Hyacinth wondered where she was going. Another island? A faeren mound? Or maybe one of the trees in California beside the house she barely knew?
The vine fire flickered around her. She couldn’t think about that. None of that mattered.
Hyacinth Smith shut her eyes, slid her fingers inside a small box, felt a pull as violent and constant as a waterfall, and dove forward.
The top of her head slammed into something painfully hard. Something cracked, but not her skull. Panic flooded through her. She was stuck, half in and half out. Was the cupboard blocked on the other side? A tree? A rock?
Hyacinth splayed her bare toes on the stone floor and scrambled in place. A small chain was digging into her face. She splayed her toes again and tried to push, but her toes wouldn’t grip.
Someone put two hands on her backside and shoved her forward so hard that her face skipped across a wood floor and banged into another wall. Rolling onto her back, she looked around. She had just emerged from the very bottom of a wall into a tiny attic room. The wall was made entirely of doors. So many doors. A small black one with a gold chain attached to the inside lay loose on ground. Dry glue was crusted around its lip. Someone had tried to seal it shut. A bucket sat in the corner, but otherwise, the room was empty. The only light was yellow and incandescent and entering through the room’s open doorway.
Kibs wriggled out of the wall facedown and then rolled away quickly.
“How’s it going?” Hyacinth asked.
The faerie shook dust and ash from his hair. “Not good. That woman could drink the whole world. Where are we?”
“In someone’s house, I think,” Hyacinth said. “An attic, from the look of the ceiling.”
Kibs nodded. “We should go.”
“No.” Hyacinth was surprised by the certainty in her voice. “We should wait.”
“He’d want us—”
“I don’t care.”
—
NIMIANE FOUGHT TO DRAIN the fiery vines in front of her, straining at the cage that kept her from the sons of the eye-thief. Bast sat on her shoulder, looking down on her shorter enemy. Inside, so close she could taste his sweat, the boy fought to stop her, with arms spread and hands touching stone on both sides of the doorway.
“Go!” the boy yelled at his brother. “Go! I can’t hold her.”
The other boy shook his head.
“Now!” Mordecai screamed.
Reluctantly, his brother obeyed, dropping to his knees and worming his way into nothingness.
It didn’t matter. When the cage was down, Nimiane could drain them all dry through an opening half that size.
Gathering the full force of her devouring hunger, Nimiane pulled at the cage. There was so much power in it, so much life, and in a moment all of it would be inside her, feeding her.
The boy’s hands slipped off the walls, and he staggered backward. The cage across the open doorway opened as he did.
Nimiane laughed. Happiness was not something she often felt—the primitive happiness of a child inflicting pain and taking what she wants.
Mordecai was panting, sweating, but for some reason, he didn’t look scared. His hand was open, fingers spread, palm on fire, ready to fight on.
Nimiane didn’t think about how the cage had opened. It had not been absorbed, and she did not even notice. She didn’t fear anything that this powerful little green blood could do to her. And why should she? He wasn’t his father.
Still laughing, ready to devour, she stepped across the threshold.
Bast tensed. And the boy smiled.
“You think that was a fight?” Mordecai asked. He clenched his fist, and the cage of fire dropped back down behind her. He jerked his arm and the iron door slammed shut on the outside, with its own web of vines glowing, inside and out.
Nimiane spun in surprise, confusion not yet fully turned to fear.
“Green blood,” she said. “You think this can hold me?”
The boy dropped to his knees and dove at the swirl of nothingness that had swallowed his brother.
Nimiane leapt for his legs, closing both claw hands tightly around his ankles. There was so much strength still in him that it burned her as it flooded in. And then she felt the heat of his palm press against her face. The blow from that touch spun her across the room and slammed her into the wall with a tangle of fiery rope around her throat and face.
—
HYACINTH AND CALEB DRAGGED Mordecai into the attic room. Caleb grabbed the black cupboard lid and slammed it back in place. Mordecai spun around on his belly, shut his eyes, and pressed his palm against the door, tracing the outline.
Then he let his face fall to the floor. He was pale and breathing hard, pooling sweat.
