The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence… has gone awry!  As it so happens the declaration was too powerfully worded, and effectively declared independence from the realm of Earth.  The signing founders, and those legally considered their property, and a Native American tribe roped in as well thanks to an old treaty, have been transported to a strange new land where trees write upon their own leaves and owl-eyed worms march about in the shapes of men.

Twenty years on the Founders are desperate to return to the war they never started, and have enlisted their mixed-heritage children as an army to help them fight the Bickyplots: thirteen shambling horrors with colonial inspirations of their own.  Here the written word is magic, and a new declaration might undo everything, but what of the children who have fought and journaled so hard to build their own lives?  Find out in this, the second of the Declaration duology.  (Here’s the first!)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 30 minutes)

(estimated reading time for entire novel: 6 hours)

Declaration

Gibberish Mire

by

Blaine Arcade

From the Bickering Hall Retroactive Deed

In finding this land most hospitable we, the Bickyplots of Bickering Hall, must conclude that such a plainly-stated welcome indicates an intrinsic desire for proper mastery and dominion. So it is that we declare, on the standard of the furthest distance that can be spied by the tallest amongst us, Impestle Hissmidge, allowed the luxury of tippied-toe, all of this land surrounding our port of entry is called Evidentia and is our sole property.

All of its resources shall be considered direct products of it, and thus the property of Bickering Hall as well. So too are the clouds, gases, and stars above it. So too are the diseases that manifest within its boundaries. So too are its minerals, vegetables, and animals.

Of note are the animals most like us, the Silhouettes, who have already amply demonstrated they are unfit to manage the intellect they possess, overshadowed as they are by ours to such a degree as to be unable to lay eye upon us descriptively without first signing the intent to do so.

They too are hereby sworn in as our property, signatures included, for so long as Bickering Hall stands. This shall not be undone by any such similar act attempted by any other mind or spirit from this or any other world, realm of Bickering not excepting.

Should any other mind or spirit of notable intelligence arrive in Evidentia they shall not be able to declare themselves master of us, or of our property, or of our land. They shall be able to claim only the smallest rights of the squatter: the mere scraps directly under their feet and resting bottoms.

Of their arrival we will be immediately made aware, and provided ample opportunity for preparation and response. Our legal authority and stewardship having already been tested with the Silhouettes, that record will be taken as evidence for consideration by the powers that be.

We have subsumed and transformatively shamed those who were here first; this means that, for all motives and purposes, we were here first. Those who come after are thieves, even the very children of us or them. We will not relinquish what we have taken, as we have molded ourselves by it, and would thus be unjustly transformed ourselves into nothing if deprived of it.

If the powers attempt such a destruction we will be filing grievances from our deathbeds, urns, and beyond the grave. The worlds shall not move on from us without seeking proper legal authority and offering much reparation. We all are bound by agreement first and only. Your status is your consent to these affairs.

Sincerely we sin and sign,

Blacknib Bileby             Incontible Bludgehaven             Oolbook Dudgewhistle

Impestle Hissmidge             Pumpwine Cult-on-Sea             Questinking Spywulph

Hamishand Glazemouth             Eggnonce Chattelpool             Voluptogast Devalming

Licketysplit Godswallop             Cadavawing Wighthall             Middlebitch Flaywood

Xylofont Phanny-upon-Twone

Bid me when Forty Winters more

Nature who form’d the vary’d scene,

Of rage and calm, of frost and fire,

Unerring guide, could only mean

That age should reason, youth desire:

Shalt then that rebel man presume

(Inverting nature’s law)

To seize the dues of age, in youth’s high bloom,

and join impossibilities?

If Gold could Lengthen Life, I Swear

Freedom and health, and whilst I live,

Let me not want what love can give;

Then shall I die in peace,

And have this consolation in the grave,

that once I had the world my slave.

—American drinking songs

Resignation

A Pursuitian spring arrived, but the hermits could not emerge from their shells just yet. So much had happened, in quiet, in plotting, and now it ruined their muscles like force trapped in springs, as emerging too early could mean death.

The winters of this world were predictably unpredictable, whether you used the name Evidentia, Pursuitia, or Wormland. Blizzards fell like stones skipped by a god, could freeze many a creature in place before it sought shelter, the main reason most of the native animals took verminous forms that made it easier to find narrow holes and disappear to the warmer underground.

This too was the cause for trees and shrubs of the land to grow page-like leaves with script-like veins and ink-like sap, allowing them to mimic the fires of letter-writing passion and public-screed fervor, accessing the magical substratum of meaning beneath Pursuitia and thus warming them enough to survive the snap blizzards.

The cold faded out slowly, but could return in an instant, steal three or four more days from life. So the hermits waited, across their three camps. First to risk emergence were the Bickyplots of Bickering Hall, whose bodies were but another shell protecting a horrific skittering heart, and which could be sacrificed to the cold. The only real danger at that point came from the second type of hermit, should they find the frozen body before another Bickyplot.

They called themselves humans, and pilgrims, and Founders. If one of them was caught out in a cold snap they would most likely die immediately, so there was no choice but to give their archenemies the Bickyplots a head start.

Third were the Silhouettes, who did not peek out of their hovels, treetarps, and tunnels until there was absolutely no chance of another solitary snowflake, and as they were native to Wormland, this was a physical imperative, so their legal masters the Bickyplots could not rouse them prematurely and make them do any of the chores. Instead the housework would be allowed to pile up, quite literally, and Bickering Hall would spend its first month of spring being the worst smelling place in all that world, whereas it was only the fifth the rest of the year.

In Pilgrim’s Anchor, where the humans dwelt, multiple signs were used to judge the emergence date. First there was the ambient temperature, reported by drafted notice and scientific instrument alike. Then was the blooming of various Pursuitia plants, as well as whether any of them went to seed via autocombustion. Last was the shedding winter coats of the anatimals: free-living pieces of whole animals that lived back in their native realm of Earth, and the less native one of America.

Lolloping rabbit ears were good indicators, leaving clumps of white fur when they threw themselves off table corners and smacked harmlessly against the floor, but only when they deemed the winter season over. Both the Lenape and the Freed, and any of the young who chose to winter over with them despite the thinner walls and sparser supplies outside the crackling keep of Independence Hall, used these anatimals’ clumps to choose when to emerge.

As for the Founders in the hall, the now-decrepit white men who had started all of this with some kind of cockamamie declaration meant to free themselves, which somehow trapped all of them in Pursuitia, they would not come out until all the signs across every method were in agreement, which was still before the Silhouettes. Perhaps that was because they didn’t want their own kind milling about, probing their stronghold for any weaknesses, for while every man, woman, and child was united against the Bickyplots, there often weren’t any of the towering junk piles around, and they would have to be against something, which to men like the Founders would automatically mean the highest authority in the land. Never once did they consider the possibility of the highest authority being the land itself.

Independence Hall dreaded this particular emergence. Their annual Stoking Dramas, calculated theater that warmed their spirits for the duration of winter, had been interrupted, both by an early blizzard and, before that, the stumbling baffling arrival of Private Blueberry Kidd, who had been the prisoner of the Bickyplots after disappearing in the midst of battle.

Escape seemed impossible, since her home had mounted no effort to reclaim her beyond the collapse of a negotiation that was but a ruse and excuse for more violence on both sides. From a cynical lens, the varietal installed in all Founder spectacles and magnifying glasses, that meant she had been intentionally released back to them, and likely carried some kind of disease, be it a natural malady or a drafted one that might infect all those journals the young liked to use to chatter amongst themselves.

They should have liked to banish the girl, which was hardly banishment at all, considering that none among the Founders, the Lenape, or the Freed ever claimed her as their own. How such a bastard was possible in so small a world was never explained to her, and she was left to assume that, like most of the others, she had a father among the Founders and a mother among one of the two groups forced to live on the outskirts, acting as a shield against harsh winter winds for Independence Hall.

Information could pass between the peoples, even though they could barest hop between homes for most of the icy season. Ink witchcraft and drafting sorcery allowed it, any prohibition was a matter of willingness to share. What scuttlebutt had gotten around to everyone involved Kidd’s claim, once she regained her senses, itself a process half as slow as winter, that she had visited the home realm of the Bickyplots, and come to understand their nature.

What she had to say had obviously been passed around Pilgrim’s Anchor, but only around, not penetrating to the Founders’ core. They feared hearing it. If she had the truth it could upend any aspect of their lives, or all of them. If this was some kind of lie it would sow discord and destruction. A possible trial was discussed, one in which she could be sworn in with drafting magic, hand over a stack of their most sacred tomes, and thus prevented from lying.

Blueberry was the outer citizens’ bargaining chip, but the Founders had one as well: Muster Hart. The only child of a white mother and white father in all of Pursuitia, though his parents had passed some years ago, Hart was the favored son, the only youth seen as fit to make decisions once the last pale generation was too old and significantly deceased.

The goal was always to return, to pick up what they’d misplaced and send it all back to Earth, even to the exact moment they left, undoing the children they’d coerced out of darker women so they could try again with the ones they wanted, do it properly and Christian the second time around, resurrected in the manner and name of Jesus, which they would be able to say again without feeling the cold twinge of spiritual isolation.

Muster, forced to go by his Christian name Scudder all winter long rather than the Lenape-memory gifted to most of the young, was almost as lost as the imprisoned Blueberry just before winter fell like a bushel of box turtle bowls. He had flagrantly declared his love for Bonfire Paine, made a fool of himself on the very stage meant to secure their immediate future, and in the process endangered a future further than that.

He was the Founders’ last resort, and the only way to ensure he would continue the work of drafting a proper Second Declaration was to separate him the darker children, most of whom seemed far too eager to go native, to wriggle around in the mud like the Silhouettes, dreaming not of revolution, but peaceful foraging, every soapbox speech halted by an apple in the mouth.

These forces would undoubtedly clash, in some fashion, as soon as the doors of Independence Hall were thrown open and its stale oppressive atmosphere released. Watched they were, by all outside, as they largely pretended to go about the early spring duties of discarding or organizing what the blizzards had bitten into and held in their jaws all winter long. Outer adults like High Water, Missing Moon, and the head inkwitch Gladiola Newtown disguised their frequent glancing worse than the young, who treated such things as reflexes in the social lives stored in their shadows.

