The Chestnut King

  Anastasia did, and her mouth fell open. They stood on an open plain, rolling slightly, lush with short turf, deeper and brighter in its green than Kansas in the spring, spotted in places with ancient trees. Behind them was a dense wood. And in front of them, dominating the plain, rose a round, steep hill, nearly a mountain. Its sides, emerald green, stepped up in seven leaning and off-balance terraces to the peak. And the peak was crowned with a tall square tower. Knobbed spikes reached into the sky off each of its corners. Behind the green, behind the hill and the trees and the tower, the sky swirled with the whites and grays and charcoals of the rain-bearing clouds.

  Fat Frank stood staring at it with his thumbs in his belt. He glanced at Anastasia and looked quickly away. His bulbous cheeks had been wet. “Never thought I’d see it. Nor that it existed to be seen.”

  “What?” Jacques said. “Tears from the queene’s own Franklin Fat?”

  Frank sniffed. “Rain in my eye.”

  The bald faerie pulled his mustache and spread his arms.

  “What is it?” Anastasia asked.

  “That,” Jacques said, “is Glaston’s Barrow, the first mound of the faeren fathers, Hall of the Chestnut King.” He winked. “No man has entered since Clovis, and his bones are in it still.”

  * * *

  Coradin walked down a long, broad hall. He had smashed in the rotten door of a barrack on the street level and was now two floors belowground.

  Turn.

  He turned and faced a wide opening, closed off by an iron grate. The five men around him stepped forward. Only two still had torches. The wind thrown up by the horseman had smothered the rest. The wind had also gathered the dust and ash from the circle and forced Coradin and his brothers to their bellies in the street. When the dust had cleared, the horsemen were gone. But they hadn’t gone far. Not if the boy was still with them.

  The three without torches gripped the grate and forced it up, grinding ancient gears as it rose.

  My fathers kept armies of your kind. You will find what you need.

  Henry slipped off the broad horse’s back and followed his father and Caleb up a short but wide flight of steps. They were at the rear of a building that Henry would have called a palace in any other city, but here it seemed modest—four stories of black stone, arched windows and porticoes, supported by thin, bonelike pillars and buttresses and a balustrade encircling what looked to be a flat roof. The horses stamped and snorted in the ash, and the men stayed with them. The dog flopped down panting on the steps.

  Caleb whistled as he reached the door, and Henry looked up. The owls, five of them, rose higher and drifted away over the city. Mordecai stopped and waited for him. Henry hadn’t been able to tell him much in all the blowing wind and galloping that had gone on since they’d met in the circle. He wasn’t exactly sure where to start, and he was still carrying the little pyramid tucked under his arm.

  Caleb threw open the doors and stepped to the side. His bow was over one shoulder, and two short swords were tucked into his belt. Mordecai carried no weapons. Taking Henry by the shoulder, he led him through into near darkness. Then he pulled a limp sack out of his cloak.

  Henry smiled. “Faerie light?”

  Mordecai nodded and slapped the sack three times against his thigh. Then he held it to his lips and—Henry strained to hear his words—hummed quietly. A snap. His father jerked the mouth open and cracked the sack like a whip. Light exploded through the house, ricocheting off walls and burrowing into cracks. There were no shadows. The light was everywhere.

  Mordecai smiled and led Henry through a small room and out into the main entryway. The floor glistened white wherever feet kicked away dust. Stairs twisted up to mezzanines, three in all. It was open to the roof.

  “With a little encouragement,” Mordecai said, “this light may last us an hour.” Henry followed him onto the stairs. His father’s eyes had hardened, and his rough jaw moved slowly. “Tell me quickly what brings my son to Endor. I cannot imagine it to be good news.”

  “It’s not,” Henry said. He stopped. Mordecai turned and faced him. Henry stared into his father’s eyes and saw that they were black. They were focused on his face, on the threads on his jaw. Henry put his hand up to cover it and stopped. If he needed anyone to see it, it was his father.

  Mordecai sighed. “It grows quickly.” He put his arm around his son’s shoulders. Caleb stopped on the stairs behind them. “Come,” Mordecai said. “Your uncle and I hunt for a cure. Tell us your tale while we search. There is not much time.”

