Witchy Kingdom Read online

  Table of Contents

  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

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  WITCHY

  KINGDOM

  Secrets of the Serpent Throne

  D.J. BUTLER

  Witchy Kingdom

  D.J. Butler

  DRAGON AWARD NOMINATED SERIES. Both previous entries in the Witchy War series, Witchy Eye and Witchy Winter, were nominated for best alternate history novel at the Dragon Awards.

  SEASON OF THE WITCH

  An encounter with her father’s goddess has not turned out to be the end for Sarah Elytharias Penn. Now, with the Imperial fist tightened around her city of Cahokia and the beastkind of the Heron King ravaging across the river, she must find a way to access the power of the Serpent Throne itself—a feat, she has learned, that her father never accomplished. To complicate her efforts, Cahokia’s Metropolitan, a beloved and charismatic priest who despises the goddess as a demon, returns from a long pilgrimage and attempts to finalize the Wisdom-eradicating reform that dogged Sarah’s father when he was king.

  Meanwhile, Sarah’s brother Nathaniel and her brilliant but erratic servant Jacob Hop find their steps dogged by the Emperor’s Machiavel, Temple Franklin, as they hunt in New Amsterdam for the third Elytharias sibling. As Simon Sword’s destroying storm threatens from the south and west, and New Orleans is thrown into deadly turmoil when a vodoun priest and mameluke assassins contend for ultimate power and control of the Mississippi, the chance for a unified New World teeters on the brink. Sarah Penn understands she may face a hard fate in the final reckoning. But she also knows that only she can access the power of the Throne—if she can find the Wisdom inside to unlock it.

  BAEN BOOKS by D.J. BUTLER

  Witchy Eye

  Witchy Winter

  Witchy Kingdom

  Witchy Kingdom

  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 © 2019 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: 978-1-4814-8415-2

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-715-5

  Cover art by Daniel Dos Santos

  Map of the Palace of Life by Bryan G. McWhirter

  Map of the Hudson River Republic by Bryan G. McWhirter

  First printing, August 2019

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Butler, D. J. (David John), 1973– author.

  Title: Witchy kingdom / D.J. Butler.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019017288 | ISBN 9781481484152 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Historical. | FICTION / Fantasy /

  Epic. | FICTION / Alternative History. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.U8667 W585 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017288

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  For Margaret Barker

  and Frances Yates and Robert Graves

  and all my other heroes who have been willing to

  look long and deeply down unmarked paths.

  “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sarah lay against the wall of the long nave of the Temple of the Sun, gazing at the naked Serpent Throne across a space that should have been veiled. She had a long Imperial dragoon’s wool coat pulled over her as a blanket against the chill night breeze wafting into the Temple through the open door.

  It was night, and the Temple was dark. Sarah was here because she couldn’t sleep elsewhere, hadn’t been able to catch a moment’s sleep anywhere but atop the Great Mound since the moment she had seen her father’s goddess on the Sunrise Mound.

  William Lee had told Sarah that her father occasionally slept in trees. Was it some experience like this that had caused him to do so?

  Or was it a taboo he had chosen?

  Sarah dozed in and out. When she was awake, her mortal eye saw nothing but gloom and shade. Through her Eye of Eve, though, she had visions.

  She saw smoke and pollution. Something was wrong, she saw; not with the throne itself, but with how it had been treated. But beneath the mists of darkness, light shone. It was the brilliant blue light of the eternal Eden into which Sarah had briefly set foot, and yet it had a warm, golden glow, as well.

  It reminded her also of the light she’d seen inhabiting the Serpent Mound above the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers, where her father’s acorn, planted, had grown into a tree that was in some sense also her father himself.

  The light was power.

  Sarah had come far, leaving her childhood home in Appalachee at the word of the monk Thalanes to search after the lost heritage of her father and the stolen wealth of her mother. She had made her journey less for those things than for the sake of the kin she had learned she possessed—a brother and a sister she had never known.

  She had found her brother. Her sister was still missing, though, and Sarah and her people were penned within the wall of her father’s city, Cahokia, by hostile Imperial forces. She had seen Eden, the land of her father’s goddess, but only barely set foot in it and had not mastered its power. That power now winked at Sarah tantalizingly through a veil of pollution and wrongdoing.

  Sarah needed to get access to that power if she and her people were going to survive.

  The throne had an occupant. At least some moments, drifting in and out of troubled sleep, Sarah thought she saw a woman—the Woman—sitting on the throne. Was she smiling at Sarah?

