The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards (44 page)

The city of Dumarre quaked. Walls shifted and cracked. Great bells fell from their towers, splitting in the streets with their final peals. The eastern sea rose above the wharf and climbed out of the canals. The western sea threw up great waves, and the seawall fell beneath them. Foam washed the streets.

The walls of the palace and the streets and the courtyards around it were mortared with dandelions, and the tower roofs bloomed with gold.

Inside the throne room, Henrietta blinked and shook her head. She was on top of Zeke, and they were piled against a wall. She sneezed. The air was sweet. And heavy.

Sliding off Zeke, she sat up. The bars of their cage were bent and split. She couldn’t see anything else—the room was too bright. It was made of yellow fire.

“Wake up, Zeke.” She slapped his leg and squeezed her eyes tight and opened them again. Again she sneezed. And again. The room was all dandelions—up the enormous walls and across the beamed ceiling.

She stood up. Where was Henry? Had the witch killed him? She’d seen him shake and pretty much explode. And he’d thrown something. Where was the witch?

Henrietta pushed out of the cage, still blinking. Her uncle Mordecai was dropping to his knees beside a body,
and Fat Frank and the raggant were with him. Frank was sniffing loudly and sobbing. Henry, his arms spread, lay facedown in the dandelions.

There was pain.

There was sorrow and emptiness and loss. There was fury.

There was a single, twisting dandelion.

Take it away
.

No.

Weed
.

Yes.

You’ve died. You killed yourself like the finger-fool. You gave yourself to me. Me, me. I drank the world. Drink. Drank. Little fool. Little green fool. I want the marble. Bring it back. We don’t die. Can’t die. Bring it back
.

The dandelion grew, and others grew beside it. The darkness faded, and the voice was lost.

Henry opened his eyes, and he pulled in a long breath, a breath that slowed and surged but wouldn’t stop until his ribs creaked and his chest was bursting.

Lips touched his forehead. His mother’s lips.

Hyacinth was smiling at him. He tried to sit up.

“Don’t,” she said. Her fingers were on his jaw.

Fat Frank’s face loomed into view, pale and bloodless. “It’s not over,” he said. “Let him up. The witch scrambled.”

Henry was pulled to his feet.

“Can you stand?” Mordecai asked. Henry nodded and looked around. Dotty was beaming beside him. Uncle Frank had a wide grin, and he and Penelope were propping up Monmouth between them.

James, with a huge purple stripe across his throat, stood beside his father.

“Little brother,” he said. “You and I are nothing alike.”

Caleb and Zeke were both sitting, pale but smiling, with their backs against the lower throne. Beo’s head was on Caleb’s lap. The fair man was slowly peeling off his armor beside them. Henrietta and Isa both glowed behind filthy faces.

“I know you don’t like us to hug you, Henry,” Isa said. “But this isn’t about you.” She threw her arms around him. “Can I squeeze, or will you break?”

“A little,” he said, and then he groaned with the pressure.

Henrietta grabbed his head and kissed his cheek. “Even though you cut my hair.”

“How did you get here?” Henry asked.

“Later,” Fat Frank said. “Later. Henry, where did she go?”

“Where’s Richard?” Henry looked around. “Could someone find Richard? He was with the faeries in the courtyard, but that’s the last I saw. And Anastasia and Una are with the Faerie Queene. I felt sick leaving them, but I thought we were all going to die.”

“Now, now,” Fat Frank said, pulling Henry’s arm. His
fingertips were white. “That was a marvel, truly and for sure, but the witch ain’t dead.”

“Peace, Franklin,” Mordecai said. “Let the boy breathe. The finish can wait a moment.”

“But where is she?” Fat Frank asked. “She’ll fly. She’ll grow again and take another root.”

“She can’t,” Henry said. “She’s broken. But I’d rather find her now.”

A few courtiers were picking themselves up out of the dandelions. Henry pointed.

“Make them help pick up all the faeren. And someone find Richard.” Sighing, he turned to Fat Frank, but Mordecai took his shoulder.

“Must you do this?” he asked.

Henry nodded.

“Alone?”

“I’ll go with Fat Frank.” He pointed at the fair man by Caleb. “And he should come if he can.”

Phedon picked himself up carefully and bowed. “I owe you the empire. I will come.”

