The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards (41 page)

“I don’t want to be your king any more than you want me,” he said. “But I made a promise.” He swallowed. “I just want to fight beside you. And I want to kill the witch.”

“Up, Henry!” Thorn shouted, and this time, voices joined in. Fat Frank began to stomp, and every foot found the time. Henry smiled. He had one hundred and sixty-four
faeries, armed and marching. If he had to die, it was a good sight to end on. He looked at his sister and his cousin and Richard, the faeren warrior. He wished there was somewhere safe for them, somewhere better than a battle. But he’d left fingerlings in Hylfing, and there was nowhere else for them to go. If he had his cupboard, he could send them to Kansas. If he lived and one of them didn’t …

Fat Frank began to sing, chanting as he stomped, and while Henry had never heard the song, the faeren knew it well. They all joined in—even Jacques—and dirt rained down from the ceiling.

“Henry!” Una yelled beside him, as the walls and ceiling shook. He turned and looked into his sister’s worried face. “Happy birthday.”

He tried to smile, but couldn’t.

She shook her head. “That was no bargain.”

“I know,” he said, and he shouldered open the door.

Wood splintered and snapped, glass shattered, and Henry staggered into a bright yellow room before tripping on a toppled hutch and falling onto soft carpet.

Rolling onto his side, the voices and the stomping grew louder, and the faerie column marched in after him.

Henry reached his knees and looked back at the wall. The door had torn through some kind of plaster and knocked over a hutch full of crystal. Henry sneezed. By the smell of it, there had been perfumes.

“Hello? Who are you? What’s going on?”

Henry turned and saw, sitting primly behind a delicate desk, a young faeren girl laced up in one of the most awkward dresses he had ever seen. Her face was pretty but powdered to a shade of death, and a gold lace crown looked bolted to a coil of red braids on the top of her head. An old skeletal faerie, with big glasses on his nose and wearing a long black coat, bent over her desk, pointing at papers. He must have been more than deaf—neither Henry nor the crash nor the chanting, stomping faeries seemed to draw his attention.

“Here, Majesty,” he said, tapping the desk. “Your seal here as well.”

“Excuse us!” Henry shouted. “Where’s the door to Dumarre? We’ll just get out of your way.”

The Faerie Queene stood up and walked out from behind her desk. The old faerie didn’t notice. He turned over another parchment and began tapping his bone finger.

“Who are you?” the queene asked again. Henry stood slowly. Fat Frank leapt in front of him and dropped to one knee, tugging at his helmet, but it wouldn’t come off his head.

“Majesty,” Frank said, “I am humbly, and often faithfully, your servant. I have had some difficulties with a district ruling …”

“Rise,” the queene said, and tapped Frank’s helmet. “With whom do I speak?”

Frank stood but kept his chin down. “You speak to the future Chestnut King on his way to war.”

“King?” the queene asked. Her eyes grew. “War?” She looked at Una and Anastasia and then back to the armed faeries.

“Yes,” Henry said. “I don’t really have time to explain, but we need a door to Dumarre. I heard there was one in your palace.”

“There are several,” said the queene. “Long out of use but not so long as the door you have just entered. What part of the city?”

Henry tried to think. What parts were there? But the thumping and shouting were too much. “Hey!” he yelled back at the faeries. “Hold off for a minute.” The columns quieted, and more than a few of the spiny-headed soldiers looked disappointed, especially those standing on the back of the broken hutch. “The harbor.” He’d leave some of the faeries there to stop the galley. If they’d beaten it.

“Which harbor?”

“The one, on …” Henry scratched his jaw.

“The western sea, Majesty,” said Fat Frank.

She looked at him and smiled. “My name is Alma.”

“And mine is Franklin, Majesty.”

“Okay,” Henry said. “We need whatever doorway is closest to the western harbor.”

Small, armed faeries in puffy, short pants thundered up a flight of stairs and into the queene’s room. They stopped, panting, staring at the columns of faeren sticking out of the wall.

The queene turned to her guard. “Escort them to the second courtyard, the southeastern door.”

Confused but obedient, the guards turned.

“Here, Majesty,” the old faerie clerk said. “Set your seal here.”

