The Chestnut King Read online

  “Witches,” Henry said out loud. “Or babies.”

  The door to Badon Hill wobbled on its one remaining hinge, letting in a cold sea breeze. His door. The door that had been his first entrance to Kansas. The compass locks in the central door were still set to Badon Hill. That would be the way that Caleb had come. It had been the only way, at least at first. But Henry had something new, his own door arrangement. For now, he was the only one who knew about it.

  On the left side of the wall, there had been two doors that connected to each other. Numbers 24 and 49. Henry still remembered the numbers, even though Grandfather’s journal was at the bottom of the harbor, at least if it hadn’t washed out to sea. And he remembered what they had been called. Cleave. That had been their only name, one word for both of them. Number 24 was open above his bed. Number 49 was gone. He had torn it out.

  With a deep breath, Henry stepped closer to the wall. An angry voice trickled out of a door near the top. Somewhere else, somewhere distant, a woman screamed. A barrage of smells, good and bad, surrounded him. Henry’s throat tightened. This was a much faster way to get home than traveling to Badon Hill and then hopping through faerie mounds, but it still made his head throb, and he always ended up with a bloody nose.

  Where Number 49 had been, there was only a hole in the wall. The wood was splintered around it, and the rusted crowbar Henry had used was on the floor, pushed halfway under the bed. The ninety-nine cupboards had been reduced to ninety-eight.

  Henry knelt on his bed and relaxed the focus in his eyes, letting the wall swirl in front of him, watching only the motion, the drain and burble of gaping mouths. Staring straight ahead, he lifted his right hand. The scar was heating up on his palm, but he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t see past the bright, writhing dandelion fire between his wrist and his fingers. The room brightened. The swirlings shifted. Trails and strands moved toward his hand.

  Tears ran down Henry’s cheeks. His pulse beat painfully in his temples. He couldn’t let himself blink. He lost everything when he blinked. Henry flattened his hand on the edge of Number 24 and moved it around the cupboard mouth in a slow circle. The swirl grew. It swallowed the cupboards next to it, and Henry moved his hand a little faster. His mind groped around for help, for strength in the old plank floors, in the rock and sand of concrete plaster, and in the cool air outside the attic roof. It all flowed out of his hand.

  The current thickened, mixing elements. Colors changed, and smells blended, but all of it was tinted gold. All of it answered to the dandelion. The wall had found a single motion. The other cupboard doors had been forgotten.

  Henry could feel the pull now. He was going to flush himself.

  Ignoring the physical wall, the wood of the doors, and the metal of the knobs, ignoring his own size, Henry shut his eyes, held his breath, and leaned into the funnel.

  His ribs popped and compressed. His teeth ground together, and something warm ran down his lip. His fingers found cool stone, and he fell into fading daylight. Blinking, Henry lay on his back, a small gapped roof above him. The view was cut off by a face, dark and serious, and two eyes looked down at him from around a blunt horn. A coarse tongue licked Henry’s nose and swabbed his lip.

  “Sick,” Henry said, and both his calves cramped. “Ow!” He jerked up, banged into a rickety wall, knocked over a heavy clay pot, and grabbed his toes. The raggant staggered and bellowed, offended. Then the fat animal flared its wings, restoring its dignity, and walked away.

  When his calves relented, Henry climbed to his feet. He was standing in a tiny shed, smaller than an outhouse. Old pots leaned in stacked towers in one corner. A spade with a cracked handle leaned in another. Behind him, a rotten bench hunkered over Number 49, the simple-looking cupboard that Henry had freed from the old farmhouse. Its door was open. Henry kicked it shut and wobbled out of the shed, onto the upper roof of his mother’s house. Hylfing, pale in places with new cut stone, charred in others, spread out beneath him. He could see the walls, framed up with scaffolding. He could see the bridge, straddling the river where Eli FitzFaeren had died to save him. Where Darius, the tall, insecure wizard of Byzanthamum, the witch’s pawn, had fallen with the Arrow of Chance in his throat. He could see the harbor, purpled in the early twilight, and he could hear the pounding sea beyond it.

