchman is quite the learner.”
“Yeah,” Cal agreed. “Remembers me of a baby in that way, starin’ wide-eyed at the world and takin’ it all in with no effort.”
Uris raised his eyebrows in thought.
Then the beastfolk had to be taught. They stood gathered in a clearing a hundred yards from the trail, snorting and hooting and pawing at the moist earth, as Chikaak yipped and growled, then pointed to Bill, who hadn’t dismounted, and said in English, “advance.”
Bill blew the notes for advance.
The beastkind lumbered forward in a mob.
Bill blew halt, and they stopped.
“Again!” Bill cried. “Impress upon our men, Chikaak, the importance of moving in lockstep. Left foot together, then right, then left, you understand?”
Chikaak herded the beastmen back across the clearing, barking and snarling at them as he did so. The coyote-headed warrior pantomimed marching, then stepped aside. “They’re ready to try again.”
Bill blew advance.
Unevenly, jostling, but more or less together, the beastkind advanced. Bill laughed with glee astride his big gray horse, the beast prancing from side to side until the beastfolk were about to overtake him.
Then he blew halt, and the beastfolk warriors stopped.
“Hell Bells, Jake!” Bill roared. “You’ve done it! And Chikaak! I’d promote the both of you on the spot, only then we’d have two officers and no sergeant, and Freiherr von Steuben would have me whipped.”
“By the Serpent’s breath,” Uris murmured. “He’s learned to talk to the beasts.”
“Yeah,” Cal agreed. “His English is startin’ to sound almost natural, too.”
Through Chikaak, Bill dismissed the beastkind warriors to eat, and Cal found himself rushing after Uris to talk to Bill.
“You have accomplished the miraculous, Sir William!” the counselor cried.
“You mistake me, suh.” Bill leaned forward and rested on his saddlehorn. He looked peaked after just the morning’s ride. “I am no miracle-worker. I will admit, however, to having two surprising fellows in my employ.”
Uris grabbed Bill’s saddle like he wanted to climb up onto the horse with him. “But Sir William, please allow me to expand your vision even further.”
“Further than walking forward and stopping? By all the gods, suh, you must resist the mad ambition that seeks to swallow you.”
Uris laughed aloud. “You plan a combined force of pikes and muskets, yes? Or at present, muskets and bayonets?”
“It is what I have,” Bill said. “I shall follow as best I can in the footsteps of old John Churchill, who taught us that infantry is the thing that advances to the enemy and shoots him to bits.”
“Tonight, let us examine your warriors’ gear and mine,” Uris said, “and reapportion some of it. I can give you real spears, for instance, rather than short carbines fixed with bayonets.”
Bill stroked his long mustache. “That would be an improvement.”
“What about the horses?” Uris asked.
“Hey!” Cal objected.
The other two men turned to look at him quizzically, and he realized he didn’t have a good reason to protest their use of the animals he’d been leading. “Only I reckoned we might could sell some of ’em, or trade ’em for food.”
“Uris is right, Calvin.” Bill’s eyes gleamed. “If we can mix some of his men in with the beastkind, we can mount the others. That gives us pike, musket, and horse. The pike protects the musketry as it advances up to the enemy as close as it may, and as it retreats. The horsemen are held in reserve, either to quickly move to meet flanking attacks, or to drive forward when the enemy is in disarray, cutting him down with sword.”
“A few weeks, Sir William,” Uris said, “and you are ready to go to war.”
Bill chuckled. “A very small war, suh. All together we may have seventy fighters.”
“Gideon defeated the Midianites with only three hundred.”
“Pray, suh, let us not test how our warriors drink. I would be afraid to be any fewer than we are.”
“Advance, retreat, and halt were a good choice to start,” Jacob Hop said. “What other commands do we need, Captain?”
“Left face, right face. Double-time advance, full retreat, charge.” Bill tugged at his own chin as he considered. “Load muskets, fire. Cavalry charge and withdraw. That should be enough to get us started, and we can devise more as we develop more complex movements. Ideally, I’d like to be able to communicate more precise commands in relation to the firearms: poise, cock, half-cock, aim, and separate commands for each step of reloading the weapon is how the blue book has it. Though naturally, we do not wish to become too elaborate. Discipline and victory are generally better served by simple commands that are hard to misconstrue. Please tell me, counselor, that your Firstborn warriors are not tone-deaf.”
