(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 37 minutes)

Correspondence for Proposed Prisoner Exchange

More weeks had passed, Fool’s Gold Floyd as diligent a calendar as his many other functions. The date was December 11th, which meant the Stoking Dramas were now just three days away. After that would come the first blizzard of Pursuitia’s aggressive winter, blanketing the ground in penetrating permafrost that could claim all a man’s toes before he could take as many steps.

If the blizzard came and Blueberry was still incarcerated then she would be riding out the entire winter with the Bickyplots, who would themselves not dare to leave Bickering Hall the entire time but for the briefest and most vital of errands. The fiends would grow bored, then cajole Chattelpool into breaking out his favorite pet for them to play games with in the torture dungeon-cum-gaming hall they undoubtedly possessed.

She would be the highest scoring section of a dart board by the fifth day snowed in according to her own estimates, and she was gifted with such accurate readings of the weather, not a gift while imprisoned, that she correctly guessed this would occur no later than the 17th. In the window overhead she had already spied dog-earing frost in the corners, layers of ice collapsing on each other in orderly triangles.

This early in the month, at that low an altitude, meant the patterns were an ill omen for an already terrifying and oppressive season. Winter next would be among the harshest they’d known in Pursuitia; flitting flights between close buildings would put them at tremendous risk of being blown away or getting lost in a white tempest.

Only Independence Hall was guaranteed to be safe, with its thickest walls and drafting reinforcements. The Lenape and the Freed would be left to chance, some bound to lose their homes in the gale and hail. If so it would be a mad dash to the next structure over, which was not certain to have enough stored food to last them all until the last storm snapped, somewhere around February the 15th.

Blueberry was no stranger to the finale season’s perils, for while she often took advantage of her friends’ hospitality inside Independence Hall during the rest of the year, the Founders always made sure she was not inside when the doors closed for the last planned time. The other groups were not unkind to her, but it took more than kindness to earn a place in someone’s home and access to their stores for such an interminable duration.

The problem was patched each autumn, when she struck an agreement with one of the families to forage and prepare not only her own food, but as much as she could gather beyond that as payment for joining them during the long and cruel freeze. With her capture she would not be able to complete her preparations that year. For the first time since she was too small to carry a musket she would have to rely on compassion alone.

There must have been some, and it must have had some authority, otherwise the Founders would never propose what they did: a prisoner exchange. Fool’s Gold kept her abreast of the entire process, as each message sent between estates was publicly posted. It was actually the Bickyplots who first offered, hardly surprising when considering that Wighthall was not only one of a mere thirteen, but much more powerful and skilled to their estate than Kidd was to her own.

Initially she assumed the proposition would be rejected outright, and it mostly was, but room was left for negotiation. As the parties remotely haggled over her life, Blueberry spent many hours considering the possible reasons.

First is the obvious: they’ve gotten what they wanted. Floyd has already confirmed it; over a thousand variations in, a manifestation of the conscious Cadavawing has finally agreed to sign the Second Declaration. His authority over the gates of Pursuitia, laid down before pilgrims ever set Anchor, is now void. Twelve more signatures or deaths will throw those gates open.

Floyd didn’t have access to the transcripts of the interviews, so I don’t know what sort of Cadavawing caved to our demands. He could be friendly, or nearly respectful like Spywulph. More likely he is just extremely tired of being strapped to a table all day long, a sentiment I now understand all too well. I should consider myself lucky there’s no specific information the Bickyplots think they can extract from me.

So now the Founders are willing to trade him back in exchange for me, but why? Surely they can get more with such incredible leverage. All I can offer them is scraps of intelligence, the roughest of floor plans for Bickering Hall, informed mostly by the creaking of boards and the banging of barred iron doors.

And I doubt there’s much interest in my fellow specimens, who keep discovering the trails they’ve blazed over and over again. Much like my efforts to understand these monsters. I have no better grasp on their motivations or cruelty than anyone else, despite having spent more time with them than any other human can claim.

No, I have no value, as they should know. If my brothers and sisters had somehow twisted the collective wing of Independence Hall on my behalf then Floyd would have told me. I must have a defender at the highest echelon, perhaps even in the Committee of Five, and it follows that he must be my father.

He fights for me, so righteously that he would throw away a Bickyplot to reacquire his line, but not once in my life has he revealed himself. Not even an anonymous letter. No aid in resources. Why? Why must I remain a secret? And from which party? Until I have my answer I am worthless, save the point value assigned to my various organs when I am mounted on the Bickyplots’ giant dart board.

On the day of the exchange her thoughts moved back to what Floyd had sent her, an exact copy of the final agreement. Her captors would arrive soon, to prepare her for transport in whatever way they saw fit, she imagined being rolled up inside a rug crawling with vermin, so now was her last chance to look at her field journal and spy some hidden code or sentiment from the man who loved her from the whispering shadows of their close-knit government.

The exchange is to take place in Hopkinson Field, which is called by Bickering Hall the Scab of Brass. We of Independence Hall will arrive at 12:00 sharp, which is the sore-draining hour by Bickyplot time.

We will come as three, astride tin horses, alongside a company of twenty fine soldiers, who will have encircled a bound and gagged Lord Cadavawing Wighthall. They will be heavily armed, but weapons will not be drawn without provocation.

You will arrive as no more than six Bickyplots, accompanied by no Silhouettes, and you will have Private Blueberry Kidd with you and in good health. Her face will be immediately and fully visible to us. In fairness you too will carry weapons, but they must not be brandished at any point in the proceedings.

We will then begin the exchange, to be achieved by the prisoners each stepping forward under their own power and passing on parallel paths, one pace for Wighthall to every five for Private Kidd. Once they are back where they belong, both parties will retreat from Hopkinson Field in the spirit of cooperation, and the incidents that led to these unfortunate circumstances duly forgotten in polite future exchanges.

Do have all attending parties sign this draft if it is to be the final one, as we have already done.

That was the most relevant section, so it was the one Blueberry read through the most times, enough to make her eyes sore solely along the horizontal. Was there a hint of love anywhere in these lines for her to read and take comfort in? The Founders did request that she be ‘in good health’ and not just ‘alive’. Perhaps there was enough room in that phrase for hope to nest.

For the time being it would have to, as there came a sound, not closely related to any of the creaks and clunks she had by now memorized. In a flash the journal disappeared into the folds of her uniform, but there would be a very curious delay between that first sign of their approach and the unlocking of her cell door, filled with equally strange noises.

At the surface there was the clamor of all the Bickyplots crammed into one passage, from the scratchy chicken toes of Xylofont to the inflated cushions holding up Godswallop. They were all muttering too, arguing something, but doing so in their version of a whisper. Kidd threw herself to her feet, flew to the door, planted her ear against it.

There was something else under all their cantankerous milling. The clicking of mechanical teeth? The grinding of the molars of the king under the mountain? It brought forth an imagination more wild than her own, filled her head with images of enchanted swords, immortal forests, and witch curses riding bowlegged on a night wind. Whatever this sensation was, it and the furor about it were localized nearby, to a spot she suddenly recalled.

The gate. Or door. The wall that might be opened, if something went very wrong or equally right. That was where the skittering heart of Incontible Bludgehaven had tried to make a sharp turn. Innately Blueberry knew the creature had not feared the thirteen protruding emblems arranged in a circle upon it, each unique, but whatever lay on the other side. She might know it soon enough, as the Bickyplots were stomping again, headed her way.

Kidd stood. With the sudden head rush came the understanding that it was a worthless gesture; it would do nothing to assert her dignity when all twelve enemies towered over her. Will they all even fit in this chamber? Three locks took turns clinking in the door, then it was thrown open. Her answers bent forward and practically collapsed into the menagerie, one by one. Their bulky day robes, gowns, capes, and trains disrupted the paths of the foreign anatimals, sent them into ignored chaos.

Before they could surround her, Blueberry put her back to the purple treeish thing, careful not to let any part of her slip into one of the puckering knotholes. At least in that position nothing could be directly behind her.

“You’re supposed to bow, has Eggnonce taught you no manners?” Bludgehaven squealed out of his hinge. His knobby hand, slightly chilled with malice, shot out and grabbed her shoulder, forced her into the supplicant gesture. It only lasted a moment, as the unnaturalist slapped his hand away.

“Do not touch my property,” Chattelpool squawked. “Why are you all still here? I don’t need you anymore.” All their heads converged on her, blocked the light, cheeks squishing. Drooling paint dripped from Hissmidge’s mop of hair and stained her shirt four different colors at once.

“We want to see it work,” she said. “I haven’t seen anything from-“

“Shut it!” Lady Flaywood snapped, nipping at Hissmidge’s locks with one of many maws. “Don’t tell it nothing. Just put the bark on Nonce.” Her caretaker Bickyplot squeezed out of line with the others, knelt down, and pulled something from his pocket. At first he appeared to turn the pocket inside out, but the piece of periwinkle blue detached, like a suction cup, and refused to hold its shape while Eggnonce continued to rotate his hand.

It was brought right up to Kidd’s face, where she could smell grassy lemon. The stuff poured like thin putty, but within its changing shape she noted a craggy texture reminiscent of tree bark.

“Hold still little miss,” Chattelpool ordered, “and hold your breath unless you want it in your stomach, which I promise you do not.” The human took a deep audible breath to indicate compliance, with her cheeks puffed out. Displeased, the Bickyplot pinched her face with his free hand, forcing most of the air out with a spray of spittle.

“Eugh. Dreadful,” Dudgewhistle grumbled, the arms on the spine of his head wiping off droplets that never actually made it to either of his covers. Kidd had little breath left, but was given no more time to adjust. The blue material was slapped onto her face like a wad of dough, Chattelpool’s talon smearing it around, covering everything.

The sensation was most unpleasant, bringing her to her knees. Many times in her life she had fallen against a tree, scraped a knee or elbow on its bark; what explored her face now felt like the exact moment before skin was ruptured in such an instance. Magnified, prolonged, it was now a meticulous itch, tiny hooks grabbing her every pore and each pulling in a random direction. She feared if it continued for long her entire face might separate from the layer underneath and become one with the material instead. Pain hides opportunity. I must do it now while his hand covers my mouth.

“Ah! A perfect likeness!” Lady Devalming said. She clapped her hands, a few others joining in. “It just needs a coat of paint.”

“I’ll get to it straight away,” Impestle tittered, which was the last thing Blueberry heard muffled through the plugs of material cozying themselves in her ear canals. A new pair of claws pinched just under her chin, and the whole mask went rigid. It was peeled away, sending most of the tiny hairs of her face drifting down. Hissmidge had removed it, and as she pulled up to her full height she turned her wrist to examine the underside of the now-solid object.