But his eyes were open and they met Hyacinth’s. He smiled.
“We did it,” he said.
“Let’s see if it holds,” said Caleb.
“It will hold,” Mordecai said. “Unless one of our family opens it.”
“That looks uncomfortable,” Hyacinth said. “Here, sit up.”
“No,” Mordecai said. “Not moving for a year. This feels fantastic.” And he shut his eyes.
—
NIMIANE PACED IN THE DARKNESS. The boy had closed and sealed the way behind him, linking it up to the whole cage. But she could still feel lives in the hallway outside. She could hear voices calling for her.
Again, she threw her strength at the web, and again the room merely brightened. Already she was exhausted. Empty. A blind and scabby hag.
How was this possible?
It wasn’t. She could wield more life than a nation. She reached out through the iron door and found lives, lives she needed. She took them quickly, to the last drop, until their souls were gone and their bodies ash. Life after life after life she gathered, until the men outside no longer screamed and she felt them fleeing. But too slowly.
Nimiane, witch-queen of Endor, daughter of Nimroth, raged. For hours she raged, hurling every life she could gather at the green blood’s vines until they burned so bright and hot that the stone melted around them. Her skin blistered, and Bast writhed in pain on the floor. All night she raged, until she no longer had enough strength to burn the stones. Until there were no more lives within her reach. Until she had turned her army into ash and herself into a shivering crone, bleeding black undying blood on the floor of her forever.
And then, for the first time in three and a half centuries, Nimiane of Endor wept.
Outside, as the moon set on old Endor, on abandoned weapons and empty clothes and muttering madmen, a cool breeze climbed down from the sky and redusted the streets with the ashes of the queen’s army.
—
BENEATH ANOTHER MOON, IN a place called Kansas, three companions and a faerie talking about pie limped down a narrow country road toward a small country town. A three-story farmhouse with a glowing attic window stood behind them. Wind chimes called to them from the porch, but they didn’t listen.
One of them stood straight, and his smile was quick. One was bent in pain but happy. And one of them was a girl with bruised bare feet, who felt lighter than light itself. And one of them was a faerie, grinning and pulling his wiry hair down around his ears (and talking about pie).
All of them were hungry. Starving. But they were in search of a city park, where the faerie promised there was a tree with a wide hole that he knew from long ago.
“Where are we?” Mordecai asked.
“Does it matter?” Kibs answered.
No. No, it didn’t matter. Not to them. Not right then. But while they walked, Hyacinth looked up at a high-legged silver water tower, standing guard over the entire town. Painted in large block letters on the tower’s belly, there was a simple name.
HENRY
And suddenly she missed her family desperately and wanted to throw her arms around her mother and kiss her father and laugh with her sisters and listen to her brothers taunt each other despite the years between them.
“Are you okay?” M
ordecai asked.
“I think so,” Hyacinth said. “At least, I’m pretty sure I will be. You?”
“Yeah,” Mordecai said, rolling his shoulder. “Pretty sure I will be.”
LAWRENCE AND HARRIET AND Circe and Daniel all sat on the end of a long dock, with their legs in frigid water. Across the lake, steep tree-lined mountains rose up from the water. Behind them, there was laughter and splashing and a camp bustling with kids of almost every age.
“I don’t understand,” Lawrence said. “What rules did she break? She said it wasn’t magic. I was there.”
Circe slid her arm around her little brother’s shoulders. “Sounds pretty magical to me,” she said. “And amazing.”
“Super amazing,” Lawrence said. “Hy was the awesomest. Stupid rules.”
“Well, yeah,” said Daniel. “Aren’t they usually?”
Harriet sniffed and wiped her eyes. “At least Mom and Dad found her. And she’s with a nice family. I hope they aren’t the only ones who get to visit. They have to let us visit.”
“I’ll make them,” Lawrence said. “I don’t care about the rules.”
“Hush,” Circe said. “In public, we talk like she’s dead. Like she never happened. Always.”
“It’s just us, C,” Daniel said. “I won’t pretend when it’s just us.”
“It isn’t,” Circe whispered. “Look.” And she nodded toward the shore.