  But at other times, she seemed to see a second figure, standing behind the goddess: a tall, green, heron-headed man. Was she seeing the Heron King through her Eye of Eve, or in her dreams? He wasn’t consistently there, and Sarah’s uncertainty built up in her heart as dread.

  The Heron King rested one hand on the Serpent Throne, and it seemed to Sarah that the hand sat also on the shoulder of the goddess. In his right hand, the Heron King held a sword.

  The one Sarah had given him.

  Had that been a mistake? With the Heronplow she had gained in return, she had rescued one of her two siblings, and she had, once, saved her father’s city from an incursion of rampaging beastkind.

  Was that enough? Did that
make the trade worth it?

  Uncertainty became fear, but Sarah was so exhausted that she continued to drift in and out of sleep, fear notwithstanding.

  “Beloved.” The Heron King stretched forth his hand. “Beloved.”

  He touched her shoulder.

  Sarah shrank and cried out—

  “Beloved, you’re dreaming”—

  and woke up.

  Pale light crept in through the temple’s door. Sarah looked immediately to the throne, seeing the light and the pollution, but neither the goddess nor the Heron King.

  “Beloved.” Maltres Korinn knelt beside her. He’d positioned himself carefully, so that the light shone on his face and revealed his identity. That face wore an expression of concern. “Forgive my touch, Beloved. You were crying out.”

  “I ain’t made of glass.” Sarah shivered and sat up, pulling the coat up around her neck. “I can stand some handlin’. Iffen I had my choice, I’d rather you shake me than call me that title.”

  Korinn didn’t take the bait, but she knew he wasn’t about to stop calling her Beloved.

  “Beloved, the Handmaid Alzbieta told me you had disappeared from her home. The wardens and I have been looking for you.”

  Sarah took a deep breath and exhaled, trying to force the fear and uncertainty out with the air. It didn’t work. “I can’t sleep there. I can’t sleep anywhere, except here. It’s the damnedest thing.”

  “Or the most blessed.”

  “You try it for a week, and then tell me that.”

  Korinn nodded. “I’ll talk with Alzbieta. I believe there’s a solution.”

  “Maltres,” she said, “how did you end up here? I don’t mean looking for me this morning. I mean, how did you end up as Regent-Minister?”

  Maltres Korinn eased himself into a cross-legged sitting position. “I love this land. I love the city, too, though I long to be in my own brambles and groves in the north. But this is the city of my goddess, it was the city of my king, and now it’s the city of my queen.”

  “I ain’t queen yet.”

  “In time. So when your father died and a group of the city’s leaders asked me to take care of the city until a successor was chosen, I couldn’t say no.”

  “Leaders, meaning the wealthy?”

  “Some of them were wealthy. Others held important titles, like Royal Companion and Notary and Archivist. Or military rank—Jaleta Zorales was one of them.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to use their support to just take the throne for yourself.”

  “But that wasn’t what they asked me to do.”

  Surrounded by Imperial troops and caught between a god of destruction and a cold-blooded necromancer, it touched Sarah’s heart to be reminded that there were still people in the world who acted out of duty, and for love. “I never hear you talk about a wife, or children.” Sarah softened her Appalachee twang, not wanting to sound hostile. “Does that mean you’re…you’re not the marrying kind?”

  Korinn laughed. “It means that my wife died, and my children are grown or mostly grown. They have lives of their own, and are not here in the city. But when I can get back to Na’avu, along with harvesting blackberries and cutting dead wood out of the forest, I will read with my daughters and ride with my sons and sit beside my wife’s grave to tell her of my adventures in the big city.”

  “Sounds like a good plan to me.” Sarah rose creakily to her feet. “I guess that’s all the sleep I’m going to get tonight, though. Time to go fight the good fight.”

  * * *

  “Foxes have holes,” Etienne Ukwu said, “and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.”

  He spoke loudly, the opening words to a quick sermon. He stood atop a wooden crate he had placed on an angle on the boardwalk in the Vieux Carré, and he wore neither his black vest, with its Vodun patterns, nor his episcopal garb. He wore his black trousers and a simple white shirt. He counted on his reputation to tell people who he was.

  His reputation, and the Brides.

  The women within earshot noticed him first, turning to look at him as the Brides touched their souls and their bodies. The men took only moments longer.

  Etienne had chosen this corner because there were no gendarmes in sight. Still, they would hear of his appearance and they would come. He had to speak quickly.

  “A keen-eared critic will say, ‘ah, this Ukwu compares himself to Jesus,’ but no. I am not the Son of Man, but only the son of a man, the son of a poor man who served this city. And I, too, have tried to serve the city, and look at me now. The fox of a chevalier has a hole. The vulture bishop, my former beadle, has a nest. And I, the son of your poor servant?”