Bonfire Paine watched the doors as she swept branches from walkways. Blueberry Kidd watched the doors as she brushed her hound tail anatimal Wagner, a chore that now had an extended duration to its plausibility, seeing as her pet had come out of the Bickyplot realm significantly longer than it had gone in: evidence of her claims.

Members of the junior Committee of Five watched, hearts frozen in terror but still jumped up into their throats, to see what had become of Muster Hart, who had been duly elected as the president of the secret Junior Congress, and on whom their own declaration rested, the one meant to guarantee them a life even if their fathers’ ambition of erasing them from history was achieved: the Carve-Out. Though of Five, only four watched, Crow Eyes, Pony Clark, Oakes Newtown, and Sassafras Whipple, as the fifth was who they hoped to see.

It looked like another whole day would drag itself out before the reveal; eyes started drifting away. But then the rope was pulled, and the Liberty Bell atop the hall let freedom ring once more, tolling as proud as always, the straw mats that had kept its clapper still during the blizzards magically combusting, freeing sound and rings of smoke alike while it swung.

Freed from the grounding chains of prose and lyric, the toll of the Liberty Bell was the only statement every citizen of Pilgrim’s Anchor agreed with wholeheartedly. It bore no footnotes, no exceptions, and levied no taxes upon the idea of freedom. With that uniting banner waving so that even those within could acknowledge it, the doors of Independence Hall were thrown open. A military grid of the young, in full battle uniform for no clear reason, marched out instead of casually stretching, popping, and twisting the winter fatigue away as they would have preferred.

After them came the Founders, some confined to wheelchairs that drove themselves, a drafted destination posted to their back. Others had canes. Not many stood tall on their feet alone. This last winter had exacted its own tax, right out of the hearth of their rib cages. Worse still, they had dedicated themselves to draconian work, to cold iron plots and a birdcage for the junior president.

As soon as the emergence formation broke up everyone gave themselves permission to reunite, to pull aside, to start in on discussions they’d rehearsed their side of for the last month. Missing Moon and Master of Sciences Benjamin Franklin were among the most agreeable on both sides, and went to it almost as friends, to the exclusion of everyone else, especially after the Lenape man gifted Franklin one of his favorite treats: beef tongue anatimal jerky.

The Jefferson children, no doubt suffering their father’s strict drafting tutelage all season long, split up and practically ran to friends they’d only been able to contact via infrequent smuggled letter. Independence Hall called it security when the injunctions posted on their walls prevented magical transmission of messages between the young, but as with all systems of high-minded men, there were low-spirited creatures capable of circumventing every rule as well as the attention of the authorities that wrote them.

This last winter the method of choice had been rolling up tiny letters in rat ear anatimals, which got around by bundling themselves up like carpets and wheeling about. Once that wheeling took them through cracks and beyond the walls the letters had been ordered to transmit themselves to the recipients’ journals.

On the underbellies of such vermin was how those in the hall learned of Kidd’s claims, and how it had taken her so long to untangle them. Apparently, the Bickyplot world was so different from both Earth and Pursuitia that thought itself could not function in the same fashion; it had to contort, gnarl, pickle, babble, and then interpret its own nonsense, and all of that was just to take your first step where the towering monsters dwelt.

A coalition of adults and adolescents alike was about to accost some key Founders on Blueberry’s behalf, try and arrange a public hearing to air her claims openly, but it was in that tension’s shadow where the emotion of these various reunions found its true height, and its truer nadir.

Muster exited the doors last, like an afterthought, like a wet coattail. Instead of formal military clothes he was in a long worn coat, a satchel over one shoulder, looking ready to head out and forage. Not before warming himself by me, Bonfire declared in thought and act alike, striding toward him with every intention of embracing him, of transferring so much direct heat, with no diffusing scorn at all, that she might blacken his bones.

Not a day had gone by, locked down in the howling cold, that she hadn’t thought of his gesture at the Stoking Dramas, where he had tossed aside his memorized lines and instead read to her from his many love letters over the years, brazenly flouting the Founders’ wishes right in front of them.

The old fools shot out of their seats in offense, though some of them could barest stand. Her dear Hart had been attacked as swiftly as he had made himself vulnerable, foremost by Editor Pro Tempore Francis Lightfoot Lee. The thought of him scorched Bonfire’s eyes, nearly popped her more delicate veins. She was confident that withered old stork had never known love in his life, and that was why he had to ignite the evidence of her romance at first sight of it, turn the craft of her courtship to cinders.

She could have murdered him right then and there, and would have, if there was no power struggle to consider. If their lives were a cave, and she as free as he, he would be dead, instead of keeping her lover all to himself, no doubt tormenting him, day in and day out. Muster didn’t fight her, but she also couldn’t find his spirit in the touch of his skin as she took his hand and dragged him away from the public paths, up against a cool outer wall where raccoon tooth urchins trundled vertically and where mumbling Pursuitian mosses pooled in the trenches between neighborly wooden posts.

“I have half a mind, and a full breast of ire, to march into the Jefferson library and paint over the face of the bookshelves. To tell them that I still love you,” she said, eyes trying to claw him open, to expose the precious boy under the oppressive permafrost. When that failed she clawed him more literally, brought him into a tight embrace. He felt fragile, malnourished, his spine a broomstick.

“I love you too Bonfire,” he suddenly sobbed, but his arms didn’t rise to hug her back. Together again, they cried for several minutes, suppressing gasps so that only the anatimals and mosses could hear. Mist crept over the fence, indicating an ocean of it just outside the settlement, and drifted down over its side as a curtain.

Muster had to pull away in order to reach the document tucked into his coat. In his trembling hand he held a black envelope with a green seal. It was fatter than he. Inside, its most crucial paragraphs were written thus:

To those concerned,

I, Muster Scudder Hart, hereby resign the office of president of the Junior Congress, effective immediately. As my last official act I grant authority in the interim until the next election to Vice President Sassafras Whipple.

Due to recent circumstances of my own creation it has become impossible to execute my duties to their fullest. The Founders have collectively agreed to address my disobedience with a more aggressive education, with remedial social navigation, and with burdensome surveillance. Now my every act will be scrutinized, and I cannot hope to maintain my involvement with the Carve-Out and be in position to advocate for it when the moment arrives. It must be one or the other, and the Founders will accept no substitute as their heir.

So it must pass to the rest of you to inspire it, structure it, ink and draft it, entirely without contribution from myself. Rest assured I still have every intention of doing my now shrunken part on behalf of our undeclared generation. It will appear as if I have abandoned you, even that I am repulsed by your sight and presence, but it is all a ruse, the thorny luggage I must carry on their command and expectation in order to be the conduit.

Once the Carve-out is in my hand I will see to it that it becomes part of the Second Declaration, and that every remaining Founder will sign it as directed by us or suffer the pain of death so that their signature is no longer necessary.

Farewell to all of you, as our contact will be severely limited from now until we make our final move. Farewell my friends, and a curse upon my family.

Muster Hart, of no legitimate post

“A resignation letter?” Bonfire said, a tear slowing as it crossed her cooling cheek. She hadn’t opened it, somehow knowing through sheer dread alone. Punctuated by suppressed gasps and hiccups, he explained its contents, and came to what would hurt them both so much worse.

“We cannot be together Bonfire,” he managed. “They won’t tolerate it now.”

“My Hart,” she pleaded, crumpling the envelope in her hand. Shortly all their peers would see every crease on the letter, interpret them as the specific lines of this rending conversation, equally disheartening and disemboweling, tearing them out and apart. “Don’t give in to them. They are the past! They are a misstep in their own pathetic attempt at revolution. Faces dropped in the mud at the outset, forever sore over it, sticking their broken noses in our business and demanding we set them straight.

But we are free! Not without consequence, but free to choose! Choose me as I have chosen you. Disregard them wholly. I will cherish you everywhere Muster, reduced to the dim of a Silhouette shack, trapped in the niceties and stricture of Earth, or as nothing more than scorch marks on some god’s blank slate… even there we would appear as one. Please Muster. Choose not smartly, but wisely! Choose with love!”

“I am… but it is a love for all of you, a love in which I cannot share. All they want me to be is selfish, and that is what I must ultimately refuse.” Bonfire stepped forward to grab him again, but he held up one hand to stall her, which opened his coat and let her see. Something lurked within, snaking around his chest. A stripe of it was revealed as it crossed from one side of the collar to the other, bold and red, striped with a black palsied script, illegible to all but the man whose quill excreted it. She knew it as the editing ribbon of Francis Lightfoot Lee, a drafted familiar, a nasty counterpart to the anatimal pets kept by many of the young, much more pernicious and less impressive than the tin horses.

She also saw what its presence meant. While she would remain adamant that he could always choose better, that flash of ribbon made it clear they would no longer loosen their clutches in the hopes he would interpret privilege as respect and duty. Now they would own him, only one rung above the indignity of forcing him to sign over his person via the magic of Pursuitia, as had happened with the Silhouettes who now mopped the floors of Bickering Hall and sucked on the mops when they were thirsty.

He had allowed her to take him in her arms once, and now no more, because that ribbon would record everything his body encountered and report it back to Lightfoot. Then hunched old men would luridly look it over, redact what they did not like, in part preventing him from doing it again. Such editing would not alter his memories, not without his signed consent, but they would alter any records of his actions. In a sense they could delete his footprints, muffle the echoes of his words, and altogether erase his impacts.

That would happen if they hugged again. Her best guess, which was correct, was that the Founders had allotted him one brief goodbye with her, and even briefer contact, before the ribbon would tighten around his presence in the world, choking off impact and capability alike until he could not deviate from the path they brushed clear before him. Left with no recourse but to collapse, she did so, not upon her knees, but as an avalanche all over her expression. To watch it continue would kill Muster, so he spoke his practiced words.

“I’m still allowed to make myself useful,” he choked. A shrug of his shoulder revealed he had a musket on his back, the stock hidden behind the satchel. “As long as I do it in approved company, and myself is on that list. I’m off to gather some leaves of paper.”

“There could be another blizzard,” was all she had to say while chaos reigned in her heart and lungs.

“Then I will scold it for arriving late and not freezing my final moment with you. Goodbye Bonfire.” There was a security notice posted on the fence within reach, curious moss fiddling with its corner the way a donkey might attempt to eat a shirt. In a fit of despair Muster ripped it off, making such a shocking hole in their perimeter that the posts of the fence immediately swung up and open, like a reverse spring-loaded drawbridge. He cast the notice aside and rushed out of Pilgrim’s Anchor before the hole in the magic could patch itself.

