Dandelion Fire

He stepped backward, bringing Henrietta with him into the darkness.

  * * *

  As the world began to reform, swirling through focuses, revealing the mound-magic and then sliding into paneled walls and green clay ceilings, Henry turned and began shouting.

  “Mordecai has returned!” he yelled. “He stands in the breach at Hylfing!”

  “Where are we?” Henrietta asked. “I can't see anything.”

  Frank stepped around beside them. He grabbed some earth, spat in his hand, muttered a few words, and dragged it over Henrietta's eyes. She blinked, wiped away the goop, and rocked back in surprise. Five faeries stood facing them, armed. The corridor split into five ahead of them.

  Henry looked at Frank. “Get to a way room. Prepare a door for Badon Hill right away. And one for Hylfing,” he added. Frank ran down a corridor on the right, and Henry turned back to the guards. He was actually surprised that he had made it this far. If he made it out of the mound at all, he would be shocked.

  “Do you have an alarm?” he asked them.

  They all nodded, shifting on their feet and regripping their small clubs.

  “Sound it,” Henry said.

  Not one of them moved.

  Henry stooped down and gathered up a fistful of dirt. He looked at it, looked at them, and raised his eyebrows.

  “Sound it,” he said again.

  One of them hurried to a root on the corridor wall and pulled it three times.

  Nothing happened.

  “Will I hear anything?” Henry asked.

  Suddenly, the ground shook, and light surged out of all the corridor mouths, carrying the sound of an army of bells.

  “Take me to your hall!” Henry yelled over it. “Run! We'll keep up!”

  They wove through the quickly crowding corridors. Babies were crying, women were yelling, men were being angry.

  “To the hall! Mordecai's returned!” Henry yelled every time they pushed through another group, before sprinting to catch up with their guides on the other side.

  “What were you going to do with the dirt?” Henrietta asked while they ran.

  “What?” Henry asked. “The dirt?”

  Henrietta nodded.

  “I don't know. I think I could have grown a dandelion. Maybe.”

  When they reached the hall, it was already in an uproar. The place was filled, shoulder to shoulder, with worry and anger.

  Henry plowed his way through the doors into the same room where he'd been dragged in his underwear.

  Radulf was already behind the table, banging away with his mallet. And he was wearing his fuchsia robe.

  Henry walked to the platform, left Henrietta standing beside it, climbed up, stood on a chair, and then stepped onto the table.

  He walked to its center and kicked the mallet out of Radulf's hand. Then he turned and faced the crowd, preparing to shout over the alarm.

  He didn't have to. The alarm stopped.

  “Of all the brazen—” Radulf began.

  “Quiet!” Henry yelled. “By order of the green man!”

  The room was still.

  “You returned for your execution?” Radulf asked.

  Henry ignored him. “What is the seal the committee uses?” he asked. “What face is carved into every one of your halls? Now look at mine. Really look. The committee stamps their letters with a face they hate. They hate Mordecai and every other true pauper son and green man.”

  Faeren guards were moving toward Henry. Radulf leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.

  “Mordecai has returned!” Henry yelled. “I am his son, and he returned from his sleep this night. He returned at my christening. Do you know what that means?”

  A murmur ran through the crowd. Many of them obviously didn't.

  “Mordecai,” Henry hurried on, “was betrayed and entrapped by faeren on this committee, and he has returned. This committee even condemned me, his son. He has returned, and the faeren will be judged!”

  They understood that.

  A guard grabbed at Henry's ankle. He moved back. Another one was climbing onto the platform. Rip and Braithwait had entered through a side door, and the crowd was parting around them.

  “Right now,” Henry yelled, “Mordecai struggles to save Hylfing from the wizards. When he has finished, this is where he will come. Show your loyalty, or wait for his judgment. It is your decision, but make it now. The faeren in the Hylfing hall have joined the fight, and a way room has been prepared. Join them now, or stay and wait. See how he repays those who sit on their hands. Go now!”