  Henry was tired of stairs, but he hurried up them, and was led down a hall, through a doorway, and into a library piled with books and scrolls and manuscripts. Stacks filled an enormous stone fireplace and blocked the tall windows. Much was beneath dust, but much had also been recently shifted. A table, bowing beneath the weight of pages, had only one small clear end.

  Mordecai lifted a stack of loose manuscripts onto the table. Caleb leaned his bow against a tattered stack of papers.

  “What is this place?” Henry asked.

  “When Endor was green,” Mordecai said, “and Nim-roth was no more than a young pauper son in his father’s house with a questionable taste for wizardry, this was his home.” He looked up. “And this was his room. But we wait on your story. Why do we find my son running from fingerlings? From the hills, we watched lights on the bell tower and rode in when we heard its ringing.”

  Both Caleb and Mordecai stopped and faced Henry, leaning against the table.

  Henry took a deep breath. Looking at his father, at his uncle, he felt a knot growing in his throat. He would not cry. He would not even let his voice waver. “The morning after you left, soldiers came. There were two more galleys in the harbor. They were looking for you. You weren’t there, so they took Uncle Frank and James and Monmouth and my mother.”

  Caleb straightened, and his face became stone. Henry couldn’t look at his father’s face. He couldn’t look in his eyes. Staring at his boots instead, he continued. “Fat Frank and I tried to find them, but fingerlings were in the city, too, and they came after me. When I got back to the house, more soldiers had come, and they were dragging everyone out and putting them in a wagon. A whole crowd was trying to stop them, but they couldn’t. When Henrietta fought too much, they hit her on the head and threw her back in the house. Then they lit it on fire. Grandmother was inside, too.”

  Henry looked up. His father’s eyes were no longer black. They were ice. He was leaning forward now, and his jaw worked silently.

  “I got inside,” Henry said, “even though a fingerling tried to stop me, and I got Grandmother and Henrietta up to the roof and then through a cupboard up there that I had from Kansas. You didn’t know about that, I’m sorry.”

  “We knew,” Mordecai said.

  “What?” Henry looked from his father to his uncle and back again. “For how long?”

  “Since your first bloody nose,” Mordecai said. “Go on.”

  “Well,” said Henry. “There’s not much else. I mean, there is. Lots. But not important. I left Grandmother in Kansas with Mrs. Johnson, and Zeke and Henrietta and I came through the Endor cupboard to find you.”

  “Zeke and Henrietta?” Caleb asked. “Where are they?”

  Henry held up the little pyramid cupboard. “We came into this horrible crypt.” He looked at his father. “And I’m sorry, but I think I let Nimroth and Nia and everyone else out. And then the fingerlings had us trapped on top of the bell tower. That’s when I started ringing it. We all went through this little pyramid cupboard into Frank and Dotty’s old house, and then I reached back through and tipped us off the tower. When it landed in the street, I left Zeke and Henrietta there, and you found me in the big circle.”

  Mordecai stared at his son. Caleb smiled and looked at his brother.

  “Lucky, too,” Henry said. “I didn’t have much of a plan.”

  Mordecai pointed at the cupboard. “Zeke and Henrietta are in there?”

  “They’re t
hrough there, yeah.”

  “Well.” Mordecai crossed his arms. “You have walked the spiders’ webs.”

  Henry grinned. His father sounded like Uncle Frank.

  “Who told you that you faced fingerlings?” Caleb asked. He looked at his brother. “I cannot think fingerlings likely. Nimiane used other, newer tools—wizards and witch-dogs.” He looked back to Henry. “Did Fat Frank name them for you?”

  For a moment, Henry rolled through his memory. Who had told him the name? “I think the witch did,” he said. “In one of my dreams.”

  “You spoke with the witch?” Caleb asked. Mordecai’s eyes were back on his son’s jaw.

  Henry nodded. “And I’ve seen the fingers. I cut two off. But more fingerlings just keep coming.” He put his hand to his cold scar. “They can find me anywhere.”

  Henry watched shock spread across his father’s face.

  For a moment, Caleb was motionless. “We must move,” he said. “Now.”

