Dandelion Fire

  “Wait!” Henrietta yelled. “Where are you going? Don't send us alone!”

  “Go!” Caleb yelled. “The wizards are through ahead of us. On the ridgeline.” He pointed back. The cave mouth was set between boulders near the top of a long slope that climbed into a ridge. In the wind and the rain, Henrietta could see nothing. And then she saw cloaks, dark cloaks moving down toward the doorway. “They are coming! Go now!” Caleb slapped his horse's rump, and she felt its strength tense beneath her. But there was no strength behind her to hold her on. She clutched and wobbled. Caleb was running toward the man on the ground, carrying his bow in his hand. An arrow was still on the string.

  Henrietta turned away, terrified, bouncing onto the horse's neck.

  Away in front of her was a rolling plain, divided by a river. Straddling the river mouth, she could see a small city with pale walls and spires.

  Beyond it stormed the sea.

  “The city of your fathers,” Eli said behind her. “My city. May it weather the tempest.”

  Lightning struck beside them.

  lifted Henry back onto his stool. Quiet voices rustled through the room.

  “The accused will stand for committee examination,” Radulf said.

  The hands grabbed him again, this time pushing him to his feet.

  Henry wobbled. They wanted to kill him. And he was standing in front of hundreds of people in his underwear.

  Braithwait eased his bulk around the table, stepped off the platform, and made his way toward Henry. He was carrying a wooden pointer.

  The round faerie stopped and stroked his thick beard.

  “Who is your father?” Braithwait asked.

  “I don't know,” Henry said. “You tell me, you're the ones who—” Henry's throat tightened. It didn't merely tighten. It closed off entirely. Radulf sniffed from behind the table.

  “Answers only,” Braithwait said, and poked Henry in the chest with his stick. He turned around, pacing. “So, you do not know who your father is?”

  Henry tried to speak. His mouth wouldn't open.

  “Let him talk!” someone yelled from back.

  “Look at him! He's Mordecai's boy right enough.”

  “Same nose!”

  Radulf banged his mallet and scowled. When the room was quiet, he nodded to Braithwait.

  “We presume from the chaotic, unfocused nature of your ah, how shall I put it, aura, that you are nameless. Is that correct? Has a christening or other naming rite ever been performed over you?”

  Henry still couldn't speak. He shrugged. He knew he had a name, but he was pretty sure no ritual had come with it.

  Braithwait stood in front of him and bobbed on his toes. “Could you explain, for the benefit of the committee and those assembled here, the meaning of the primitive symbol on your belly? It appears to be a type of brand, a mark of possession. And I should warn you, such things are not in truck with anything other than dark corruption and evil. How did you acquire it?”

  Henry chewed on his tongue. His jaw was beginning to ache. Fear and worry were moving into panic. He looked up at Tate. The faerie wasn't even watching. He was slicing more cheese.

  “I warn you,” Braithwait said. “Your silence shall be interpreted by this body as an admission of guilt.” The faerie's voice rose, rumbling up to a roar. “Have you bonded yourself to darkness? The scarring on your body and face make it seem so! Did your continued actions, after notification from this body, result in the unentombment of a witch, excuse me, the witch-queen of Endor, bloodthirsty in rage and madness? Speak up, boy!”

  Braithwait brought his pointer across Henry's stomach.

  He winced and tried to double over, but could not move. He tried to grab at his stomach, but his arms were locked in place. He could only look down and watch the stinging stripe welt up, joining and crossing the scars made in Byzanthamum.

  The crowd had begun to rumble. They were more than rumbling, they were roaring.

  Henry shut his eyes, trying to absorb the sudden pain, to drive it away. He could hear the yelling and the banging mallet. Over it all, he could make out the voice of Fat Frank.

  “I'll cut off your hand, Braithwait! Touch him again, and off it comes!”

  Men and women shouted, babies cried, and the mallet banged.

  Somewhere under and through all the noise came the sound of typing.

  As the din of the crowd ebbed into muttering and complaints, Henry opened his eyes and looked around.