  Henry jumped off the table and grabbed Henrietta by the arm. She looked stunned, running her eyes over the crowd and the hall and even Henry.

  “We have to beat them down,” Henry said. “Or we'll take too long.” He grabbed a young faerie, a girl, by the shoulder.

  “Can you run to the way rooms?” he asked.

  “I'm fast,” the child answered, and she turned and ran, darting through the mob.

  The crowd was all confusion. Let them sort it out, Henry thought.

  The girl was indeed fast, and by the time they'd reached the stair down into the Central Mound, few faeries were ahead of them.

  “No farther,” Henry told her. The tiny girl stood and watched as Henry gripped his cousin by the hand, and the two of them descended into the darkness.

  “Wow,” Henrietta said when they had been swallowed.

  “Yeah,” said Henry. “Ask me about it later.”

  At the bottom, Henry felt around for a door. When he'd found one and opened it, he called for Frank. When there was no reply, he felt for another.

  “Frank!” he yelled again, and began to move on. A crowd of faeries was descending the stairs behind them.

  “This way!” Frank's voice echoed back, and Henry and Henrietta pushed forward in the dark.

  “What is this stuff?” Henrietta asked as the blackness sank to the floor around them.

  Henry smiled. “Light,” he said.

  Two doors were open, two way rooms prepared.

  Fat Frank stood in the hall, waiting to direct traffic.

  “This one's Badon Hill,” he said, pointing to his right. “And this one is Hylfing.”

  Henry stopped long enough to send the first of the faeren into the Hylfing room, and then the three of them slipped into the other and shut the door.

  Henrietta threw her arms up over her eyes and staggered back against the wall. Henry, squinting, led her down the sloping floor to the balanced sticks.

  “We might need some light,” Henry said. “On the other side. Torches or something.”

  “Torches,” Frank said. “Ha.” He hurried to a shelf and rejoined them, carrying a limp sack.

  “You won't find any faeren on the other side of this one,” Frank said. “I'm the only one from that hall still alive.”

  Henry stood in front of the stick doorway, took a breath, and stepped through, still holding Henrietta's hand.

  Darius had not been expecting faeren. He had never encountered them in Byzanthamum. They were pests, harder to sense, but weak. He didn't care to fight them anymore than he cared to fight flies. It was not yet time to enter the city alone. He looked forward to that. He'd even saved himself a horse.

  He sent the wizards forward again and strengthened the wind at their backs to weaken the arrows and spread the flame. He needed some of them alive. At least until the faeren were gone.

  Henry stood in the dark and smelled the earth around him. It was Badon Hill, but Badon Hill below the surface. The smell of his cupboard without the wind. He walked forward to the mouth of the small faerie hall and heard Frank sniff behind him. He was thinking of his dreams, of what he had seen below the stone at the top of the hill. The raggant bones and the carving of a green man. This hill had been his father's cage.

  He looked out at the towering trees. There was a moon here. They were far enough north to be out of Darius's storm, and the breeze was sharp but soft.

  Henry didn't know which side
of the island he was on, but he knew which way he had to go.

  Up. To the top.

  “This is beautiful,” Henrietta said.

  Henry filled his lungs to bursting and nodded, digging his feet into the mossy slope. It was soft, green breath silvered over with the moon's silence. He had to remind himself to hurry, and his mind drifted back to when he'd first seen the magic of Badon Hill, the roaring, surging potence of its story, of the living words that were its glory.

  “Is there a path or something?” Henrietta asked.

  “Yes,” the fat faerie said.

  “But we're in a hurry,” said Henry, “and we need to get to the top.” He thought he could see where the island peaked in front of the stars. The faerie hall had been well up on the island. He was grateful they didn't have to climb all the way from the bottom.

  As he pushed himself, Henry savored the sharp pricks of the clean air in his lungs. Soon, the trees thinned around them, and Henry could make out the broken-down stone wall standing out in the moonlight above them. When they reached it, they walked through the ruined gate and stood beside the long barrow stone.