  “Fool,” said Mordecai. “I’ve been a fool. Nimiane positions the board while we root through a library. Of course fingerlings could find you.” He turned to the manuscripts piled on the table. “Caleb,” he said quietly. “We have been wasting our days.”

  “Maybe not,” Caleb said. “But we did waste our time covering our tracks. They’ll come straight to us.”

  Mordecai filled his lungs slowly. He looked deep into Henry’s eyes and lifted his right hand to his son’s jaw. Henry saw the swirling brand of grapevines on his father’s palm, and then he felt it in his flesh—a slow, twisting strength, as rich as it was deep. He saw pain in his father’s eyes when he touched the scar. The eyes moved away, around the room, but his hand stayed where it was, warming cold death.

  “This room was my hope,” Mordecai said. “We searched for a secret without knowing what it might be—only knowing what we needed it to be. But there is no time for sifting through this graveyard now, even without the fingerlings. Nimiane has struck too soon and too hard. The board is set, and now we play her game.”

  “What were you looking for?” Henry asked.

  Mordecai smiled and put his other hand on Henry’s cheek. “We search for the death of death—for the tapestry of power behind Nimroth that first fused his soul to his body and gave him eternal leeching life. We search for your life, for all our lives.”

  “The Blackstar?” Henry asked.

  “Perhaps,” Mordecai said. “Perhaps not. We have searched for it before. Nimroth hid it before his madness rose to its fullest tide. He carried only a disguised pebble in his last year enthroned, much to the disgust of his heirs. In the end, even he believed it to be real. He does still. His sons entombed him with it. But if you have seen his husk, you may know this already.”

  Caleb tumbled a stack of decayed books off the windowsill and onto the floor. Pages ripped free and slid through clouding dust. He rattled the casement off its hinges, threw it down into the street, and whistled.

  “Notch and stirrup! They come!” he shouted. Then he turned to Mordecai. “Brother, we cannot carry books. The witch is in Dumarre, that much we know—the emperor’s phalanxes would not form against us without her whispers in his ear.” He picked up his bow. “We have galleys to race or I should beg to perch here and wait for the finger-men.”

  Mordecai straightened, dropping his hands. “I would have given my sight for Eli FitzFaeren in this room, at this task. I have been useless.” He looked at Caleb. “Nimiane wishes us to race into her arms, and she baits the hook well. We may yet bite.” He rubbed his jaw, and Henry watched his father’s eyes unfocus, staring away past the books and the walls, past the house and the life-drained land. “She has left us three moves with little difference between them. We are taken by the fingerlings, or we run to her snarling but powerless to make the kill, and her fingerlings come behind us. We defeat the fingerlings, and still we run to her. That buys time, but time is of little use. As you say, we race the galleys already.” He sighed, and his eyes reentered the room. “What does she fear? Not death. The coming of her madness? We must find a way to play beyond the board. We must do the unexpected.”

  “Unexpected or no,” Caleb said, “what we do, we must do now. Much has already been decided for us. We outstrip the finger-men on horseback, or soon, very soon, we face them on foot.”

  “Henry?” A voice drifted out of the pyramid. Henrietta’s whisper. “Henry? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

  Birds screeched, and the long howl of the great dog echoed through the house.

  Downstairs, wood splintered.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Henrietta leaned her back against Henry’s little bed and stared at the darkness. He had told them to stay and had ignored their objections. By the time she really had managed to clear her head and get her bearings after diving through a world-seam on a tower wall, Henry was gone.

  She flicked on her flashlight and pointed it down at the little cupboard to Endor. It was weird thinking that Henry could be carrying the other end around. It was weirder thinking that she had just come through that tiny door. She wiped her nose and checked her fingers. The bleeding had stopped.

  “We should save the batteries,” Zeke said.

  Henrietta killed her light. “We should go after Henry.”

  “Let me know when you figure out how.”

  “If he hadn’t lost Grandfather’s journal, we’d be able to. We could set the compass locks to Endor and crawl through downstairs.”

  The floor creaked as Zeke shifted. “We’re here for him. We can wait.”

  “Does he even need us?” Henrietta asked. “It’s not like either of us did much in there. We rang the bell. You threw the hatchet.”