“Keep holding it until it sets,” Chattelpool warned, but his concern abruptly shifted back to his specimen. He’d expected a big gulp of fresh air, perhaps some amusing sputtering, and a grimace would’ve been nice too, but Kidd was stone-faced. Her eyes still moved though, so she was alive. Although the same could be said for the mask, which definitely was not.

Its expression disturbed Blueberry greatly. Once her eyes adjusted to the missing and dangling lashes she saw what they had made: a replica of her own face. The color was still a uniform light blue, but otherwise it was flawless. The bark texture had gone. Its lifelike qualities extended to her minutest mannerisms, as the eyes blinked in her rhythm and the lips adjusted to hide scowls and sadness. She couldn’t ask what they were going to do with it, but the idea quickly came on its own.

Of course Bickering Hall had no intention of honoring the terms of the prisoner exchange. At the string-snapping party they had been double-crossed, and worse in their many oblong eyes, it had preempted their own treachery. The exchange was naught but an excuse for a fight they were all spoiling for, and it was a miracle the pretense still held.

That mask was to be part of a decoy. Once their resident artist had it powdered and rouged it would indeed pass for her; all they had to do was mount it on a human-shaped mass clothed in rags and bind it in chains to explain why it did not move. Then they could get oh so close to their giddy revenge upon Pilgrim’s Anchor for spoiling the string-snapping surprise, whatever it had been.

And they were so eager they were already off. Without so much as a goodbye the Bickyplots had begun filing out of the menagerie, shoulders dancing with anticipation. Good. What a relief it is to be found boring. Get out. This is my workshop, where I will craft my brilliant escape!

As if he had heard her thoughts, Eggnonce, the last in the train of his brethren, paused in the open doorway. The naked bird inside his head turned before the rest of him. No. No damn you. Just leave. You already know me better than anyone else thanks to your pokers, your scrapers, and your spit cups.

“Where has your curiosity gone?” her captor asked coolly. A pause. His feet twisted; back he came. “You have as many questions as I do, but now they’ve all scattered like bugs?” Blueberry didn’t speak, just stared back. Her eyes were hard, her jaw tight, yet an incontinent drop of fearful sweat rolled down her temple. “I wonder why.” Bending down, his talon reached for her tensed throat.

It appeared she wouldn’t get a chance to create an exit after all, and in days winter would be upon her very heart and soul. The only war left would be for survival, and its only ceasefire death.

If, and only if, they had not both lived in Pursuitia, the world of drafting, where intent and authorship carry great power, and where sometimes declaring the proper stewards of that power takes a bureaucratic amount of time to process. One such instance had finally resolved, and its parcel was instantaneously delivered right into the lap of one Private Blueberry Kidd, who had already signed for it.

“What is that?” Chattelpool asked, his little bird sticking its beak between the antler-bars and angling toward the item. He had good instincts, Kidd had to admit, because he didn’t immediately reach for it. It was an option not provided to her, and when her thighs shifted underneath the decorated prism of wood some madcap notion of drafting activated.

Nails extended and stabbed her, but she couldn’t scream, only seethe through clenched teeth. Her lips parted involuntarily though, and a glancing Chattelpool saw periwinkle welling up between teeth and gums.

“Ahah! Give it over you scamp.” The Bickyplot’s claws flashed as they neared, but the upper face of the item in Kidd’s lap had even longer nails to offer. They shot up out of scattered metal holes, punctured the unnaturalist’s arm. When he recoiled it lifted Kidd into the air, bringing significant pain to both parties.

Unmarked Rodney had incidentally pulled a most impractical joke from beyond the grave. His invention that made his fellows most skeptical of both his genius and his benevolent intent, his unmarked rod, had arrived into Kidd’s custody after much time in magical limbo. She had entirely forgotten that she’d agreed to hold it, keep it hidden from prying founding eyes, before Spywulph had even shown up with his dinner invitation.

As it turned out he had made the correct choice. Kidd had no quarters of her own, thus the rod would never appear somewhere expected, and had in actuality remained incorporeal until the forces behind drafting decided the receiving party was sufficiently receptive. If she hadn’t been dangling by her triply skewered thigh meat she would’ve had the presence of mind to guess at the rationale.

Obviously the menagerie did not count as her quarters, for she was being kept prisoner. By various strong definitions they were owned by others, and so was she. One thing only had changed. The door was left open. Chattelpool was never remiss in managing the portal clinically prior to that day, but he hadn’t had to accommodate his entire family at once. Even now it hung wide open, cool air pouring in as if possessed by a curiosity of its own.

Since it was open Blueberry was free to leave, and if she could freely come and go the menagerie must have been her quarters, thus the unmarked rod was delivered to the quarters of the signatory.

To her lower quarters specifically, where it had punctured and drawn blood now splattered all over the shells and hides of various oblivious anatimals. Eggnonce couldn’t match their composure, pathetic considering he faced little risk of permanent injury with his kind’s regenerative abilities. It was just pain, and his poor tolerance of it was Blueberry’s greatest opportunity.

Through agony and a mouthful of amorphous alien wood, she managed to free her leg and grab the rod by the two portions that looked the emptiest of features, and thus safest. It did not strike her again, waiting at least long enough for her to yank and free the object from the Bickyplot’s flesh as well. Before the towering intellect could recover, she landed on her feet and tried to reorient the weapon.

One part looked like a handle, which could’ve simply been bait, but there was time only for trust in Rodney’s designs. She held it by that feature; the length of the rod was flat against the side of her forearm. Two iron bars unfolded from nowhere in particular, snapped into place on her arm. The pressure was extreme, painful anew, but it did not break the bone.

She used it for stability, swinging with all her might from her hips on up, whacking at Chattelpool’s legs. Each blow triggered a different mechanism within the rod, manifested with shrapnel, a fuchsia flame, a spinning hammer head, a spray of anatimal teeth, a rusty scraper not unlike some of the tools he had used on Kidd, and a piece of roughly cut wood almost as large as the rod itself that landed in the grass harmlessly, unless you count the harm caused by Chattelpool tripping over it.

The Bickyplot was suddenly on his knees, but not too confused to know the rod was causing all this. In one calculated strike he took hold of it, and Kidd’s arm, pulling them closer. Her foe’s insatiable curiosity had not caught up to the fact that the unmarked rod, in its sinister inscrutability, punished all attempts at analysis and mastery.

It vibrated, stronger the closer it came to the Bickyplot’s head. Then a cute little door fell open, as if it simply forgot it was supposed to stay closed. Out flew a spinning sliver of metal that fed itself straight through the antler-bars of the cage on Eggnonce’s shoulders, forcing him to release Blueberry.

He reeled, grabbing at the basket of his head, but there was nothing he could do as the projectile bounced around inside. The little noggin-bird screeched, tried to flee, and succeeded too much when the sliver cleanly severed the umbilicus binding it to the neck-stump. Screeching became hoarse croaking as it flapped its way free of the cage and wheeled about madly, deflating all the while, dropping a steady stream of toxic blood.

The shriveled thing smacked wetly against a wall, turned back, and as it crossed in front of a knothole an inexplicable suction drew it into the darkness. Then the tree-thing swallowed. A paralyzed Kidd couldn’t thaw her legs until after Chattelpool toppled, completely unconscious. The body was intact, the living heart still lurking inside, but her mind was not on murder, set instead on a prize so expansive that she might be able to walk upon it.

As they’d all long guessed, the hideous chick inside the Bickyplot’s cage was equivalent to an entire head on the others, so he would not rise until it was completely regenerated, but given its small size that might only take minutes. Blueberry fled, pushing aside the sensations of the freshest air she’d accessed since her imprisonment.

She wasn’t leaving, at least not the way she came. The way they came. The world of the Bickyplots. There was nothing better for a spy to claim than that knowledge, and if she could return with it she would be labeled not a prisoner of war, but its executioner. It took great effort to spit the blue bark into her hand, the one not attached to the unmarked rod.

The stuff tried to cling to the roof of her mouth as it stretched, requiring her to shovel with her tongue to fully extract it. Insistently shapeless, the material’s flow was almost indistinguishable from a squirm. Projections easily escaped her fingers, encased them, but never separated from the central mass.

Whatever this was, it conformed to any surface it came across, and even retained qualities of motion, like muscle memory. The Bickyplots had opened that wall, that was what she’d heard earlier, and reentered their native world to fetch a sample of it in order to make their decoy Kidd. They called it bark, so it must come from a tree, never mind that I just saw one of their trees eat a bird. Not even an orchard of them will dissuade me. My whole life I have mastered this world I am not native to. I could make myself comfortable in Hell, cook my meals over its fires, bring the devil that spade he asked to borrow.

“Ready yourself Wagner!” she urged her pet; the dog-tail slithered out from under her collar. Its job would be trivial compared to the closed-throat gagging she’d fended off after biting a piece from the bark while the Bickyplots molded the mask. By virtue of the anatimal’s facelessness she didn’t need to concern herself with asphyxiating it, so she smeared the periwinkle putty-wood across Wagner’s blunt end aggressively.

Once it was in place she concentrated on reaching the gate, achieved it in moments. Though open just minutes prior, it showed absolutely no sign, appearing as solid and static as it had the first time she’d seen it: thirteen large textured emblems arranged in a circle over top of metal grates. Thirteen Bickyplots, thirteen slots. Each must carry a key, or use a digit as key. What about Wighthall? I shouldn’t put it past them to cut off their own limbs, keep them withered as spare keys. However it was done, Wagner is now their equal.

“Open them,” she ordered, more as a way to catch her breath since the anatimal often understood her desire from nothing but the way she thrust her bearing arm. The lowest emblem, red and round, a metal sore peeled off an ashy aged foot, looked to Kidd like a decorative summary of Licketysplit Godswallop. At the center was a slot, and as Wagner wriggled against it the alien wood seeped into its every opening, took the shape of whatever mechanism lay within.

With a grab and a twist Blueberry tried to turn it like a key in a lock, and that was exactly how it worked. The whole emblem glided in a complete circle, producing a clean click somewhere behind. Briefly she begged the world to continue favoring her, as she feared pulling Wagner would separate the morphing material and leave it lodged in the lock, but luck was on her side yet again.

The substance of the skeleton key seemed to prefer contact with living flesh, so it clung to Wagner as she moved on to the next emblem over, styled after the gardener Pumpwine Cult-on-Sea. Again the wood greedily gobbled up the emptiness. Twist. Turn. Eleven to go. Wagner proved invaluable when it came to those at the top of the circle, as whipping the dog-tail up extended her reach greatly.

A lock coated in dried fatty wax, most likely representing Hamishand Glazemouth, was last to go, put up no more resistance than the others. Its click was more of a clunk, and that clunk more of an explosive barrel dropped out of a chute into detonating whitewater rapids. Blueberry fell back, threw up her forearms defensively.

