The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards (11 page)

He thought of his father. He thought of the way he smelled of leather and forests and the cliffs by the sea. He thought of his laugh and the deep blackness in his eyes. He thought of the awkward wonderful moment when his unknown father had first kissed him on the head, and the scratching of his jaw.

He opened his eyes, and he knew that he was not in his father’s dream. He was in a different kind. His father was in it.

Henry stood on the side of a street. He had no body. He was part of a wall. Five men and five horses lay motionless, with limbs splayed in the dust. Ash drifted in the air above
them. From a gaping doorway stepped eight men in black, with their hair in oiled knots. Between them they carried a glossy gray stone box, open and empty, the color of death, the length of a man. Black symbols had been inlaid along its sides, symbols that made Henry feel a sickness creeping over him, a cold sucking pulling at his strength. Into the end a black skull had been set, and black vines twisted out of its mouth and eyes and nose—the skull of a green man.

The box was lowered into the street, and dust swirled slowly away from it. The eight fingerlings picked up a man, and as they lowered him into the box, Henry saw his face.

Henry had no mouth to yell, no body to use in a fight. And then he did. He stepped out of the wall, ready to kill, ready to be killed.

The fingerlings looked at him, and the world went black.

Pauper son
, a soft voice said.
You would enter my dreams? You would brush your sour mortal soul against my immortal essence?

Henry saw nothing. He sensed nothing but the voice. And then he was in pain.

I had thought to save you for last
, the voice said.
To wait until your father was ash in my hands, but you die now, pauper son, dream-walker, pup to mongrels. You die now
.

Henry struggled, but he had no arms to flail. A flash of gold spun in front of him, a living word, a defiant war cry, a weed. It twisted with green.

I can see
, Henry thought. And then he heard, not the witch’s voice, not her anger or her deathly bitterness, he
heard the dandelion’s burning song—a song of life, of laughter and death and life again, of wind and rain and sun, of ash and birth, of triumph and tragedy and victory in every defeat. He watched and he heard and he ached, not with a physical pain but with desire, with a yearning for everything the dandelion was, for everything it promised. Henry and the witch together watched the fire that guarded his soul, the place where a weed had taken root. Thick gray threads, arms, serpentine beams wrapped around the dandelion fire; they wrapped and contracted and smothered the burning weed song.

While Henry watched, the dandelion died. The green went gray and joined the strands. The golden fire slowed and stopped and drifted away in ash.

Grief, overwhelming loss, surged ice-cold over Henry as he watched the ash settle onto the witch’s gray rot. But then, while he watched, each spot greened where it landed. One hundred plants spun themselves leaves and burst into fiery bloom.

Henry laughed, and the great, grinding death fought the noise and the heat and the life. A flower had become a choir, a flame had become a blaze. As more were killed, more bloomed, and suddenly, the gray serpents were gone. Henry, bodiless Henry, watched a single, slowly twisting flower say its name, and that name was a poem, and that poem was the history of the world—of all the worlds.

The dream was his again.

“Nimiane,” Henry said. Could the witch hear his mind’s
words? Had she gone? The words of his christening, spoken by his grandmother, flooded back to him. “I shall be your curse.”

A queen, a witch, rose from her bed between the trees and gathered up a cat in her arms. She was feeling something new. Was this fear? No. This was … urgency. The boy could not be allowed to grow.

She walked into an oval clearing and passed through it. She walked beside a black pool and its fountain. It was time to begin bigger things. The fingerlings would bring her Mordecai, or he would bring himself, pursuing the bait of his family. The witch smiled. She looked forward to meeting his wife.

There was no more reason to hide since the galleys had fallen on Hylfing. She had shown herself, and she was ready. She had made her fingerlings, and armies and fleets waited on her. She stood behind the throne of the empire.

Old enemies would die. A new world would bow.

“I just think there has to be a better way,” Henrietta said. Three backpacks sat on the kitchen table.

Only one looked even slightly new.

Zeke handed her a red plastic flashlight, now with fresh batteries. “Maybe,” he said. “But it’s not like Henry would want to go if he could think of anything else.”

Mrs. Johnson was making a loaf of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. “How bad is this place?” she asked.

“Bad,” said Henrietta. “Super creep.”

Zeke turned around and faced his mom. “But Henry’s dad and Caleb are there. And they don’t know what happened.”