The climb was grueling. Henry’s bones felt like paper. His eyes hurt, and his right hand felt run over. His jaw was burning, and the baseball thumped in his pouch. The gray strand that trailed faint gold from his face was thinner than a spiderweb and hard to follow. He kept losing it. Fat Frank was still impatient, but dizzy and weak on his feet. Phedon insisted on expressing his gratitude and running
out of breath on the long spiral stairs. And then, near the top of the tower, Henry realized that he’d gone too far. The thread was no longer leading up, and they had to walk slowly back down the stairs, trying to find where they’d missed a turn.

The turn was a small window. Or it looked like one. When they opened the window, a door appeared, and they stepped out onto a small, unrailed balcony. Slung on its enormous chains, the hanging garden now leaned a little forward. Across the rope-bridge, a wooden door in the garden wall had been left hanging open.

They crossed the rope-bridge one at a time. Fat Frank hobbled out first, bouncing, testing its strength, and then Henry. Inside the garden, Henry couldn’t help but be surprised how nothing had changed from his dream. He didn’t know if he’d expected it to be in ruins, but he hadn’t expected it to be the same fake-perfect place.

“Well, this is a bit of evil,” Frank said. “These trees aren’t trees at all, and they’re not living on tree life, nor the grass. It’s all stolen and stored and shaped into a wicked wrong perfect.”

“It is very well balanced,” Phedon said, and Fat Frank wheeled on him.

“Well balanced, like a slaving ship. The right number of lives to a bench and the right number of chains. Only this is worse. A slave on a chain is still human. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your slaves what went missing or fell down stairs are stuffed in these trees.”

Henry had already begun walking through the grove, and the others hurried to catch up.

“Why did you want me to come?” Phedon asked, ignoring Frank’s loud muttering.

“Your brother’s here.”

“Maleger? Is he alive?”

“I doubt it,” Henry said. “But we’ll see.”

The black pool had overflowed to one side because of the garden’s new angle, but nothing else had changed. Nothing, until Henry reached the little clearing and Nimiane’s bower.

The two trees that had held the man’s hands had both died. The trunks were ashen and peeling. In between them, in an awkward pile, his feet still in the earth, was Phedon’s dead and fingerless brother.

Phedon dropped to the ground beside him. Fat Frank and Henry moved into the bower.

On the couch, with her legs curled up and a dead cat clutched to her chest, was Nimiane, witch-queen of Endor. She was tiny and shriveled in her rags, a blind and hairless monkey.

“Pauper son,” she whispered. “Pauper son grew fire inside us. Fire. The marble ate our blood. It drank it up. Where is our blood? Make the marble give it back.” She coughed, wheezing.

“She’s dying,” Henry said. Frank moved closer, staring at the witch’s head, at her swollen sockets. Suddenly shivering, he backed up.

“Not dying,” the witch hacked. “Don’t die. We don’t die.”

“Nimiane,” Henry said. “You are.”

“No!” the witch shrieked, and she lunged from her couch. Her nails dug into Henry’s chest and groped for his throat. “No! There are drops left. They will grow. Give me yours.”

Henry gripped the witch’s wrists and twisted her down to the ground. He felt her, even now, gathering the strength she had stored in the garden. That was her life, all that was left of it. Her skin began to chill, and Henry’s jaw ached.

“Nimiane, peace,” Henry said, and he gathered himself. He pressed his blazing right hand to her skull. Her mouth opened in a silent scream as her arms dropped to the ground, limp. Her breathing was even. He’d been wrong. She was shattered, but she was still dangerous. She was an evil seed.

Henry poured more of his life into her flesh. Her leathered skin softened and feathered, and her breathing stopped. Henry stood, breathing hard, and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. He wanted to wash his hands. At his feet, a pile of dandelion down lay in the shape of an old and shriveled woman, unmoving in the stillness of the garden.

Fat Frank sighed with relief and sat on the witch’s couch. Phedon had come at the sound of the shrieking, and he stood, horrified, with his mouth hanging open. “I loved her,” he said. “I met her first, I thought by chance, and introduced her at court. My brother won her love, or so I thought, and I envied him. I wanted him dead.” He put
his head in his hands. “This is my fault. My brother, my father, she took them both. I brought her in. I thought her lovely.”

“I broke the seal on her tomb,” Henry said, and he walked out of the bower into the clearing.