  A chair scraped back, and Tate rose to his feet. Then he climbed onto his chair and, from there, stepped onto the table.

  Radulf banged his mallet. “Chair addresses William Tate!” he yelled.

  “William Tate addresses Chair!” Tate yelled back. And he stuck out his tongue.

  “Contempt!” Radulf yelled. “Let the minutes show contempt!”

  “Aye,” Tate said. “Let them.” He turned to the stenographer. “Bertha Big-Foot,” he said, and the woman looked up. “Have you a pencil? Might be best to include a picture.”

  The crowd roared with laughter, and Tate moved into a series of gyrations, faces, and contortions that Henry had never seen, movements that could not have been possible for human joints.

  Tate's ears inverted. He shut his eyes and reopened them, bulging and white. Swollen lips protruded, and a thick tongue slid out between them, sputtering a long and profoundly moist raspberry in Radulf's direction. Then he fell on his face, grabbed his heels behind his head, and rolled to the center of the long table, where he uncoiled, springing into the air and landing on Radulf's mallet.

  Radulf was blotched purple. “Any faeren child,” he said when the cheering had quieted, “could put on such a display. There were times when faeries would be moved by such things, but that time has passed, William Tate. It passed with your father. This”—he jerked his mallet from beneath Tate's feet—”is not a circus. It is in fact an emergency session of some moment.”

  Tate grew very serious. “Aye,” he said. “As momentous as a kitten's piddle. I can see that.” He raised his arms for the crowd to be quiet, unmoving from his spot on the table. When the room was as quiet as it ever had been, he spoke. “Faeren big and little, round and knobby, I have one thing to say.” The crowd waited patiently while Tate examined them. “Mordecai never died. And when he returns, as he must, don't ask me to explain what the faeren in one of his districts did to his seventh son.”

  Something crashed toward the back of the room, and a cloud of soot rose from the farthest fireplace. Faeries jumped to their feet and parted, opening a path through the crowd.

  Henry was just able to lean, watching the crowd stir and shift.

  Into the front stepped the raggant, black with soot and wheezing small clouds from its nostrils. It walked directly to Henry, limping slightly as it came. Then it turned, sat down on Henry's toes, lifted its nose in the air, and sneezed.

  Henry laughed, and the laughter unlocked his jaw.

  The crowd stared in silence.

  Radulf banged his mallet and shouted, “Committee to adjourn and be deliberate. Accused to be enclosed in quarantine and trebly sealed. Sentence to be posted in the main hall by moonset.”

  The committee members rose and exited quickly through the side door. Benches skidded as the crowd of faeren pressed forward to stare at Henry and his raggant.

  Henry was shoved into a different room. It was smaller, and the ceiling was lower, carrying two lanterns. He staggered across a coarse rug on the center of the floor and turned around. A faerie threw his clothes and backpack at Henry's feet, and then the raggant tried to enter.

  One guard bent and wrapped his arms around the creature's belly. The raggant bellowed, flaring his wings into the faerie's face and raising a swirl of soot. The faerie held on, and the animal twisted, swinging its head and clipping him with a blunt horn to the jaw.

  The faerie clutched his face, and the raggant dropped to the floor. Two other faeries jumped on it. Bellowing, snorting, flapping madly with its eyes
rolling and nostrils chuffing, the animal tried to drag the faeries in, tried like a small, black, wildly angry train engine with wings. It slid backward, and the door closed. Henry could still hear the snorting bellows, mixed with the sounds of faeries yelling in what sounded like pain.

  A large cushion, like the sort Henry had seen used for a dog's bed, was lumped in the corner.

  Henry dropped his backpack beside it and then shivered in the still room. He wasn't sure what exactly there was to do now, but he could start by putting on his clothes.

  He slipped on his jeans and shirt, then dropped onto the cushion to work on his shoes and socks. When they were on, he leaned back in the corner and looked around the room. He had no idea how committee meetings usually went, but he was pretty sure he had just experienced something abnormal. Most of the crowd had seemed to be on his side, or at least amused by Tate and his bizarre routine. But he was sure Radulf and Braithwait and Rip wouldn't care at all for what the crowd thought.

