The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards (45 page)

Henry picked slowly at the bandage on his jaw. The raggant snored beneath his chair. “I did make a promise,” Henry said quietly. “And I’ll keep it.”

Nudd raised his eyebrows and held out his hands. “Behold the boy,” he said. “He keeps a promise.”

Henry put his hands on his head and leaned back. Faeren were so stupid. At least some of them were. All of them were petty. Fat Frank had never been like that. Which is why he was in serious trouble, too.

Frank’s sorrow hadn’t lifted. Henry knew his friend was proud of him, and swollen with the praise of the queene, but that seemed to be the only spark of life left in the former faerie. His joints were hardening, and his eyes were cloudy. His breathing was brittle and mechanical. When Henry had looked for his friend’s wild green strength, he had found only yellow and cream and, worst of all, rigid white. Not one ounce of the mound magic still flowed within Franklin Fat, and he hadn’t allowed himself to be bonded by the Chestnut King. He wouldn’t until he found out what was happening to Henry.

Henry jerked up. Someone was talking, but he didn’t care. He pointed at Nudd.

“But what did I promise you?”

Nudd’s brows sank low in confusion. “To be heir to my throne. To be the Chestnut King.”

“Right,” Henry said. “And I will. But for how long?”

“As long you like,” Nudd said. “Or until you pass the crown to an equal, not from among the faeren.”

Henry grinned, really grinned, for the first time in two days. “Well, I’ve found him,” he said. “You can crown me if you like, that’s fine, I said you could, but then I’m turning right around and crowning him.”

“Who is it?” James asked.

Mordecai was looking at Henry. His eyes were skeptical.

Henry jumped out of his chair. “Hold on.” He turned and ran over to the carved door in the wall. The bookshelf still stuck out awkwardly beside it. Henry knuckle-tapped the door and opened it quickly.

“Hey,” he said. “Could you come in here for a minute?”

Behind him, Caleb burst into laughter.

“What?” James asked. Uncle Frank rubbed his jaw and sent half a smile at the Chestnut King.

Henry stepped away from the door and held out his hands.

Fat Frank limped into the room on one crutch. His clothes were sharp and new, and his face had actually been washed. But his eyes were heavy, and his nose and fingers were white. He turned and stuck his head back through the door. “Yes, Majesty,” he said slowly. “I’ll just be a moment.”

Nudd snorted. “‘Not from among the faeren’ was too confusing?”

“Frank,” Henry said. “Are you a faerie?”

“No,” Frank said. “Not but in my spirit. And good riddance, I begin to think. Struck from the mound magic—all legal and binding. Used the last of it in Dumarre. Look at me if you have the eyes. You’ll see no green.” He held up his pale fingers. “The toes are worse. Can’t much balance. I’m a common dwarf, and I’d be a chalk road-marker within the week if I let things go. Alma, Her Majesty, even put in a recommending as to a reinstatement, but she couldn’t help herself and squashed in some extra bit demanding an apology. The district said it wasn’t in good order or had an improper seal or some such.”

“Frank,” Henry said. “Have you joined the faeren of Glaston’s Barrow?”

Frank leaned on his crutch. “You know the tale. I was seized, thrown in the cellar, and then Henry here freed me
by hook and barter, and I joined in battle. But I haven’t been bonded, nor fed by any of the chestnut life, as you can see. I was waiting until Henry was the Chestnut King to do that. No offense.”

“As for being my equal,” Henry said, “I can do better. He is my brother. Without Frank, the witch would still be on her throne in Dumarre, and Endor would still be crawling with the undying. I used his courage more than mine, and whenever I ran out, he gave me more. We fought side by side, and I listened to his directions and followed his orders to the end.”

Mordecai’s eyes twinkled. He turned and gave Nudd a tight-lipped smile. “If the faeren had been more like Fat Franklin, you would have walked free in your world long ago, chains broken at the naming of your son. My father called you Robert Kirk. Was that your name? Your son would have lived with his father, your wife with her husband. Your bones would have long been in the ground and your mind at rest.”

The Chestnut King sputtered his lips and tugged sharply on his beard. After a silent moment, he flushed and nodded.

Laughing, Henry turned to the confused faerie.

“Franklin Fat Once-a-Faerie, how would you like to be the Chestnut King?”

