Witchy Eye Read online

  Table of Contents

  MAP

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  WITCHY EYE

  Flight of the Serpent’s Daughter

  D.J. BUTLER

  BAEN

  Witchy Eye

  D.J. Butler

  A STUNNING BAEN BOOKS DEBUT. A brilliant Americana flintlock fantasy novel set in a world of Appalachian magic that works.

  Sarah Calhoun is the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Elector Andrew Calhoun, one of Appalachee’s military heroes and one of the electors who gets to decide who will next ascend as the Emperor of the New World. None of that matters to Sarah. She has a natural talent for hexing and one bad eye, and all she wants is to be left alone—especially by outsiders.

  But Sarah’s world gets turned on its head at the Nashville Tobacco Fair when a Yankee wizard-priest tries to kidnap her. Sarah fights back with the aid of a mysterious monk named Thalanes, who is one of the not-quite-human Firstborn, the Moundbuilders of the Ohio. It is Thalanes who reveals to Sarah a secret heritage she never dreamed could be hers.

  Now on a desperate quest with Thalanes to claim this heritage, she is hunted by the Emperor’s bodyguard of elite dragoons, as well as by darker things—shapeshifting Mockers and undead Lazars, and behind them a power more sinister still. If Sarah cannot claim her heritage, it may mean the end to her, her family—and to the world where she is just beginning to find her place.

  WITCHY EYE

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 D. J. Butler

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-8211-9

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-565-6

  Cover art by Daniel Dos Santos

  Map by Rhys Davies

  First printing, March 2017

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  Acknowledgements

  The Story Monkeys—Platte Clark, Michael Dalzen, Erik Holmes, and Eric Patten—deserve a lot of credit. They read this somewhat large book in real time as I wrote it. In particular, thanks to Erik, who made a really good point about Darth Vader.

  You need companions on the road. My agent, Deborah Warren, has been one of my greatest allies. She was willing to take this book to market, even though I think it wasn’t exactly in her comfort zone.

  Larry Correia’s a fierce fighter for his beliefs, so if you’ve crossed swords with him over politics, you may have come away bruised. He is also the most generous writer I know, with his time, with his endorsements, and with his good cheer. Thanks, Larry.

  And of course, many, many thanks to Toni Weisskopf, for taking a chance in bringing on a new guy.

  For Katelyn Westergard,

  who was an early reader.

  And for David Young,

  who knew my mad ambitions years ago.

  MAP

  “Everybody hide your fairies!”

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was red, puffy, shiny and swollen. Like some obscene overripe fruit from Jamaica, her eye bulged in its socket, useless, sealed shut, and glinting with a hint of pus. Was it twitching at him? Obadiah shuddered.

  “Witchy eye,” he muttered. “’Erne’s ’orn, that’s a blighted phiz, poor chick.”

  The gnarled Appalachee crawled like a pot of fire ants, boiling out of their secret holes in the hills and trickling down their winding trails to the Tobacco Fair. They never quite managed to form up into lines until they got to Nashville’s gates and the solid Imperial stone forced them to.

  With them had come the rickety mule-pulled cart, the gaggle of whipcord-thin waifs jangling about it, and this ugly, smash-faced girl pulling the lead rope.

  Even without the eye, she would have been no great beauty. Her hair was thin, black, and ragged, her skin so pale it was almost white, and she was filthy. Obadiah knew it was a trick of the mind, but he thought he could smell her stink cutting through the fetid miasma of the crowd from fifty feet away. She had a wool shawl over her shoulders—purple, with smiling golden suns woven into it—but it covered nothing. The shawl was more a defiant spit in the eye of the coming winter than an actual garment. Under the wool she wore the tight shirt—forearms bare—and slatternly high skirt of Appalachee, clothing that would have been scandalous in Philadelphia or in New Amsterdam.

  Not that Obadiah would have minded seeing a little flesh; on the contrary, he enjoyed looking at a woman, as long as she had meat on her bones.

  And two good eyes. He looked again at the Appalachee’s swollen face and cringed.

  Around Obadiah, Market Street—the wide, stone-cobbled way that led from the Charlotte Pike Gate to the Cumberland River—teemed with life. The emperor’s Revenue Men guarded the heavy iron portcullises of the gate, dour-faced but shining with their breastplates, steel bonnets and long Brown Bess muskets. On the towers, Pitchers watched the road outside town and polished their big guns. The gate was of recent construction, like the walls. It was only—Obadiah scratched his belly and did the math—thirty-odd years ago that the Philadelphia Compact had set aside the Imperial Towns as revenue sources for the emperor. Thirty-one years, this being the Year of Our Lord eighteen hundred fifteen. Old John Penn, no fool he, had got right down to building walls and gates and, of course, setting taxes.