Bonfire wilted against the wall just as it returned to its proper position. She burned there for some time, straining her jaw so much she nearly cracked a tooth, and with that so near a fact the toothy urchins fled the area, lest it happen to them.

None but the moss heard her swear revenge.

Muster might not have been able to continue to his destination of nowhere in particular if the ribbon had kept patrolling the folds of his clothes, like the serpent-devil so lambasted by Founder Witherspoon during his sermons. Every step lessened the problem however, as the Editor Pro Tempore had developed the item so aggressively that the further it got from his will the less power it had.

At a certain distance from Anchor it would be nothing more than a loose strand, though its lifelike qualities would return as he did. This meant he was now freest in complete isolation, with no company but Pursuitia’s papery trees, which were also his excuse for going out when his true intention was just to feel the collar loosen for the first time since winter fell. The Jefferson library always needed fresh drafting materials, so there was always a reason for one of the young to go out and forage for them, be they ink ingredients or produce that would become paper. He’d told Lightfoot he was off to gather fallen leaves, and that he would handle the pulping and acid treatments upon return, no need to supervise at all.

So Muster sought that distance as he waded deep into the confused mist, pooling yet wary that snapping cold might drive it into the ground and make it cower as frost. It was easy to get lost in a Pursuitian forest, even without the low-lying clouds, as the layout of the trees often became homogeneous grids of their own accord, to mimic accord, to add yet more heat of will to their heartwood.

No one, except perhaps Blueberry, had memorized which false orchards were which in the lands surrounding Pilgrim’s Anchor. Instead the young used wildlife signs, since the animals knew the place better. Such copious mist offered up its inhabitants for this purpose: hangervanes.

Some of their blue and indigo inks came from cloudliners, native worms that hugged cloud exteriors like slugs on garden walls. The hangervanes were close relatives, but they hung midair in banks of mist, only chest high. Muster found one quickly, suspended in a drop of incorporeal mucus, curled into an S, its eyes closed as it hummed serenely through its little pouting lips.

The former president smacked its tail and sent it spinning. Big violet eyes flew open; the hum became excited peeping. Hangervanes always made a show of being disturbed, but it was routine enough to always have the same result: they stopped facing the Pursuitian equivalent of north, which was believed to be a pole of intent rather than magnetism, yet unknown as none of the intelligent civilizations had visited that place. Still, it allowed Muster to get his bearings and select the direction where he thought he might find the best harvest of loose leaf.

Hangervane expressions could be read as well, once they’d stopped spinning and the dizzy daze had vacated their swollen pupils. The science was frustratingly inexact, hardly more solid than surveying social events, but Muster thought the hangervane looked impressed with what it spied in the distance, knowing not how to interpret such a look.

Beyond its tepid instructions all he needed for guidance was the gradual slack in the editing ribbon wrapped around his person, both irritating and liberating. Loose it was inside his shirt now, so he stopped, looked about to see if he actually could complete his ruse. The mist was still thick, but it avoided the leaf litter, kept everything dry and crackling.

Boat-shaped leaves were full of air whether capsized or not, granting great volume to the carpet of detritus. They came in browns, yellows, and creams, waxy seams sealed equidistant and parallel, inviting prose, be it written by a pollinator in mere mimicry or a real intelligence like Muster.

This spot did not look familiar, but that could’ve been the fog. He grabbed his musket, used its butt to brush some leaves aside and see the topsoil. Dry. He wasn’t close to the marshes, a spotty range of them that terminated at Dare’s Bog, formerly Edward’s. There was a place he hoped never to return, despite its human presence.

Ghosts of a long lost colony lurked there, clinging to withered bodies, all except the child Virginia Dare, already a celebrity by the time she’d vanished on Earth. Here she, or her will, possessed an alabaster statue rising out of an awful contrasting murk. No matter how many times he’d retold the tale of their encounter to the Founders, none of whom had bore witness, they grew only more giddy at the prospect of opening a line of communication, of allying with those sunken spirits against the Bickyplots.

Each iteration Muster attempted on them used more horrifying language, but he couldn’t get his ultimate point across, as he knew they would not accept terminology that implied or outright stated they were acting in bigotry. Of course, the young and their elected head had all thought, of course they’re wetting themselves at the prospect of a fresh crop of white settlers.

They’re far from white, Muster thought, trying to argue with the Founders yet again, their only representative the temporarily dead ribbon. They’re blackened by the bog, yellowed by the old butter and cheese they buried themselves in. Colors were drained and destroyed by their secondary method of preservation, all that was left to them after they gave their best to the village daughter to live out in binding stone, as if that’s any better. The statue in the village square can inspire many, but it cannot leave. And should there be no one left to inspire? That life would lack a point, and in those doldrums they would surely go mad.

The crunch of a leaf lifted him out of his pondering. His alert mind broke the sound down, eliminated suspects. The sound had two phases, like a toe and a heel, not the singular plummet of a dead branch. Nor was it the slither of a worm; the only worms in Pursuitia that took steps were the Silhouettes, and only when their masters forced them to contort into an upright shape so they could better perform housework. Silhouettes were also very light, where this sounded heavy.

Heavier than a man. Breath held, he lifted his musket, had nothing to aim at but the broad side of the mist. Without a Franklin kite spinning overhead there was no way to charge his weapon with boltshot, leaving him with a single ball to fell a Bickyplot, for that was all it could be in the known portions of Pursuitia.

They too foraged for food and materials, not trusting their slaves to employ the greedy eye or the craftsman’s lust when searching the woods. Sometimes the young had encountered them over the years, and they’d learned the hard way what tactics were best: running, fleeing, hiding, and faster running.

But in the mist Muster had nowhere to run to. He’d let his bearings slip once more, counting on another hangervane to reorient him once he was finished gathering. That would no longer work, as they knew the same methods for dealing with Bickyplots, and were employing them now.

He’d never actually seen the hovering worms in anything but an idle pose, so their slithering caught him off guard; he almost stepped backward, which would’ve made a crunch of his own, and roused the suspicions of whichever of the thirteen Bickyplots was out there. Twelve, he recalled, as their architect Cadavawing Wighthall was still a prisoner bound in the basement of Independence Hall, where he’d languished all winter long.

In the possible twelve there were still the worst ones to find yourself across from in the middle of the woods: Middlebitch Flaywood the huntress or Incontible Bludgehaven the jailer. Those two were the worst combination of malicious, tenacious, and skilled in pursuit and combat.

Another crunch came, heavier still, so much heavier, freezing Muster so completely in terror that the hangervanes, which now swarmed past him, glided around his body like water around a rock. Their expressions were easy to read this time: wide-eyed fear. Distracted as they were, they still did their duty, and helped him learn the layout of his situation. They all fled from the same direction, so that was where he should aim his weapon.

One shot wouldn’t do for a Bickyplot, and definitely not for that heavier crunch. As far as humans knew there was no way to fell one of those; it could only be warded off by the clangor of the Liberty Bell. No name had been settled on for the beasts, as they were a rare sight; the young bluntly called them Bickyplot hunting dogs. Not dogs. And their hunts were brief, most of their duration taken up by catching, biting, swallowing whole.

Mammoth in size, easily twice as high as a Bickyplot, who were themselves more than twice the height of men, these monsters were believed to be ripped from their masters’ home world, and it was encountering them that had been the best evidence of a consistent portal to such a place before Blueberry had returned with her addled account.

Their hide was like a cluttered pile of warty ornamental gourds, spattered with green, orange, white, and purple. In their alligator mouths, which always hung open in a pant, the only feature similar to a dog, sat giant dagger teeth, all of different sizes, half of them serrated. Tiny yellow eyes wandered, perhaps nonfunctional, as they rarely stared in the direction they charged, seeming to guide more by scent and sound.

Squat splayed limbs and a potbelly belied its terrible swiftness, as it could leap a great distance like a toad or sprint with a gait equally of startled lizard and loping mountain lion. A wide dragging dragon’s tail swished back and forth, its pale yellow tip nosing upward and wheeling in circles, acting far more alert than its eyes. Such monsters could’ve destroyed the human presence in Pursuitia, but they were rarely seen, and it was believed the beasts were too difficult to feed and maintain, and were thus returned to their home realm after completing the task for which they were extracted.

Muster had seen one before, and prayed to never see it again, but the mist had fears of its own, refusing to provide him cover any longer. All at once, as if sucked in by subterranean giant, the vapor was siphoned into the soil. The patch of forest was clear, and he could see the trees were not arranged in a tidy grid, were instead huddled together, one of those huddles suffering a showering stream of urine from under the raised leg of a Bickyplot hunting dog.

How they exerted control over such animals was a mystery, as its pitted tin collar fed down to a meager whipcord leash in the hand of Middlebitch. Her lolling head, a mace of gaping hound mouths facing all directions, spotted him with one of the solitary circular eyes between tropically vibrant cheek flaps.

In a flash her free talon was pointing his way, and she was barking something at her companion, and her companion was not her dog. There was a second Bickyplot in her hunting party, and though any addition to their number was the worst dark cloud, his identity was its tarnished silver lining.

Questinking Spywulph was the most reasonable among them, the two arced nightmare heads, with webbing and Cyclopean eye between, that sat upon his shoulders capable of seeing each side of any argument. He too spotted Muster. Does he recognize me? We’ve never spoken, but he has seen me lead my friends into battle, and issue charging orders.

Somehow, all four of them had an even greater foe to contend with, which had robbed the mist in the first place. That was the clearest sign that a snap blizzard was about to strike, which it would in seconds. They all needed shelter, immediately, or they would be frozen solid. In the moments before he turned away, Muster saw the response of the Bickyplots, and only puzzled out what it might mean after.

Flaywood was very agitated that she could not pursue the human, and the only conceivable reason she couldn’t was that handling the hunting dog was her responsibility. The comical scene also revealed what could have been a weakness of the beast; its handlers were unwilling to interrupt it while it urinated.

In the future that could mean an excellent window of attack, but only if an interruption physically pained or disabled it. If it instead made it ornery or impossible to control, they would only be worse off. Either way, Middlebitch had shouted at Questinking to do the chasing in her stead while she waited for it to finish relieving itself.