  Zeke laughed. “Which bounced off.” A backpack slid across the floor. “Henry’s pitching. Slap your glove and talk him up. Pitcher throws better when a team props him, even if it’s just with chatter.”

  Henrietta sat in the dark and listened to Zeke breathe. “You mean like, ‘Atta babe, down the pipe,’ and that stuff my dad would say? Then we’re just cheerleaders.”

  Zeke yawned. “We’re in the field with him. We back him up. If a pitcher’s real good …” He yawned again, slowly. “Then we’re just cheerleaders.”

  “Boys are ridiculous,” Henrietta said. “You’d never call each other ‘babe’ after a game.” She waited for a response. “Zeke?”

  Zeke snored.

  “Sheesh.” Henrietta turned her flashlight on. Zeke had pushed his backpack against the wall and was lying flat on his back with his head propped up on it and his mouth open. Henrietta scooted closer to the little door to Endor, crossed her legs, and listened.

  She couldn’t hear much. More noises drifted out of the other doors. She looked over at Zeke. She could never sleep in this room, not with so many doors open. A sudden burst of wind pushed through the Endor cupboard, carrying a funnel of ash. She slid her backpack over and blocked it. After a while, she pulled the pack away. Could she hear something? She leaned closer. Thumping? Voices?

  She didn’t want to yell for Henry. He could be hiding. He could be in the middle of something. There was no “could be” about it. He was sure to be in the middle of something. She bit her tongue and waited—listening to distant sounds trickle from the other cupboards, the creaking of the old, battered farmhouse, and the breeze moving through the broken round window at the end of the attic. Zeke rolled onto his side and stopped snoring. Sighing, Henrietta imitated him, lowering herself to her side and propping her head on her backpack. With her mind wandering, imagining horror after horror pursuing Henry, she stared into the dark mouth of the little cupboard.

  “Atta babe,” she whispered.

  Time crawled by, measured by an unknown sun outside and Zeke’s breathing in the attic. Henrietta blinked. Her mind was foggy. Had she been asleep? She wasn’t now. She could hear voices. She rolled forward and put her ear in the cupboard mouth. Henry was talking to someone. Caleb? It was Caleb. She laughed. He’d found them.

/>   She pressed her face into the cupboard. “Henry?” she said. “Henry? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

  No one answered.

  Caleb and Mordecai both stood straight. Neither flinched. Shouts rose from downstairs, and the dog’s baying grew. Caleb, breathing slowly, looked at his brother and smiled with tight lips. His eyes held no fear. Drawing one of his short swords, he held out the hilt to Mordecai.

  “We stand here,” he said.

  Mordecai nodded, taking the sword. He turned to Henry. “Is the way open to Hylfing?”

  “Maybe,” Henry said. He shifted nervously. His father didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry. “But the fingerling followed us through once already.”

  Caleb ducked into the hall and disappeared.

  Mordecai set his right palm against the black pyramid. One swift movement of his wrist sent Henry rocking backward. His father had opened the seam more than head-high with nothing but his own strength—a hole, bounded by deep purple and twisting green. “These stacks are useless.” Mordecai pointed to one side of the room. “But these”—he turned to the wall behind Henry, mounded with scrolls and rotting leather and loose pages—“one sentence may mean a different world. Take as many through as you can. Store them safely in the ruined farmhouse. Get to Hylfing.”

  Caleb stepped back into the room. “They come cautiously,” he said. “But they are armed and helmed and wear collars and chains. It will not be easy.”

  Henry sagged. He didn’t want to get anywhere. He’d just finished getting somewhere, and it had been horrible. He wanted to plant himself firmly in the shadow of his father and uncle, wherever they might go. “Can’t I stay?” he asked.

  “If I could keep you with me, I would,” said Mordecai. “I would keep you with me if you were weak as well. But you are not. Find Fat Frank. We will meet you in Hylfing if we can. Wait at The Horned Horse, but do not wait more than a single day. If we do not come to you, travel with your cupboard. Stay nowhere long. Enter the mounds together and demand passage to the Faerie Queene. They are stubborn now, but you have bullied faeren before. The district mounds will be no help. They will not aggress beyond their regions, and Dumarre must run mad with a plague of faeren if we are to succeed. That city must receive no galleys.”