He couldn’t leave the garden, not as it was, with all its stolen life. He reached for it, but there was so much. Henry shoved his hand into his pouch, and his fingers closed around his baseball. Pulling it out, he began to pace the garden. Where he walked, the false trees died and the grass shriveled. Phedon, with the body of his brother over his shoulder, stood by the gate and watched Henry work. Franklin Fat-Faerie leaned against the wall, breathing loudly.

In Henry’s hand, the baseball grew hot, and it grew heavy. The old leather smoothed beneath his touch, the core crackled, and every inch of string wound tight within it crawled with life. When he was finished, the garden was a graveyard of fake trees and carpet turf.

“Now what?” Fat Frank asked.

Facing the west, Henry could just see the falling sun above the garden wall. He pulled at the wind, and it bent down and rustled through the ashen garden. Filling his lungs and hardening his bones, Henry rocked back, hopped forward, and brought his left arm around.

The air cracked as the ball left his hand and climbed the wind’s back, sailing for the bloody sun and below it the western sea.

The great chains groaned and popped as the garden
sagged and tipped. The black water from the pool ran through the grass and slopped against the wall. The three hurried across the swaying, jerking rope-bridge and scrambled into the tower. They turned and watched the chains slip and the hanging garden fall, rolling to its side, trailing ash, trailing down, thundering in its death.

Henry
York Maccabee sat in a chair beside his father. His uncle Caleb sat beside him, and his uncle Frank beside him. James stood behind Henry. He’d been offered a chair, but he was too angry to sit. Henry could hear his mouth opening and shutting, but he hadn’t spoken. Mordecai had told him not to.

Across from them all, filling his living chair, sat Nudd, the Chestnut King.

Henry hadn’t eaten or slept in two days, not since the throne room. And he hadn’t wanted a birthday party. His day had passed. He’d catch the next one, and his family could visit him in his dirt room at Glaston’s Barrow. Richard, between telling his war story and explaining how he’d been stabbed in the thigh and exactly how it had felt, insisted that he would live with Henry, and Henrietta had suggested that they all move to the faerie world and pretty much live forever. Una and Isa had simply cried and hugged their brother. Anastasia had wanted to fight the faeries. Zeke had told Henry he was sorry, but he thought he’d make a good king. That was before Caleb had taken him back to Kansas. Hyacinth had said nothing. She
had simply sat with her son on the roof of a smaller house in Hylfing, overlooking the sea, and when he asked, she sang.

He’d asked a lot.

“Nothing moves in Endor,” Mordecai said. “The tombs are still. And dandelions spread in the streets. It will green. You should have destroyed the star many years ago.”

“I told the boy there were risks,” Nudd said, pulling at his beard. “And it was a true telling. I could not say which king or prophet faerie crafted it. It might have released a more ancient evil and returned us all to the world’s first death.”

James’s teeth clicked.

“But,” the king continued, “the fuller truth is that I tried and failed. I had not the strength, nor had Amram, your father. He struggled with the star on this very barrow and called down lightning beneath the tower. Those days before his death, risks were worth the taking.”

“And in these times?” Caleb asked.

Nudd shifted his weight. “They were again. Who placed the star in the boy’s hands and sent it to the last striking serpent of Endor? Was that not a risk?”

Mordecai smiled. “It was, to my mind, a bargain. Your closet world is secure enough. What did you risk for yourself? And what punishment did you heap on my son’s courage?”

Nudd chuckled. “No risks? A third of the barrow troop has fallen. Jacques One-Eye fell at the last in the throne room, along with twenty others. Punishment? Being a
king is punishment? Counting centuries like men count decades is punishment?”

“It is,” Caleb said. “As you well know. Jacques we honor as we honor those others, and those among our own city’s fallen. But my brother asked what risk you took for yourself, not what risks your bold faeren fighters took. You left Henry no choice.”

“He had a choice,” Nudd said. “And he made a promise and said his word was binding.” He smiled. “He’ll be crowned tomorrow, and then I’m away from this world and from my life.”

James snorted.

Uncle Frank cleared his throat. “I had a little taste of entrapment once. I found love in that world, but I never stopped being lost in it. I was just a weed in the wrong ditch. If you intend to hold Henry to this, I have to say, I’m likely to work myself into an almighty spite.”

Nudd laughed and held his belly while it shook. “Henry gave me his word. And Henry it will be who holds himself to it.”