Spywulph obeyed, catching up swiftly thanks to his gigantic strides. Muster was already fleeing, but he could not let the monsters take priority. Even they were more likely to listen to reason than the weather, than the flash-freezing aftershock. Where could he shelter? Pursuitian ground was quite flat, they’d never found significant caves, and the only holes they could fit inside were made by tunneling opera worms, none of which were present.

The trees themselves survived the weather in a variety of ways, so his only hope was the most hospitable of those varieties. Many families of the plants warmed themselves with false intent, so the more artificial a trunk and its leaves appeared the more heat it generated. Sometimes this effect was so powerful, in a tree with four branches that grew in a square, its leaves like both pages and the sails of a ship, that the entire thing combusted and rained debris over a wide field.

What Muster found, and was able to reach, was decidedly more natural than that, but still an obvious specimen of what he required. The species escaped him, Bonfire was better versed in botany, but the broad group of such trees were called Bycandelites, a sniff of a joke, as they produced soft light good enough to read by.

That soft light was not just luminescence however, but the result of flames, only marginally more welcoming than the clutches of Questinking as Hart dove under the large tree’s canopy, hoping the Bickyplot would be left out in the cold. He had time only to wrap around behind its trunk, widened into boxy burls, and drop down into a sitting position, resting his head on the drably orange bark and staring up at the sky.

The blizzard fell on them, a giant sheet descending with a bat’s swoop, boulders of hail dropping near to the ground before exploding and spinning as white whirly-devils. Outside of the human’s sight Middlebitch, griping and scowling, leapt into the column of continuous hunting dog urine to use it as a capsule of warmth. Its flow would continue for several minutes, even as the absent-minded animal allowed itself to be frozen in place, tongue not even retracting.

Muster reflexively hugged himself to ward off the cold, but that would never be enough. A blast of it hit him, prickled his skin so thoroughly he thought his gooseflesh might pop off as a spray of tiny clay marbles. A precursor to death, he assumed, before then the tree defended itself, its page-proportioned leaves igniting in smooth creamy flame, red lines of pseudo-prose writing across the veins to keep itself stoked.

Its generated umbrella of heat washed over Muster and shielded him. Just outside its influence the world had returned to white, even less of it visible than in the thick fog. How long he would be trapped there was a mystery, but the season was definitely over, making a blizzard lasting more than a day extremely unlikely. He settled in, determined to make the most of it, as here was a justifiable stretch where he was totally unmonitored. Out came his journal and an engineered quill housed in a thin tube of wood.

A squat bottle of ink was his whole supply, hardly the size of a walnut. It was his only choice for color, limiting the magic of drafting, but he had taken it with him very deliberately, hoping for an opportunity to use it, though not under threat of hunting dog. It was a dark variant of fanning green, an ink of growth, of rambling, of spreading, of putting roots out because the medium would not accept down.

Sentiments written in it would extrapolate from and expand upon themselves, a seed planted with a thought, and over time one could learn what they might have thought if they had kept their mind turning along those lines. For Muster it would serve a different purpose. It would take his place.

Like with Bonfire he was only allotted so many goodbyes in half as many forms. Now he could craft his farewell and explanation to Blueberry, his closest friend from the previous age, the one where friends were permitted. Befriending her, again like loving Bonfire, was itself rebellion, always discouraged, as he had more than enough parents to go around, and the dirty urchin Blueberry had not a one. For some reason he was not allowed to loan some of his surplus out to her.

Momentary fear subsided when he saw a satin flash of red grabbing his journal as he drew it out, but it was just a coincidence of positioning; the editor’s ribbon limply released the book and hung dead, a bookmark in the boy. Muster tapped his ink pot, dabbed in the reservoir, and kept the nib turning in his hand so he wouldn’t lose a precious drop while he mulled over what to write.

There was so much to say, but he wanted the ink to say it, across more time than he might have and across as much paper as Blueberry was willing to provide as fertile ground. Better for the words to be concise, chosen expertly, so that the branching of the verdant ink would not stray far from his likeness.

Blueberry,

Our trail together ends here, as I am imprisoned in metal, having taken the form of an iron in the Founders’ fire. You understand this better than the others, for where their walls imprison me they have always repelled you. Our mission continues, and I promise I am fully present in spirit, as this ink will grow to show, hopefully into a garden tribute to our friendship.

Please take care of Bonfire for me. I wish for her to pass me by, for her not to linger on what we’ve lost, and so will not give her these green tidings as I give them to you. Whether you are elected or not, you are now the leader of our generation, as you have seen the camp of the enemy, and are the only one who bears both the knowledge of two worlds and a golden heart. There is nothing you cannot do but what you are unjustly denied, and all that I have already done, behind locked door, written in a hand that has held yours.

With love and trust,

Mustard

For a moment he thought the Founders had sent another agent to watch over him, and to attack if he disobeyed their orders, for a flaming object landed in his lap and threatened to burn away the sprouts he’d just planted for Blueberry, and before they were even sent off to her journal by an authoritative closing of his own’s cover.

He batted it away so that it rolled a short distance, unfurling rather than striking at him again. Glowing orange upon it were the veins of a leaf, granting relief. It was just a false page fallen from the canopy of the tree sheltering him, a castoff expense of the bycandelite’s battle with the blizzard.

Muster’s examining eye lingered, as there was little else to do now, and he saw a full sentiment written out on the leaf, one that convinced him to lunge forward and smack at it with his sleeve until its fire was put out and its lines cooled to charcoal black. Blowing its smoke away, he read aloud from the thoughts ambushed and cornered by char.

“-us the Mad Letterman knows what the ground has belched up wet and worming. His ears have gotten bigger with every squelch they make, and now he, who is still me, can afly with ’em somewhere safer.

No place can be called safe, unless you’re calling it the iron and locked kind, when two herds of white folks surround and aclose in. That’s why I’m flying off to freer parts with these giant ears o’ mine that hear too damn much, right be-alongisde the piggy ear anatimals. Be wary while you’ve got the chance.

Should you need some more help from the Mad Letterman, which you should, just keep looking lower than the Flounders look, and you’ll find the notes I’ve left in stock behind for your young benefit.”

“This tree has constructed an entirely false identity, hmm,” Questinking Spywulph mused, giving Muster such a fright that he flipped like a click beetle, accidentally put his head out into the blizzard while he was on his back. Though he scrambled back into the toasty umbrella immediately, there was already frost across his hair and eyebrows, and his lips were blue, the fear contributing.

The Bickyplot sent to pursue him had not been caught and frozen by what now raged around them; he must have dove for cover in Hart’s very shadow, and not been heard thanks to the deluge howl of the wind and the lad’s pulse and breath in his ears. The whole time he’d been writing his farewell to Blueberry one of his occasionally-mortal enemies was sat leaned against the opposite side of the same tree, obscured from view by the boxy burls that almost formed two seats, so much so that it could’ve been more intent from the tree, more hope it could pass or serve as craftsmanship instead of nature.

“Lord Spywulph,” was what Muster eventually said through chattering teeth, numb tongue preventing any other epithets. The Bickyplot wasn’t attacking, just leaning his towering frame around the trunk, displaying only one of the pitch black horseshoe horse heads that made up his cranium. His sole eye stared from the center of its bridle spiderweb, free of anger. Bickyplots didn’t feel true curiosity, their minds skipped straight to full ownership of everything fathomed, but Muster saw the closest look in Spywulph’s eye, one of incomplete understanding; his internal sounding device returned no final depth yet.

“Young master Scudder Hart,” the monster retaliated, “commander of the brats.” He saw Muster’s flopped-over paralysis, his needless proximity to the sharpened wind. Then his eye watched a pair of flaming leaves fall between them. “I already proposed a truce on your behalf, several minutes ago. A ceasefire is most appropriate, don’t you think, given that this tree won’t cease its fire?”

What the Bickyplot scout claimed had some truth to it. This arena was confined and dangerous to the both of them, despite the lord’s obvious advantages of size and strength. His kind were generally more flammable than humans, with some notable body parts among them, like Hissmidge’s hair, Glazemouth’s wicks, and Wighthall’s curtain eyelashes, being as catching as any kindling.

Thus it was conceivable that he would want to avoid a scuffle where burning debris rained down on his head and back, yet he didn’t seem afraid of the tree, even reaching out and tapping one of the falling leaves with a sickle claw, which instantly swirled around the digit and became a twine of cinder and smoke.

“Yes, I agree,” Hart finally said, scuttling forward but refusing to put his back to the creature once more. Spywulph did not bend back out of sight either, their awkward staring continuing for several minutes. What stopped it was the Bickyplot’s impatience as he tried to grab another leaf, only for it to turn to ash in the air again.

“Bah,” he muttered, a scowl in his gnashing horse teeth, a blue tongue emerging like an antennae to briefly flap back and forth. “I wanted to read more about this tree.” Hart’s thoughts finally turned back to what he had recited. Disappointment and confusion writhed in his memories, worms brought up to the surface by cold rain, finding no relief in its direct path.

“I could give you a whole lecture about it, minus any conclusion thanks to the reveal that its source was mere vegetable matter. This tree is the Mad Letterman!”

“And you were already good friends with this Mad Letterman?” his fellow seasonal prisoner asked, enticed claws slowly drumming across the bycandelite’s bark.

“He was supposed to be a friend to us all.” Revealing anything to Spywulph was unwise, information was ammunition to a draftsman looking to shackle you in ironclad footnotes, but Hart’s frustration with his cage, the one back in his bedroom, hadn’t ceased boiling over. If he confided in his friends or the fiance of his broken promises there would be punishment, and if he took his concerns to the Founders directly they would only apply more restrictions, wrap him in scarlet ribbon until he was mummified.

“We thought him one of the Freed,” he continued, “a dark-skinned man living on his own outside Pilgrim’s Anchor. He had what we want: liberation. For years he has fed us helpful wisdom, even secrets of our elders. How a tree came by such information I have no clue. To think, it was all mere adaptation, part of this one life’s struggle to last through these harsh winters. The inspiration was false… not that my people will ever know… unless they sit and read at the base of this tree themselves.”

“You’re not going to tell them?”

“I’ve brought them enough disappointments. No more. Let the legend live on I say.”

“It could live on for you as well.” Spywulph twisted out of sight. Hart leaned, saw only a relaxed shoulder of his black coat.

“How do you mean?”

