The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards (20 page)

The bird hopped back to her stomach, startled. Two other crows landed beside the first, both sleeker and gray-eyed. All three flared wings and bobbed, cawing. More circled ahead, descending.

Anastasia’s heart raced. The faeries had to notice. And they had to notice before she lost an eye or a lip. She managed to grunt, and then inhaling over her limp tongue, she snorted. But no one set her down, and the branches still slid by quickly.

Leaves parted around her, and she was in shadow. Deep, cool shade. The sun was gone, and an enormous, dense canopy cut off the sky. The sleek crows flapped up, cawing frantically, fighting to retreat through green. The old, brown-eyed bird hopped forward, gave her a last, long, one-eyed stare, bobbed its head, gargling, and followed the others.

Invisible hands lowered Anastasia to the cool earth. Una, rigid, four feet off the ground, rocked down beside her.

Jacques’s face appeared above her upside down. Sweat
dripped down his bald head, through his bushy eyebrow, and onto the purple eye patch. He smiled.

“Up, poppy,” he said. “Should have toted you from the first.”

Anastasia’s body went suddenly limp. She coughed and put her hands to her face, opening and shutting her jaw slowly. Then she sat up.

They were in a hollow. Moss and bare dark earth spread up the sides of the bowl. Limbs as thick as any tree she had ever seen loomed out over the cool circle, dipping the broad fingers of chestnut leaves down nearly to the ground at the outermost.

In the center, three enormous trunks rose up separately and then joined together to form a single tree as big around as an old grain silo.

Una sat up beside Anastasia and looked at the strange canopy. Richard, still stiff, snored quietly.

“Where’s Fat Frank?” Una asked.

Jacques, the only visible faerie, turned around. “He is being taken. We follow soon.”

Anastasia looked up into the tree. The branches bulged with green spiked clusters. “Are the chestnuts square?”

Jacques laughed. “The konkers will hold triplets of any shape the king desires. This is one of the ancient three-maced trees, a gateway to his kingdom.”

“Konkers,” Anastasia said quietly. She looked down at the faerie. “Are we going into a faerie mound? Henry says the faeren live in mounds.”

“Stand,” Jacques said. “And follow.”

Both girls scrambled to their feet. Richard’s stiff body rose off the ground. The broad faerie moved between the girls and gripped their arms above the elbow. Together, they walked toward the triple trunk and stepped easily into its center.

Jacques turned them to the left, and they walked back out and veered right around the next trunk and stepped back in. Back and forth, they wove in and out of the great tree, twisting and looping and turning while Jacques whispered to himself, concentrating, like he was reciting the pattern.

Anastasia’s eyes widened as they moved in and out of darkness, circling in the domed green world. Each time they stepped out of the tree, something had changed. The ground was more level, or even sloping down. The moss was taller, yellower. The tree’s canopy was higher, the tree younger, the trunk slighter. Green konkers, ripe and cracked open, lay strewn on the ground. The tree was in bloom, perched high on a hill, and what was that beneath her? A highway? With cars? It was. She knew it was, and she could just hear a horn honking far beneath her as they turned again into the trunk and stepped out beneath bare branches and falling snow.

Una laughed. The faerie was twisting them in and out of a dozen different trees, winding them around the surface of the world, around the worlds.

And then they stopped, centered beneath the trunk, with a soft bed of loam and leaves and bark beneath their feet.

“Shut your eyes,” Jacques said, and squeezing the girls’
arms tight, he pulled them backward into a cool, light, drizzling rain.

“Turn,” he said.

Anastasia did, and her mouth fell open. They stood on an open plain, rolling slightly, lush with short turf, deeper and brighter in its green than Kansas in the spring, spotted in places with ancient trees. Behind them was a dense wood. And in front of them, dominating the plain, rose a round, steep hill, nearly a mountain. Its sides, emerald green, stepped up in seven leaning and off-balance terraces to the peak. And the peak was crowned with a tall square tower. Knobbed spikes reached into the sky off each of its corners. Behind the green, behind the hill and the trees and the tower, the sky swirled with the whites and grays and charcoals of the rain-bearing clouds.

Fat Frank stood staring at it with his thumbs in his belt. He glanced at Anastasia and looked quickly away. His bulbous cheeks had been wet. “Never thought I’d see it. Nor that it existed to be seen.”