All the emblems rotated once more, this time of their own accord. Metal scratched and whined, the devil flicking a forked tongue of quicksilver. The wires that made up the grates contracted, separating, shrinking down to tin buttons and then to nothing. Between them diamonds of backing wood opened fissures as they too shrank. The crisscrossing lines had behind them a wall of whipping color, its threads, its sheets, so fast that she could not discern any individual hue.

The wall that held up the locks vanished into itself, yet they remained in place, turning like heavenly bodies that had never known so much as a morsel of a meteor. Then the diamonds became points, became nothing. Kidd blinked. It didn’t solve the veil before her. Why can’t I… see? No, I can, I’m just not meant to see it properly. Not only is that not my world, it does not run on the thoughts of man. A different god dwells there, and in its thoughts the Bickyplots were born. I know nothing of its basal morality, its existential structure. Will I survive if I pass through?

Even now Chattelpool was growing a new bird that could squawk out the alarm. She’d come this far, any attempt at escape already damaged by her lingering. It was time to find her spine, and wrap her soul about it tightly to keep out the slings, arrows, flames, and venom of a world that bred the greatest evils she had ever known.

“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof!” she declared, throwing a tenacious Wagner over one shoulder where it became a bandoleer. Her words were writ upon the Liberty Bell, and she hoped they would toll and dispel just as the bell did, destroying all evil in a protective bubble about her that might allow traversal in the realm of Bickering.

Armed with nothing but the unmarked rod she strode forward. In a single abandoning leap she threw herself into the circle of emblems, through the veil of foreign colors her eyes tried to repel.

Sensation crossed out, rewritten. Time peeled, its layers glued back together in a newer messier arrangement. Thought sunk like a stone. It could be said that Private Blueberry Kidd landed somewhere, but to say it in the languages of man was to have the notion shredded to incoherence as soon as it hit the substance that passed for air in that world.

Sanity was wrought in man through countless generations and trials, and still only ever got them as far as a round planet and a god up above. Here there be no sanity. In Bickering waters all was contingent instead upon propriety, itself determined by something distant and daft. Kidd struggled to right herself, write herself, draft herself, think off and kilter, before being inside this other being ended her outright.

“Proclaim liberty,” she muttered, as the new thought of survival shoved the old her into the musty protection of dark denial.

Stage directions for ‘The Love of Democracy’

Scene VII. Courtyard by the bell tree.

Enter Roquefort and Jezebel

ROQUEFORT.

Is this truly what you want? Could it not be that you desire something more than an ornament, and which you have simply come to associate with this sound?

[Plucks bell from tree, rings it.]

JEZEBEL.

That is no mere ornament; do not try to fool me! Each harvest these are handed out to the young men who have also reached the age from which they might bear a crop, that crop both the ripe and rank ideas bandied about in discourse civil by protocol but not by nature. It is a badge of participation, one that we are denied.

ROQUEFORT.

It is also an invitation to scrutiny.

[Threads bell, wears it about the neck. Prances around tree like cat.]

You now hear my every move. I cannot act with any privacy, and am thus no better than a belled ox or cat. My moral compass is monitored, its needle the mast of a ship upon whose deck I am not the captain. My superior officer and the winds tell me how I must turn it. Are you not happier to go silently? Already you have the ears of the men, including those far above my station, and through your whispers something stronger than a vote has worked its way into our governance.

JEZEBEL.

Almighty god gave us this tree, so they say. He planted it here in front of a crowd of witnesses, and they watched it spring up before the moon rose. No instructions were included beyond its symbolism, yet somehow the menfolk have drawn the conclusion that only they were meant to wear the bells. With them they cast their votes in matters of congress while we idle outside, waiting to hear what fate has been chosen for us.

To wear the bell is to be recognized, and to be recognized is to be respected. Do not lecture me on what powers I do and do not have, for history will recognize only the powers recorded. My children will not read that I was nothing but their mother.

ROQUEFORT.

Your children? But we have not been so blessed yet.

JEZEBEL.

Only because of my position, on which you imply envy. How am I to whisper in the ears of power if I’m so round with child that it pushes me away? Had I the guarantees of the bell I could get right to the work of rearing, and know that any daughters would also be so secured.

[Approaches tree, is blocked by Roquefort. He hangs bell back on branch.]

ROQUEFORT.

You mean you would leave this life behind if I vote in favor of Proposition XIX? The vote is for you the single step up to the altar of marriage?

JEZEBEL.

It is the step up that allows me to make the decision in the first place. Without it I am not a person, and it takes a person to become a bride and then a mother to a man’s legacy.

ROQUEFORT.

You taunt me my love. I know your ways, and how you have spoiled for change on the capital steps year in and year out, a different man on your arm each time. My friends have heard these words too, I imagine. You would offer to marry anyone who would vote you into a bell.

JEZEBEL.

I would marry anyone who would give me the vote and who would win me the right. Legal success will be my dowry and I will accept no substitute. Until then the ringing of all these bells is just the antics of the alley cats, which I have always seen fit to ignore. Good day, young man.

[Exeunt.]

“Yes, that’s the page,” Muster said, jabbing at the paper across his chest, nearly knocking the script out of Fool’s Gold Floyd’s hand. “Sorry.” The pair continued to march as they talked, Founders ahead and more of the young behind. Hopkinson Field, the site of the prisoner exchange, was not far now.

“And what do you want me to write in?”

“Just an extra stage direction. At the start of the scene put a book or a satchel of loose papers in Roquefort’s hands. Potential proposals, something of that sort. I haven’t asked Arrowhead permission for the edit yet, but once I explain the situation I think she’ll allow it.” Fool’s Gold produced a pencil as his president spoke and began to write in the margins. Normally it wasn’t part of his duties to handle the Stoking Dramas at all; he didn’t even like acting in them.

Since becoming Blueberry’s primary correspondent however, suddenly he’d been asked to pick up all sorts of slack when it came to journals, scripts, and the collecting of the leaflets left around Anchor by the Mad Letterman. At that very moment his coat was stuffed with penciled and inked errands, the thickest task being the script in his hands that President Hart had ordered him to snatch off the stack just before heading out.

It was Floyd’s hope that not asking about the orders and requests would eventually cause the others to lose interest in his free labor, but that tactic had not succeeded so far. Still, he kept mum as Hart prattled on regarding his unusual break in authorial protocol. It sounded as if he was trying to justify the decision to himself; Floyd merely nodded along.

Was this what Blueberry’s life was like? She too often wound up in the cracks of the younger generation’s machinations, sealing them against unforeseen hitches. If you needed something hunted up from the wilderness you called in a favor with her, and she mostly acted as if she’d owed you ten even if you owed her five. He resolved that, the next time he wrote to her, he would mention his new understanding of her burdens, but this just reminded him that she hadn’t responded the last time he’d asked for an acknowledging dot.

Perhaps she was finally out of ink; it didn’t mean she was dissected on a table. Fool’s Gold hadn’t told the others yet. It was but one absent smudge, and everyone had become choked with stress in the past few days. The bite of winter was in the air and at their throats, earlier than usual, forcing the population to overlay days on their calendars and accomplish twice what they normally would.

Compounding all of this was how profoundly and chaotically the news from the bog had struck Pilgrim’s Anchor. The facts had been relayed exactingly, and through examination of Independence Hall’s archives it was decided that the presence out in the swamp was genuine and not some trick of the Bickyplots.

Other men had come before, and they had died in Pursuitia, but only mostly. Something of their spirits remained in their bodies and artifacts, though it might have just been an echo animated by drafted magic.

Many of the Founders lost interest when they learned there was no one young, and not one beating heart. Their hope was clearly that white women lived among those of the lost colony, that they could finally have younger wives and concubines with enough vigor to handle the household properly.

They also seemed to stop up their ears with wax during all parts of the report, and all subsequent reminders, that the atmosphere of the encounter had undoubtedly been hostile. The bog butter mummies had offered not one word of comfort, no words of any kind, as they’d emerged grasping from the reeking depths. Virginia Dare herself had molested the president of the Junior Congress, though he was nothing but a corporal to the elders.

This was deemed impossible, though that was not stated outright. The young had learned to read between the lines that were the creases on scheming statesman foreheads. All the Founders saw was a potential ally: a company of bodies as or more immune to harm than those of the Bickyplots. Floyd, Hart, and all the others foresaw what a problem this wall of hardened ignorance could become, and who would have to deal with it, but every party recognized that the issue would have to be put off until the spring. The blizzards were simply too close to consider mounting any sort of second expedition concerned with diplomacy. The Founders would instead refine any proposals for Miss Dare and her attendants over hot drinks and a roaring January hearth.

“-Arrowhead was particularly perturbed by the ending of this one anyway,” Hart finished, only for an awkward silence to flow in and make him realize he’d been the only one talking in the entire company.

I should keep it all locked away up here. It’s better they not know how frequently my mind wanders from my presidential duties. Wander it did, back and forth across the stage directions in Arrowhead Ellery’s play. Three years running she’d been considered their best playwright, due in no small part to her ability to write around the dictates of the Founders and still make her point, a skill which, under less formal circumstances, had earned her Lenape-memory in the first place.

The men who appreciated Shakespeare and little else upon the stage had decreed that certain endings, themes, and morals were forbidden in the Stoking Dramas, arguing that it was a matter of safety. Despite the atmosphere of a festival and a crowd full of Sunday-best clothing, the evening’s purpose was largely utilitarian.

Pursuitian trees protected themselves from the trials of winter with the false intent inherent to their papery leaves and inky sap, what were together so like the forceful declarations of drafting. Intent became heat, sometimes even flames, melting ice and snow before they could do their damage.

On that same principle the Stoking Dramas ran every year, as close to the first blizzard as the Anchorites could calculate. Five plays were written and performed, mostly by the young thanks to the vigor in their artistry, to a mandatory audience of everyone. Narrative momentum blew on the coals of emotion, earnest entertainment fanned the flames, and spiraled plot lines maximized the surface area of intellectual grappling.

All of this combined to have a drafting effect, though one not tied to any specific document, its energies more primordial to Pursuitia. Heat. Enough to last as long as they kept thinking about the stories. The better the Stoking Dramas the more comfortable their hibernation, the less wood they had to feed the fires, the longer they could survive if exposed to the outdoors.

Yet the Founders undercut their own efforts with censorship. Inherently the men feared a flame run wild, a social fuse that might see them undermined and overturned if it created an anger which superseded its possible consequences. So their tamping boots extinguished certain themes each year, including that which was present in The Love of Democracy: women’s suffrage.