“You have assumed the worst, after admitting you had previously assumed the best of the Mad Letterman’s intentions. Perhaps you have changed, more than the ideas on these paper leaves. Why have you not considered that the Mad Letterman could have been who you thought, but that he has moved on from this place? The tree might’ve observed him directly, learned to mimic his writings to enhance its heat. These could be echoes of the very real man, who has done just what he has said he has done, flown away on giant ears, to empty lands of lesser conflict.”

“Why Lord Spywulph, that might be the wisest notion I’ve heard all winter.”

“I could be a philosopher,” the Bickyplot said, nodding in further praise of himself, “if Bickering Hall didn’t already have a complete understanding of life and its foils. Conquest is everything, and when that is finished you can have your dessert.” Then he recalled he was not in the middle of the woods for nothing. “Our truce has been a smashing success.”

“I can’t find a single flaw in it thus far.”

“Why not take the next step? Let’s warm ourselves with negotiation, as the time will pass whether or not we spend it on silly bricked-up silence.”

“What is it that we would be negotiating?”

“An exchange of the only thing we could offer in this predicament: knowledge. For you see, we were out searching for something, and I imagine you could help Lady Flaywood and I find it.”

“This is a much riskier proposition than your last,” Hart noted, trying to match his cool tone, despite his voice coming from somewhere equivalent to the Bickyplot’s elbows on the other side of the Mad Letterman. “You’re searching for something, and you’ve brought one of your hunting dogs to help you find it. It must be crucially important. If I could help you, what would you do for me and mine in turn?” The Bickyplot’s contemplation could be heard in grinding horse teeth, chugging nostrils, and the web between them going taut.

“The date of Mister Licketysplit Godswallop’s heart-pouring.” Hart took his turn in quiet thought. He tried to search the heavens for guidance, but was quickly blinded by the bycandelite, so warm and yellow-white in its fire, ten thousand candles eating as many moths. His eyes retreated to his lap, found only nervous fingers picking at the leather binding of his journal, which had at some point, unknowingly, closed. Blueberry might be reading his greenery already, and might not be finished until after he returned.

That’s not the issue at hand. If I am to go on I must always be stood upon the issue at hand, so that these hands cannot be idle and tempted to search for younger skin to pick at.

Muster Hart, and the rest of Pilgrim’s Anchor, Mad Letterman included, had no idea what a heart-pouring even was, nor was it clear if the Bickyplots knew these events in their lives were complete enigmas to the humans. But, Questinking seemed to think the date of one to be a significant bargaining chip.

A similar term had been found on an invitation delivered by Spywulph himself the previous year, to a celebration of Godswallop’s ‘string-snapping’. That had devolved into a battle that wounded both sides, and nowhere in the chaos had Hart or his company learned what a string-snapping was, or if it had occurred during the fight with no obvious sign.

So all he could assume of a heart-pouring was that it happened sometime after a string-snapping… and in the two decades since the founding of Pilgrim’s Anchor they’d never heard anything about either phenomenon occurring to any other Bickyplot. What could they be? Hopefully not the inchworm preparing for its cocoon. The day Bickyplots are winged is the day we are all crushed by dropped stones.

“Alright,” Hart agreed before he’d fully puzzled his strategy out. The blizzard’s vicious bite could be over any time. “Before we begin you must swear to allow me a head start once the weather clears, as I have no incentive to divulge anything if I can’t take my reward back to my people.”

“That’s a matter of course,” Spywulph conceded, almost offended it hadn’t gone without saying. “Our dog will need time to thaw regardless.”

“We’re in an accord then. Tell me the date of the heart-pouring. Then, if I am to tell you where this treasure you seek is, you must describe it.”

“The date on your calendar is April the first. Now, we don’t like it when our pieces and parts are lying around for any petty thief to find,” Spywulph said, reasonably enough. “At the prisonerless prisoner exchange you used Lord Wighthall’s head as a decoy. It was not the head you first took with you, so you must have experimented upon him in a way that made more.”

“Yes, we did,” Muster said slowly, trying to figure out word by word if he was revealing anything but reasonable assumptions.

“We’re out looking for that first head you stole.”

“You don’t want the heart? Isn’t that the Bickyplot?”

“The cardiolic self is the ultimate self, yes, but we know that is currently your prisoner. We wouldn’t expect you to give up such a sharp edge on us. That would be bad form. It shouldn’t be unfair to let us have the refuse though. We carry sentimental attachments to some of this castoff material, even after physical attachments are broken.

When we eventually win Cadavawing back, he will want his heads returned to him, especially the one he wore the longest, which was the first. Our dog has been given the scent on some of his belongings, like his human spine back scratcher, and is trying to track the heads that way. Not much luck so far. Where did you discard them?”

“Far from here and far from Anchor,” Hart said too quickly. He knew exactly where the excess heads were, and that there was a hill of them rather than a handful. Each one had displayed a slightly different personality, and the Founders had wanted one willing to sign a few magically binding documents, so they’d knocked them off with a giant hammer one by one until an agreeable variation had grown.

The then-junior president had been tasked with dumping the toxic waste in the furthest and foulest bog they’d mapped, which was now known to belong to the alabaster likeness of Virginia Dare and her buttery bog bodies. The idea of the Bickyplots going to war with that faction, over a repulsive rotting lump, was too enticing to pass up. That was assuming the head even could be reclaimed, and that it was not permanently lost to the depths of the mire.

“It is sunk in a bog. You know where the fens begin? Follow the edge, longer than you want to, until the ground becomes unstable and the muck yellows. There should still be human trails there, as the land holds prints a long while, and they will stop where we left them.”

“Sunk you say,” Spywulph muttered, claws tapping a little more assertively on one of the flattest and boxiest parts of the Mad Letterman, as if he was pressuring a cabinet to belch up a specific document. “Our puppy must’ve found a false trail. The day might’ve been a total loss without you Scudder; you have my thanks.”

The young man was too clever to fall for that, and just clever enough to hold his tongue. Glossing over the dread of Questinking calling it a puppy, if that beast, which always seemed such an onerous drain on their resources, was pulled into Pursuitia to track scents they must have believed its skill was superb. It would not have led them astray.

If, on the other hand, they were searching for multiple things, not just the head, that might explain their presence there, where there could be found much excellent stock for drafting papers. Hart was ostensibly there for the same reason. And if they wanted papers they were creating a new document, drafting new magic.

A cold seep, separate from the buffeting snow, plunged through him. Several ideas had clunked into place, bringing to life a sinister mechanism: the oiled animal-crushing gears and machinations of Bickering Hall.

Perhaps this new document was to be a replacement for one lost… lost because it was kept in a place deemed the safest, not their home, but the replica of their home that sat on the shoulders of Cadavawing Wighthall. Guarded by a cardiolic self prowling its halls, guarded by twelve siblings, guarded by the bigger likeness of the building most of the time, and likely replete with miniature furniture, cabinets, safes, and locks; that was where Hart might have hidden his most precious treasures if he had access to such a secure yet overlooked pocket.

Something vital to Bickyplot rule was in that bone-grown and skin-painted model of their manor. It could be the deed to Bickering Hall, the enslavement agreement the Silhouettes had unwittingly signed, or even something that kept that portal to their world in healthy function. Hart had just told them where they could reclaim it. If it can be reclaimed. If they can defeat Virginia Dare. If we have all the luck in the world the two parties could eliminate each other. This is still valuable intelligence, but how do I make use of it when distributing it to my web will draw the Founder spider, decrepit yet still many-legged?

“Would you like an additional minute added to your head start?” Lord Spywulph asked. Presuming Muster’s answer, the young man heard the Bickyplot’s long arm stretch, strain, and pop all the way around the girth of the tree, his grotesque hand incautiously dropping a slip of something into the human lap despite the drifting leaves that could have caught it first and burnt it up. Are there fewer now? Does the Mad Letterman recognize the importance of this meeting? I should heed the forest’s wisdom, that’s what Bonfire would say, whether its origin is in man or not.

“What’s this?” Hart asked, picking it up and turning it over. There was script on it, a dull faded black, no ink of any magical variety, but what came to more immediate attention was the slip’s material: something flaky and fleshy. More like dried meat than leaves.

“I was hoping you could tell me,” the Bickyplot explained. “You’ll find something to say if you want that minute. We recovered this, from a place that is none of your business, and it is clearly human. Like all your attempts at declaration, the words whimper with the fear of failure. Your Founders will never get back to where they fell from if they keep wincing with every step.”

“This… was written by Founder Jefferson. I would recognize his hand anywhere, almost as smug as Hancock’s.”

“Yes we know that already; he’s signed it hasn’t he? Tell me something else.” For that Muster had to read the entire excerpt, knowing two sentences in that he had never heard these sentiments out of the man before, despite Thomas Jefferson being the closest thing he had to a father at that candlelit point in time:

He 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.

This piratical warfare, 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.

“I’d like to know where you acquired this,” Hart said after running through it, his mind still sprinting even as his mouth stopped to wait for an answer.

“I’m sure you would. You have not earned that minute yet.”

“It’s old. The Founder Jefferson of today would never write something like this. The king of Great Britain was their previous oppressor, whom they were ready to go to war with. The slavery it speaks of is the slavery of our Freed in Pursuitia, the dark-skinned.”

“Like your little miss.” He knows I was with Bonfire. This one is too observant. If it wasn’t for that shred of something akin to sympathy that he has we would all have been defeated by now. “Were you happy to have her back just before winter set in?” Oh. He meant Blueberry. “She lost many a game to me while Eggnonce had his scientific way with her.”

Scientific. The word’s ending broke off, regenerated only to its stumpy base. Science. Muster recalled something else, something that only occurred the prior year, but which felt like a lifetime ago, as the person it most concerned had died before the first thorny snowflake fell. Caesar ‘Unmarked’ Rodney II. He had been the protégé of Science Master Franklin, and as good a soldier as a junior president could ask for, until his journal was punctuated by Bickyplot blow at the still-enigmatic string-snapping party.

He had shared something with Hart however, a conversation overheard between Franklin and Jefferson, both of whom were on the original Committee of Five, heavily involved in the drafting of the First Declaration. Hart had Unmarked’s report in his records, but even then the tenor of Jefferson’s remarks had struck him as strange, and he found that he did not need to consult those records to recall.

