Sorceress Kringle

Everything you know about Santa Claus is a lie.

And that’s just the way she likes it.

She remembers nothing of her real parents. She was abducted as an infant by a band of fairies who taught her all she knows. For as long as she can remember, she’s been obsessed with orphans, magic, and ice. She’s forever spying on children in the real world, hoping they will shed light on her own beginnings. Everyone calls her Key, but no one can tell her why.

Now, in the year 1660, on the fledgling Dutch island of Manhattan, Key must take a stand against madmen who would eradicate the world of magic forever. Spirited and guileless, Key fights for the ones she loves and watches as her legend springs gloriously to life.

She knows in her heart that she can make humans better than they are. If she can get to them when they’re young enough, she can teach them wrong from right, naughty from nice. Her real name is Kris Kringle, and this is how her story begins.

Written by a winner of the Derringer Award.

An epic origin story of the world’s most beloved magician, as you’ve never imagined her.

Not intended for children.

BUY Sorceress Kringle

Chapter 1

One of the sorrows of a life as long as mine is remembering how beautiful the world was once, with ice still in it. My remaking began on a Winter’s day when Roelof took six of us above ground to select a tree in the woods outside town. I don’t recall the precise species. It may not matter. We made short work of it. Roelof and his lieutenant, Dashiell, took turns with their axes, while bald-headed Flamel patiently worked from the other side with his saw. I and my kinswomen—Kyupert and Katrina—emptied the ropes out of our sacks and fashioned some webbing to enclose the boughs.

Much as it pains me, I can still close my eyes and smell the snow—deep, wet, and as innocent as I was. I was just a girl then, with a heart full of uncrushed love and so little reason as to believe that all I saw was sensible and knowable.

The air was brisk and the sound of our labors shattered the silence and quieted the loons on distant lakes. When the tree fell, it was like a piece of the earth had broken. We did not congratulate ourselves because the hard part was next. We pounced on it with ropes and began the long slog back to the trapdoor that would take us home. We grunted, strained, tugged—and the tree rocked and slid into line.

“Try to keep up, won’t you?” Roelof chided me. “What’s the use of such long legs if you can’t keep up?”

“Big words for such a little man,” I snapped.

His head rocked back in a throaty chuckle. How hard I used to work to devise clever retorts to his jibes. It pleased me to no end to hear his laugh. He had beautiful eyes and a lean, fine-muscled body under his deerskin jacket and breastplate. His hair and beard were thick and springy and blond-ginger. 

The snow was shin-deep to me, but my brethren waded through it like ponies in a raging stream. We were safe while in the woods proper. The tricky bit was leaving the woods and entering the open pasture and farmlands of the neighboring people. 

In those days a race of people had taken up residence in the free village of Boston-Town. We lived in the vicinity. Under Boston. Below Boston. Around Boston. Sometimes, when we had a mind, we lived within it too, but only at night under the cover of darkness. My caretakers had learned long ago to be wary of humans. That did not mean we lived in fear—far from it. We were joyful as only smallfolk could be, and no time was more joyful than those days that rounded out the year.

We had come out early that day to go about our business before the residents awoke. Normally we traipsed through the land like we were lords of it, but we were ever mindful that our passing gave fright to the odd beings who called these territories home. I bore them no ill will. But I knew them to be a hard, queer people who conducted themselves in a manner so appalling to our eyes that we called them Severes.

As we poked our heads out of the woods, we saw a line of split-log fencing that was all the warning we needed that the people of the land were close by. We moved swiftly, cautiously. But I halted in my tracks when I spied a white-tailed deer nibbling at the grass under the snow.

“Do you see her?” I said to Roelof.

He smiled and gestured to the others. The tree slowed to a stop as we watched the deer’s delicate jaws chomping away. The fur on her breast rippled in the cold.

Katrina, my mother’s onetime handmaiden, raised a hand to her lips. “Are you there, sister?” she called in Earthtongue. “Are you there, brother?”

No response. Which meant that the deer had not been one of us in life. And thus not one of the philosophers now. But she was still lovely to behold.

Just as the deer’s mouth dropped again to the earth, I felt a flash of cold at my breast. Then a child’s scream cut through the air.

