This week’s bit of fiction is up over at Noble Cobra Magazine. It’s my alternate take on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Grey Champion (which is highly recommended since, come on, it’s Hawthorne), presented from the other side and with an extra two hundred years’ perspective:

There was once a time when New England roiled and churned with a fury not to be equalled until that fateful age, near a century hence, when it would rise in open revolt. Good King James II, that man of steel emblazoned with the Cross, had turned his eyes upon the colonies. By his decree they were no longer to be divided into petty squabbling states, each one a dictatorship in its own right, but were to be united as one, ready to stand against France, Spain, or the savage tribes. What their children’s children would do by violence, King James sought to do by law.

Yet he reckoned without the restive, angry spirit of the Puritan; as stern and unyielding as his own, and in whom austere piety and the lust for wealth combined to a fire of near madness against any who would affront the one or check the other. This spirit, which had cut down the Maypole of the Merry Mount and hunted witches in the Salem woods, was arrayed against the meagre force of Sir Edmund Andros, the King’s representative, who as a youth had seen that same puritan power murder his lord and tyrannize England and who knew it for what it was. With naught but a small band of loyal confederates, Sir Edmund sought to enforce the law upon these men of flint. All the while, both in England and New England, plans were made and chances watched, and the drums of rebellion rumbled in the hills.

Even as the fire built beneath them, Sir Edmund and his few allies remained at their posts. The grey, hard faces of the Massachusetts men passed them by in the street day after day, casting looks like stones upon the king’s men as they passed by in their warm, rich regalia. The white steepled meeting house trembled at the shadow of the ancient Sacrifice conducted within its walls, while the men who called themselves Godly stood outside and looked on with hate. Women with coarse grey dresses and coarser hearts turned their noses from the bright coats and manners of the ladies of the crown. For a long, hard winter the snows and frost of New England fell upon the town, cold as the hatred of it inhabitants for their new lords.

Rumour, that swift and elusive elf, as nimble in the woods of New England as the fields and towns of our Mother Kingdom danced from house to house and street to street. Parliament had laid its plans. The implacable king had fallen into their traps. Deception and betrayal once more rose from the countryside, cloaked as ever in the blessed word ‘liberty’. So she whispered and twittered all through the winter, and men heeded her and waited, their weapons ready to hand while the icy Atlantic beat upon the rocky shores as if stoking the fires of rebellion to ever greater fury.

Read the rest here and enjoy!