Founder Jefferson had blamed the transportation of Independence Hall to Pursuitia on the edits to their First Declaration. There was a passage, written by him, entirely excised, that he claimed was the best single culprit; he had also declared his intention to place some version of it in their second declaration, their attempt to undo the first.

Could this be that very passage? It speaks of freedom for all men, men that he has mistreated here as long as I’ve known them both. Anger, the denial of war they were ready for, was all it took to rob him of his sympathies. He needed servants to prepare his virtues for him, just as they did his breakfasts.

But then it occurred to him, and weighed on him, and quickened his blood, and dried out his mouth, and made him swallow his fear. This passage might be the key. It was brief, and one of the original drafters intended to place it back in. That spot, espousing similar sentiments of just freedoms, could then, logically, be instead filled by the Carve-Out. Finding a spot for it, and judging its most effective parameters, was now done, as it could be swapped in for this passage of Jefferson’s, which would already be written around.

That was half the battle, but the rest of the young needed to know it had been fought by the light of the Mad Letterman. He hadn’t the time or the correct ink to inform them properly, and once he returned to Anchor the red ribbon would tighten about him once more, monitor his efforts, tattle with forked crimson tongue in the waxy melting ear of Editor Lightfoot Lee. Hart had to send the message now, as clearly as possible, while the blizzard cut him off.

Acting faster than he thought, he quietly opened his journal to the middle and slipped the unpleasantly fleshy scrap of writing inside. Then he closed it. A drafted rule on the first pages, which he had used many times, would enchant the piece, transport it to the pages of the journal he last communicated with, which was Kidd’s. She could handle it from there.

“Kindly return it,” Questinking requested with an open claw like a long-dead branch still pregnant with wicked snap.

“I’m sorry, I’ve just burned it,” Hart lied. “I assumed you had made copies.”

“Hmhmhm,” the Bickyplot chuckle-chided, arm curling back out of sight. “We have.” But not of whatever you stored in Wighthall’s head. That’s drafting. Copies would have diluted its power. “Triplicates of triplicates we have, of everything you’ve ever dared say in our presence, or to our dullard slaves.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything more to say about what Jefferson wrote. Was that enough for my minute?”

“Twenty seconds.”

“It’s a deal.”

“They should send you to do all the negotiating,” Spywulph rattled, voice sleepy. All his horse nostrils chugged in a cavernous and monstrous yawn. “This has been almost pleasant. We’ve achieved enough for me to justify laying about the rest of the day, which I plan on doing, no matter if Lady Flaywood barks her head off and sicks her heart up her throat on me.” Hart heard long inhuman arms cross, leather sleeves squealing, rusty buttons grating.

Strange as they were, the sounds made him want to lie back and rest. The Mad Letterman was so warm, like a hot bath, the light as soft and kind as his mother’s nearly-forgotten cheek, surviving only in memories where he was drifting off to the most peaceful of swaddled sleeps. Sadly, starkly, there was to be no rest for the weary.

Darkness, wind, and snow were sucked back up into the sky, more abrupt and startling than a cock’s crow. The Mad Letterman extinguished itself, to save firewood, before Hart could jolt upright. Once on his feet he whirled around, aiming his musket, but Lord Spywulph was still hidden behind the tree, silent.

“Twenty seconds are almost up, young human.”

Muster turned and bolted, kicking frozen and brittle leaves a great distance if they didn’t powder on impact. He was long gone by the time Middlebitch burst out of the yellow column she’d been squeezed into. Her urine reek wasn’t enough to bring their hunting dog to a faster thaw, preventing any pursuit.

When she accosted Questinking, lounging under a smoking tree, he urged her to relax, and if not that simply pipe down, for there was no more work to be done, not there. They needed to organize a jaunt and picnic.

To Dare’s Bog.

Sworn Testimony of Private Blueberry Kidd

Days later, once the last of the Founders had finally peeked their heads out and accepted spring, aside from the two who never left the building and hadn’t felt direct light in years, it was time to sort out the nasty affair that had sent them all into scurrying chaos at the Stoking Dramas. It was arranged that Private Blueberry Kidd would share her full account of the supposed Bickyplot realm, and what she had learned in the ensuing months as she unraveled and categorized what she referred to as ‘a tangled and fermented mind’.

The Lenape and the Freed already knew most of it, so the Founders thought it best to appear universally open to discussion. Every citizen of Pilgrim’s Anchor was invited to attend, limited only by the seating capacity of Independence Hall’s supreme court room, and the spillover space in the central hall and further assembly room.

Of course the Founders needed all the benches, elderly and infirm as many of them were, and the adjacent standing space for their nurses. Only past these smears of white and gray, like crackling paint that had forgotten its hue in dehydrated dementia, could there be seen faces more sympathetic to the witness.

And that was what she was, by emotion and appearance alike. They had her seated behind a table, isolated with no counsel, blackening under the gaze of her entire village. She withstood the early phase of the torment admirably, stoically. As everyone settled in, brought out their writing instruments and journals for posterity, she scanned the crowd to see who among her peers and elders had managed to squeeze into the Founders’ presence.

Trusted adults were fewer for her than anyone else, but she saw the mother of her friend Crow Eyes, High Water, as well as the reliable Lenape man Missing Moon, who nodded to display his confidence in her. The head nurse, Louise Paine, mother of Bonfire, was a helpful barrier, always ready to point out to a white man how he looked a little more like the color of death each day. And there was the head inkwitch Gladiola Newtown, whose son was on the junior Committee of Five.

Behind them were those who would never disown her, even if they sometimes had trouble figuring out where she belonged, understandable given she couldn’t find that place herself. There was Edward Rutledge II, Fool’s Gold Floyd, Windstorm Jefferson, Honey and Sassafras Whipple, Bonfire Paine, White Smoke and Dragonfly Hancock, Oakes Newtown, Crow Eyes…

No Hart. In her mind she still called him Mustard, but the affectionate nickname felt more foul and flaccid every time she thought it. He couldn’t be there. I know why. Stop with these childish feelings. I’ve explained it to myself over and again. He can’t. He is a prisoner. Only we can free him, and we must bring the key of the Carve-Out. First we must defeat the Bickyplots, and Mustard has already taken the first steps there too. I will step where he has stepped. I will not stray as I did from my parents.

In one short foraging trip Muster had upended much, hopefully tilled the ground enough to make it fertile for her attempt to sow a plot crackling with Franklin ingenuity and bottled lightning alike. He had shared with everyone the date of the heart-pouring, whatever that was, and that the Bickyplots were searching for the first severed head of Cadavawing Wighthall, likely because of an important document magically hidden inside.

And he had shared, with only the young, the matter of the Jefferson slavery passage. Kidd had extracted it from her journal just as he’d planned, passed it off to the Committee of Five, which was struggling to replace Hart, even now, seeing as he’d just performed another act worthy of the position.

Surely, with all this news flying around in the air like malfunctioning Franklin kites, they could accept what Blueberry had to say. She may have gone temporarily insane, a process she was about to delve into in detail, but there was no outward sign of it, aside from the dangerous obstacle locked onto her forearm, and that had happened before she’d even stepped foot in the world Bickering.

It was the final invention of Unmarked Rodney, so beloved by the boy that he called it the unmarked rod: a mad imagination’s amalgamation of secret drafting compartments and hostile intent, expressed mostly in wood and metal. It had appeared when Kidd had needed it most, allowing her to escape the clutches of the birdbrained unnaturalist Eggnonce Chattelpool, but, like the severed head of a snapping turtle, it had refused to ever release its grip. Any attempt to remove it resulted in weird injuries to assisting parties, as Honey Whipple and her simultaneously fractured ankle and molar could attest.

The pain of its endless bite had dulled over time, but not the purple flesh surrounding where it was clamped. It’s like Rodney is holding onto the only mortal flesh he can still access. Perhaps there is something he thinks he must do, and then it will release. I will trust, as I now expect the others to trust in me.

“If the private would please begin,” requested Founder Clark. Everyone was quiet.

“Yes,” was her first word, followed up by the creak of her journal’s cover as she set it on the wood in front of her and opened it to her prepared notes. They weren’t really notes, just detached and scattered words, written in different sizes. If she had tried to read proper lines there, in front of her whole world, that nasty condition of hers that scrambled letters and turned punctuation into rolling pillbugs would doom her before the first sentence she couldn’t find the end to. Instead she had carefully curated and placed the individual words to remind her what to discuss. Their size was their importance:

Disorient Pliable Fluid                                          dependence no secrets seeking

Inhabitants are the Inhabited

tavern                       tavernkeeper patrons                    drinks               desire

steady in chaos              questions answers                       pacific                                fear was my own

Void                                                                    sat on end, missing

eaten,escaped, friendly now, returned

                              Wagner the adder

Each word and phrase was a node, struck in her mind as a bundle of bells, alarming memories that couldn’t help but quicken her pulse and shorten her breath, as if she was about to tip a cart downhill with a sword and send herself into battle. This was not a battle against the Bickyplots. That was already won, on the internal front at least. This clash was in her own name, against the multitudinous gravel tidal wave of her reputation. This was the war for faith in Blueberry Kidd, which had lasted all her life, and in which she had never had more than one clinging fingertip on the edge of the map, supporting her whole weight.

“Founders, friends, I urge you to heed my words with the utmost care and precision. I know there was a time where I appeared completely mad, raving nonsense as I returned from my long incarceration in Bickering Hall. I assure you that madness has been tamed, untangled, and flattened into familiar order. Along with it I have brought the revelations that could end the war, if only we plan according to my experience. Treat every detail in this account as Eggnonce Chattelpool treated my every eyelash and pore. Study them, and see through to the larger truth.

The Bickyplots kept me in an enclosure with unrecognized anatimals, not far from a massive door behind thirteen locks, each one opened by a specific hand. Through the use of a shape-shifting key, the material of which I am told was used to mimic my own face during the attempted prisoner exchange, and an item devised by the late and beloved Caesar Rodney II,” she lifted her arm, causing the wooden abomination to crackle and break a spring somewhere inside itself, “I was able to escape my cell and open that door.

Beyond, the door having erased itself more than opening, was a portal. Our enemies were near; I had little time to decide. Ultimately I chose to enter, fearing none of us would ever have such an opportunity again.

