The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards (39 page)

Monmouth dropped to his knees between the tillers. Only he saw the smaller galley crumple around a gaping hole at its waterline. Men streamed off the ship while it rolled to its side, taking in the sea.

“Frank?” Monmouth crawled to Frank’s body and felt for a pulse. It was slow, but it was there. Jumping to his feet, he ran down the stairs. Before he reached him, James flopped onto his face, sputtering.

The deck hatch opened, and Hyacinth peered out.

“Come up!” Monmouth said. “Hurry. We got them, but Frank and James are hurt. Meroe’s gone.”

Beneath them, the galley began to tip. Timbers, cabled to a sinking ship, groaned in panic.

Coradin shifted on the back of his horse and looked around. Five hundred red-shirts—more than a third of them archers—held their positions around the wharf as the galley stroked closer. Only one had reached the sinking green ship before it had vanished beneath its bubbles, and he did not know what they had found. Hopefully, what his mother needed. Living bait.

Most of the soldiers stood in rank along the water, but smaller clusters had been placed in each street and along
the city wall. Two dozen men with dogs and wolves on chains kept their own command, but Coradin watched them and knew what they sought. They would be the first to know when the green man gathered strength or prepared to strike.

And he was here. Somewhere. Waiting with Coradin, to see what the galley had salvaged.

Coradin looked at his brothers, also on horses, two with silver helms and chains like his, two with the black helms and the three-snake horn of the emperor’s cavalry. He looked at the iron-plated wagon between them, hitched to two armored stallions, rippling, stamping warhorses. Ropes anchored the horses to cleats on the pier, and they strained against them. They knew their home and their path. There would be no driver.

The queen thought much of these Hylfing brothers. How could she not?

Breathing slowly, Coradin shut his eyes. He felt something greater than he could ever remember feeling, greater even than the rush of his first battle and the triumph of his first kill. She had made him strong. She had poured the strength of a dozen men inside him. And now she was feeding him more. He felt no pain, not from the burns beneath his helmet or the weed that had rooted in his chest or the weariness of his journeys or the agony of the mountain race the boy had run. When he turned or bent, he could still feel the steel tips of two arrows within his chest and belly. But they felt only curious and out of place. The others had come out easily.

Strength. It was good to be full. To be painless. To be the earth, ready to quake. He needed to feel a sword in his hand, to release some of the pressure within him, to clench a hilt.

As he drew the blade, the wind changed. It lost its salt, no longer crawling in on the back of the sea. And it was colder, the breath of mountains climbing down from the wilder heights of the sky.

The witch-dogs were moving, turning in place, straining wizard senses, tracking a stronger power.

Oars were in on the galley. Cables had been thrown, and sailors hurried to lash it to the end of the pier. A plank slid from the deck, and red-shirts, ready for their task, climbed aboard.

Coradin turned his horse away from the ship and scanned the walls. The wind was growing. Chop sprang up on the harbor’s surface, and serpent banners snapped along the great seawall and above its gaping gate. The huge portcullis crept down toward the water. The harbor was closing.

The prisoners were on the deck, limp and dripping. Seven. He’d been told seven. They were on the pier.

Coradin nudged his horse forward.

Frank watched the silver-headed horseman move toward them. He saw half a thousand red-shirts on the wharf and in the streets and on the walls, and his heart sank.

Dotty sniffed. “I want all my babies to see Kansas again.”

Frank opened his mouth. He wanted to make her promises, to tell her lies, but he couldn’t. Instead, he leaned his face over into her wet, straggling hair.

“Dots,” he whispered. “You’re my life, and I’ve loved it.” He drew in her smell, and she leaned her head against his lips. “Every kiss, every dirty look, every night we slept between clean, starchy sheets, and every night we didn’t. Every nag and needle and nudge.”

He sat up. “Your peaches,” he said. “And your applesauce. How many pies do you think I’ve eaten in my life?” He looked down at her. “Not enough.” He smiled. “If we get out of this, there needs to be more pie. That’s all the complaining I’ve got.”

“Stop it, Frank Willis,” Dotty said. She sniffed and held Penelope tight.

No more pie
, Frank thought.
No more anything
.