Muster had read the script through several times now, making sure it was the place and scene where he wanted to make his move. Each time it became clearer how Ellery had nimbly dodged Founder objections. Suffrage was not ultimately promoted as the character of Jezebel, provocative name indicative of disrepute to the elders and rebellion to the young, would not be victorious in her efforts.

Instead she would lose in the high tension of the final vote, suffer a breakdown, weep and rage and castigate all those around her as she lost the strength to stand on the capital steps. Bifurcating brilliance. The Founders saw the emotional instability of a manipulative woman, Eve and Lilith rolled into one, the viper’s venom sucked out of the bloodstream and spit onto rock under a hot sun to sizzle away.

The young, as well as some of the elder Lenape and Freed, would see a tragedy: a person who fought her smartest, hardest, and most cunning with a determination she never should’ve been forced to both forge and wield. All of it spent just to rise to a baseline dignity denied her. Nor did she fall short, as the line was callously raised when she approached it, no compassion for her left hand that reached out to breach the drowning surface or her right which struggled to keep her breath from leaving her throat. She did not succeed, but she did serve the purpose of warning all those who would come after. Your oppressors will never individually invest as much in their cruelty as you will in self-defense.

Ultimately the day could be won, if you broke up the block of solid disapproval, if you chipped away at each piece and made them see how they were individuals, how each question furthered the crack that might separate them from the rest, earning the treatment of gravel underfoot despite once being part of the statue.

That was on display when all the men, even the one lover she truly gave her soul to, Roquefort, to be played by none other than President Hart, rang their little bells in unison. Their united note was drowned out by Jezebel’s shriek of sorrow, like falling off a cliff into the sea. Their unity, their civil peace, was altogether less than her singular agony. This would be discussed among the young in the coming cold, and they would draw from it much more warmth than the Founders did their smug satisfaction.

Soft as a slipper slap, Floyd closed the script and tucked it away. His instinct, as well as that of all his comrades, was to reach for his musket, but he stilled his hand. There was still a facade of bargaining as they passed out of the treeline and into Hopkinson Field.

A good distance across there stood six Bickyplots, sets of three flanking what appeared to be Private Kidd. Middlebitch Flaywood, Incontible Bludgehaven, and Oolbook Dudgewhistle to the left. Questinking Spywulph, Hamishand Glazemouth, and Pumpwine Cult-on-Sea to the right. They called the field the Scab of Brass, owing to its color and the wide crusty inflorescence that grew on the tightly-packed grassy stalks which rose to chest height on a man.

Hart squinted. That appeared to be Blueberry. He wished to call out to her, to wave at least, but protocol had to be kept. To act otherwise could jeopardize her safety. A snot rope of curiosity dripped over his mind. Do they think something similar of their brother Cadavawing? He twisted just enough to glance at the nearby colossus the Anchorites pretended was their prisoner.

Technically it was part of their prisoner. In the process of beheading Wighthall hundreds of times some of the heads were preserved for scientific study, mostly those that indicated significant change in the form as its overall bone architecture shifted from Bickering Hall to Independence Hall.

These were not discarded along with the others in the bog that had also undergone a rapid change; it had been called Edward’s Bog, but was now Dare’s Bog. Science Master Franklin selected among these heads the least rotten and dead for use in their Bickyplot double. Diagonal blindfolds had been applied, to hide that the eyes didn’t move, and the same went for the gag shoved into the doors of its mouth.

As for imitating the ability to walk, so the Bickyplots wouldn’t suspect anything on approach, they had mounted the head on a few sturdy barrels and boxes, steadying and gluing them with a drafted notice to the shoulders of a secret fourth tin horse. All but the hind quarters were hidden by a baggy cloak, and once they’d entered the high grasses it was impossible to see the protruding metal haunches.

The three tin horses that served as distraction stood at the forefront, each ridden by a Founder: Edward Rutledge, James Wilson, and Carter Braxton. Any of them might have chosen to give a speech during the parley, but their tempers seemed short. A presence lurked within the grass, one treacherous, contributed to and sensed by all parties involved. Yet the charade continued.

“What’s wrong with his head!?” Lady Flaywood barked, pointing as if she could be referring to anything other than Wighthall.

“They remodeled the stupid bastard,” Ooolbook suggested, vertical mouth slit spitting bookshelf dust. One of the slender arms on the spine of his head grabbed the stock of the blunderbuss over his shoulder, but didn’t draw it.

“We take it Lord Wighthall has never spent much time around a building other than Bickering Hall?” Founder Braxton asked at the top of his lungs. All of the nerves that would’ve been in the ankles of a flesh and blood horse were instead in his wrists, kept also out of his voice. “After some time with us his head changed shape all on its own, to resemble one of ours, perhaps out of envy. We trust you’re not accusing us of having another Bickyplot in our care that you’ve never met.”

Their enemies glanced at each other, communicated much in grimaces and shrugs. Ultimately they must’ve accepted the explanation, as Dudgewhistle kicked Blueberry’s back to get her moving. She marched straight toward the Founders, and after a distance they would characterize as five paces the Wighthall decoy was released from its circle of escorts, the horse holding it up obeying a whispered order to trot straight and steady.

As the prisoners met in the middle Muster assessed the potential battlefield one more time. On paper the Anchorites had the advantage, as the only weapons the Bickyplots had were their firearms, usually loaded with metal dross, bone pellets, and splintered wood. Here in the Scab of Brass there was nothing for them to reload with but the paltry scattered stones in the soil.

The yellowed grasses hid much however, such as the Franklin kite on its wheeled pallet behind the last two soldiers of his own contingent, pulled along by ropes around the ankles. Kidd passed Wighthall. We won’t have to use any of this after all. What a relief. Wringing signatures out of these monsters is paramount, but it will remain so after winter. I need to get down to the simple task of warming myself. And to do that I need… He glanced over at Bonfire, but her face was locked ahead, discerning eyes concerned with Kidd.

Hart took a third look himself. What did she see? Blueberry was alive, blinking, moving, all sorts of things they had hoped to see out of her. You know her better than that you fool. Look at her expression. A Founder sees nothing on it, that she has made sure of, but I can see. There should be subtle guilt there, at ‘making’ all of us come out here to rescue her. There’s nothing. That face has never known her struggles, nor will it be perturbed by this!

Reflexes trained to respond to lightning strikes, Hart took up his musket in one swift motion. No need for caution, Blueberry couldn’t be hit. It wasn’t her. He squeezed the trigger, loosed a determined shot that whizzed by his false friend, sliced a few hairs from whatever mop or giant paintbrush they’d turned into a wig.

The ball struck Oolbook right in the mouth, tearing through all his pages and bursting out the back in a flourish of confetti. The Bickyplot sputtered and flailed all four of his arms. The other monsters readied their guns, hooted and grumbled equally in anticipation and judgment.

“Corporal, what was that!?” Rutledge snapped at Hart. Not an order. If it’s not someone’s else’s order it’s not supposed to come out of me.

“Let the kite fly!” Muster shouted at his soldiers in the back, who obeyed instantly. The machine was unfixed from their legs, rapidly charged with its baton. “That’s not Private Kidd; it’s a fake!” It would take too long for the Founders to see it, so Bonfire drew out one of her hatchets and hurled it mightily. The blade landed squarely on the forehead of the human decoy, splitting its face in two, but halfway through splitting it turned to putty and melted away. All that remained was a hunk of more typical wood, roughly carved in the shape of a human head and torso.

The object continued forward, came close enough that they could see its bottom. Instead of legs it had a metal wheel and some machined limbs pumping little pedals, which the young recognized from the food carts they’d encountered at the battle of the banquet. The Founders saw this and finally accepted, giving the order to attack once the false Kidd had fallen over.

Cutting through a large swath of grass, the Franklin kite buzzed into the air, extended the blades that would keep it aloft. Even in broad daylight it shone, a righteous blue lamp that quickly fed their weapons a rain of blazing bolts, to be momentarily redirected at the charging Bickyplots.

But only five of them charged. The sixth, Spywulph, instead rushed to the Wighthall decoy as it was riddled with musket fire from behind. One strike with the stock of his gun confirmed it was a fake, but his focus didn’t shift to the battle. Instead he yanked off the head and turned it over in his hands repeatedly, searching for something. The horse-heads bowing the horseshoe of his visage ground their teeth and snorted.

Is he looking for Wighthall’s heart? He must know we wouldn’t be foolish enough to bring it. It must be something else, but the Science Master has been over those heads with a fine comb. There’s nothing to find. Questinking suggested otherwise by wrapping the severed Independence Hall in his weapon strap and checking every other step to make sure it hadn’t left his side.

If Hart dwelt on it any longer he would instead be forced to dwell on the bloated paw of Bludgehaven squeezing his skull like a walnut. He ducked under the swipe, jabbed at the safe-headed monster from below the blooming grass. Bayonet found clothing. Knee. Infiltrated both.

His weapon was energized, and with its judicious discharge the jailer Bickyplot convulsed, buttons and buckles jangling across his hideous officer’s uniform. Repulsive flesh like a dull, greasy, iron pan lit up a sickly blue as the square door on his head flew open. The half-dog residing within flopped and slobbered, trying to claw its way free.

This was a textbook execution of the best possible strike against a Bickyplot, for launching a lightning bolt directly to their hollow interior almost always stunned the heart within, prevented beating and thus motion or thought on the part of the larger creature. Incontible fell over, swallowed by the grass, discernible only thanks to the smoke rising off his singed edges.

Several others had witnessed their leader’s beautiful attack, closed in to try and claim the jailer’s heart, but the altercation hadn’t gone unnoticed by the opposition either. Gourd-headed Pumpwine had been assigned a similar role to those dragging the Franklin kite. He whipped his fat leg in the direction of his fallen brother, revealing the item he’d been dragging under the grass the entire time.

A chain. On its own a chain, even on the inflated scale of a Bickyplot, might not have been so bad, but here every seventh link was attached to an open-topped metal box containing a good deal of industrial detritus, all of it perfect for loading into a certain sort of weapon.

The kick swung the entire chain over the fallen Bludgehaven, forcing the humans to duck, which still left them vulnerable to the shrapnel that was flung out. Several metal splinters were taken, one perilously close to an eye, and it forced a minor retreat. Pumpwine moved in on their quarry, squatted over it to keep the buzzards away.

All the while the other Bickyplots advanced, and when they nearly tripped over the chain they knew it was time to reach down and reload. Each boom from their barrels, louder than a boulder wrestling match, had great scattering power. The best shields the humans had were the tin horses, but instead of dismounting and holding them sideways to cover the retreat, the Founders had already fled to the back.

Nor did they abandon their next most valued asset, the fourth tin horse under the remains of the Wighthall replica. A piercing whistle from Rutledge called it back. Still blindfolded by the cloak, it nonetheless knew the way to any master that had signed the notice on its flank, in the process disregarding anyone else in its way.