Frank’s eyes widened and then narrowed. He swallowed hard and sat down on the floor. He looked into every pair of eyes in the room, checking for any hint of jest.

“Well?” Mordecai said.

Fat Frank sputtered and began to blink. Tears filled his eyes, and his lips scrunched up tight. “I haven’t been long without a people, but it’s like not having a head nor a body. I’d be a faerie again?”

Nudd nodded. “The king of faeries.”

“Franklin,” Uncle Frank said, smiling. “I’d get right down to the business of a royal family.”

James laughed. “And a few royal words for the district committees.”

Fat Frank spun on his heel and hobbled back through the door, slamming it behind him.

That night in Hylfing, bonfires blazed in the square, and while men plucked strings and swirling women drew them out to dance, the Faerie Queene came on the arm of Fat Franklin, surrounded by strange little women laced up in prisons for dresses and guards in puffy pants. Henry took off his solid silver necklace and hung the chestnut around his fat friend’s neck. Then, while Frank and Dotty danced with the faeren, Henry ate plates of fish until he thought he would burst, and while the fires died and his mother hummed and sang, he stretched himself out in the street beside her, beside his sisters and his laughing cousins, his brothers and the tall shapes of Mordecai and Caleb, and, tucking a folded hoodie beneath his head, he slept, his mind dreaming only of the sea and tall wheat and a baseball field full of gold.

Hyacinth woke him when the moon was high and the faeren were gone and the fires were dim beds of popping coals.

And all them rose and went into The Horned Horse and carried lanterns through a doorway Mordecai had prepared.

The attic of the old farmhouse was still damp, and the floors were covered with silt. The water had finally torn apart the small cupboard and closed its own gate. Pieces of it were scattered through the little room full of doors and out in the attic, where stacks of wrinkled papers rustled.

Downstairs, the plaster had collapsed from the ceiling and burst in fragments on the dining room table and in the kitchen.

“I liked this house,” Anastasia said. “I feel bad for it, all alone here.”

“It’ll be fine,” Frank said. “It might just be happy to see us go. And it has itself a prairie to watch as good as any Kansas wheat.”

“Not quite,” Henrietta said. “But almost.”

Mordecai opened the back door a crack. The camera crews and crowds were gone, but two people remained, asleep in the back of Frank’s old truck, one camera on a tripod beside them. An unusual wind came in over the burned fields, gentle but firm. A little gust peeled off and climbed for the sky. A tripod tipped, and a camera filmed the mud.

They waded through the marsh in a line, the girls holding hands, the women braced by their husbands.
Monmouth, with his head still bandaged, between James and Caleb.

Richard squelched along beside Henry, limping proudly on his bandaged thigh. He hobbled closer to Anastasia, and beside her, he felt tall.

“A sword went right into my thigh,” he said. “All the way in. I watched it come out.”

Anastasia had heard. Listening, Henry smiled.

“And the whole time, I kept banging the soldier on the head.” Richard sniffed nobly. “With my mace. You should have seen it, Anastasia.”

“I wish I had,” she said. “Do it again. Next time I’ll watch.”

Henry filled his lungs with the cool air and listened to the wind. Broad wings sifted the air overhead, but the raggant was invisible in the darkness.

“Go ahead,” Henry whispered to the knot of cousins and sisters around him. He wanted to walk alone.

They hurried on, but Henrietta wasn’t so easy to push away. She walked with him through the mud and into the street, and she stayed beside him, saying nothing, all the way to the small slope that was the Henry, Kansas, graveyard.

Tilly and Zeke were waiting for them, huddled beneath a blanket.

As the line approached, Tilly stood, shifting nervously, her son’s shoulder anchoring her to one place.

Hyacinth and Dotty walked to her, and they hugged her, and the three women wiped their eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Tilly said quietly. “I didn’t know what else to do. There wasn’t any money, and I already had the plot.” Three sons stood at the foot of the grave and held up their lanterns. The earth was freshly turned, like a newly plowed field, and a small cross at the head of it said simply, Mother. Beside it, there was a thicker cross. The name on it was the name of Zeke’s father—Timothy Johnson. Tilly suddenly laughed through her tears. “I couldn’t even afford all the letters in her name. We can do a new stone.”

“You have done much for us,” Mordecai said. “You named her well.”

Tilly sobbed, and Caleb set down his lantern and wrapped her in his arms.