For some time I was not able to think, know, or remember anything at all… the reason is that I had passed out of the world of Evidentia and into what could only be the native world of the Bickyplots.” She paused for gasps and whispers, which came as expected. A few editing ribbons, most parchment-colored as opposed to Lee’s crimson serpent, swam between Founders. She’d only just started and they were already passing the notes to arrange their plot against her. What good was evidence to minds that only ever had the same singular goal?

“I was disoriented,” she continued. “Beyond that in truth, far beyond. My mind drowned there, only resurfacing to try a new sort of breath because that world does not enjoy death as Evidentia does, as the Earth seems to yet more.

Somewhere between the insertion of a new instinct and human ingenuity I discovered the fundamental difference between these worlds that makes them incompatible. Earth, Evidentia, and Bickering… exist along a line. They are a gradation of one axiom: intent. These three worlds seem to be neighbors, occasionally dripping into each other, because they are.

On Earth, intent has no power beyond motivation. A man must use it to fuel his body, to do all the work necessary to bring it to fruition. In Evidentia, intent has a thinly spread power of its own, like the weather, which can be harnessed and honed the way we would the wind with a windmill, or lightning with Franklin rods.” Founder Franklin cheerily adjusted himself in his seat, accidentally shocking his neighbors with stored static well in excess of a typical man rubbing his rump on a cushion. “Thus the animals see intent, the plants are furnaces of it, and those of us with intelligence can, with care, draft altered reality.

But what of Bickering? There intent is one of the ultimate forces, no weaker than light, shadow, fire, magnetism, or gravity. There the world does generate intent, but intent also generates the world. What is thought becomes true, when thought purposefully enough. You might think this makes every native a god, but remember that they disagree with each other over what paradise is, and the world itself has just as much to say, and is still so much bigger than all of its life.

When you understand this you can take your first step there; as you push on the world it pushes back. There is no isolation; everything is interaction. At that point my only goal, just that one was difficult to keep inside my head, was to explore. Eventually I made my way to what I now believe was a building, despite several traits no building would have in either of our other worlds.

Inside it was most like a tavern, and like a tavern it had a master and patrons going about their business, who paid little attention to me despite my alien form. I think it was the keeper who managed the building with their thoughts, as when someone wanted a drink they simply thought it toward themselves. Off the shelf it would fly, bumbling like a bee, to their waiting hands and mouths.

I too was able to summon one, but not well, and these beings finally took note. I should say here that they were not Bickyplots, not as we know them. A Bickyplot is made of refuse, of hoarded items glued together with spiderwebs and tar. These were made of their world. When they were drinking they were partly made of drink; when they sat they were partly made of stool. I think they travel and try new things to avoid becoming stagnant carbuncles on the ground.

They spoke to me in a friendly manner. All the fear there was my own, and I don’t think they could even feel that emotion. I did my best to communicate, with great difficulty. As with the other aspects of Bickering I was only able to fully understand after I had returned and solved both sides of the conversation, like a wooden puzzle constructed by two different craftsmen.

My attention turned to something seated at the end of the bar. Qualities take on different characters there, but here I would call it dark, cold, empty, and unintended. It was some kind of void, the hole left by something’s absence. Ladies and gentlemen of Independence Hall, I believe that void was left… by a Bickyplot.”

“Absurd,” grumbled one Founder while four others nodded around him. Two of their ribbons collided head on, lost their vigor, and fell to the floor like loose bandaging. The scuttlebutt behind them, among the Lenape and Freed, was much less cynical, but no less confused. I have to drag them through the process, with no time to do so, with none of the tools my mind was forced to cobble together like hand axes and pestles.

“I inquired!” Kidd shouted over all of them, doing her best to make it sound like an adjustment and not a countering volley. “I asked the tavern dwellers what this void was, and I’m certain they told me that one of their regulars had gone missing, and ever since their spot was haunted by that black vacancy.

Consider what I have explained. Those in Bickering are their world; the world is them. Those pieces are missing because they can be found here in Evidentia, where they have become twisted and malformed due to the difference between the worlds, just as I had to learn existence anew in theirs.”

“Private Kidd,” Founder Jefferson addressed, standing tall as he could, pushing away the supporting arm of a nurse, “do you mean to say that the very act of entering another world-“

“-turned them into the monsters we know,” Blueberry finished for him, almost putting him back in his seat. “And it is not because they entered another world, it is because they entered another’s world. It did not belong to them, but their intent was for it to be theirs, as that was how they treated their own land. Being here does not create evil. Colonizing it does.”

The implication was not lost on any section of her audience. If their foes became Bickyplots through entitled invasion, even unintentional as it might have been, then the Founders were the exact same sort of creature. Their decrepit age was not their dying days, but the completion of their transformation into gnarled monsters whose morals had calcified into cudgels, to cease their self-righteous and cruel bludgeoning only when it caused the weapons themselves to crumble.

This was not true of the young, whose only sin was birth, and which was only a sin in the withered root of Christianity the Founders had brought with them, likely no longer connected to the stump of the crucifix tree. It was not true of the Lenape or the Freed, who were merely caught in the dragnet, twice over, of Founder affrontery and ambition. It was those signers of the First Declaration who had sought to make the land theirs when it already belonged to the Lenape and other native tribes.

Blueberry’s insult was yet worse, as she outright said the Bickyplots were hopeless. They automatically became towers of excess and debauchery because it was in their nature. Choice may have never entered the equation. They lacked the capacity to change on their own, be it through intrinsic trait or unassailable momentum of historical precedent.

The Founders could have, at every step, with every toll of the Liberty Bell, done differently, acted more equitably to all living things, regardless of world. Pursuitia was now infected and infested with anatimals, possibly also with ferns and grasses of Earth, and would never be clean of them again unless a resolution of erasure was drafted by a god. No Silhouette was consulted about these additions. The health of the opera worm population was not taken into account, nor the cloudliners, nor bycandelites, busy bushburns, spruciferous waddle-worms, tricky carpet-pullers, bubbling thought shrubs…

“In conclusion!” she shouted. Her conclusion was not actually there yet, far from it, but she was burning through patience faster than any other person in Pilgrim’s Anchor could. Her wick was always dusted with gunpowder; a parent so absentminded that they’d forgotten Kidd was theirs must have also overturned a keg of it onto her as they left for the final time. If I’m right… I don’t need them. I don’t want them! They’re on their way to becoming a Bickyplot while I’m the one learning the truth. Abandoning me was a favor to my future. So thank you, father. Hopefully mother is your better.

“In conclusion, after I left the tavern I was consumed by a member of the Bickering wildlife, but was able to think myself free and even befriend the creature. It was surely the untainted version of the Bickyplot hunting dog.

Finding my way back to this world was no easy task physically, as all the landmarks had moved, but doing it mentally was much more achievable. I returned to the portal, which seems to never close, and passed back through. In the process…” She held her arms wide, signaling Wagner to slither out of one coat sleeve, across the wide gap of her chest, and into the other. Its body went on much longer than it would have the previous year. It could no longer be said that it was possible for such a tail to have been attached to the rest of a dog at some point.

“Passing through has made my anatimal elongate permanently. Perhaps time flows faster or slower in one world, and thus something like Wagner might have to find a way to pass through reasonably in both. Whatever the cause, I think we could use Wagner here as a tether, to mount an expedition into Bicker-“

“An expedition!” Founder Witherspoon boomed. “Whatever for!? If you’re truthful you talk of willingly walking back into devilry!”

“To defeat the Bickyplots!” she answered just as harshly, the most vicious she’d ever been with one of the men in the open, the intent of it striking him like a slap. The man clutched the bible that never left his person, undoing his grip only to search its pages for a curse he could cast upon her. “The voids where the Bickyplots belong are waiting for their return. We absolutely must mount a full assault and an expedition. If we can find a way to force them back into their world they will return to their proper places, and the evil of their current form will be erased as if it had never gone awry. We will free not only ourselves from their tyranny, but the Silhouettes as well!”

The Lenape, the Freed, and the young struck, hand to hand. The applause filled the chamber, roosted boisterously in the ceiling like crows jousting and broadsiding with their bills. Here was their faith, their trust. Blueberry was almost too stunned to take it in, forced herself to recover and devour the sound of each impact, store them away inside her heart like toy drums she could disturb into an encore whenever she wished. Even without a family she could build a presence. The woodpecker in its hole could be part of the tree, as long as it defended its home with its life.

“Clear the chamber!” several Founders started to hoarsely repeat, waving their trembling hands around, using gestures to order their nurses to corral the riffraff out, which they pretended to do. Those present understood nothing would get done until the Founders could seal themselves away from everything else and make a collaborative decision, entirely with uncontaminated reason they would claim. It did empty out. Blueberry went with them, as she automatically knew they would not question her in more detail. Their minds were already made up on her, just not the claims.

Part of her expected to be embraced as soon as the doors were shut. That’s what should have followed from the applause, but she found herself slipping between backs and shoulders, flowing through the people as if they wanted to extrude her, smooth and seamless as Wagner journeying down her spine.

Exhaustion was what stalled her, still in the middle of everyone, bumping against an island of a bench. She took a seat. For some time her vision went in and out, sometimes empty black and sometimes sleep. The testimony had taken something out of her that she had not known was in limited supply; her soul struggled to replace it.

When she came out of it she felt like no time had passed, with the chamber still crowded, the chatter having only died down a little. Her head tried to lift, but something soft and heavy clung to it. At first she thought it was a pillow, delivered to her neck kindly while she was nodding off, and it was, but not a sort that took lightly to the source of heat that warmed it in turn trying to leave so quickly. It grasped her as she moved with pink pseudopods.

“Hold still, I’ll get it,” the girl sat next to her said. It was Honey Whipple, the friendliest face the Founders hadn’t locked away in a desk drawer. She twisted and scratched the top of the pillow, its fine hair corn silk yellow upon pink; it vibrated with an internal purr and detached. Honey moved it into her lap, allowing Blueberry to see that it was a piglet-belly anatimal that had grabbed onto her with its teats.

As usual Honey had an entire menagerie, in collage form, about her person, a buffering crowd of brainless friends protecting her from the other one: pig ear butterflies nestled in her collar, hiding her true ears, cat noses clipped her to cuffs with their nostrils, whiskers wrapped loosely around her fingers, and pewter lizard paws crawling across her skin like spiders.

“Didn’t want you to have a sore neck,” she explained as she stroked the pig belly. “I would’ve let you sleep longer, but the Founders are shuffling around in there. We think they’ve made a decision.”