The horseman in silver approached, sword in hand. Sailors and soldiers retreated as the horse clopped around the red-shirts and reached the end of the pier, stamping.

Yells rose up from the city. A downburst of wind tumbled soldiers and raised a billowing plume of dust. Wolves were howling.

Coradin’s horse reared while a dust cloud surrounded him from behind. Two of the prisoners had broken free and were running toward him. One was thin and pale, the other built like a young bull. Coradin brought his sword down at the bull, and his blade met and severed a shackle
but found no flesh. From the other side, a knife dug into his back. The smaller man had ducked beneath the horse’s pawing hooves.

The horse screamed and tripped, collapsing to one side. Coradin fell to the pier while the horse crashed into the water. A foot pressed down on his sword hand, and he grabbed the ankle and jerked the young man to his back. As he leapt to his own feet, the other, slender, with a blade twined somehow with green and silver light, slashed at his throat but found only iron collar and chains. Both struggled, but neither were a match for him. Their lives were his to take. With his boot on one throat, his blade went to the other.

Bring them to their cages
.

Coradin clubbed the slender one on the head and ground the throat of the other, while the man kicked and slashed at his leg with a knife.

Red-shirts pulled the two young men up.

Walking easily against the wind, Coradin turned his back on the silent crowd of sailors and followed the prisoners toward the iron wagon, his blade still in his hand. The skirmish had only slightly eased the pressure within him, and while he walked, he could feel more funneling in, pouring through the finger on his skull. He looked at his blood brothers on their eager, prancing horses beside the wagon, and the witch-dogs, pacing the streets with wind-ducked heads. The archers would be useless in the wind. Perhaps that had been the point. Red-shirts even bobbed
in the harbor where they’d been thrown by the first exploding gust.

Where was this green man? His would be a life worth taking.

Mordecai knelt on the rooftop with his eyes closed. The house was halfway up the harbor street, along the quickest path between ship and palace. He could feel his wife and his daughter, the struggling of his son. But his mind stretched elsewhere. He groped in the sea, and with its strength, he pulled down winds from the sky’s roof, where storms are laziness and hurricanes are sleep.

“They have reached the wagon,” Caleb said. “Pray Phedon and his men are ready. The streets all swarm with red.”

“Signal,” Mordecai said quietly. Straining, with sweat on his head beading and drying and beading again, he drew the strength of another gust and piled it down into the street. Opening his eyes, he watched Caleb draw his bow, a bundle of quivers hanging on his back. The flaming tip of an arrow kissed his knuckles, and he let it fly into the storm.

A moment later, a shout rose up from the streets. The doors of houses and merchant stalls and warehouses were thrown open. Men with sword and pike poured into the red-shirts, and Phedon, the emperor’s son, in full armor, was at their head.

“All are in the wagon,” Caleb said. “They will cut the
horses. Witch-dogs lead, red-shirts, pike and bow, surround. The finger-men press close to pace the stallions. The horseless one climbs onto the wagon. He rides a stallion in its harness.”

“To the street,” Mordecai said. “It is time.” Breathing slowly, evenly, he stood. “How much would I give for an army of faeren?”

Caleb didn’t answer. He walked in front of his brother to the stairs. Four flights down, they found their horses and the three men of Hylfing who had ridden with them in Endor. Mounting, Mordecai and Caleb took up their positions in the street, the others beside them. The animals shifted their weight on the cobbles and whickered at the blowing dust, but the men said nothing. They sat, and they waited. And then, staring down the bent harbor road, they heard the feet and the howling and the heavy wheels on stone.

Caleb whispered to an arrow and then fitted it to his string. All but Mordecai held bows.

The first chained wolves came into view, and four of them tumbled whimpering in the dust. The rest were slipped from their chains. The wolves came snarling, one after the other pierced and falling, tumbling, dying, and the horses pawed the street. One reached Caleb. Twisting, his horse put a hoof into its skull. Arrows flew while wizards flung their curses to bend the shafts away. The wizards were clumsy, weak city dwellers, but there were enough of them, and strength pushed from behind. The wizards parted, and a swarm of crossbow bolts flew up the street,
breaking in the green man’s wind, rattling against houses and twisting onto roofs. But not all of them.