The deer bounded away over the fence.

We tensed, our fingers going tight against our ropes.

In the space left vacant by the deer’s departure we could now see a small wooden cabin. I remember being so fascinated by the icicles that dripped from the roofline. We did not have such lovely things in the warrens, and I had to go to the Above Lands to witness the miracle of frozen water.

But I digress. One of the Severe men stood at the door, shaking a young girl by the shoulder. They were both dressed in the dark fabrics of their kind.

“No, Papa!” the girl cried. “Please, no!”

At first I did not understand the man’s words, but as soon as the child spoke I knew that they were speaking English. For some reason I have always had that gift—the ability to puzzle out the meaning of a child’s speech, no matter the tongue.

“Silence, girl!” the man said now. “Thou wilst speak when I say thy may.”

“Papa, I did not mean—”

The man raised his hand and struck her hard against the mouth. A cruel swat as if he did not treasure this gift of his own loins. The girl fell off balance and teetered toward the outer wall of the cabin.

My hands curled into fists.

Fair, red-cheeked Kyupert spoke. “We should go,” she said. “There is no point in staying.”

“That’s how they are,” Flamel said.

“Humans,” Dashiell hissed so loudly that one word practically ended with a tsk.

I took a step toward the end of the tree. Roelof raised a hand to impede my progress. “No, Key,” he said. “Let it go.”

My own human nature leapt to my heart. Rage clouded thought, anger obliterated sense. The child’s weeping had curdled the dawn, and all I wanted to do was make it right.

“We’ll go,” Roelof said quietly. “Let your anger pass.”

Across the pasture, the man sternly lectured his daughter. “Up early and not yet at work? Dost thou mean for thy mother to wait on thee like a princess?”

The word princess caught in my chest.

“I was only playing, Papa—”

“Play is idleness and idleness is sin, child. Thou knowest that. If thou hast time for play, thou hast time for Satan himself.”

Roelof tapped Dashiell’s shoulder. Go. His black, bearded kinsman nodded in agreement. They began to tug at the ropes again. I took a deep breath and lent my weight to the task. I willed my anger to pass. It was for the best. What did I think I was going to do, anyway? Instruct an adult human man on the proper rearing of children? Give him a sound thrashing while my brothers and sisters watched from the sidelines? No—whatever was swirling in my head right now was folly. Best to let it go.

The man turned his back to us and made water against the side of the cabin. As his steam rose almost to the height of the icicles, I could hear the girl’s muffled cries emanating from inside the house. I hoped that she had found solace at the bosom of a loving mother, but I could not know for sure.

We got the tree moving again and left the farmstead behind. I imagined that this would turn out to be a pleasant morning after all, but it was not to be. About a mile down the line of trees I heard the sound of a creature in peril.

Our ears had been trained to hear the things humans missed. Without uttering a word, the smallfolk let the tree slide to a halt and dropped out of sight behind it. They did this so quickly that I was the only one left exposed, looming over the tree trunk and its quaking branches.

“Key!” Roelof whispered. “Get down. He’ll see you.”

I dropped down. I saw a skinny, male Severe garbed in brown and a floppish black hat. He dug in his garments and produced a stone, which he fit into a leather sling. He whirled the sling over his head until the air whistled. The stone hurtled and dropped to the earth. Then came another cry of pain.

The object of the fellow’s hunt appeared to be a crow. Its wings were splayed against the snow, twitching, as its legs tried to gain ground. Each time the bird pulled forward a few inches, another stone came raining down. Its caw had now morphed into a piteous cry that broke my heart.

More appalling to my mind was his attacker’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of ammunition. Snow had covered the ground completely for weeks. I didn’t see how this Severe could assemble such a plentiful stockpile unless he’d made it his business to habitually maim defenseless creatures.

Understand: I bore no animus against those who hunted for food. The gwa’gli hunted always. But until this moment I had never witnessed someone kill a creature for sport. The notion was barbaric.

I took a step forward.

Roelof threw up a hand. “Key, wait. Leave it be.”

I was sick of his caveats. “What, this too?”