“Thank you,” Kidd said, voice barely escaping the accumulated muck in her throat, a belch out of a tar pit.

“Don’t sound so defeated. If we’re going to use anatimals on this expedition I’ll be in charge of them, and that means we’ll be victorious.” Her impish smile was almost enough to pull Blueberry out of her malaise, but it only managed the same for her slump.

“First the Founders must decide whether or not I’m a raving mooncalf.” Honey nodded once, a firewood chop, moved onto the next thought like the next log.

“Might I see Wagner?” She held out her arms, tiniest anatimals retreating into her clothes. If the two had been cooped up together for the winter Honey would’ve studied his change for days already, but she had made it into Independence Hall when the blizzard dropped, toastiest building in Anchor, and was also not put out by the Founders, as she was the most qualified to manage the prized anatimals kept in hutches adjacent to the tin horse stables, really more like tin horse slots, as when the metal statues were inanimate they never needed to feed, socialize, or settle down for a nap.

Honey had slept cozied up with a pile of her charges all winter long, only occasionally troubled by Master of Sciences Franklin when he pestered her with the anatimal questions she never wanted to address: which ones were best for eating and how to prepare them.

Kidd rolled one shoulder, loyal Wagner understanding the order perfectly. It slithered out of her collar and into Honey’s palms, continuing to do so until its entire length was wrapped around them five times. She hefted the wait, impressed.

“Who’s a heavy gentleman?” she teased, for her own benefit more than anyone or any anatimal else’s. “You know, with Emperor and a few others I’ve found that power increases exponentially with anatimal size. A small piece of an animal on Earth was often the strongest, as our parents claim anyway. A turtle could bite off a finger. An ant could lift an acorn cap many times its own weight.

Emperor is strong enough to carry a man in flight, as we’ve all felt and seen. I would not be surprised if Wagner now has the power to bind a Bickyplot as well as any rope or chain.” The claim did more to perk Blueberry up than any pep talk could. She saw herself riding into battle on a tin horse, unmarked rod on one arm, deciding when to become a jousting lance, Wagner in the other, lassoing the nearest Bickyplot and dragging it behind. She might not need any army to storm Bickering Hall, not if her experience and Pursuitia provided enough implements. I entertain this only because Mustard is gone. Without him to vouch for me I am cut off from Anchor’s resources. The unmarked rod, like me, was literally unwanted by everyone else.

About to deflate again, she was cut off by doors thrown open and a booming announcement. The Founders had indeed come to an accord amongst themselves regarding a strategy. Now they would deign to loosen the purse strings of their drafting, allow the army of the young and the twin labor forces of aging Lenape and Freed to access the materials that should have belonged to all.

Everyone that could fit was ushered back into the supreme court chamber, where the Founders had turned their seats around to face them. Founders Witherspoon and Hewes were the ones who remained standing, pacing back and forth until everyone stilled, their arms folded behind their backs. The ribbon holding Witherspoon’s bible page stuck up in his grip like a cock’s tail feather. Each was waiting for the other to speak, as they would then alternate, dividing any ire from the audience between the two.

“Out with it!” someone lost in the shuffling feet shouted, bold within the very walls of Independence Hall. Somewhere under the floorboards, and in the nearest drafting room, the remark was recording itself in vengeful color and scratching script. Who but the Mad Letterman would have such gumption? Only Mustard. Kidd searched for him in the crowd, though the voice hadn’t sounded like him at all.

“Pilgrim’s Anchor will act swiftly!” Founder Hewes responded, intentionally failing to clarify their position. The roll of his eyes handed speakership off to an irritated Witherspoon.

“Having taken into consideration not only Private Kidd’s testimony, but also Corporal Hart’s regarding his encounter with Lord Spywulph…” Their framing it as if only one of us could be believed. They see not the kinship in our camaraderie, only that one of us has a higher rank and is, coincidentally, white. We have concluded that…” He tried to roll his eyes as Hewes had to return the role, but he was nowhere near as experienced as the mercantile Hewes at disappearing when it was time for a party to take responsibility. “Diplomacy must be attempted.” His tone of hopeful upswing convinced the man he could get in some words without risk.

“We never had a chance to properly celebrate what is a truly historic accomplishment, that being the discovery of the fate of the lost colony at Roanoke. We’ve misplaced our historians back on Earth; rest assured that this would have them salivating.

Here it is much more useful as alliance than knowledge. Misshapen as they might be, merely clinging to life instead of living it, they are human. They are us, and we must trust that they remember friendship. Let us not overlook that they are in possession of Lord Wighthall’s original noggin, sought by the Bickyplots. An alliance formed could see not only our forces doubled, not only reinforced with the supernatural strength of the grave, but also the head in our possession.

“And as far as them trying to drown us in a swamp?” Autumn Middleton, one of the young, found the bravery to ask, smartly avoiding too much scrutiny by framing it as a question.

“We would not expect any of you children to understand the nuance of forging adult relationships,” Witherspoon shot back, the remark swung like an iron rod. “You would scarcely believe how many current friends are former enemies when you are as old as we are. It is natural to unite against a cruel higher authority, as we will against the Bickyplots. Your first encounter was, in all likelihood, a terrible misunderstanding. You marched into their home, polluted it with a mound of decapitated monstrous faces, and brought out your weapons when they surfaced to investigate. A mutual fright. Unfortunate, but it would be a terrible waste to treat it as immediate doom.”

The young jeered, followed by emboldened Lenape and Freed, only slightly quelled by Hewes throwing up his hands and letting them slowly fall. He considered that his work, not a word spent, and ceded the floor back to Witherspoon, who was eating the corner of his own lip as he realized he’d been left with delivering the blow that would smart the most. He tiptoed around the subject awkwardly.

“And thus united with our fellow men we will be more than adequately equipped to take on Bickering Hall… on any such occasion where that might be necessary.”

“So we are to assault the hall?” a Freed asked. “We’re going to shove them into that portal of theirs?” Witherspoon pursed his lips, pushed them out to look like a strangled duck.

“No.” An uproar. Swift and broad. They believed me. The Founders can’t. It may not even be in their natures. A commotion such as that might’ve indicated full revolt and rebellion back on Earth, not so in these halls so protected by drafted magic inside and out that the paper served as insulation. Here their magic suppressed the noise, turned it into the draft from butterfly wings by the time it reached a Founder’s cheek.

If they had truly tried to surge, to break brittle bodies underfoot like twigs, all Pilgrim’s Anchor safety measures would trigger, and even if the Founders were killed the Lenape, the Freed, and the young interwoven would not succeed. No he says. Just like that my imprisonment is made pointless. I’m not proper enough to help. Better to fall to your death than reach for the grimy hand of Blueberry Kidd. It wasn’t actually ‘just like that’, as Witherspoon had a good deal more to say on the subject, especially now that he’d seen the furor fizzle under the threat of their retaliatory written enchantments.

“Private Kidd has been through a harrowing ordeal and our hearts go out to her.” They’re not the ones surrounding me right now. “It is clear that she is mistaken about the nature of the Bickyplots, likely brought on by the experimentation of Lord Chattelpool.”

“Perhaps intentionally so,” Hewes chimed in, quickly retreating back into silence.

“Yes, quite right,” Witherspoon nodded along, as if the word ‘perhaps’ had not been included at all. “The dark crevices of Bickering Hall have been exaggerated by fear and duplicity alike into this fever dream of yet another world, this one moth-eaten and insistent upon itself. Fanciful and fascinating, but no more true than the tin Pegasus Draftsman Jefferson always dreams of.” He tried to get a laugh going among his fellows, twisting around, finding mostly the distant face of Jefferson, distinctly unamused despite his looking another way entirely.

“It was no dream!” Private Kidd declared, not to defend herself, not to convince him, just to exist more truthfully, more in accord with the world, than the men in charge. Everyone thought she was trying to argue, as Wagner emerged from her hood, stood tall and wide as any cobra, silently asking the Founder to explain the anatimal’s new prodigious size.

“That mongrel tail means nothing. Anatimal size has always been vexing. Need I remind any of you we have udders big enough to ride and pig ears that could keep you warmer than quilts!” Honey almost spoke up, stopped herself prudently. Her thinking was right, that all those anatimals attained their strange sizes and shapes through selective breeding, but she was also correct in her assumption that no one would be satisfied with that when they recalled that breeding was coaxed, heavily implied, and yet never directly witnessed. The mechanism was unknown. Somehow the anatimals grew in number, and when you secluded them with others of similar variety that promoted the growth, in a way that could barely be called directed. No better explanation existed anywhere in her menagerie.

“Let it not be said that I have any bias against the creatures,” Witherspoon added, “for we will rely on them just as much in our plan based on the true state of things. The porcine ears will come in useful just as they did last year. We can use them to drop our proposal leaflets on Dare’s Bog at a distance, nullifying any dangers that might exist from them.

If she and her people are amenable, they will come to us here, where we have the advantage, and we will draft a truce to join our civilizations. We don’t doubt she is even more eager than us to return to God’s green Earth. She has been separated from it longer than any of us.” And is most deformed by her colonization, I hear. Her people are anyhow. She is but a statue, perhaps only a drafted memorial of her spirit.

“What of the heart-pouring?” someone asked, rather tactically, as that information had come from their precious pale student, not Kidd.

“While we don’t understand this concept I must point out that I was there during the string-snapping,” Witherspoon reminded, “and I couldn’t tell you if it occurred or what difference it made. I would not be surprised if the event was entirely fictional, a lure planted for us. I don’t intend to play into their devil hands again.”

The questions were dying out, always a last resort after it was made clear their rage would tear Pilgrim’s Anchor out by the roots before it would connect with any one Founder. Hewes returned to the stage, though he’d never technically left it, and helped Witherspoon cow the people back into docility. Rambling on and on, the pair of Founders faced no further opposition, the closest thing to it being the creaks of impatient Founder seats, some of them wanting the discussions to fully end so they could get drafted treatments lacquered onto their bedsores.

Blueberry’s brain had gone fuzzy, hoping to discover yet another world to live in somewhere amongst the background fog of thought. She barely heard how relieved the young were supposed to be, since they would not have to march into a swamp and do battle with the shadowy, buttery, waxy undead. All they had to do was write out, by hand for politeness’s sake as opposed to copying with drafting, all of the leaflets that were to rain down on their new friends.

Continued in Part Two