  Henry picked up his backpack and unzipped it. Inside, he fished around until he'd found the kitchen knife and his one can of tuna. Opening it was going to be a trick.

  Eventually, after blunting the knife, Henry managed to perforate the lid of the can halfway around. Then he bent the lid up and folded it back, sucking for a moment on the small cuts the metal left on his thumbs.

  He quickly picked the can clean, even collecting remainders out from beneath his nails, and then he drank the juice without hesitation. That, and a couple bites of cheese and bread, were serving as lunch and dinner and probably breakfast.

  For a moment, he wondered if that had been his last meal.

  “Don't think about it,” he said out loud. He could feel worry and gloom descending on him. “Think about something else.”

  But what else was there to think about?

  Uncle Frank? Aunt Dotty? His cousins? Baseball? Boston? The first time he'd tasted soda or felt the ball connect with the sweetest spot on the bat?

  He stood up. He took the small knife and walked to the clay wall. He would write a message.

  The clay was harder than it looked, like it had been fired somehow, but his knife still broke the surface.

  It was easier than cutting open a can of tuna.

  HENRY PHILLIP YORK came fast enough, as high up on the wall as he could reach, but what else should he say? What else was there to say? Faeries are ridiculous? I'm still hungry? Beneath it, he added (SEVENTH SON OF MORDECAI).

  Henry leaned against the wall and thought. No one had ever trained him for this sort of thing. Everybody should have some famous last words ready. They should make you come up with some at school.

  What would Uncle Frank say?

  Finally, he started carving. It didn't take him long. He only had so much wisdom to pass down.

  HENRY PHILLIP YORK

  (SEVENTH SON OF MORDECAI)

  IF THEY RE PITCHING FAST

  CHOKE UP.

  He stepped back and looked at it. It was okay. Very Uncle Frank. And if they weren't actually his last words, at least it was good practice. Almost smiling, he sat back down on the cushion and set the knife beside him in case he thought of anything else.

  For a while, he picked his teeth. Then he shut his eyes and tried to imagine himself in the barn, looking out over the fields with the raggant beside him. His mind got there quickly, but it wouldn't stay put, always slipping right back to where he was.

  His grandfather had written out his own last words. It had taken him two volumes, but that was the sort of guy he must have been.

  “Not very Uncle Frank,” Henry said, but he still dug into his backpack and fished out the two plastic-baggied, rubber-banded books.

  He'd always been impatient with his grandfather's writing, the style, the wordiness, the indirection. But he had time on his hands now, though he didn't know how much, and he needed to distract himself.

  He'd flipped through the pages of both volumes many times, glancing or staring at diagrams that didn't make much sense at all, and scanning pages for his name. This time, he settled into the back third of one of the books and resolved to make sense of what he read.

  The first thing he looked at was a diagram done in pencil with a few ink notes in the margins. At the top, Henry recognized the small outlined shape of his wall. There were no cupboards on it, excepting a central rectangle with two dots that he took for the compass knobs. At the base of his wall, the floor was drawn out to make the space look three-dimensional. The other walls had been left off. The pencil had traced the attic stairs but nothing else until farther down and forward. Then there was another floor and the angled outline of what had to be Grandfather's cupboard. A dotted line ran directly between it and the central door in the attic. Where that line intersected with the attic floor, there was a crude, childish arrow. Two other dotted lines ran up from the arrow, one to either side of the cupboard wall, level with the compass door. One terminated in a small circle, the other in a T with a rounded trunk but sharper crossbar.

  In the margin was written, Crude, but more detail unnecessary. Three from FitzF were needed. No more. Farther down, there was another note: Two years of adjustments, uncounted ritual before more than 75 percent of cupboards functional.

  Henry understood enough to realize that the illustration was supposed to help explain how Grandfather's cupboard accessed the attic cupboards. But it didn't do much other than reconfirm what he already knew—the cupboards were magic.

  He glanced down to the first paragraph below the illustration.

  The boy? Henry turned the page, scanning quickly.