Bonfire was forced to pass up a clean shot and roll to avoid its gallop. By the time she was back above the grass Hart was approaching. Instead of giving her an order he took her by the wrist, pulled her into the retreat. What paralyzed her more than their flagging position was the look on his face, having not witnessed its like before.

He looked defeated, but not from the skirmish. This altercation was not more intense than some of the others across the years, but it carried the weight of broken trust. Always there had been some degree of cordiality in the correspondence between factions. Both sides saw themselves as the more civilized, and always sought victory in the preliminary battle of manners.

But now those given invitations rode in on Trojan horses. A prisoner exchange contained not a single prisoner, and instead there were mechanical snakes in the grass. This winter they would all brood bitterly over how pointless it was to even talk to each other. Spring would not bring renewal, but aggression.

The Founders would push their advantage with Wighthall in custody, nary a second thought, or never a first, for the fate of Private Blueberry Kidd. Paine sensed the coming year would see the final draft of the Second Declaration. The Carve-Out would have to be completed in turn. She and her fellows were reaching the age where adolescent rebellion became adult grievance.

Drafted protections of their power or no, the Founders might face a military ready to insist upon their own lives, lives made in Pursuitia. That was her dream, though she would be happy to see the old men vanish into the sky off to wherever, as long as it severed the strings on her Hart. She would be perfectly content to stop being a leader, a soldier, a spy, to be just a person thinking about when the roof of her cottage needed fresh thatching. That was what a life made felt like, not a life inherited and obligated.

The shade of the trees dispelled her anger. Partial retreat had become full. The Bickyplots still pursued, and gained ground with their massive strides, but the neutrality of Hopkinson Field was only so large. By a quick signature a signal was relayed to those back in Independence Hall, ready to strike.

And strike they did, right across the Liberty Bell so it would ring its loudest and echo throughout the surrounding woods. At that range its sonorous swell could do little to harm the Bickyplots, but it would make clear they could not approach much more without losing the power to fight.

At its first ring all five pursuers paused, and at the second they had turned back, their last volley nothing but insult. They dragged with them the blackened smoking rag doll that was Lord Bludgehaven, and, as several of the young noted with concern, the empty Wighthall head.

Hart was still wordlessly pulling Bonfire along, even though their run had slowed to a walk. He didn’t look back, perhaps hoping to maintain the connection longer than he could justify, as they still weren’t speaking outside their official capacities. She allowed it to continue, but had unknowingly picked up a stowaway off the ground when she’d rolled to avoid the tin horse.

The blob of now-mixed paint and foreign wood slithered off her back, following the rhythm of her motions, then down the bridge of their arms onto Hart’s. When he felt it he freed his hand and stopped to examine it. Whatever the material was, it didn’t conform to his palm but for a moment. Instead it recalled something, almost fondly, and changed back to Kidd’s face. It blinked at him.

I hope you can keep this blank face around them. Don’t let them break you. We know what’s behind that look, I promise. You’re the strongest of us. It took an ax to split even a false version of you in half, and all it takes for me is selfish love. Every vote for me was wrong. It should’ve been you Kidd. Where are you?

He couldn’t know that question’s futility. Her location couldn’t be reached by foot, hoof, wheel, or sail. A better question was how. Not the how of emotions, of being well or unwell, curious or terrorized. It was the how of existence. How exactly was she put together in the realm of Bickering? How much was thought rearranged in a world far more divergent from Earth than Pursuitia?

How was up and down? Left and right? Alive and dead? Truth and imagination? How? How?

How!?

Ashoal undir allone, sand in her grass and her breachts, a Blubbery Kid headrizoned on her twinhardly dockingposts. Bickering rebeforne her, Earthly aftertaughts. Hundarse belonged there at many tweenlegs its passed while lapped and victoribboned Wagonly aborvet thatsuch Blubbery headrizon.

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“Arse their others?” That was Kad’s crucifal quer, upon which she could be strung or threecheered if she made anchorage once maritimore. “Others blottoed out lichen this avoid?”

Ans for hers came from severall direcshuns, pittying and judged mental alike. The payingtrons newsed of mored inbeed, nearbought buh scittered as rats roundearing a bushelbomb. No valleyed number was eggs-in-a-hat, But Konsidderd it nown: three antenn, aeye. If not, she was a bug.

Bereft of watered food, urged to sip chewy down treatised trachea and stomache, she daren’t try such vactuals of the weld as were on dis plate. Efflecks novel in taste woodknot be wort any in jury, verlicked of the payingtrons be dammed. Havening taughaut herself to taughat in thisere weld, Kindd reseasoned her way into full bell and resounded to jurney backwords and speke out existent solutions to pils’ grim probelms. All theyhado was patch garmeant holes dug by missteps in othered eart. Then, hopping, the burro might correct the bunn. If sodun, Hancox wherint needid to the bottom line, norse signplash of blood pact.

Shanked for hospit fromer mount, dissed she down to whine and board before taaughauting a portall to her highlow and goodbye. Their font farewells dent muffler when walls closed en, mient kinderly. Housever, Boxedin Kinder’s wildern essomething else enterly. She didn’t know if the tavernacle had rescuttaled its posetion orf the scene chained cuelinkously on its ownsome.

Lawst and eturnallied around shemite have binned, if not for Wagoneer, hose drifting tail, like a lackaday kighter, whippled the old wayther vanegloriously. Founding thair homepath releaved her warrties and vacated her stoolpigeon bowery. Wuawking was her job; she jot to it.

Remeandering in a fallen past putted her to the footcliff she’d surveyved down and now up. Taughauting a flighting change seamed pokeable, but she was apprehen siven thatmite make her growings; change made to the boddice roll into the mind. Then wherewillf sheebe? A wingird Kidstrel could innestly migrate to other Anchorage.

Wiser to constriked a hillup tunnel, she taughaut, thus breakinground. Darknest came swifts, dispelled out lighter by lighter with the taughaut that emberdded brazierocks shwould glow justace some warms and muffshrooms do. Lightly ore-inted skywaird, they contunnued along force everal minants unterhill stompped by inn decision.

“We shoutd be,” she muddered. To reach the address tissue she taughaut the inclined to stairing, then clined rabbitly insearcha vole. Panic set sailment and broke mast when she hither head on the roof of a mouth. “Open!” she taughaut, but this puppil wisened absorpint. Farm hands were no bettle at convincting it to make whey. Somehowl she spolked them down a gulleyt without real icing, and went down humiddlingly smoot.

Button sescinded taut, perhappening the beating east had taughaut them good eatin, thus ate. Ahunt and a brainstorm were both and the saim. A seasoned stormand had the edge on green newshooters just rooting for their saccolades. Thusled taughaut, her bigmeanestest nonotion woodent be a bell to free them. Amore indoors ectstraction was reachoired.

“Wageknaver, take the long weigh out, go in it and onyew.” Furst she warped the barkless limbandied twinehine armer, then cast out him as just a feashting pole. Heard in Bicker the tale’s taughauting langthened the tailing of its yarn, and it read the cast as stage dire ections, ectit stage left.

Twas her thinkering that they culled knot untide the turning of these beariertrap jaws in light of the proximperiority to the mawnster’s taughauting mined. Theocraticly, it woodwheeled less con troll further awoi, no guards potted in the backdoirt so to speek. Tung undherfoot attampled to pull the rugroute, forcing her to gummy dance while not gutting poker teeth self-de-feedingly. Ownly whent somewhere aft-her Wallower tugbit, informing Bluebitey it had sniffed out the rear eggsit.

The meaghty mountin’s gutt werem an eaten meaghtier laborynth to traburps, and havewood digressted her in a coroner if she didn’t halve of the treadcrumbs of Wisgomer guiding her thrue.

Almonst too cleater the pathtertaste was, as Kud chew through fasst as gass, coloding with the backed-up whall, smacked way passt gob. Spoon as she upped, down she fingerfooded in surch of a single cinch of gropening. Buttnaut. This barredy caveity was compleaten seal shunned.

Gnawthing reminded her behindquarters; therrier was no going back. Vapors moist vile got the byest of her nose, lighvened her bread. Morsel was her fate unless they acted owt. Summorning the moulthi-story arcs of Wunger, Boldberry taughaut it all as a whippes pike braught a lesson-is-moron agrainst the bellyend.

Together torn pairashot freel and fel, a briefs gawp to the landing. Her hidden grimed byle, Kodd fisht out of its waters with a trawlghaut that she might stand clean against her foenster.

The gigastric colonossal anima-ated en circle to purview its portvent nouvoe, more cure iss than infured. Soon its I and its I came tombrest atop Boisterry Kard. Both suffused a pangtern o wreck ognition. Klod onlyhad meteor spoked with saucy payingtrons and tavendor at the local bubbleshop, thus her douting arrivaled the impausibilty that she had bean-eaten buy one uv them transhaped towalk thus.

Yetshi new the creature mnemorically, oran illustation stopped past her idvenue. If avoid reminissed the saltaste ovits bickypork, mightint this concur ent devhour be a silber piepiece of a second placer? That feell floort in her boarns, but boarns croaked hallow, indictating a bronz meddle beneat.

Served juisty memmery: Kread was chaste by a sin othered from Bickerploys: what they callerd their ‘haunting daug’. In Pursoot it had warmed them off the fiars off Heel, haunting with a haunger one caughd here vial the oprickled mouth. Haunting doowmed young ondald alick, even chewly diswayded with the library bell and emberstyx incertified to the snottears. Thatenacity absent her this curio? Naut lie clear.

Highear was an imal which, despirited and snaeckt her, was nor mor hawstyle than a trufling pig at a fun gal’s pilzroom. Taming frendly caught by it, not fleevil. Nose dawning, it liked her smiell, allowed her toosie plentearful pashing I and I as a them of ess kindn. That’w ine struck her corked, pop goes the ideal.

Twas the verity act of invalidading, of changing the colornize, that second-faced your everydey bickerbeing into a soured puss. Ahhahh, she falled into wintereason, sum combined nation of taughauting things to troots and Pursuitors res pawns to lie test in tents. A head full of brewed bad reacsh, like which potion that drunkens a lord into wor.

Houwould founded yothers respeke to E normalous knews? Of shi was wrighten, et mint peach of thirtyn tries had annals dove better self jumpst a hoam awf. A curate for their loamsickness caude bay indert from Bicker. Prough in the pudd, deman ders would found, spurring her spade to hand ful off to pock it. She pawsed, scoutred hands blacksined.