Beside Mordecai, one of the horsemen collapsed into a wall, his horse with a bolt in its shoulder and a wolf on its rump. Mordecai poured all that he had gathered from the sea into the street in front of him. Cobbles exploded beneath the wizards, and the bearded men tumbled and flew backward into the red-shirt archers, slashed and beaten by whistling shards of stone. A wind, dragging plaster from the walls of houses and ripping away awnings, roared into the men with bows, shaking the iron wagon and blinding the horses.

From where he rode, with the stallion’s anger beneath him, Coradin watched the green man work. He leaned forward against the wind and felt his body shake. He watched the wizards fall, but he had known they were weak. He watched the archers waste flights of arrows until the first horseman fell. The red-shirts pressed forward too slowly, afraid of four men on horseback barring the way. Afraid of one man who brushed their bolts aside.

You are wasting time
.

Coradin slapped the horse beneath him with his sword. He urged it forward into the archers, butting and trampling through the red rows. His brothers stayed close beside him.

The stallion was mad beneath him, lips curled, neck writhing. An arrow glanced off its skull plate, and another sliced into its shoulder. Gripping his sword, Coradin guided the pair of horses toward the green man, and the
two struggled to a gallop, the wagon bouncing behind them, four horsemen in black beside them.

It was the brother who came to meet them—the archer—drawing his horn bow as he rode, a knife blade in his teeth.

As they neared, Coradin raised his sword. The archer turned from him, and his arrow, lightning from the string, found the other stallion’s eye. The horse staggered and tripped, dead even as it fell to its side.

The wagon began to twist. It would topple. Coradin’s own horse leaned, turned.

With one slash, Coradin cut the dead horse free, and the wagon rumbled on. Two of his brothers had fallen to the street, and another of the horsemen. They had reached the green man, and Coradin raised his sword to throw.

Come, and he will come. Reach me
.

Arrows flew for Coradin’s horse, but its armor held. Its rider’s sword flicked shafts away.

A burst of heat from the green man lifted Coradin from the horse. He hit the wagon and spun, bouncing in the street. Red-shirts swarmed around and over him. The wagon raced on.

The fight left him behind, and he stood slowly among the bodies of whimpering wolves and wizards. Red-shirts, motionless or groaning, lay on the cobbles. More smoke was swirling in the air. Turning, looking down the hill toward the sea, Coradin saw flames rising above the roofline.

The wharf was burning.

Henry
sat in the room where the king had left him. Shelves heavy with books lined the walls. The room was bright, thanks to the yellow glowing chestnut clusters that covered the earthen ceiling. He was deep in the mound, in the Chestnut King’s personal chamber. Behind him, the king’s bed began as a tree, but branches flared out from a trunk base and held up an enormous mattress. Thinner limbs and leaves rose to the ceiling around the edges. Henry wasn’t exactly sure how or where the broad man would get in. But right now, he didn’t care.

A rectangular box sat in front of Henry, grown from a chestnut. He had not been able to see any seam or hinge, but a lid had fallen open at a word from the king. Now Henry sat alone, staring at its contents. Brittle leather was packed tight inside, and in that nest there was a single egg, smooth and round and black as emptiness. Faint white light wavered around its edges like flame. Nudd’s ash had left him here, swallowed silently by the flame.

Henry held out his left forefinger and stuck it in the white light. He felt nothing. And then, gently, he touched the Blackstar.

He had expected cold, but nothing like what he felt. The blood in his finger stopped moving, and he felt the skin on its tip begin to harden.

Jerking his hand back, Henry squeezed his finger. It hadn’t felt evil, not the way that Nimiane’s cold had felt. It hadn’t pulled at any of his life or strength. But it had stopped both.

Henry tucked his cold finger underneath his leg and held out his right hand. He watched his dandelion grow. It had no fear of the white light or of the stone. The star was a prison to evil, and evil lurked within it, but it was not evil itself. Henry pressed his palm against it, and his heat remained. He gripped it and picked the stone up. His dandelion surged and bloomed around it. The white halo of light mixed with the gold, and the green leaf blades flattened against it, twisting over its surface.