  Henry didn't let himself stop to stare at the cold, breeze-dusted sky, crowded with an audience of stars. He walked to the old, cracked tree and knelt beside its trunk.

  He felt nervousness, like he had when he'd first crawled through the cupboards. It felt like he was returning to something unknown, something that was no longer him.

  He closed his eyes and wedged himself into the crack, reached forward, felt his hand touch Grandfather's carpet, and scrambled into the room.

  Kneeling on the floor, he shivered. The bed was there, the open door, books, a lamp, another life, a chapter buried. The sky outside the shattered windows was gray but un-sunned. Predawn.

  Henry sat on the bed and waited for the others.

  Henrietta crawled through and stood quickly, rubbing her arms. Frank somersaulted out after her.

  “Okay,” Henry said. “The diagram in the book had a straight line between this cupboard and the compass locks. Where that straight line crossed the attic floor, Grandfather had drawn an arrow. We need the arrow.”

  “So we go upstairs and pull up floorboards?” Henrietta asked.

  “Right,” Henry said. “I have a knife, but nothing else.”

  “There's a hammer in the junk drawer.” Henrietta laughed, surprised. “And I think I might know which board it's under.”

  Fat Frank was looking around the room and out at sprawling grass fields. “This is where you lived?” he asked. “Dismal place.”

  “Oh no,” Henrietta said. “This isn't Kansas. Kansas isn't, well, Kansas has wheat. And people.”

  On the landing, Henry climbed his attic stairs, and Henrietta descended to look for a hammer.

  The faerie followed Henry.

  In the attic, the only light trickled in from the broken round window set into the end, and it wasn't enough. Henry opened his bedroom doors and tried to envision a straight line from the compass locks down to where he imagined Grandfather's cupboard would be.

  He couldn't even see the seams between the floorboards.

  “Need light,” he muttered.

  The faerie fished the limp sack out of his shirt, swung it around his head, kicked it twice, shook it, and then pulled a string and dumped it out.

  Blackness dribbled to the floor and then sprang into white light. The attic blazed, experiencing real natural light for its first time.

  “Too much,” Henry said, blinking. “I can't see.”

  “Oh, don't worry,” said Frank. “It found the window. It will fade.”

  Henry got down on his hands and knees and examined the floorboards. None of them had nail holes.

  Henrietta rose up out of the attic stairwell and handed Henry a hammer. The light was already softening.

  “You can carry light around?” she asked.

  “We can, too,” Henry said. “In flashlights. Which one were you thinking?”

  Five feet out from the doorway to Henry's room, Henrietta crouched down and pointed. The floorboard didn't just have nail holes, it had nail heads and hammer dings in the wood around them. “I always wondered why this one had been nailed down,” Henrietta said. “I thought maybe it squeaked. But then every floorboard up here squeaks.”

  Henry ran his hand over the battered wood and looked at his clawed hammer. He wasn't exactly sure how to start. He flipped it to the claw and slammed it against the floorboard.

  The faerie laughed, jumped around him, and took the hammer from his hand.

  “We don't have that much light, nor that much time.”

  He crouched over the floorboard, his belly on his thighs, and swung the hammer with sharp accuracy. The claws bit into the wood around a nail, and with a jerk and twitch, the nail screamed and rattled to the floor. Again and again the faerie swung, and each time he jerked a nail free.

  Finally, as the light faded to orange, he wedged the claw into the seam between the floorboards and threw his body against it. With a crack and squeal, the board rose. Henry and Henrietta grabbed on to it, snapping it up.

  Beneath it, there was a long silver case. It was open. And it was full of water.

  Inside it, there was something that, at some point, could have been an arrow.

  Henry reached in, hooked a finger beneath it in the water, and lifted it out carefully.

  He let it rest across his palms, and the three of them stared at it.

  The shaft was badly bent, and the wood was soft and fraying around cracks. There were only two feathers. One actually. One and a half. Water dripped from both of them, and Henry thought he could see hints of orange in their color. But they were ashen.