  The Revenue Men couldn’t do much off Imperial land, so they did as much as they could where they were allowed. Today they assessed on each entering vehicle the lawful Fair Toll, thruppence per wheel, payable in whatever coin the party could scrape together. Louisianan sols, Ferdinandian pesos, German thalers, and copper duits from the Hudson Valley rattled around in the Revenue Men’s iron box alongside the more familiar pennies struck in the Philadelphia Mint or the Tower of London. Obadiah had a similar chaos of currency in his wallet, as did any traveling man, but mostly he carried the Imperial and Ohio Company coins in which he was paid.

  The bustle of activity on Market Street clustered around the canvas tents of the great tobacco buyers. The tents and stalls varied wildly in appearance, and Obadiah knew that each look was carefully cultivated. A white, washed canvas, stiff and upright with the pennant of its merchant house flying was a signal to sellers that this was a prosperous buyer, who would likely pay the best rates. A tent that sagged and was gray with the history of the road told the Appalac
hee the buyer might be somewhat down on his luck, and not to get too demanding on price. A disordered stall was a trick, a feint that pretended that the stall’s owner was distracted or inattentive, and was a ready victim for sharp haggling. It was all show.

  The bulk of the buyers spoke with the soft drawl of the southern Crown Lands, Georgia and Carolina, but Obadiah recognized the nasal twang of dour-faced Roundheads, the bouncing verbal roll of tall, blond Dutchmen and the crisp, happy tones of brown-skinned Igbo Free City men in the chuckling Babel around him. There were Geechees in the market crowd, too, and Haudenosaunee, and Frenchmen. No beastfolk that Obadiah had seen (not that he would have been troubled to see beastkind—a woman with a bitch’s head, or a nanny’s legs and tail, was still a perfectly serviceable woman), only one or two of the Soulless and a single Jew of Araby, looking ready to freeze to death in his bright silks and turban.

  A stream of wagons oozed down the street from the gate. The canny hillfolk drove two-wheeled vehicles if they could manage to cram their piles of cured brown leaves into a cart that small (the poorest of the poor growers carried their leaf on their backs to avoid the toll entirely), and four-wheeled only if absolutely necessary. Every cart or wagon was overburdened almost to the point of collapse, in the interest of minimizing the taxes paid to Obadiah’s master’s master, the Emperor Thomas Penn. The tobacco growers crouched on their conveyances with ears cocked, listening to queries and bids whooped at them on every side until they heard one they would accept, at least as a basis for beginning negotiations. Obadiah heard snatches of Castilian, Dutch, and French, but the business of Nashville was mostly conducted in English.

  “Two pounds, I’ll give ye!”

  “What’ll you take for it by the hank, sir?”

  “Is that Brightleaf, son, or Fire-Cured?”

  Nashville’s Tobacco Fair, like any market day, was doubled in size by the addition of swarms of people who neither bought nor sold pipeweed but sought instead to profit by catering to the needs of the tobacco traffickers. Apart from doing his job, this was the part of the fair that interested Obadiah. Less savory entertainments (quite savory enough, to Obadiah’s taste) would be offered later, but even this early in the morning every scrap of cobblestone not occupied by a buyer’s tent or a seller’s wagon was home to a juggling act, an ale-seller, a puppeteer, a shifty-eyed poet, a bellowing news-paperman, or a hawker of rolled cigarettes.

  Obadiah disliked trade; his father had been a cooper in London, more or less successful, and it was a damned life. Too much getting up early, too much risk of failure, too much counting of pennies and scrimping to buy more stock and tools for the business. His was not the life Obadiah wanted.

  Obadiah wanted steady money, drink, and women.

  When he’d left his father’s shop he hadn’t gone far, at first—he’d just walked down to the marshes of Woolwich, to train for the cannon. That had seemed promising at the time. The coat of arms of the House of Spencer sprang into Obadiah’s mind’s eye, a griffin rampant over the Cross of St. George, horn sinister and hammer dexter. Only later…later he’d decided he needed to leave England entirely. Obadiah’s own tongue tasted bitter to him and he grimaced.

  He dismissed the train of thought from his mind. Suffice it to say, Obadiah was no bazaar tentman, and he was more interested in the entertainment than in the buying and selling going on about him. Also, he suffered from a fierce thirst for a mug of good ale. Herne’s hoofs, even bad ale would do. He just needed to get a little work done first.

  He finished the circuit of Market Street with his gaze and came again to the witchy-eyed girl. She had stopped and stood still, glaring at him. He glared back, willing her to move along. Her one good eye squinted in his direction, looking devious and infernal alongside its slick, monstrous mate.

  No, he was no merchant, Obadiah told himself, even if he too had come with his master to meet the needs of participants in the Tobacco Fair. His employer was no merchant, either, though he shared a high-pitched nasal accent with the Roundhead traders, what Obadiah in his youth would have called a Norfolk whine. The Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton would take money, but he took it as offerings from a collection plate, and he took it, Obadiah recited as if it were a table of numbers learned by rote, because taking it allowed the givers to have the blessing of a voluntary act of sacrifice.