Tilly Johnson bit her lip. She didn’t like seeing knives and a hatchet going into backpacks, especially not when she wasn’t sure how they’d be used. “You all at least need to get some sleep first,” she said.

Henrietta pulled her wet hair back tight and rubber-banded it into a ponytail. “Maybe,” she said. “See if you can talk Henry into it.”

“Henry,” Grandmother said. She kicked the afghan to the floor, but she was still asleep. “Henry? She has him. Henry?”

Tilly hurried to the chair, grabbed Grandmother’s hand, and felt her forehead.

Henrietta ran to the bathroom.

“Henry?” She banged on the door. “Henry!” She tried the knob, but it was locked.

Zeke swiped a straightened paper clip off the top of the door jam and stuck it in the small hole centered in the knob. With a pop, the door was unlocked, and Henrietta threw it open.

The bathroom was cool, despite the shower. The mirror over the sink was perfectly clear, no steam.

“Henry?” Henrietta asked, and she rattled the shower curtain. “Henry!”

She pulled the curtain back.

Henry was curled up with his knees to his chest. His
eyes were shut, and his mouth was frozen open. His skin was the color of paper. A thick black liquid, unaffected by the water, had oozed out of the center of the burn on his jaw.

Henrietta dropped to her knees and grabbed her cousin’s arm. The water was frigid. Henry’s right arm flopped limply over the side of the tub, and his hand opened. A fat wad of wet dandelion down fell out onto the floor. The same fuzz had mounded up around the drain.

“C’mon, Henry,” she said. She slapped his hand; she slapped his cheek. She stuck two fingers on his neck, but she wasn’t patient enough to feel around for a pulse. “Wake up!” she yelled. “Wake up!” She reached out and tried to wipe the black goop off Henry’s jaw.

He jerked and knocked her hand away.

Blinking in the cold water, he looked from Henrietta to Zeke. Mrs. Johnson stepped into the bathroom behind them.

Henry snatched at the curtain and threw it closed. “What are you doing? What?”

Shivering, he managed to slide forward and turn off the water. Then he slipped to his feet, wincing. His ankles were tender.

“Um,” Henrietta said. “Well, you looked dead.”

Henry’s irritation warmed him slightly. His embarrassment warmed him more. “How’d you know how I looked?” he asked, shivering. “Until you looked? Would someone hand me a towel, or I might really die.”

Henrietta sniffed and shoved one in. “Grandmother
started yelling for you in her sleep, Henry. She sounded scared. I knocked, I yelled, I even shook the shower curtain first.”

Henry didn’t say anything. The bathroom door shut, and he was left in cold silence. The towel was rough and felt even rougher against his goose bumps. He cinched it tight around his waist and threw back the dripping plastic curtain.

Facing himself in a wide mirror, Henry stepped out of the tub and moved closer.

He couldn’t take his eyes off his own face. He looked tired and thinner. Dark circles framed his eyes, and his cheeks had sunk. How could this much change in two days? Slick his hair back and notch his ear …

“I look like Coradin,” Henry whispered, and he turned his head to check his jaw.

The gray scar had grown. At the very first, it had been a pock the size of his pinkie tip, a burn from a drop of the witch’s blood, and much smaller pocks around it where the blood had spattered. Now there was just one scar, more than an inch across, and blood had leaked out of the center.

Henry licked his lips and swallowed back the beginnings of panic. He’d find his father, and they’d find the rest of the family, and his father would find the witch, and someone would find a way to kill her. The witch had to die. Somehow. What he had seen in the witch’s dream wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Not yet. It was what she wanted to be real. Had she sent the fingerlings into Endor? Henry
picked at the blood spot on his jaw. It was awfully black. He got a fingernail underneath it and tried to break it off. It was rubbery and wouldn’t break. He pinched it between his fingers and pulled.

Gasping, trying to catch his breath, Henry watched the thing lengthen, stretching, pulling more out from his jaw, sloppy and wet after the dry tip, the texture of an earthworm.

Three inches of it fell away from his face and dangled between his fingers, dead and black. He dropped it in the toilet, flushed, and turned his back quickly, again facing the mirror. A single drop of blood perched in the center of his scar. Red blood. Normal red blood. He controlled his breathing, slowly, steadily.