“Wait.” Alma, the queene, smiled at Una and Anastasia. “Do they go to war as well? Will you return this way? I am not often allowed the pleasure feminine guests can provide.”

“They can’t stay,” Henry said. “They’re human. They’ll get bonded, won’t they? Stuck? Can’t ever go home?”

The queene laughed. “Maybe in the Old World but not here. This palace is built with common mound magic, hidden in the human world, attached to the old. No one wants to snatch them up.”

Henry looked at his sister.

“Please?” Anastasia asked. “Henrietta’s met a queen before.”

There was no joy in Una’s eyes when she nodded at her
brother. Even less when he nodded back and began to turn away. She knew what he faced, and she knew the cost of losing. Now she knew the cost of winning.

“Brother,” she said, and he stopped. Beo turned in a circle around him. “You are strong, Henry. Like our father.” She raised her hand, and he raised his.

“Good-bye, Franklin,” the queene said, and Fat Frank nearly burst off his breastplate, folding himself in half, bowing as he backed down the stairs.

The line of faeren moved through the room, smiling, waving, and hopping, while the queene and the two girls watched.

Una sank to the floor. Anastasia looked down at her and then dropped beside her. She knew the risks, too. Or she thought she did.

“Henry will win,” she said. “He’ll be back. Zeke beat the witch once with a baseball bat. I saw him do it.”

Una smiled at her cousin.

“You know,” Anastasia said, “we should have just killed the witch then. I had a knife. I could have done it. Penny wouldn’t let me.”

“It wouldn’t have worked,” Una said. “The witch isn’t like us.”

“Maybe,” said Anastasia. “Maybe not. I shouldn’t have listened to Pen. I should have tried.”

“If you’d gotten her blood on you, you’d be dead.”

Anastasia sniffed. “Henry got her blood on him, and he’s not dead.”

“Henry’s strong,” said Una.

“Up,” said the queene, smiling above them. “I can’t have ladies as guests talking about blood and death on the floor of my chambers. What shall I show you?”

In the second courtyard, three fountains burbled. The queene’s palace had been a strange cross between the wildness of the mound Henry had explored and escaped with Fat Frank’s help—bending passages, swirling confusions of stairways, magically tangled—and something orderly and marbleized, more like a museum than anything else. At least it seemed like it was supposed to be orderly, but that wasn’t really something that worked for faeren. Even the straight hallways had a little rise and fall or bend or narrowing. And the second courtyard was actually on a slope. Two different doors could have passed as the southeastern, but only one of them had smoke trailing in at its sides.

Henry nodded at the puffy-panted guards, and the door was opened. Coughing, tugging his sweatshirt up over his mouth, he stepped out of the doorway and onto a narrow cobbled street. Below him, the harbor was surrounded by flames thrashing in the wind. Every building around the wharf was burning. A dozen barges, loaded down with goods and people, poled toward the sea gate. Others, too slow, sank in flames. The water was full of swimmers. Bodies of red-shirted soldiers were scattered in the streets. From all over the city, alarm bells rang.

Jacques and Frank stepped beside Henry while the column filed into the street.

The galley, even if they had beaten it, wouldn’t be coming here. But the galley had already come. The fight had started, and he knew his father’s wind.

“The war begins without us,” Jacques said.

“No matter,” said Frank. “We bring the finish.”

Henry turned up the street, and he began to run.

Frank
banged his aching head against the side of the wagon as it bounced through the streets. Wind whistled in the gaps, shrill enough to be heard above the clatter and the shouting and the howling. Monmouth was unconscious but breathing. Hyacinth held her son’s head on her lap while he dragged in painful breaths, and Isa ran her hands through his hair. Frank’s arms were around his wife and daughter. He’d tried to fight when James and Monmouth had attacked the fingerling, but he hadn’t done much good. He’d blackened a soldier’s eye and received a cracked rib for his trouble. He bounced again and slammed his back into the wall, and then the wagon was tipping, leaning to the side. With a crash, their box-cage hopped in the air, then shook and rocked as it landed. They’d been righted, and the wagon raced on, even as an invisible body tumbled across the roof.