“What?” Jacques said. “Tears from the queene’s own Franklin Fat?”

Frank sniffed. “Rain in my eye.”

The bald faerie pulled his mustache and spread his arms.

“What is it?” Anastasia asked.

“That,” Jacques said, “is Glaston’s Barrow, the first mound of the faeren fathers, Hall of the Chestnut King.” He winked. “No man has entered since Clovis, and his bones are in it still.”

*  *  *

Coradin walked down a long, broad hall. He had smashed in the rotten door of a barrack on the street level and was now two floors belowground.

Turn
.

He turned and faced a wide opening, closed off by an iron grate. The five men around him stepped forward. Only two still had torches. The wind thrown up by the horseman had smothered the rest. The wind had also gathered the dust and ash from the circle and forced Coradin and his brothers to their bellies in the street. When the dust had cleared, the horsemen were gone. But they hadn’t gone far. Not if the boy was still with them.

The three without torches gripped the grate and forced it up, grinding ancient gears as it rose.

My fathers kept armies of your kind. You will find what you need
.

Henry slipped off the broad horse’s back and followed his father and Caleb up a short but wide flight of steps. They were at the rear of a building that Henry would have called a palace in any other city, but here it seemed modest—four stories of black stone, arched windows and porticoes, supported by thin, bonelike pillars and buttresses and a balustrade encircling what looked to be a flat roof. The horses stamped and snorted in the ash, and the men stayed with them. The dog flopped down panting on the steps.

Caleb whistled as he reached the door, and Henry looked up. The owls, five of them, rose higher and drifted
away over the city. Mordecai stopped and waited for him. Henry hadn’t been able to tell him much in all the blowing wind and galloping that had gone on since they’d met in the circle. He wasn’t exactly sure where to start, and he was still carrying the little pyramid tucked under his arm.

Caleb threw open the doors and stepped to the side. His bow was over one shoulder, and two short swords were tucked into his belt. Mordecai carried no weapons. Taking Henry by the shoulder, he led him through into near darkness. Then he pulled a limp sack out of his cloak.

Henry smiled. “Faerie light?”

Mordecai nodded and slapped the sack three times against his thigh. Then he held it to his lips and—Henry strained to hear his words—hummed quietly. A snap. His father jerked the mouth open and cracked the sack like a whip. Light exploded through the house, ricocheting off walls and burrowing into cracks. There were no shadows. The light was everywhere.

Mordecai smiled and led Henry through a small room and out into the main entryway. The floor glistened white wherever feet kicked away dust. Stairs twisted up to mezzanines, three in all. It was open to the roof.

“With a little encouragement,” Mordecai said, “this light may last us an hour.” Henry followed him onto the stairs. His father’s eyes had hardened, and his rough jaw moved slowly. “Tell me quickly what brings my son to Endor. I cannot imagine it to be good news.”

“It’s not,” Henry said. He stopped. Mordecai turned and faced him. Henry stared into his father’s eyes and saw
that they were black. They were focused on his face, on the threads on his jaw. Henry put his hand up to cover it and stopped. If he needed anyone to see it, it was his father.

Mordecai sighed. “It grows quickly.” He put his arm around his son’s shoulders. Caleb stopped on the stairs behind them. “Come,” Mordecai said. “Your uncle and I hunt for a cure. Tell us your tale while we search. There is not much time.”

Henry was tired of stairs, but he hurried up them, and was led down a hall, through a doorway, and into a library piled with books and scrolls and manuscripts. Stacks filled an enormous stone fireplace and blocked the tall windows. Much was beneath dust, but much had also been recently shifted. A table, bowing beneath the weight of pages, had only one small clear end.

Mordecai lifted a stack of loose manuscripts onto the table. Caleb leaned his bow against a tattered stack of papers.

“What is this place?” Henry asked.

“When Endor was green,” Mordecai said, “and Nim-roth was no more than a young pauper son in his father’s house with a questionable taste for wizardry, this was his home.” He looked up. “And this was his room. But we wait on your story. Why do we find my son running from fingerlings? From the hills, we watched lights on the bell tower and rode in when we heard its ringing.”

Both Caleb and Mordecai stopped and faced Henry, leaning against the table.