  The tip was sharp stone, but one of the barbs was missing, and Henry wasn't sure if it was on straight.

  “Well,” Henrietta said. “It was a good idea, Henry.”

  stared at the arrow, and his heart sank. Fat Frank crouched in front of him, and his eyes were excited.

  “Look at it!” he said. “See what you're holding.”

  Henry looked back down. This time, he really looked.

  He almost dropped the arrow.

  Strength swirled around its fringes, but beyond that, Henry could see something else. The stone tip was white-hot and alive, crawling with an unquenchable story. Henry slid his hand away from it, down onto the shaft. It was straight and thick in his hands, growing without increasing, burning without being consumed. And it was fletched with three long, fiery feathers, cold feathers, mothers to the wind.

  Henry swallowed and blinked, and once again, he held a twisted, rotting ruin of an arrow.

  “Which is real?” he asked.

  “Both,” the faerie said. “The two are married. You see its story, its shaped name, and living glory, and you see the wood and stone decayed. They are twined to one and will not be separated. We must go. You were right to come. This arrow must fly.”

  “But how can it?” Henrietta asked. “Even if it's magic, you still couldn't hit anything with it.”

  “We'll see,” Henry said, and he stood up, holding the arrow in the middle, hoping nothing would fall off. Henrietta grabbed the case and dumped out the salt water pooled in the bottom.

  The three of them hurried down the stairs and back into Grandfather's room.

  Henry held the arrow to his chest, and for a moment, he panicked. Grandfather had used the arrow to make some of the cupboards functional. The door might be closed. Dropping to his knees, he stretched his hand into the cupboard, holding his breath, feeling for the back, afraid that he would find it. He felt moist earth, a worm, and night air. Relief flooded through him, and he crawled quickly back up into the moonlight of Badon Hill. When the others were beside him, he began to run, now holding the arrow away from his body.

  “Careful!” Henrietta said.

  He knew. Don't run with scissors. But he also knew she was more worried about the arrow than him. He wasn't sure he could break it if he tried. They plowed an
d slid down the side of Badon Hill, and Henry brushed his free hand over tree trunks as he passed them. In this light, in this moment, he felt like he could talk to them if he tried. If he knew the words.

  Sitting impatiently in the little faeren hall, the cousins watched Frank prepare a doorway back to the mound.

  And then they were through, back into the upper branches of the Central Mound.

  The corridors were as bright as they were silent. There were no guards to be seen, and most doors hung open, revealing beds unmade, food uneaten. Occasionally, they heard the voices of children.

  Henry laughed as he ran. How many faeries had he sent? Worry crept in. Had they helped? Could they help? Or would they fight on the wizards' side? If he'd frightened them too much, they might have.

  He wondered where the committee members were. They wouldn't have gone to help, though they probably had gone somewhere else. Somewhere very far away.

  Henry followed Frank as the faerie rushed down the stairs into the Central Mound, panting but unweary He had an arrow, an ancient talisman in his hand, and that brought its own strength.

  “I can't believe this is light,” Henrietta said as they entered the darkness, and Henry laughed again. He didn't say anything.

  The way room back was empty.

  They hurried, squinting, down the sloping floor and through the doorway without a beat of hesitation.

  Two faeries sat in the hall with their arms crossed.

  They both jumped when Henry appeared.

  “Why are you not at the wall?” Henry asked. “What are your names?”

  They ran out of the hall in front of them.

  Henry climbed up slowly and stepped into underbrush and storm-darkness.

  He could see very little, and he'd forgotten the rain, and the wind had grown. The clouds flashed with lightning, but he couldn't see the forks. They were on the other side of the city.

  Together, Henry and Henrietta slogged through the mud and the brush while Frank rushed ahead to the wall and the gates.

  The gates were open.

  The guards were gone.

  Henry pulled in a deep breath and looked at the streets ahead. They still had a city to cross.

  Frank Willis looked around for his brothers. The city below the river was burning.