When the wagon stopped, the shouting lessened and then finally faded completely. Someone thumped on the outside, and chains rattled loose. The small hatch opened in the back, and two helmeted men in black, fingerlings, grabbed Monmouth’s ankles and pulled him out. When he
was gone, they reached for James and pulled him away from Hyacinth and Isa.

A silver helmet with black eyeholes leaned into the wagon. “Out,” it said. “Quickly.” He reached for Penelope’s leg, but Frank kicked his arm away and slid himself toward the hatch. The fingerling grabbed his feet and jerked him out of the wagon. He bounced on cobbles, and for a moment, with his vision blurring, he lay still, staring at the smoky sky. They were in a walled courtyard. On one side, the mounded roofs of a palace grew into broad-shouldered towers. Two red-shirts gripped his arms and lifted him to his feet. The girls and their mothers were lifted from the wagon and handed to soldiers. Penelope kicked a fingerling and landed her other foot in the stomach of a soldier before her arms were pinned behind her back.

As they were dragged through the courtyard, Frank looked back over his shoulder at his wife and his daughter, at the wagon and the arched gate beyond it. An iron portcullis had been dropped, and men in red lined the street. Huge wooden doors were closing from the outside.

The soldiers dragged them up stairs, down corridors, and up again.

Black doors were thrown open, and a crowd of terrified, pale-faced courtiers scrambled to clear a path.

Frank’s eyes hardened, and he forced his mind to calm. Nimiane sat on the emperor’s throne in a blaze of scarlet. A drooling old man sat in front of her. Frank straightened and managed to get his feet beneath him, trying to walk tall between the soldiers.

“Francis,” the witch said, and her laughter was sweet. “And Dorothy. Again we meet.” Her eyes lifted. “Lady Hyacinth,” she said. “Lovely Hyacinth. Has your bloom faded?”

The crowd of courtiers was shifting, moving back toward the doors. With a crack that rattled the windows and stirred ash on the floor, the doors slammed.

“Nobles and ladies,” Nimiane said. She leaned back and shut her eyes. “You shall not leave. I prepare an entertainment for you. Before your eyes, an ancient line shall be expunged. A tree felled, the root pulled, the ground plowed and salted. Are you not accustomed to seeing beasts encaged?” She waved her hand, and the soldiers dragged Frank toward the wall and a row of iron cages.

His daughter Henrietta, with a filthy face and lopsided curls, was standing at the door of the closest one. A battered Zeke sat with his back against the wall behind her.

“Henrietta!” Dotty tried to pull forward, but the soldiers held her back. “Henrietta!”

“Queen,” one of the courtiers yelled. “The city burns!”

“Does it?” Nimiane asked. Noise died. A cage closed, and Frank was wrapped in a spell of silence. Monmouth breathed softly beside him.

Leaning against the bars, he stared at the witch-queen and the motion of her laughter—noiseless to him. She did not turn her head, but his eyes were drawn down into the eyes of a cat. He pulled back and watched Dots and Penelope hold hands with his missing daughter between metal bars.

She was alive. Even in all this darkness, that spark brought him hope. Henrietta looked up, and he smiled at her, the little girl he’d raised in the Kansas wheat.

Penelope cried, but Henrietta smiled back at her father. She’d gone into the fire and come out alive. The blaze was bigger this time, and they all were in it.

“Dots,” Frank whispered to himself. “My beauty. Now, this is the worst trouble we’ve seen. Death’s brink might just come and go.”

Frank Willis sat down to watch his daughters and his wife. He felt heavy, ripe. A field of memories was ready for harvest.

The canals were crowded with barges making for the eastern harbor and the sea. The streets alongside them once again bustled with citizens, families, and merchants, come up from their cellars and down from their attics to make one last attempt to flee the city.

Coradin could see them from where he stood in the hilltop street outside the palace. They looked like ants dragging eggs from a ruined nest. Smoke filled his lungs, and faintly, muffled by the storm inside him, he could feel his eyes burning. He wanted to help them, to bring some order to their exodus or command the eastern sea gate raised. Why must the city burn? Why flames?

It shall be remade. The fire cleanses
.

His two finger-brothers had moved ahead, pacing the wall around the palace. The Hylfing riders had been pulled down, struggling to reach the passing wagon. Five
horses and three bodies. The green and the archer had escaped.