Henry took a deep breath. Looking at his father, at his
uncle, he felt a knot growing in his throat. He would not cry. He would not even let his voice waver. “The morning after you left, soldiers came. There were two more galleys in the harbor. They were looking for you. You weren’t there, so they took Uncle Frank and James and Monmouth and my mother.”

Caleb straightened, and his face became stone. Henry couldn’t look at his father’s face. He couldn’t look in his eyes. Staring at his boots instead, he continued. “Fat Frank and I tried to find them, but fingerlings were in the city, too, and they came after me. When I got back to the house, more soldiers had come, and they were dragging everyone out and putting them in a wagon. A whole crowd was trying to stop them, but they couldn’t. When Henrietta fought too much, they hit her on the head and threw her back in the house. Then they lit it on fire. Grandmother was inside, too.”

Henry looked up. His father’s eyes were no longer black. They were ice. He was leaning forward now, and his jaw worked silently.

“I got inside,” Henry said, “even though a fingerling tried to stop me, and I got Grandmother and Henrietta up to the roof and then through a cupboard up there that I had from Kansas. You didn’t know about that, I’m sorry.”

“We knew,” Mordecai said.

“What?” Henry looked from his father to his uncle and back again. “For how long?”

“Since your first bloody nose,” Mordecai said. “Go on.”

“Well,” said Henry. “There’s not much else. I mean, there is. Lots. But not important. I left Grandmother in Kansas with Mrs. Johnson, and Zeke and Henrietta and I came through the Endor cupboard to find you.”

“Zeke and Henrietta?” Caleb asked. “Where are they?”

Henry held up the little pyramid cupboard. “We came into this horrible crypt.” He looked at his father. “And I’m sorry, but I think I let Nimroth and Nia and everyone else out. And then the fingerlings had us trapped on top of the bell tower. That’s when I started ringing it. We all went through this little pyramid cupboard into Frank and Dotty’s old house, and then I reached back through and tipped us off the tower. When it landed in the street, I left Zeke and Henrietta there, and you found me in the big circle.”

Mordecai stared at his son. Caleb smiled and looked at his brother.

“Lucky, too,” Henry said. “I didn’t have much of a plan.”

Mordecai pointed at the cupboard. “Zeke and Henrietta are in there?”

“They’re through there, yeah.”

“Well.” Mordecai crossed his arms. “You have walked the spiders’ webs.”

Henry grinned. His father sounded like Uncle Frank.

“Who told you that you faced fingerlings?” Caleb asked. He looked at his brother. “I cannot think fingerlings likely. Nimiane used other, newer tools—wizards and witch-dogs.” He looked back to Henry. “Did Fat Frank name them for you?”

For a moment, Henry rolled through his memory. Who had told him the name? “I think the witch did,” he said. “In one of my dreams.”

“You spoke with the witch?” Caleb asked. Mordecai’s eyes were back on his son’s jaw.

Henry nodded. “And I’ve seen the fingers. I cut two off. But more fingerlings just keep coming.” He put his hand to his cold scar. “They can find me anywhere.”

Henry watched shock spread across his father’s face.

For a moment, Caleb was motionless. “We must move,” he said. “Now.”

“Fool,” said Mordecai. “I’ve been a fool. Nimiane positions the board while we root through a library. Of course fingerlings could find you.” He turned to the manuscripts piled on the table. “Caleb,” he said quietly. “We have been wasting our days.”

“Maybe not,” Caleb said. “But we did waste our time covering our tracks. They’ll come straight to us.”

Mordecai filled his lungs slowly. He looked deep into Henry’s eyes and lifted his right hand to his son’s jaw. Henry saw the swirling brand of grapevines on his father’s palm, and then he felt it in his flesh—a slow, twisting strength, as rich as it was deep. He saw pain in his father’s eyes when he touched the scar. The eyes moved away, around the room, but his hand stayed where it was, warming cold death.

“This room was my hope,” Mordecai said. “We searched for a secret without knowing what it might be—only knowing what we needed it to be. But there is no time
for sifting through this graveyard now, even without the fingerlings. Nimiane has struck too soon and too hard. The board is set, and now we play her game.”

“What were you looking for?” Henry asked.

Mordecai smiled and put his other hand on Henry’s cheek. “We search for the death of death—for the tapestry of power behind Nimroth that first fused his soul to his body and gave him eternal leeching life. We search for your life, for all our lives.”