Prologue

As I stare down at the young woman, I am delighted by what I see. She’s just turned sixteen, finished her first woman’s moon, and has passed from girl to womanhood. She came to me still wearing her skirt tied with a prominent virgin’s knot.

Not that she came willingly, of course. Her father’s lineage abducted the girl from her mother’s village. Muskogee are matrilineal, so while the girl might have been the man’s daughter, she was merely the product of his ejaculation. Not of his clan or lineage, and hence, not his family. Essentially his, but not his. Perfect for a sacrifice. Didn’t really cost him anything but a little emotional distress.

Which is nothing compared to his and his lineage’s much more parochial desire to influence the scales of justice on their behalf. Seems the man’s uncle, a man he adored, had gotten into a little trouble with the local orata, or village chief. Something about a murder.

Frowned on, you see.

But in the convoluted way the Muskogee think, a word from me to the orata would set everything straight. Place the guilty cur beyond the pale of local retribution. Hence the offer of the girl.

To me.

And who am I?

Some call me a witch. The Muskogee have given me the name Lightning Shell, for the mask I wear. It covers the horribly scarred left side of my face.

I am as puzzled by that scar as anyone. One should remember getting burned like that. Must have been terribly painful. But I have no memory of it. As I have no memory of so many things since that day in the river.

As I stare down at the girl, her eyes fix on the beautifully flaked long chert knife I hold. She is tied to one of the polished center posts that hold my roof up. It’s a heavy piece of black locust, driven deep into the ground. She can’t pull it up no matter how hard she struggles. The wad of cloth in her mouth will dampen her screams.

Which disappoints me, but I do have to make some concessions to the town’s folk. The way they fear me already is almost irrational.

I reach down with the blade and sever the rope holding her skirt up. As it slides down her young hips, her eyes widen and she shrieks into the cloth.

Like my ancestors, I, too, have come to Cofitachequi after a setback.

When the first Cahokian expedition crossed the Blue Mountains and followed the ancient trails into the east, they found a rich and fertile land. The Muskogee peoples who lived in small villages along the waterways called their country Kofitachake. Kofita means to scoop out, excavate, or dig out. Chake means shallow waters.

My people, as they so often do, butchered the pronunciation and called it Cofitachequi: Ko feeta check ee.

The Cahokians came to Cofitachequi a little more than a generation ago led by War Leader Moon Blade, a Four Winds Clansman in line for the high chair at Horned Serpent House. I was just a boy back then, but I remember the uproar. Cahokia had almost broken out in open warfare. Something about the work levy needed to flatten out and grade the Great Plaza. At the time Moon Blade, resisting the levy, was threatening to march Horned Serpent Town’s warriors on the Morning Star House.

Blue Heron, who was a young beauty at the time, had outmaneuvered Horned Serpent Town’s clan matron, and Moon Blade was sent east by order of the Morning Star himself. Not that it was called exile—nor was Moon Blade’s departure from Cahokia anything less than a pageant; Moon Blade left at the head of nearly a thousand warriors and commanded a flotilla consisting of five hundred canoes.

The journey down the Father Water, up the Mother Water to the Tenasee, thence east and across the Blue Mountains to the coastal plain of Cofitachequi had taken nearly nine months.

The various tribes along the Tenasee would never forget. They paid for the army’s passage in stolen food stores, enforced labor, and when they resisted, in blood. Entire villages were left destitute.

Once east of the mountains, Moon Blade’s disciplined warriors had made short work of the petty Muskogean chiefs. Being used to scuffling among themselves, the Muskogee—barely masters of the organized raid—had no chance. Disciplined Cahokian squadrons were able to surround and defeat them with little effort. The local chiefs and war leaders found themselves hanged in squares; their people were then taken captive and turned into work details.

Nor was dissent a problem. Again, the key word is “petty.” So great was the animosity between the various local factions that the previously abused among them rarely hesitated to turn on their former chiefs when called upon to aid the Cahokians.

Moon Blade was a man of many talents, not to mention charisma. And he had learned from the fine art of politics. After his arrival and conquest, he set about building his chieftainship. Adopted the local term Mikko, or high chief. Nor was he averse to women, seeing as he married a woman from each of the major Muskogean lineages. Eleven women in all. And he promptly went about siring children from them.

In a sense, Moon Blade grew the colony into an organic blend of Muskogean and Cahokian. They worship the notion of Morning Star but don’t play chunkey with the same passion. Build palace-topped mounds but keep their old beliefs in the ancestral Spirits.

Unlike Moon Blade, I have no idea how I got here. Seriously, no memory at all. One heartbeat I was underwater choking Night Shadow Star. The next, it’s half a year later and I am here with a horrible scar ruining the left side of my face, and wearing a shell mask.

The night I appeared to them, lightning struck one of their sacred charnel houses. As it burned down to coals and charred bones, I came walking out of the smoke and flames, my shell mask on my face.

After an entrance like that, is there any reason they shouldn’t consider me a Powerful sorcerer and witch?

There are times when the simplicity of human belief leaves me stunned.

Beyond the walls of my mound-top temple, lightning laces the storm-torn sky like tortured worms of light. Wind gusts shake the walls, cause the leaping flames in my central fire to twist and curl.

The girl screams again, her eyes glistening with fear.

She is a pretty thing. I trace the tip of my knife around her round breasts, tease the tips of her nipples with the knife’s point to make them stand erect.

She throws herself against the bindings, tears leaking down her cheeks.

Lightning flashes again. White and blinding, it is close. Followed by the head-splitting crack of thunder, as if it were breaking the world.

“It’s all right,” I tell her, knowing a Muskogee girl can’t understand a word of what I say in Cahokian. “I need to see the future. And to do that, I need your blood.”

Her scream is so violent it puffs her cheeks around the cloth gag in her mouth.

A terrible staccato of thunder bangs and booms, violent belts of rain pelt down from the storm.

As a blinding stab of lightning—my Spirit Power—turns the clouds white, I make my first slice up from above her thick black pubic hair to just below her sternum.

As her entrails spill out, I see the pattern. Watch as they slither, fold, and spill.

The lightning’s blinding flashes enable me to see across the distance. The shape of my sister’s face is molded by the ropy knot of intestines.

“So,” I whisper, “you think you are coming for me? Oh, my beautiful love, you have no idea.”

I shall be ready.

Ever so ready.