If Bastarby Katadd was wrighten, Anchorage plunge in mulch the saimed fasten. Everyworld out of a Funding tongueburrow shoehorned steppedsister feet into glass. A Found was lost, and maynly reunion on revisitations to Earthly haunts. Her fouther’s straingth to claim her over his head was singlehanded, than hand left-Earthed. The Do-overclaration, mucking hole, filled up willing would plat flant a familitary. X apert… she woodknock be there. Shed be getting knoisy and nocking boots on carved-out grundertaking.

A head a top herself, Kild had thirst to escape the lands and argumounts of Bicker. The harmless daug had alriddy bit ther hand to feed; it aloud her to petite tulip of its closed for burpness moutt, essuing a pleasy grumburr like highbrid pumabull. Them were on their sepa rates, haum fasterrier and her slode in fatrigue, butt Wagger had knot become a limpet, still flue the way to smollke signaled chimnere.

Dawning arduous her eyes on line, stepping in tiered buckets, Klumddddistracted herseelf with darc thauts on the nurture of mansters. The foundlers of Pursuit were flawed and cordered men, prowners of outburst eaglo, yet she had scenes with their compolete charactors who mustavad a dimensioned three on Bicker’s two.

Unlesson, she couldn’t per sieve it through the monstper spective she was borned into. Her lends weren’t hers to give. Evil was the liet by which she luux. Haps she had missed when judged the Silhouones; the riverlaced bendworms were not oblivirile simple by the tons. It was them who monked wholesum and livid rightchess. Pacificly pious. Destinned in a heavyn oil of their own macht.

Foundnation had no qualms mastarting a tradetional slave markt, had wormply not been underbooted Bickerly first come, and thus first servile. Her fatherbears luurked wursandwurs in her ides of marching, and that taughaut steps countered by grabburs fingered. Goggling down, wherenested figuremeans of Foundlings woodfired and dirtcaked chrying to slope her dress. Bicker was unFounded, meaning tistinytoy Omas Jeffson, tat tiddly Frank Benlin, and tot twaddled Edwardian Ruttage whir but produce of her mage nation.

Weeding bells offed in her belfry to free the hoppy couple of her legs from tee lil lecher-lifes kneen on haulding her lowned back. Am anateur locat taughauting, the buggers ppoped unperferssionally, squacking insomersaults as they went, but wither mind off her subjections she walks inhunderd steeps back to whares belonging to her.

Fine alley dawned on the portertall imleading her back to Pursuit, on witch cast thirteemblems aspin. Wagnaughty went on aheadless to take the firstep fur muttkind and dogpassled through slippy as a diveweed ducked a claer pond. Buoyberry sawn in half the assistail, with the tallend begetting taller in Pursuit of their gaol. A trick o’ the lighsp? Nay, sum con version of misaligned chief twixt Bicker et Pursuit.

Kordd doubtfilled it asfaras harmdoing; Wonger could go to any length fitting and stall his oldself be. She also alonged, herried, to the gataway: ownly way backtrack guardless of transitformation. Holding on breathst and Wagtail, Kavaddlier plunged deepths.

On the through spies her Is wouldandid, many thingklings good and sam to tauddle offorgetfully. Amung up on them hoisted aflag was revolation of airy war, nunother than her sistered self mirried on otherwordy glenss. Four infaces starbbed en retern: a grunning skullk, a silberwept sly, a fattle pompswallow, and a chimerchine misparted. These folk faced her prisontly, passerated her, and condeemed her funiture of form. One werd spokes frown each mouthed, hubbed ather repertition: Freebooter.

Thine all ova subborn, Kadd was rehomed in Pursuit sumed. The old chase was on agen, Bickerprey scenting her runnings. Now she just hud to think taught straights. Via salutions? Upside smacked on the head, nauthing shook loosepapers. Via how? How!?

The Revised ‘The Love of Democracy’

The Stoking Dramas were underway, five productions across two nights before everyone locked themselves indoors for the bitter doldrums of Pursuitian winter. Night one had gone flawlessly, not so much as a ripped costume change or a leaky sandbag, a stroke of much-needed luck considering there was a guest critic in the audience.

Cadavawing Wighthall, bless his latest head and soul, had asked to sit in on the plays to observe human culture. This was the one iteration that had proven agreeable and signed the draft of the Second Declaration; he even understood, without a peep of complaint, that they had ample reason to keep him as prisoner and use him as leverage despite his cooperation.

“Honestly we would’ve done the same,” he’d admitted, nodding his heavy lopsided rendition of Independence Hall, ringing its little bony replica of the Liberty Bell. “But can I share a theory with you?” The Master of Sciences was all ears at the word ‘theory’. “You built me. Strange notion, yes? But you did. What you might call a change of heart absolutely isn’t!

No one can change a Bickyplot’s heart, but the mind? Truly flexible, despite what our longstanding feud might have you believe. We learn by lesson and laceration alike! The more my mind comes to resemble your hallowed halls, the more its thoughts run to and fro within just like all of you.

I’m not claiming I can be trusted, no. The heart wants what it wants and fears what it fears, and I must obey. There are things I can never reveal to you no matter how many times I’m decapitated and renovated. And given the chance I will return to my brethren. But I am saying that I understand you humans now. That makes me a man of similar appetites, and little food has been provided to my intellect. I’ve heard some scuttlebutt of these ‘Stoking Dramas’. Do you think perhaps I could watch? I think I will be better company during the blizzards if I too can have them warming my spirit throughout.”

The writers and players had no say in the matter, only the Founders, and much debate had been had about the notion behind closed doors, reenacted nearby by their offspring in their mimicry espionage. Just two days prior to the dramas they learned they would be hosting a Bickyplot, as it was decided there was little danger even if their enemies regained their brother.

It was a safe assumption that the Bickyplots had their own means of staying warm in winter; a safe assumption they had surely made of the humans. Sabotage would be all but impossible, as a play somehow tainted by an act of drafting could be discarded and a new one with equally old themes penned in its place.

And the last thing the Founders wanted was to be trapped with a whiner that had ‘missed out’ for the entirety of the season of the harsh critic, as he would of course be a guest of Independence Hall rather than trusted with any of the Lenape or the Freed.

So the players found themselves trapped between Independence Hall and its scale model, as the larger was the backdrop of the dramas and the smaller was in the last row, still able to see thanks to his immense height, strapped to a standing board and a metal frame so he couldn’t lash out and do any harm.

Not that it appeared he would. A smile in a doorway was impossible, but the Bickyplot seemed to smile with the curtains of his eye-windows as he watched the proceedings, quieter and more attentive than the majority of the humans. Although a diligent observer, of which there were none thanks to their need to feed their heat-coffers with drama, might have perceived an extra nod of latitude to Wighthall’s head, suggesting he was spending most of the time admiring the building on which his cranial form was now inspired, like a fresh gosling imprinting on its mother.

He had behaved himself during the first night, the evening’s programming divided between the comic farce ‘A Bickyplot Bakes a Pie Most Foul‘ and the modified closet drama ‘The Paragon in the Drunkard’s Cloak‘. As with all the plays, the young had slipped in their symbolism, with the first being, in naked truth, a criticism of the Founders’ frankly grotesque fondness for cabbage and the odors it produced from their guts in the more confined passages of Independence Hall, and the second being aggressive praise for the mysterious adult figure of the Mad Letterman.

Cadavawing behaved himself, so on the second night he was moved up several rows, though there were now some complaints from the back that he couldn’t be seen over. Those people were hushed forcefully, from all sides, as every interruption was another ember of warmth sapped from them in the difficult time ahead.

First ran ‘The Silly Silhouettes‘, ostensibly a romance and a comedy where all the characters were Silhouettes, brought to life by baggy costumes covered in rope. It was for the commonest among them, not much thought required, plenty of laughter extracted whenever they pretended to get tangled in each other.

Second on the bill was ‘The Judge of Philadelphia‘, the most indulgent for the Founders, in which a valiant justice of the people led a one man legal crusade against the unfair edicts of the distant British king. Of course this required the most research in the archives, which would never be misused for the purposes of any kind of illegal document or parasitic Carve-Out, as the young knew the monarchy as nothing but a worlds and oceans-distant family of inbred goblin-frights. It was difficult to believe they were as evil as the Founders said, and even if they had been there was surely some humanity in them never acknowledged in Pilgrim’s Anchor.

‘The Love of Democracy‘ was to finish out the evening, the Stoking Dramas, and the autumnal season. That night the colony would bar its windows, bolt its doors, and darken their lamps, whether or not the blizzards had quite arrived, for they could drop on you in a snap, strike like a diving owl, and freeze you where you stood if the winds didn’t roll you to lands unknown and shreds innumerable.

There was much on the shoulders of that open script, for while the other works had been as rewarding as any other year, there was a pall cast over the whole event that only intensified on its second day. It concerned the fate of Private Blueberry Kidd, who had, for some time now, failed to respond to any messages sent via drafting.

It could’ve meant she had run out of viable ink for dots, and was still being held captive, but that hope only soured everyone’s mood, as it meant they were condemning her to a winter with the Bickyplots, where perhaps she would be a toy meant to serve the same purpose as the Stoking Dramas, her suffering fueling them.

Or she might be deceased, executed when caught communicating with the outside world, or in revenge for the deception involved in the prisoner exchange. Fool’s Gold Floyd and Rutledge II, an unlikely partnership, had come to their president with the idea that they might scrap one of the dramas and quickly write a new one, a disguised poetic ballad in Blueberry’s honor, and draft it in such a fashion that it would send her its warmth across the distance and shielding spells between them.

Hart hated having to dash those hopes. All scripts had to be reviewed and approved by Founders, remember? Why did they make him say what they already knew? Drafting magics this crucial to their survival couldn’t be wasted on a gamble for the safety of one, yes? Why did they cast him as the villain before anyone stepped foot on the stage? Such a strategy could be detected by the Bickyplots and instigate their own campaign of remote artistic warfare, could it not? Did they have to walk away so dejectedly, as if he was solely responsible for Kidd’s disappearance?

Soon they would have yet more reason to despise him. Which might be good. They can vote me out of office. All it takes is a majority vote among us and the council. I must be hated by at least half of them by now, and if not I will be by act III. They’ll see how I won’t lift a finger to stroke a pen to save Blueberry, but I will risk the collective bonfire to restore mine. No man, no such disrespectful and egotistical child, could continue to hold the office of the president.

“Your prop, President Hart,” Floyd whispered to him backstage, still in his Silhouette costume from earlier. From out of his false coils came a thick stack of pages, some yellowed with age and some white as living bone. Muster took them with an unacknowledged thanks, the false Silhouette disappearing down an unknown burrow. His character wouldn’t need them yet, but he wanted them close, so he tucked them into the waistband of his costume and made sure they wouldn’t jostle. It wasn’t an active role, mostly strolling and speaking, until he found both his selves under the bell tree.