I shrugged him off and came around the edge of the tree. I spoke English so infrequently that I was unsure what the proper salutation was. I took a cue from something my father always said.

“Ho there!” I called out.

The slinging Severe paused to stare at me. His eyes widened and he took a step back. He was not much older than I was. A male in his teens.

“Ho, you there!” I called. “Stop that this instant. The creature’s done you no harm!”

His latest stone slipped from the sling and plunked into the snow.

“Who art thou?” he called to me. “From whence do you come? There was no one about just a moment ago.”

His words actually made me feel proud. It meant I’d learned to disappear into the landscape as well as the smallfolk.

I didn’t know how to answer his words, or if I should bother. Who was I? I was Key, same as I ever was. Key of the Owl-Bear clan, daughter of Alanda and Rhezan of the Under Warrens.

“Why dost thou comport thyself in such a manner?” His eyes seemed to screw up in their sockets. Something had popped into his head. “I’ve heard of your kind. Make thy home in the woods, dost thou?”

We didn’t. Well, not anymore. Not since the coming of stone-flinging dunderheads.

“Garish apparel, I must say,” he prattled on. 

I didn’t think that I was so strangely attired. Nearly all the ladies in the warrens mimicked my mother’s style. Kyupert, Katrina, and I were dressed in divided skirts fashioned of filched carpets and tapestries. They were absurdly heavy but kept us warm in Winter months. Our boots and jerkins were made of deerskin. And my red hair was braided and pinned above my ears in loops.

“The devil’s own garb, I’ll be bound—”

What was it with these people? I knew little of their religion, but they certainly seemed obsessed with the devil.

I marched across the snow, crunching along at every step. The faster I advanced, the more he retreated, his cloak flopping. Up close, I could see the faintest bit of man-fuzz gracing his cheeks.

“You don’t belong here,” he said. “All these lands hereabouts are the property of my grandfather!”

That made me despise him all the more. He had the effrontery to think land was something a person could own. 

“Don’t come any closer!” His empty hand dug under his garments. When he produced a fresh stone, I slapped it out of his hand, then drove my open palm straight against his nose. Two quick blows did the trick. His nose crunched and spouted blood. His face rained crimson across a carpet of white.

“Now who’s sporting unseemly colors?” I sneered.

I drew back my foot to kick him, but I knew I would not. Such violence was unnecessary, and thus impermissible. “Go!” I said. “And if I ever see you harm another creature—”

“Vile woman!”

“Go!”

“Devil’s child!”

“Go!”

He clapped a hand to his hat and ran.

Behind me came a high-pitched, mournful sound. The bird was trying its best to gather its wings under its body. But it kept toppling over, its wings flapping in an ungainly manner. 

As I approached, I could see that it was not a crow at all, but simply a bird with black feathers. It stopped struggling and looked up at me.

“You shouldn’t have, you know,” the bird said.

I stopped moving. Even now, all these years later, I cannot be certain if the creature actually spoke, or if his words simply resonated in my mind.

“Did you speak?” I said.

“I’ve died a thousand times,” it said in flawless Earthtongue, the language of my people. His was the voice of a man. “A million times. It makes no difference at this point. But Roelof is right. You should not have risked exposure on my behalf.”

You may have gleaned that a speaking creature is no strange thing in our world. But a black bird who spoke meant a good deal more, or I had not learned my catechism well at all.

“Are you he?” I said.

The bird righted itself and inspected his wings for broken bones. I waited. His eyes rolled in their sockets and in that movement I spied a minuscule, white glint that was the pinprick of eternity.

“Are you the one we speak of?” I said.

The bird threw out his chest. “It’s always bad for a gwa’gli to make herself known to empty-heads,” he said. “The boy will speak.”

“Are you the bird of all time?”

His feathers twitched across his back. “Go home, Key. Your mother has something she wishes to say to you.”

With that, the black bird skipped across the snow and leapt into the air.

When I made my way back, Roelof was chuckling to himself. “Were those open-handed strikes?” he asked. 

He often opined that some people didn’t deserve to be struck with a closed fist. I always thought he was exaggerating, but that morning’s misadventure had taught me the wisdom of those words.

“Of course,” I said. “What else?”

That’s how it began.