  Voices in the corridor muffled through his door. He looked up.

  “Didn't happen,” someone said, and the door opened.

  “Of course not,” said Fat Frank, and he stepped into the room. Tate, with his yellow hat on the back of his head, and Roland, freckled and flamed with hair, squeezed through behind him, and the door shut with a snap.

  The fat faerie smiled. “Good to see your drawers back on.”

  Tate yawned and dug his chewing cork out of his coat pocket.

  Roland was looking at Henry's words on the wall.

  “What did they decide?” Henry asked. “What's going to happen?”

  Frank puffed his cheeks. “What they decide and what happens are not likely to be the same thing.”

  Henry looked around at all of their faces.

  “They haven't decided anything yet,” Tate said. “Moon won't drop for at least seven hours. But I wouldn't be too worried. I thought we did pretty well.”

  Roland pulled at his ear and then ran both hands through his thick hair. Frank nodded at him.

  “I,” Roland said. He was blushing, but it was hard to tell. “I thought I should, well, I wish I hadn't drug you here. Not the way I did.”

  “Well, there was a notice on me,” Henry said.

  Roland nodded. He looked relieved.

  Frank crossed his arms and sniffed loudly. “Don't be too soft on him, Henry York. He should have known better.”

  “Well, you said you wanted to throw me into the sea with the wizards,” Henry said. “That would have been worse.”

  Frank raised his eyebrows. The other two faeries looked at him. “Did I?” he said. “Of course, there's mitigation for that. I'd just heard my fellows drowned from inside a sack, and then my blood was all boiling from the fight. Can't stick words to their meanings in a time like that.”

  Roland's freckles broadened into a grin.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” Henry asked.

  “Wait,” Tate said. “The mob is with me. The committee won't dare go against them.”

  “We should bolt the borough now,” Frank said. “Before the sentence. Could be all friendliness, but it won't matter if Hylfing has fallen.”

  “Shouldn't go to Hylfing anyhow,” said Roland. “Not the way the wind is blowing. Run beneath the wizards' hammer? It'd be kinder to leave Henry here alone with the committee.”

  “I have to go
to Hylfing,” Henry said. “No matter what. That's where my aunt and uncle and cousins will all be.”

  “Not to mention your mother,” Tate said. “And brothers and sisters, though I couldn't say how many are left.”

  Henry's jaw dropped. “My mother? She's alive?”

  The faeries all looked at each other. Tate shrugged and flipped his cork between his fingers.

  “As far as we know,” he said. “Haven't actually kept up on Mordecai's family over the years. Should have, but haven't.”

  “What's her name?”

  “Hyacinth,” Frank said.

  Henry rolled the name through his mind. He was feeling an entirely new sensation, a new kind of nervousness. And it planted goose bumps all up and down his spine.

  “I need to go to Hylfing,” he said again.

  “You can't help,” Tate said. “Wait and go with the committee's blessing, maybe even support against the wizards. I don't want to break you out of here.”

  “You have to try,” Henry said.

  Tate's eyebrows went up into his hat, and his bearded jaw slid forward. “I have to? Why do I have to?”

  “Because,” Henry said, “I don't know how long there will still be a Hylfing to get to. And,” he added, “even if I wait, I don't think the committee is going to be nice to me, even if every faerie here wants it. I listened to them talking in a dream. That's why they rushed my trial, or whatever it was.”

  “You dream-walked out of the room?” Roland asked. “How?”

  “I don't really know,” Henry said. “I had a dream that I was in the room dreaming, and I got out in that one. The second dream.”

  Roland stepped back and cocked his head.

  “It doesn't much matter,” Frank said. “What did you hear?”

  Henry recited virtually the entire conversation verbatim, watching the faeries' expressions as he did. At first their eyes were narrow, almost skeptical, but they widened quickly. Mouths opened, and Roland turned white between his freckles. His Adam's apple bobbed like a yo-yo.

  Henry took a deep breath and finished. “When the dandelions grew out of the wall, they knew I was there, and Radulf said they had to have the meeting right away.”