Appalachian Antics, Louisiana Luck

The Five-Minute Witchy War, Part 2

There’s always a map, right?

Take a minute and chew on this one, it’ll help you get the lay of the land, and see how the world has changed in Butler’s series.

Let’s look at the first five chapters of WITCHY EYE:

Chapter 1:

Sarah and Calvin Calhoun—both in their mid-teens but he’s technically her nephew—head to the Nashville Fair with their harvest of tobacco leaves to sell. They encounter Ezekiel Angleton, a priest under the order of Saint Martin Luther. This is an unpopular denomination among the Appalachians, and Sarah heckles Angleton when she recognizes what he is.

Sarah also meets a man named Thalanes, a traveling monk from Ohio, who’s trying to meet her father Andy—he’s a powerful Elector in Tennessee. Wary, Sarah lies to Thalanes and tells him to head to Kentucky. Thalanes doesn’t push it, but he cottons on to what she’s doing, and he waits in the wings. His intentions are good.

Reverend Angleton sets up a sermon at a tent at the Fair and Sarah sabotages his crowd with a barrel of hexed whiskey, because she’s a troublemaker. This stems from the religious dispute between the biblical Appalachee folks and the “Martinite/New Light” preachers like Angleton. However, Angleton realizes what she’s done. He takes note of Sarah’s deformed eye and thinks she’s a fey, so he pulls a gun on her to take her hostage.

Thalanes, watching from the doorway, considers intervening. He knows who Sarah really is, that she was adopted, and that her birth parents were actually American royalty—and her mother, the Emperor’s sister, just died. If Angleton takes her, she’ll be a valuable prisoner in a coming war. Cliffhanger…

Chapter 2:

Here we take a quick jaunt down to Louisiana to meet Captain Sir William Johnston Lee, known locally as “Bad Bill” or “Mauvais Guillame,” depending on the language. Although a gentleman and a veteran, he’s a bad with money and indebted to numerous people, especially dangerous power-players in New Orleans. Tonight he’s got a job as a hired gun, dueling in lieu of another gentleman whose wife has been seduced by a headstrong youth.

Before heading out to do the deed, Bill stops at a local bar for a shot of liquid courage and a pleasant conversation with Lady Catherine, a high-class prostitute who secretly loves Bill, but she knows that he is still loyal to his estranged wife up north. Until Bill pays his debts, he can’t return home to her, and for years he’s been struggling against the interest on his payments.

Bill also has an unpleasant run-in with hired muscle for the local bishop, a man of Igbo descent, and they beat him up to remind him that he owes their boss money as well. Bill’s in a bad spot. Head spinning, he goes off to the duel, squares up with the young philanderer, and ends up winning…by killing the man, which he didn’t want to do. Darn smooth-bore muskets.

As a final kick to the huevos, Bill learns from the man’s second that his most recent victim is the son of the local chevalier—one of several men to whom Bill owes money. This duel was supposed to settle his debt to the chevalier and now it just got a hell of a lot worse.

Chapter 3:

We’re back in Tennessee. Shots are fired, tomahawks are thrown, we’ve got ourselves a might-holy dust-up at the religion tent. Thalanes intervenes with some magic spells to deflect bullets and protect Sarah. The town watch (local police, basically) comes in to handle the arrests, so Thalanes used magic to disguise Sarah and Calvin, then they escape.

(There’s another Calhoun with him, his name is Young Andy, but he’s only around for a little while so I haven’t mentioned him much yet.)

While Sarah is grateful for her rescue, she’s still wary of Thalanes, and here we get an introduction to the concept of the Firstborn. Basically you can consider them to be eldritch/magical beings, whose interests run counter to the new religious/imperial order in North America.

In order to properly break this down, I might need another thousand words, or a fifteen-minute video. It’s beyond the scope of what I’m doing here to go that deep, so here’s a skinny version: in the Witchy timeline, Martin Luther was sainted as a figure of the Reformation/Protestant movement. He was from Wittenburg, Germany, and his local opponent was the fictional Cetes, also Sainted. In effect you’re talking about Catholic and Protestant preachers in conflict with one another, and since this is 1815, their beef is about 300 years old. Thalanes is a Cetean monk, therefore vaguely Catholic, and Angleton is a New Light reverend, therefore vaguely Protestant.

This is a gross oversimplification but it’s all you need to get through this portion of the text and worldbuilding.

Thalanes also asks Sarah about her parentage, and she lies to him on that front. She’s allergic to silver, which is an attribute of “Firstborn” (Eldritch) people, but it’s also a common trait among people with American Indian ancestry, and she says her mother was Native. Knowing he has to dance around her defenses, Thalanes shares a story about a man named Kyres Elytharias, a consort to Empress Hannah (who recently died). Elytharias enchanted three acorns and fed them to Hannah, after which she gave birth to triplets, each with a distinctive deformity—a bad eye, a bad ear, and “odd hair.”

Chapter 4:

Thalanes accompanies Sarah, Calvin, and Young Andy to Calhoun Mountain, where they meet “Iron Andy” Calhoun, the Elector and patriarch of the family. Iron Andy confirms to Sarah that Thalanes’ story is true and literal; he was the religious confessor of Empress Hannah, sister of Emperor Thomas Penn. Hannah bore three children to Kyres Elytharias, who was the King of Cahokia (a Native American mound city). This makes Sarah the legitimate heir to both Cahokia and Pennsland, the dominant Empire in North America.

Iron Andy also informs Calvin of this, as well as the true nature of his relation to Sarah; she’s not his aunt, not even a blood relative, just a “foster cousin.” Thalanes needs to escort her away to safety because Emperor Penn knows of her existence and the threat she poses to his Empire. He’ll come for her at Calhoun Mountain. Iron Andy charges Calvin with assisting Sarah and Thalanes on this journey. He’s rapidly initiated into a masonic order by his family as part of this charge.

We also check back in on Angleton who, in the tent scuffle, managed to acquire some of Sarah’s hair, and he uses it in a magic spell to track her location. Then he sends Obadiah Dogsbody after her.

Chapter 5:

Sarah is captured by Dogsbody before she can escape the mountain on her own. Calvin, bound to accompany her, is also captured. When their captors—five in total—settle in for the night and start getting drunk, Sarah is able to hex the wine and casts a love spell over Dogsbody so she can control him. Unfortunately Calvin is made to drink the wine too, complicating the dynamic between her and her former nephew.

After Sarah and Calvin break away from Dogsbody’s men, they’re pursued by two “mud creatures” in human shape, with connections to Eldritch magic. Remembering that the Eldritch are allergic to silver, Calvin scares them off with silver coins, but this doesn’t break his affections toward Sarah.

In contrast to Calvin, Dogsbody returns to Angleton, still under the influence of the love spell. When Angleton recognizes it, he presses a silver coin to Angleton’s face, thus breaking the spell. I’ve always read this as meaning that Calvin’s affections for Sarah preceded the magical hex, and thus endured through it. Dogsbody and Angleton then go to Calhoun Mountain, looking for Sarah, but they’re intercepted by the Calhoun clan and thus delayed. Sarah and Calvin escape in earnest…

…and now we wait for chapter six.

Conclusion

There is a LOT of table-setting in these first five chapters. The book overall is 200,000 words, and almost a quarter of that lands here. This is not casual fantasy but the upside of it is that is rewards multiple readings. (Seriously, I read this book about every 2 years.)

Grab your copy and follow along. Subscribe for the next installment, too!