Bonfire was cast opposite his Roquefort as Jezebel: the conniving while wise, impudent while assertive, rebellious while dignified. Roquefort was one of her lovers, the one who would cut her deepest with his betrayal, but Muster had already done that, and had no desire to do it again. Instead he would heal. Cauterize.

She was just on the other side of the stage, awaiting her next cue, where she would send Jezebel out to surreptitiously feed statesmen wives ideas that the fathers of their children should take time out of their vocation to raise those children, thus lowering the threshold Jezebel needed for certain votes. Muster couldn’t see the scheming look Bonfire manufactured for her eyes, nor could he see the true nobility hidden in the character.

All he could see was his love, the features that first ignited his heart after his awakening to women and romance. Supple burnished skin, seasoned well beyond bronze, made her the smartest freckle on the face of Pursuitia. Eyes of hypnotic strength, wiles and devilry in the Founders’ world, merely stuck him to the nearest Pursuitian tree, like an arrow through an inchworming squirrel tail.

He could go on and on, and he had; the record was tucked into his waistband. It was but evidence, presented in court, but not for judge or jury to pass sentence on. Bonfire would pass sentence, and hopefully another, and many more after that, until they formed a rivaling mountain range of paragraphs that he could savor in the coming hardship that was bound to last longer than the blizzards.

If she recorded them fervently, skillfully, they could reform in his memory, or even tattooed across his hide whenever she wanted them to, a fate to which he would gladly sign himself over. To be her ledger, at least until he had regained her trust and she could be his as well, would be their courtship all over again. It had been secret, so the pen had drunk ink, kissed page, and danced across ballroom paper much more than they could at first.

My cue? He started, but no, just a mention of Roquefort in the dialogue. Bonfire was gone to the stage, just a shadow to him now under the intensest electric lighting the Master of Sciences could muster, the red hot coils of which swiveled to follow the most relevant players on stage, achieved by drafting rather than science.

His eyes naturally drifted past their intensity, their unsettling panning, and found the front row, of course reserved for Founders. The men who will try to judge me, though I am only subject to her tonight. I didn’t check to see who it would be. Whoever is closest to my misbehavior could determine the intensity of my punishment. Do I have any firm friends among them?

Draftsman Jefferson. Just my luck. Normally he despises the Dramas, what’s he doing so close this evening? Keeping one sidling eye on Wighthall perhaps. He has invested in me the most, and will thus be the most disappointed. But the angriest? No. That honor belongs to his neighbor.

Editor Pro Tempore Francis Lightfoot Lee. The biggest joke of a title among the hundreds the Founders festoon Independence Hall with. Held the position fifteen years he has, and with an iron talon, yet it remains temporary in nature, for they will never accept Pursuitia as their permanent home. He will die at his writing desk, Promethean eagle quill hacking away at someone else’s hard work agonizingly, waiting for the right words to come and correct their misstep.

At least now it doesn’t matter who else is near the stage. It couldn’t be worse than Lee. I pray for the day he and his arch nemesis the Mad Letterman, the clever chaos to his incorrect order, do battle in the town square, but until then he pretends at satisfaction by pecking and burning away at our drafting privileges. I know he argues we shouldn’t be allowed our private journals.

Worse, he’s right, at least as far as his suspicions. We do use them to counteract his damned red ribbon. I’m about to give him all the evidence he could need. Will he be able to force it afterward? Unlikely… It will be localized to me. Punishment that extended beyond would be open rebellion, which the young are never stranger to.

His cue? Yes! Some time ago! His body lurched of its own accord, using a memorized stroll from a time of much less inner turmoil. The marvelous lights, Mr. Franklin’s favorite performers, for whom he could scarcely keep himself from applauding mid-show, turned their attention to President Muster Hart, ignited and reborn as Roquefort under their steady beams.

Onstage for many long scenes, growing ever hotter under the lights despite the bite in the air, the resulting performance was mechanical, perfunctory, but still functional. Some thought it a technique meant to help the character Jezebel shine. Others guessed it nerves, aware the two sharing the floorboards were tangled in each other’s heartstrings outside this temporary theater. But he kept on. This was to be a culminating moment for their lovers’ plot, and nothing short of hijacking the climactic scene would do it justice.

The ending would be ruined of course, and some would argue he had robbed them of heat, though that wasn’t true. The scandal would generate just as much; its intrigue would be like the most stubborn coals, sparking every time they were rolled, flinging cinders at every near breath. While they would be warmed, he would burn.

And why shouldn’t I? An ineffective leader can always make noble use of himself, if he humbles to mere kindling. Any man can burn as effigy to his cause. If so I will be only as spent as Blueberry, who had to do it without anyone to witness or warm. Her last words were a smudge.

Finally, his self-imposed cue? Jezebel spoke it, and he heard Bonfire’s perfect smarting voice.

“I would marry anyone who would give me the vote and who would win me the right. Legal success will be my dowry and I will accept no substitute. Until then the ringing of all these bells is just the antics of the alley cats, which I have always seen fit to ignore. Good day, young man.”

“Wait my love!” Muster cried out, flinging his prop forward where it had gone utterly unnoticed during the scene, dramatically outclassed by all the bells cast and painted green to go on the false bell tree that now hung its thin gnarled limbs over his head. The papers flapped, and as if they had generated a heady gale, the audience was blown back to alert posture.

Bonfire froze, hesitated, swallowed some fear. Then she turned back to him. Jezebel’s mask had slipped off. Terror flinched beneath. They might’ve heard a pin-worm drop, if one of the native animals had fallen from the sky as sometimes occurred.

“I couldn’t take your ring because it contained paltry lines from our love letters,” Muster continued, voice already bone, entering the powder stage. “It wasn’t enough! I must always have the entire blaze of it!” He shook the papers again. “Here they are! Every letter I wrote you! But how can I have them all at once?”

“Yes, how?” Wighthall called out from his restraints, having paid at least enough attention to know this was not part of any script.

“By immortalizing them on stage! By branding them on the Stoking Dramas, with no concern for,” he looked out at the audience for the first and only time, a concession to them, the only permission he could ask, “the sting of embarrassment.” There was scattered laughter. There might have been more, but Wighthall scattered it further with his guffaw: a honking goose scaring away tittering songbirds.

And then Hart’s eyes hit the letters. It became impossible to tear them away, or to judge what the passage of time was. Between his devotion and the active powers of the dramas, the memories were his entirety. He read them as he wrote them, for he could never do one without the other.

“Bonfire you must leave me to my drafting lessons, and not tease me with your presence outside the window. Every distracting tap is something unlearned. And that is one less thing I can misuse in the Founders’ eyes to write to you of my devotion!” He flipped to the next one, fingers shooting out as if casting a spell.

“I cannot let this day pass without seeing you. If so, the square on the calendar will fall into itself as I step over. There will be but a void in time, a notch in which to chill a digit, a stark reminder of the endured pain of loneliness, of a day without fire.” Another stroke of his hand caught and bent a page, rang across the stage with the crinkle-crack of pulped, dried, and pressed thunder.

“When I wed you I want there to be flowers, a curtain of them, a rain, a summer shower of petals turned into a bubbling font as you wade through them toward me, the entire world around you your bouquet. Alas it cannot be in Pursuitia. Those materials are rich with intent here, and it would clash with my intent toward you, and probably catch fire and burn everything down. I do not spoil you each and every moment simply so I can protect you from such a fate.”

“We would’ve both been born on Earth too, despite the differing circumstances. Yes, darling, we would, all in order to meet again. And to fall in love the same way across the unabridged gap.”

“How would your mother react if I took injury and refused to let her nurse me? For it is my new personal policy that only your hand is healing, and only upon your leg will I rest my ailing head.”

“I would eat a Bickyplot picnic for you.”

“The Founders insist we have a colony here, and not a nation, so if they will not rise to their own title I will plant a flag in their place. I will found the nation of our l-“

“That’s quite enough Mister Hart!” Jefferson snapped, his boots clopping onto the stage as the aging man managed to pull himself up onto it. He was beaten there by Rutledge, both of whom closed in. The audience erupted into chatter, everyone shifting like crickets spread on crumbly bread. Bonfire was closest though, grabbing his forearms, holding him in an embrace but leaving enough room for the love letters to breathe.

She kissed him passionately as a hot tear ran down his face. This is the life she was talking about. This is what we’re supposed to have. Our preparations are plodding steps to an open grave. Yes, better to die frolicking in the fields, tripping over a stick and vanishing into a mouthful of soil and laughter.

The two Founders were about to pry them apart in spite of the cheering now coming from most of the audience, most of Pilgrim’s Anchor, but they were not faster than the red ribbon of the Editor Pro Tempore.

On Lightfoot Lee’s belt was a gold cylinder engraved with commandments and declarations. The man, artificially aged beyond his six decades by miserly emptying of his hourglass, so that it might be filled with written statements of regret and forms in triplicate, could have his broad locomotion described as rigor mortis, but he still found a snap in a joint whenever he needed to slide the lid off that cylinder and unleash the flame-tongued serpent lurking within.

A flick of his decrepit wrist. Lured out instantly, as if tantalized by fresh blood on the wind, a scarlet ribbon unwound and slithered through the air like Honey Whipple’s snakeskin anatimal. Script like black scales was all along it: a demoralizing run-on sentence drafted to assert authority by legacy and continuity alone.

It snaked its way between Jefferson and Rutledge, between Muster and Bonfire, and wrapped around its prey. Constricting all the junior president’s love letters wouldn’t have ruined them, but then it was revealed what sort of revision this was. With acrid smoke. A puff of flame. The young lovers were practically blasted apart, the record of their courtship smote to cinders in an instant. The red ribbon still hung in the air, rippling angrily, a line of infection coursing just under the skin of the Stoking Dramas.

“Is that what critics get to do around here? Smashing!” Wighthall bubbled. A hush upon the crickets. Waiting they were, for the accelerant of that act to take effect on the Bonfire Lee had tossed it on.

“What have you done!?” she screamed at the Founder. Anything approaching her rage, directed at one of their superiors, had always resulted in a switching. The bell tree bore all the nearest switches, but it was the fruit someone was after, that someone being Miss Paine. She leapt and grabbed them off their branches, snapping the tree off its flimsy stem.

She reared an arm back, more than ready to fling the metal object at Lee’s bald spotted head with the lethal intent of a lumberjack-worm. Rutledge was close enough to catch it, as was the scarlet ribbon, as was Jefferson, as was the head that had just wandered into its probable path, belonging to Private Blueberry Kidd.

“Blueberry?” Bonfire blurted, restraining herself momentarily. The question moved through the crowd and was repeated a hundred times over. Not a soul was left sitting who could still rise under their own power. Where had she come from? Could someone just wander into their midst unnoticed? They had drafted alarms posted everywhere, but of course this was no intruder, no stranger, but their resident mouse with no mouse hole.