Hyacinth and her daughters sang, and their song made sorrow sweet. Little Anastasia sat in the grass with Penelope and wept. Henrietta cried, too, and she didn’t care if Henry saw.

When the song had finished, and the lanterns faded, and everyone shivered in the crisp autumn night, Caleb took the last gift his mother had given him, and he gave it to Tilly. It was a blue gem set in a band that matched the moon.

And then Dotty and Hyacinth and all the girls cried, because they loved Antilly Johnson, and Henry and Zeke laughed, because they would be cousins, and Frank and Mordecai slapped their brother’s shoulder, and James shook his hand, and Monmouth grinned beneath his bandage, and Richard laughed and hopped in place and
said that being happy made his thigh hurt. His wound. From being stabbed with a sword.

And farewells were said, but not to each other. They were said to Grandmother, and to the Kansas sky and to the Kansas earth, to the wind that dried tears, and to a spot in the soil that marked an end.

The group walked slowly, whispering, to a little green house on the edge of town. Bowls of cereal were poured to take the edge off the darkness, and bags were packed. When the sun rose, the house was empty, the door was unlocked, and the old car was in the driveway.

In Hylfing, there was a city to build, a fat king to visit, and a new emperor sending lots of invitations. Mordecai and Caleb stayed at home, and their hands blistered from working with stone. Frank laughed at their softness, and it was under his eye and guided by his hands that Hyacinth’s house rose from the ashes, and beside it, a house for Dotty. But Tilly wanted something set higher and closer to the sea.

Henry and Henrietta spent days on their aunt Tilly’s roof, leaning against the wall beside Zeke. And when Henry was with his brothers, or walking the hills with his father, Henrietta went alone, and she and Zeke said nothing, but kept their eyes out past the jetty, where white lines rolled toward the shore, and the sea beat out its pulse against the cliffs.

Kansas
doesn’t change much. Times change. People change. Towns change. But Kansas keeps an even keel. People and towns are decorations—summer reading. But the seasons, the plowing and the seeding, the harvest and the burning, those run deeper.

Tornadoes are more permanent than towns.

Four falls faded into winters, and those four winters, those deaths, were reborn in springs and ripened into summers. Storms came, and blizzards blew, and combines rolled to keep the timing of the years.

It was early in the fifth fall, still late in the summer by some people’s clocks, while the fields were burning, when a door reopened. A door that Kansas had not forgotten.

Henry York Maccabee stood in the dust-blanketed kitchen and looked around at the broken plaster from the ceiling and the sink with no plumbing. He looked out the window at the flat sea of green prairie, rolling gently in the wind. Mordecai and Hyacinth stood beside him. Uncle Frank nudged the plaster and dust with his foot and stared at three fat gerbils who peered out from beneath the fridge.
Aunt Dotty leaned against the door with her hands over her mouth, taking it all in, scrolling through her memories.

Henry was lean and as tall as his father, though not as broad. He was taller than Frank. His skin was dark, but a white scar stood out on his jaw.

“Oh my,” Dotty said. “I thought I’d forgotten so much, but I hadn’t.”

Henry smiled at his aunt. Her smells, her pies, they were in Hylfing now. They were connected to her, not linoleum or countertops.

When they were all ready, and small bags dangled from their shoulders, Mordecai stepped aside and let Henry open the back door.

He opened it slowly at first, confused by what he saw. There were no people, so he pulled it wide and slipped through. The others followed quickly.

Henry’s mouth hung open while his brain tried to process what he was seeing. Where he stood, the floor was glass, but that ended quickly. The rest of it was orange, waxed and polished. Large photos lined the walls between pedestalled displays in glass boxes. A rack of T-shirts was just in front of him. It was half souvenir shop, half museum.

He pulled out a black shirt. In white letters across the chest, it read,
I GOT LOST IN HENRY, KANSAS
. He pulled out another one. A flying saucer, and beneath it:
GIVE FRANK BACK
. A matching design said simply,
WHERE’S DOROTHY?
There were tiny sizes for babies and oversize sweatshirts
for the extremely large. Some of them incorporated a bizarre and unrecognizable version of Henry’s school photo from third or fourth grade. An entire rack held
WHERE’S HENRY?
in different colors and styles. A little map on the back of the shirt had a star on Henry, Kansas.