  Obadiah snorted to himself. A man said what he had to say to earn a living, and Ezekiel Angleton had to earn a living the same as anyone else. Obadiah didn’t care. There might or might not be a Heaven, just like there might or might not be a Herne the Hunter or a Wayland Smith. In any case, this life and its pleasures were enough for Obadiah, and if there were a Hell, Obadiah calculated that working for a priest covered his bets. In any case, Father Angleton didn’t charge listeners a fee for his sermonizing. He had a stipend from the emperor, and Obadiah had his room and board and a silver shilling a week from Father Angleton, which was good money for being man of all business to a priest, and none of the worry and hassle of being a tradesman. The travel meant that Obadiah’s women always had new faces.

  It was a little strange they had come here, though. They’d been to Imperial Towns before—Providence was fine, good pies and plenty of available womanflesh, and Youngstown hadn’t been too bad, though that was awfully close to the Eldritch Kingdoms and Angleton got antsy if he saw too many of their pasty faces—but they had never been as far south as Nashville. For that matter, it was strange that they would travel at all, without the Blues. He didn’t know why they had left Philadelphia and come all the way to this forsaken place. Oh, even these stunted cracker goblins were children of God, he knew Father Angleton would say if asked, but there were plenty of children of God to minister to in Pennsland. The Right Reverend Father still held, he had assured Obadiah several times on their journey south and east, his very worthy and useful post as chaplain to the emperor’s House Light Dragoons, the famous Philadelphia Blues—so why not stay with the dragoons, then? Obadiah thought he would prefer a trip with those hard-riding soldiers to any festering pit in the empire to spending any more time with these cross-eyed, gap-toothed wretches.

  Cross-eyed—at least Witchy Eye (as Obadiah began to name her in his mind) had been spared that blight. He chuckled. She might be gap-toothed, though—he looked at her again, still not moving, her stare growing angrier and more intense by the minute. Did she think he was staring at her? The girl’s mule was skin and bones and her two-wheeled cart was piled high with cured brown leaf. Half a dozen red- and black-haired beggar-looking wretches surrounded the cart, dirty, unkempt, and wild. Obadiah wrinkled his nose.

  Not that Obadiah would object to a few minutes behind a tent flap with one of their older, plumper sisters later in the day, if the occasion offered. A few minutes behind a tent flap, and then get quit of Appalachee.

  Obadiah cleared his throat. “Ladies an’ gents,” he croaked. His voice was rough and loud; it was his greatest professional asset. At Woolwich, he’d been told he might make sergeant on the strength of his voice alone, and now he imagined he was mustering a line of pikemen into formation to stand against the Caliph’s hordes. A few heads turned, including the ugly girl’s. “Ladies an’ gents, ’ark all, this be a great day in the ’istory of Nashville Town!” He raised his hands high above his head, but most of the spectators looked away again and went about their business.

  He’d already gotten it wrong, and he scratched himself in mild frustration. Habit. He cleared his throat once more and did it the way the Right Reverend Father had told him to. “Children of the New Light, ’ark ye! A mighty preacher be come amonk ye!” Heads were turning back his way. He reminded himself to make no mention of the Right Reverend Father’s being a priest. New Lighters hated the Old Gods, the pagan gods they called them, but they had no real affection for priests of any kind, even Christian ones. “Ezekiel Angleton be ’is name,” he bellowed, “an’ ’e’ll be preachink free times today! First sermon to start in one hour’s time! Preachink an�
� prophesyink!”

  “Where?” shouted one of the buyers, and Obadiah knew he had his hook in.

  “By the Town ’All.” Obadiah pointed with one arm, and enough heads turned that he calculated his work was done—he’d move on and make his announcement again elsewhere. Might be time for a pint before the first sermon.

  “You don’t mean that old codger from over Bum Tickle Crick way, do you?” yelled Witchy Eye in a shrill and surprisingly loud voice. “Iffen that’s the one, I done heard him preach and prophesy once already, and it weren’t worth a coon’s bark.” There was scattered laughter in the crowd.

  Obadiah forced himself to squeeze out a merry rolling laugh and a smile. He didn’t care much for Father Angleton’s dignity—the priest could fend for himself—but he didn’t like feeling personally attacked. “Nay, my wee lass, I don’t intend no old codger. Why don’t you come alonk an’ ’ear ’im? You brink your wee friends, an’ you’ll ’ear preachink you’ll tell your own whelps about.” There, that should do it. He turned to go.

  “I’m pretty sure Zeke Angleton was his name, though,” the ugly girl insisted loudly. “Runtiest lookin’ feller you e’er laid eyes on? Talks to hisself a lot, dribbles out the mouth? You sure that ain’t him?”

  “The Right Reverend Father does not dribble out ’is mouff!” Obadiah wheeled on the pustule-faced girl, and when he saw the triumphant gleam in her one good eye he knew he’d made a mistake.