He didn’t really want to know, but he had to check. Leaning toward the mirror, Henry let himself see, and looking at his burn, he saw it twice.

The gray, slow-spinning strands were there, ghostly, twisting away from his face. But they were no longer spiderwebs. They were the thickness of yarn.

Henry shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and turned away from the mirror.

He dressed quickly in the clothes Zeke was loaning him—an old, worn pair of jeans, striped tube socks, a Boy Scout T-shirt, and a plain black hoodie. Then he picked up the necklace his father had given him, slipped it over his head, and tucked it under his shirts. The metal was cool against his already-chilled skin. He stepped out of the bathroom and moved down the narrow hall.

In the living room, Mrs. Johnson took Henry by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes. Henry stared back into hers. She smelled like peanut butter.

“Henry York Maccabee,” she said. “You all need a rest before you go and do something this crazy. Now I’m not trying to put my foot down and keep you from going. But look at you, look at the day you been through. Rest your bones for a bit.” She let him go, straightened up, and crossed her arms.

Henry shook his head. “I slept a bit just now. And I slept back in the old house.”

“You were unconscious,” Henrietta said. “Not sleeping. You’d been crushed in the cupboard. You look horrible.”

“So do you,” Henry said. Henrietta rolled her eyes.

“We don’t have enough batteries for the flashlights,” Zeke said. “The bait shop opens in a couple hours. Rest now, then we’ll pick up stuff and go.”

Henry looked around the room. Exhaustion rolled over him. His bones didn’t want to hold him anymore.

He nodded and walked to the other mint recliner. It felt bigger than his bed. Without opening her eyes, his grandmother reached over and felt his face.

“No dreams,” he said quietly. “No dreams.”

Frank Fat-Once-a-Faerie stood in the street and wiped a sooty arm across his forehead. The sun was down, but the clouds had cleared, and a sliver moon was climbing. Richard was breathing heavily beside him with his hands
on his hips. He was wearing pants now and oversize boots—a gift from one of the neighbors.

Una and Anastasia were picking carefully through the rubble, along with a dozen or more of the townspeople carrying lanterns. Three of the house’s exterior walls still stood.

Fat Frank had heard the story, a muddled version first from Anastasia, clarity from Una, and then again from several who had been in the crowd.

“Would you like to hear how it happened?” Richard asked.

Frank snorted. “I have heard, and no, I don’t like.” He rolled the kitchen knife over in his hands. The knife that had been thrown at the christening, the knife that had gotten him unfaeried. He tucked it into his cloak. He’d found the finger, too, but after matching it to the bald spot on the big corpse, he’d thrown it to a crow. Now the crow was probably dead.

There had been no bodies in the rubble. No Grandmother, no Henry, no Henrietta. No second large man in black.

Anastasia and Una picked their way back toward Fat Frank. Una moved carefully, with her hair pulled back and her face down, scanning each shadow and gap. Anastasia scrambled, tripping. She held something up.

“Raggant feather,” she said. “But no raggant.”

Una looked up. “Henry’s alive,” she said, and she smiled broadly. “And if
he
is …”

“How’s that?” Frank asked. “The stars up and tell you?”

“Henry is capable of a great deal,” Richard said.

Fat Frank spun and looked up into Richard’s narrow face. “So I know, and so I’ve seen. But he’s no fire salamander, nor a phoenix, not at my last inspection.”

“It’s my mother’s trees,” Una said. “In the courtyard. They’re all alive, even Henry’s sapling.”

“It has some dead leaves,” Anastasia said. “They’re ashy, but the tree’s alive.”

Fat Frank puffed out his cheeks.

“When my older brothers died, that’s how my mother knew. Their trees died in her courtyard.” She reached out, poked Frank’s cheek, and grinned. “So smile, Fat Faerie. Henry’s alive.”

Anastasia tucked the raggant feather in her hair and laughed.

Frank scowled and rubbed his nose. “I’ll come back in the day’s light.”

“Do you want them to be dead?” Anastasia asked. “They aren’t, so stop grouching.”

“Dark truth shines brighter than lying hope,” the faerie said. “And that’s the dark truth.”

“Franklin, formerly Faerie?”

The four of them turned. Another faerie, taller and fatter than Frank, stood in the center of the street. He was bald and had a purple patch over his left eye and a thick black mustache, waxed at the ends. He nodded at the burned-out house and moved closer.