“On the contrary,” Uris said. “We are a people with a great musical tradition. What we don’t have long traditions of, though, is horsemanship.”
* * *
“Tell me how it is you come to have a claim on the Cahokian throne.” Sarah watched Alzbieta’a aura react as she heard the question, tightening, changing shade slightly, vibrating at a different frequency. Turmoil. Fear?
“Your Majesty.” Alzbieta looked down at the ground. “I support your claim.”
True.
“I don’t question it. I only want to understand your right.” Sarah laughed. “I want to understand my claim.”
Alzbieta still hesitated, and now she looked past Sarah at Cathy Filmer.
Cathy looked back with hard eyes.
The three women, together with the Podebradan Yedera, waited on a low rise while Sir William put his beastkind through their three-commands-only paces a little more. Forward and back, forward and back they went. In the meantime, Jacob Hop went among the Firstborn spear- and swords-men defending the knoll and whistled short tunes to them.
Sarah’s servants trained her warriors. Excellent. With seventy men she couldn’t attack her uncle’s legions in Philadelphia, but she might be able to take a town if she needed to, or a cadre of the chevalier’s soldiers.
Or a pack of berserk beastmen in the service of Simon Sword?
The Polite Sherem hadn’t recovered. Sarah looked at him now, curled at Alzbieta’s feet inside the divan, counting his own fingers and toes. She saw clearly in his aura the absence of guile, the open reactions, the childlike curiosity, and the slow processing that marked him as an idiot.
Was it her fault? Any objective analysis would surely say yes, in part.
But also, her alternative had only ever been to surrender, to give up on her father’s throne.
And on her sister and brother.
And where were they now? And were they in danger? And from whom?
So she refused the guilt her own mind offered her. The wizard had made his choices, and now he suffered for them. That was less morally offensive than Sarah’s own suffering for the choices of her uncle, for instance, or for the choices of her more sinister enemy, the Necromancer Oliver Cromwell. It was less burdensome to Sarah, in the end, than the suffering she knew she was putting Calvin through by refusing to treat him as her lover.
Thinking even fleetingly of Cromwell reminded her of the Necromancer’s servants for whom there had never been a proper accounting. Where had the Sorcerer Robert Hooke ended up? Sarah had last seen him through her witchy eye, torn away in the current of the Mississippi River, but not destroyed. And Ezekiel Angleton, the Covenant Tract preacher who had entered into some unholy pact with Cromwell that had become manifest on Wisdom’s Bluff, had simply disappeared.
Sarah sat a horse with Cathy on another mount to one side of her, and Alzbieta in her sedan chair, carried by her eight uncomplaining slaves, to her left. Beyond Alzbieta, Yedera stood with feet apart, hand resting on her scimitar’s hilt.
“You may speak in the presence of Mrs. Filmer,” she said.
“No, Your Majesty. Some things I may not speak in the presence of Mrs. Filmer. Other things I may not speak in your presence, not yet. And other things still I simply may not speak here.”
Cathy’s eyes got even harder.
Sarah almost bawled the priestess out, but caught herself. “I had a counselor, too. He was also my mentor in the arcane arts. A Firstborn, like you and me.” She peered through the palanquin’s veil and saw the priestess’s soul let slip a flash of indignation. So Alzbieta Torias didn’t fully accept Sarah as one of her people. Not yet. “His name was Thalanes, and he was a monk of the Order of St. Cetes. One of the monastic orders particular to the Firstborn.”
“I know well who St. Cetes is.” Alzbieta’s sentence began haughtily, but finished in self-imposed abnegation. “Of all the Firstborn saints, Cetes is very much on our minds these days.”
“Of course you know him. Please have patience with me, cousin Alzbieta.”
Alzbieta looked up in surprise.