She was several steps, some of them off a cliff, past disheveled. Her cloak was missing, icy gooseflesh carved into the marble of her shoulders with a frighteningly permanent aura. Across her chest, the bead work was chipped as if buckets of chattering beaver teeth had been thrown on her. Some of her hair had been cut, and a few strands stood on their own, danced a little, as they sometimes did in the charged air over Founder Franklin’s grounding grates. A few of her buttons, among those still present, had a strange patina on them, less aged rust and more tundra gale weathering. The unmarked rod still bit and held her arm, like a dead snapper.

Alive enough to stand, and apparently walk herself out of Bickering Hall and all the way back, Kidd nonetheless wore an incomprehensible expression somewhere between daydreams and the slack-jawed awe of a corpse buried in nothing but the air under the cosmos. Her wide pupils portrayed no recognition of her surroundings as she muttered something under her breath, the sound weaker than the slap of Wagner’s blunt end on her cheek, which the dog-tail did repeatedly as if knocking on a door.

Founder Lee was closest, but was less so with each passing moment, shuffling away from her in revulsion. It was Muster who scurried forward, dropped off the stage, and gripped her by the shoulders, which were ice cold.

“Blueberry!? How did you escape!? Are you alright?” There was no response, so he shook her, which increased the volume of her muttering. “What’s that?” He shook again, and once more, until most of the surrounding people could overhear.

“Hey friending, all goes at the tavern here? That’s where I’m now. To grab your drink just taught it to fly off the shelf! Taught it to, everywhere you have to taught it to.”

“We don’t understand,” Bonfire said, having caught up. She pushed a slapping Wagner away and ran her hand down Kidd’s cheek, found no warmth.

“That’s because there’s nothing to understand! She’s babbling!” Cadavawing suddenly shouted. He started leaning forward, shutters on his window-eyes banging open and shut. The restraining frame groaned underneath. “Caught something that made her rabid out in the woods I’d wager! Seen it before!”

“Quiet you!” Founder Jefferson ordered the Bickyplot, which was not obeyed.

“Been there all along,” Blueberry said, turning her head toward the crowd yet looking at no face in particular; she saw some structure past and behind, rising into the night like Independence Hall. “Bickered there all until I came along! Didn’t they Wiggler?” A listless Wagner slipped out of her collar and dropped to the frosting ground like a dead eel. Honey Whipple appeared between crowding knees to scoop the anatimal up and out of sight. “See that? He there’d and still couldn’t vex it. Free Berry vexed it, she done. That’s the there I Bickered!”

“Bickered?” Bonfire repeated. “All along… Blueberry?” She grabbed both the young woman’s cheeks and turned her face to align with her own. “Are you saying you found the Bickyplot’s home world?”

“Hahahaha!” Cadavawing boomed, no anger in his voice, all of it in his joints as he thrashed with mad power he’d never tried to access at any point in his captivity. Smoke, perhaps from the miniature hearth of panic, issued from his bell tower. “Preposterous! What a joke! Really very offensive to us though, she shouldn’t say such things!”

A few muskets appeared, trained on the Bickyplot, but they didn’t stop him from wrenching loose. The manacles had drafted attachments guaranteeing their service, so it was the beast’s arms that came off, at the shoulder. His lopsided towering form collapsed like a drenched sunflower, allowing boneless feet to slither free of their bonds.

Weapons reported, entered his flesh, but he’d entered a mad inchworm crawl that responded to nothing. He was headed straight for Kidd, laughing as loud as possible the whole way, in a failed attempt to drown out what was already proposed.

“It’s not possible,” various Founders whispered.

“Of course it is!” Fool’s Gold Floyd declared. “Look at her! Listen to her! She’s been to Hell and back, and her tongue’s still numb with ash.”

“Silence,” his father ordered, but nothing was obeying anything else in the rising chaos, the weather especially. A literal cold snap was heard overhead. Glittering white splashed and pooled on the ground. Shoes crunched as they broke free. Snow came in from an alley, then all the others, and inundated them. The first blizzard had arrived. It was already terrible, but it would be catastrophic within minutes if they didn’t get themselves indoors.

“Let’s have Miss Kidd hibernate in a nice deep hole,” Cadavawing suggested, muffling half his words when he used his facade as a shovel in order to pull the rest of his body forward, all while the young piled onto his back to weigh him down, stabbing through to the soon-to-be permafrost as if staking tent poles.

Muster and Bonfire put a blinkered Blueberry behind them, ready to fight the Bickyplot off in their absurd costumes, but then the wind kicked up. It split them. Founder hands grabbed Hart by the shoulders, dragged him away, into the white curtains that were now falling everywhere, not just the stage.

“Bonfire!” he cried out. She tried to pursue, but Wighthall’s head landed on her foot, broke several of her toes.

“Leave him! He’s stuck!” someone shouted, and it could have been anybody, so the others were perfectly happy to obey. The voice was right; the Bickyplot was now frozen to the ground just as much as he was pinned in several places. The cold was about to get them all if they didn’t retreat.

Bonfire’s numbed feet allowed her to ignore the pain of slipping free so she could then grab Kidd, cursing herself for not seizing her love, her fiance, when she had the chance. Now he was dragged off, to the Founder cave for the winter, in which they could hold him for months if they earnestly tried. And they would. His gesture saw to that. All she could do now was keep Blueberry safe for him.

The two girls were the last to abandon the stage and disappear behind the white. The blizzard settled in, content to make its own show. Howling winds coated a paralyzed Wighthall with snow; already only the hilts of his pins were visible. Inside his hollow the Bickyplot’s heart curled up like a snake in a burrow, ready to do as the humans would, and the Silhouettes, and his brethren, and most of the bookworm life of Pursuitia.

Wait.

Wait and rub hands to keep warm.

Wait and wring out of them schemes for spring.

Wait and write them down with scratching intent.

First Draft of the Declaration of Independence

The passages of Independence Hall were curiously empty. The blizzards were on; it was still technically the first one’s reign this fifth day out from its fall. The chaos of Muster’s rebellious declaration of love, and of Private Kidd’s return, had not caused the loss of any life, so all of the Founders, their nurses, their service staff, and most of their children should’ve been cooped up in the hall, under the blanket-wrapped tongue of the Liberty Bell, which kept it from tolling into strong winds all winter long.

Yet there was no one. Candlelight was rare with so much flammable drafting posted all over the walls, and it was those notes themselves that provided most of the light typically: a golden glow like luminous shards and twigs caught in the bulge of imperfect glass. That light was absent alongside the human residents.

An unfamiliar light splashed the walls instead. Its source wandered through the vestibule, closer to the door of the supreme court room, where Hart and anyone else punished should’ve been practicing line, after line, after line, until their tired hands were smearing ink. Then they would have a break, if only to make sure the winter reserves of whichever ink were not pointlessly taxed.

Around the corner bobbed the light, which turned out to be generated by a native glowing worm. The fat grub flexed uncomfortably as its tail generated an orange lantern pulse. Its helpless head was gripped in the bill of a gruesome creature, like a plucked eyeless canary, that was just small enough to waddle through the hall without knocking anything off the walls.

“I told you fools. None of this is the least bit familiar,” it squawked.

“You can’t even see any of it! I should be up front,” one of its following companions, a flat disc eye attached to the tip of a black tentacle, insisted.

“It feels foreign on my feet,” the birdish abomination argued before running into a wall and experimentally scratching at its surface, gouging out strips of waxy residue. A second eye, a ball this time, was third in the procession, ambling along on makeshift feet of bundled hair. The bird’s umbilicus, the tentacle, and the hair all disappeared around the corner and held its edge, indicating they were nearly out of slack.

“Here’s a door,” the second eye declared in a terrible feminine voice. “It says ‘assembly room’. That might be where he kept it, mhmm! I would assemble my most important documents in the assembly room mhmm.”

“Stand back! Coming through!” the bird croaked, spinning around, using the walls to stay up right. It started to charge toward its best guess as to the door’s location. A good guess it was, but the tentacle affixed a suction cup and pulled the door open a moment before, resulting in their leader stumbling and falling flat in the middle of the assembly room.

“Oh my. I could throw quite the cozy little dinner in here,” the hairy eyeball said, ignoring their goal as she checked the walls for candlesticks. “Just get rid of that, mhmm, and that, and all of those…”

“Is it in here?” the bird asked, not bothering to rise. The flat dripping squid’s eye did the work of slithering around and looking for their treasure. What he saw was the interior of the room where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where the constitution of a mighty nation would follow, if the first document hadn’t proven so strange and transporting.

But the floorboards were made of bone, not wood. The walls were cartilaginous like the inside of a nose, which made the passage they’d just entered through actually a nasal passage. The notices posted along the walls were flakes of scaly skin, their text reproduced in natural pigments. Table and chairs grew up out of the floor and could not be moved, unless the bird stumbled into them and broke them loose.

All together that made this a copy of Independence Hall, grown in miniature by the heart of Cadavawing Wighthall. It had been claimed from the prisoner exchange, from the duplicate, and was now being examined in the cavernous safety of Bickering Hall. The bird and the eyes were but extensions of Eggnonce, Blacknib, and Impestle, those three assigned to the task as they were the only ones with sensory parts of their anatomy small and long enough to make a thorough investigation of the head.

Eggnonce could have dissected it of course, but not knowing precisely where their precious target was hidden meant he might accidentally destroy it in the cutting process. If it was even in there at all.

“There’s a document here on the table,” Blacknib said, folding his tentacle into a chair so his eye could get as close as possible.

“Read it then!” Chattelpool ordered impatiently, rustling his naked wings with the awful sound of slapping chicken skin. “Don’t leave us in suspense.”

“…Has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.“

“Is that talking about us?” Impestle asked. “I didn’t get any human slaves! Do we have any more?”

“This piratical warfare,” Blacknib continued, “the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.“

The Bickyplot extremities stood in silence for a moment.

“That wasn’t it at all,” Chattelpool grumbled.

“That Jefferson one wrote it,” Bileby added. “Looks like it was taken out of something longer.”

“I knew this wasn’t the right head.” Eggnonce turned back to the door and went to squeeze through. “His original is out there in the possession of humans! If they find out he has it hidden away in there… we’re the dog’s breakfast, you hear me?”

“They can’t even take a tiny stroll like we can,” Bileby pointed out. “Inconceivable that they would think up fine print of our caliber, or suspect it.” The bird whipped around and rasped.

“And if Wighthall can’t keep his damn mouth shut and locked!?”

“Then breakfast for the dogs!” Impestle declared, only a third aware of what was being said.

The End of Volume One

to be concluded in volume two

Declaration

Gibberish Mire