  A crowd was forming. There were nods and murmurs of agreement.

  At the back of the mob, someone ran off—to fetch the constabulary, most likely. Etienne had only moments left.

  “Do not give the robber what he demands!” Etienne shook his fist in the air and several women fainted. “The only way to defeat this beast is to starve it!”

  “Starve it!” someone yelled.

  “No more taxes!” Etienne cried. “Justice for the bishop!”

  “No more taxes!” the crowd roared.

  “No more taxes!” he shouted one last time and then jumped down from the box. The gendarmes were coming.

  As Etienne slipped down an alley to disappear, he thought he heard someone whistle a jaunty and familiar tune behind him.

  * * *

  Thomas discreetly touched the Jupiter ring on his right hand as he followed Temple Franklin into the Walnut Street Prison. He always walked with an erect posture—it strengthened his air of command—and he consciously threw his shoulders back and his chin up.

  He wasn’t wearing his Town Coat because he didn’t want to be recognized. Instead, Temple had brought a three-chinned, eight-fingered gramarist from the College to ward him with hexes of protection. The magician had done his job efficiently in the library at Horse Hall, repeatedly invoking both St. Reginald Pole and also the Dagda. He had not sat down, had kept his back to the corner at all times, and had politely declined Temple’s offer of a drink.

  The College feared Thomas. Excellent.

  Now Thomas and Temple, both wearing brown coats and brown tricorn hats such as any Philadelphia burgher might don, walked from cell to cell. Temple had the ring of keys, and they stopped to open random doors and look at the men behind them. No light came through the high, tiny windows of the cells because of the late hour; in addition to the keys, Temple carried a fat taper.

  “The problem with these men,” Thomas said, “is that they’re not warriors.” He gestured with disdain at three unshaven, foul-smelling prisoners. Emaciated and filthy as the men were, they still had the soft look of clerks and merchants.

  The gesture itself hurt him. He had been shot in the shoulder by Wilkes the actor. Thanks to the ministrations of College magicians, the wound had almost entirely healed, but he still ached when he made certain motions with his arm.

  Thomas shut the door and they moved on.

  “I see that as an advantage.” Temple fluttered his fingers, a gesture vaguely reminiscent of a cheap stage magician’s theatrics.

  “I see it as a sign that we have drained our prisons of their most brutal and dangerous men, and now we are reduced to scraps. I want more marauders for the Ohio, Temple. Look at these fellows—they’re bankrupts and frauds, not cutthroats.”

  “They’re men with families.” Franklin smiled.

  They opened another door. Here too, the prisoners were ragged scarecrows whose hair had not been cut in weeks and perhaps months, but they bore sure signs of middle class Pennslander living: they still had teeth in their mouths, for instance, and Thomas had yet to see a tattoo or a ritual scar.

  Thomas considered, then dismissed an idea. “But they’re in prison because their families can’t pay their debts. There’s no ransom to be had here, Temple.”

  “No ransom,” Franklin agreed. �
��But men with families won’t desert, or turn against you. Children and wives of men released from prison via your benevolent work-release program—”

  “Fight-release,” Thomas said, “let us be honest. Or even better, pillage-release.”

  “Even better,” Temple agreed. “If your father is released from prison and brings home plunder from war, do you not feel benevolently toward the emperor who released him?”

  Thomas thought about that possibility. “You, there,” he called to the nearest prisoner, a man whose belly fat had not been completely drained by Walnut Street. “What say you? If you could be released from prison and also be paid to fight for your Emperor, say, in the Pacification of the Ohio, would you do it?”

  The prisoner raised a befuddled face into the greasy yellow light of Franklin’s taper. “Would you consider advancing me some of the money on credit?”

  “An enlistment bonus, eh?” Thomas snorted. “The Emperor’s shilling? But if I am to pay in advance, I could have free men. Let us go, Temple. These fellows have clearly not been in here long enough.”

  “But,” the prisoner said. “But—”

  Temple Franklin slammed the door shut.

  * * *

  They followed the acorn.

  The acorn had apparently been wrapped inside Nathaniel’s ear when he was born, and the Cavalier Captain Sir William Johnston Lee carried it with him along with an enchanted, milk-giving rag from Philadelphia to the home of the Earl of Johnsland, not far from Raleigh. The earl had kept the acorn and rag all Nathaniel’s life, clutching it to himself through years of madness. Now Nathaniel had both objects, in a small wooden box, and his sister, a Firstborn witch named Sarah, had enchanted it to lead him to their third sibling.