“I am used to being the one who knows…well, if not everything, then an awful lot. And now I’m coming into a situation in which I know very, very little. I’ll need your instruction, but I’m afraid I’m poorly suited to being a student. The only three people who have ever been able to teach me were a one-armed old man I thought was my father, who was stubborn enough to stare down the emperor himself, and this monk, Father Thalanes, and Cathy Filmer. I don’t think any of them enjoyed it very much, but of the three, Mrs. Filmer has been the most gracious. I beg you to be gracious with her, in turn.”
Cathy smiled, warmly but with steel in her teeth.
“Tell me more about Thalanes,” Torias said.
“What I was going to say is that he told me once, late at night on a lonely road, after we’d been attacked by demonic emissaries of the Necromancer Oliver Cromwell—” she noted with satisfaction Alzbieta’s shudder of fear, “that my father possessed something Thalanes called ‘royal secrets.’ Secrets that might, for instance, relate to the meaning and use of Cahokia’s regalia. Whatever these secrets were, Thalanes couldn’t know them, though he was my father’s confessor. And he thought my father might have taught them to me, had he lived.”
Alzbieta said nothing.
“So if you tell me you can’t speak here, or you can’t speak in the presence of my trusted companion, I assume that must be because the answer to my question is such a secret as those.”
“Not all secrets are royal. Understand this.” Alzbieta held a palm up, facing Sarah, and she drew a tight circle in its center with her finger. “Imagine that this ring contains the royal secrets. Secrets about succession. About regalia. About language. About the throne itself. About sacred spaces. About marriage.”
Marriage?
“Go on,” Sarah said.
Alzbieta drew a larger circle in her palm, completely surrounding the first. “This larger circle contains the secrets of the priesthood. Calendar secrets. Ritual secrets. Magical secrets, maybe, for those who are gifted in that way.”
Which Alzbieta was not, Sarah could tell from her aura’s tint as she said the words. A hint of disappointment. Self-loathing?
“All royal sacred knowledge is priestly, though not all priestcraft has to do with the throne.”
“Kingship…or queenship…is a kind of priesthood. Not only do I know things I cannot tell you here, or now, or in the presence of others, because they are sacred, but there are things I do not know.”
“Royal secrets.”
Alzbieta looked down again. “Also, there are things I should not tell you, because I am not supposed to know them, though I do.”
Intriguing. Was Alzbieta about to confess to a misdeed? “Part of your claim is that you are my father’s kin.”
“True. Another part of my claim is that I’m a priestess.”
“The Handmaid of Lady Wisdom, you said.”
Alzbieta nodded. “The Mother of All Living.”
“Eve?” Sarah was puzzled.
Alzbieta said nothing.
Sarah decided to leave that one for later. “And it is part of your claim that you know secrets you are not supposed to know.”
“I nursed your father once, in an illness. He was not yet married then, and his mother was conferring priesthoods and secrets upon him as fast as he could bear, priesthoods and secrets his father had tried to eradicate. Kyres was winning his fame already as the Lion of Missouri, bringing hope and justice to the battered farmers of that wild land, but a battle with a sloth had left him badly injured, and his wounds became infected.”
“I hear the sloths get big in the Missouri.” Sarah cracked a grin. The mere thought of enormous sloths was a relief from all this talk of throne secrets, priesthood secrets, and so on. And what exactly had her father’s father been trying to eradicate?
“They’ve always been there,” Alzbieta said thoughtfully. “I think maybe they once roamed widely over this continent, and have been reduced to a mere remnant, holding on in the woods of the Missouri.”
“Because of…Peter Plowshare?” Sarah ventured.
“The Heron King?”
“The peaceful version of him, anyway. I don’t see Simon Sword going out of his way to save giant sloths, unless he could turn around and use them to attack someone else.”
“But Simon Sword and Peter Plowshare are the same person,” Alzbieta said. “Simon Sword is merely the war title of the Heron King, as Peter Plowshare is his title in times of peace. No?”
Sarah laughed.
“Seems Sarah has something to teach you, too, Your Holiness.” The look on Cathy Filmer’s face bordered on smug.
Alzbieta hesitated.
“Trust me,” Sarah said.