All four heads turned and focused on a kid standing on the dock. He was Lawrence’s age and build, but with black skin, a squarer jaw, and a more serious face. At the moment, he was wearing tight gray shorts and knee socks with stripes, along with a blue shirt with his family crest centered in silver on the chest—a chess knight with wings.
“Rupert Greeves,” Circe said. “Welcome to the dock.”
“Hey, Rupe,” Lawrence said.
“Hey,” Rupert said. “If you like, I’ll show you the obstacle course. I hold the course record for the under-twelves.”
“Oh, do you?” Daniel laughed. “L, I think that’s a challenge.”
“Or,” Rupert said, “if you prefer a swim, I’ll race you to the buoys.”
“And do you hold the swim record as well?” Circe asked.
“For the under-twelves,” Rupert said, “I do.”
Lawrence pulled his feet out of the water and stood, crossing his arms to face Rupert.
“Which record is your favorite?” he asked.
Rupert shook his head. “What?”
“I’ll let you keep one,” Lawrence said. “And you get to pick which one.”
Daniel whooped, and even Harriet smiled.
Rupert’s eyes narrowed. “They are all my favorite,” he said.
“Fine,” Lawrence said. “I’ll decide which one you get to keep. Take me to the obstacle course.”
Harriet and Circe and Daniel watched the two boys jog away.
“Well,” Circe said, “they’re going to hate each other.”
Daniel shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I think L just replaced me. New best friend for life.”
—
MANY MILES SOUTH, ABOVE a cliff beside the sea, Trudie and Albert Smith stood beside young Robert Boone and watched crews with saws milling the Grove of Ways into timber.
One hundred yards away, Thor was overseeing the crackling blaze. Already, every frame in the barn and house had been consumed.
As for Granlea’s body, Trudie had refused to have her buried anywhere near the property. The Order had taken her away, and as the nearest kin, they had asked the Smiths for an epitaph.
Albert had resisted the temptation to etch SHE GOT WHAT SHE WANTED onto the tombstone, but since everything positive had seemed disingenuous, they kept it limited to her name.
Robert Boone had asked if they would like Hyacinth to be remembered with a stone as well. Albert and Trudie had told him absolutely not. She was alive, they were sure of it, living in another world—except, they insisted, there really is only one world, but it’s a tangle of branches and grains and rings and times. Hyacinth was out there. And someday, they assured Robert Boone, they would find her, and she would be vindicated.
Sometimes, they knew, the best way to deceive is to tell the truth.
Meanwhile, beside a different sea, beneath a different sun, in a different branch of this one world, Hyacinth stood on a rooftop.
She was laughing.
How could she not be when the cathedral bells were ringing in every town along that stormy fishing coast? When the city gates had been thrown open and horses were prancing, throwing sparks from their shoes, and the people of the city, and in every city along that coast, were roasting fish and chestnuts in the streets, and there was dancing and music in every square, and Caleb and Mordecai had been paraded around for days, and they were sick of it, and she had refused to have any part of it—other than dancing and laughing and eating too much?
She had found her parents in time, before the Grove of Ways was burned, and she brought them to this town. They saw where she would live and met Mordecai’s mother and watched her remove Mordecai’s fungal bite and were amazed.
Although her parents’ eyes had been wet when they’d left—and so had hers—she knew, as long as the trees wrapped time and memory inside their rings, there would be a doorway home.
She only had to find it.
Beside her on that rooftop, with his wings spread and his nose raised, her charcoal raggant felt the same.
Rory, Lucia, Ameera, Seamus, and Marisol for Listening
Heather Linn for Prodding
Chelsea E for Green Pencil Faces
Team RHCB for Not Quitting
The O of B for Still Kicking
Cyrus and Antigone for Hanging In There
N. D. WILSON lives and writes in the top of a tall, skinny house only one block from where he was born. But his bestselling novels, including the highly acclaimed 100 Cupboards series, have traveled far and wide and been translated into dozens of languages. He and his wife have five young storytellers of their own, along with an unreasonable number of pets. You can visit him online at ndwilson.com.
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N. D. Wilson, The Door Before
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