Alzbieta shrugged. “Maybe. Although maybe that land has some other special power. Maybe whatever it is that leads people to say that it is Eden has also preserved the giant sloths, the dire wolf, the aurochs, the large-toothed tiger, the tiny forest horses, and the others.”
“Somebody says Missouri is Eden?” Sarah shook her head. “You get outside Appalachee, folks believe all kinds of nonsense.”
“Others would say you carry your own Eden within you,” Alzbieta said. “Is that less nonsensical? Or what of those who say that Eden can only lie where the land is plowed, that after all the garden lay east of Eden? But Missouri is a wild land, untamed despite the children of Adam who live there. It’s a land of secrets, and of raw creation.”
“You were telling me about my father.”
“He was wounded, he was ill. My people found him and brought him to me, and so I nursed him. We were cousins, and friends from earliest childhood.”
“First cousins?” Sarah asked.
“No, the connection is more distant. But we were friends. And…for a short while…a little more than friends. As my physicians applied unguents, balms, tonics, and poultices, as my chanters sang and my musicians played, and as my incense-priests sweetened the air about his bower, I stayed by his side. We talked when he was awake. When he was sleepy, I recited to him the lays about his ancestors who led our people here and founded the seven kingdoms. And in his sleep he dreamed, and sometimes talked.”
“He told you royal secrets.” Sarah was uncomfortable thinking that this distant cousin of hers had once been her father’s lover, so she forced herself not to dwell on it.
“I didn’t know it then. I took them for fables, or riddles, or sheer madness. He was near to death more than once, and delirious often. But then I saw that many of the queer things he told me matched images on the walls of the great sacred places in Cahokia, the Temple of the Sun and the Basilica, and I began to wonder.”
“If you know secrets you’re not supposed to know, are you forbidden to pronounce them?”
“I fear that I am. And of course, there are secrets I don’t know. Secrets I fear may not even be written down.”
“Is there a place and time in which you might be able to divulge what you heard from my father?”
“I hope so,” Alzbieta said. “Though I fear that my people…our people may have lost the ability entirely to create such places. At least, we seem to have lost the ability to create the most powerful places. But perhaps, by allusion, by the artful posing of riddles, by the casual juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated texts…I might be able to lead you to the answers.”
“I could command you,” Sarah said.
“I pray you don’t.”
“It’d be a shortcut. What you’re describing sounds like it would take years of prancing about in a well-stocked library before I’d figure anything out.”
“Your Majesty doesn’t give herself enough credit.”
“I give myself a hell of a lot of credit. But what you’re talking about…it sounds pharaonic, palatine, Masonic, I don’t know. Secrets inside secrets, times and places. I have no preparation for this.”
“You have much more preparation than you realize.”
“I can’t even recite all the Electors.” Sarah snorted. “If I command you, the blame’s on me. The sin, whatever. It’s not your fault, if I order you to do it. I’m carrying enough fault already, a little more won’t hurt me.”
“If you order me,” Alzbieta said, “I only have to choose between two oaths. I am not certain what I would do in that moment.”
Sarah knew the older woman was telling the truth. Or at least, she thought she was.
“We could find out,” Sarah said. “Experiment, ain’t that the way of the age?”
“I doubt you’d understand, anyway.”
Sarah sucked in air, prepared to blast her cousin for the arrogance of her words, but checked herself. “What do you mean?” she grunted slowly.
“Forgive me, I’ve sounded arrogant, and that wasn’t my intention. I mean that the nature of an initiatic secret is not to remain secret forever.”
Sarah had no idea what her cousin was talking about. “Go on.”
“The nature of an initiatic secret is to reveal itself, in the proper place and time, to a person who has been properly prepared. Like a flower opening. Like a riddle that suddenly answers itself. Like—”
“Enough similes.” Sarah raised a hand to stop Alzbieta. “I…need time to think.”
Alzbieta nodded. “And I have one last qualification for the throne that is very important, Your Majesty.”
“If it’s just the one thing, I expect I have enough stamina left to hear you out.”
“I’m a woman,” Alzbieta said. “That, of course, is essential.”