  Henry hurried to the little stairs that would take him down to the lower roof, and then down again into the upper sun rooms of the house. But at the top of the stairs he stopped, suddenly dizzy. Leaning against the parapet, breathing slowly, he tried to calm the storm in his body. His stomach was churning from the violent world shift, and his joints felt loose. His left eyelid twitched spastically.

  “Henry?”

  Henry turned and blinked, trying to focus. But his eyes felt abused, and they refused to cooperate. The world was nothing but purple, and then a shape walked up the stairs toward him.

  “Henry?” The voice was his cousin’s. “Where did you come from?” Henrietta asked. “I was just up there, and then I heard something break when I was going back inside. Your nose is bleeding. It’s smeared all over your cheek. What happened?”

  “Is my dad back?” Henry asked. “Have they started?”

  “No. But Uncle Caleb is. He said your dad would be late. Something about Franklin Fat-Faerie. And—” Henrietta stopped. She was slowly blinking into focus. Her curls were loose around her shoulders, held back by some kind of band. She was wearing a white linen shirt, or maybe a dress, all embroidered and gathered at her waist. Not a dress. There were tan trousers underneath.

  Henry normally would have smiled and made some kind of comment about becoming a lady, or looking lovely, but he wasn’t interested in getting a reaction right now. Or in getting slapped. Henrietta grabbed Henry’s hands and pulled him to his feet.

  “You need to clean up.”

  Henry nodded and began working his way down the stairs. “And?” he asked.

  “And what?” Henrietta was following behind him.

  “You said and. And?”

  “Oh. Right.” Henry heard her sniff. She was trying to be casual. “And your brother’s here. That’s his ship in the harbor. That huge galley.”

  Henry looked up. He hadn’t noticed a new ship when he’d first tumbled out of the shed, but there it was, anchored farther out than any of the others. Henrietta was right. It was huge. Five masts—three towering—five rows of oar banks. A flag he didn’t recognize rippled slowly above the stern—white with a red emblem, long, and three-pronged at the fly.

  “James?” Henry asked. James was the sixth son, one up from Henry, one of the four still alive. Nervousness forced away the last of Henry’s dizziness, giving his stomach a new reason to burble. He had been an only child for twelve years. He didn’t know how to be with siblings, how to act or talk or touch. He was still closer to his cousins than his two sisters. And it wasn’t his sisters’ fault.

  Henrietta stepped past him and turned around. “Just be normal,” she said. “You’ll be fine. And now tell me where you were. Because I know you can’t have been in that shed.”

  Henry licked his lips. Crusting blood. “I have to clean up.”

  “Were you in Badon Hill?”

  Henry shook his head, put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder, and stepped past her. “I need to hurry.”

  Henrietta didn’t follow him. “You do that,” she said. “I’m going to have a look around.”

  Henry sighed and moved across the roof to the low, arched doorway that held more stairs. The raggant, no longer offended, snored in the shadows behind him.

  In his room, Henry dipped his hands in a porcelain bowl on his dresser and splashed his face. Then, looking in his small mirror, he rubbed at the blood. Had it been worth it? He’d seen Zeke. He’d pitched. But now his head was drumming, he’d lost his glove, and Henrietta was suspicious. And when Henrietta was suspicious, life could be terrible.

  Blinking away water, he leaned forward and examined his face. First, his eyes. A little blo
odshot but fine. His hair had been cropped short a month ago, but now brown tufts stood out awkwardly above his ears and on the back of his head, where his baseball hat had left a crease. Where was his hat? Had it fallen off in Kansas? Was it on the roof? He didn’t have another one.

  Henry reached up and touched his jaw, where the witch’s blood had marked him. For a moment, he let his eyes relax, and he watched the gray spiderwebs float out of the scar, twisting slowly. And then he pressed his palm against it and shut his eyes. Inside, his bone grew cold, and his teeth ached. But his skin was hot. A shifting, twisting, growing warmth pushed in, struggling against the witch’s deathless trace, forcing her cold away. The brand on his palm, the mark of his second sight, the mark given to him behind a barn in Kansas, where his blood had mingled with the soul of a dandelion, turned his itch into pain. A better pain. For a moment, the pleasant burning was all he felt, and then he dropped his hand, his warm jaw cooled, and the gray death strands reappeared, Nimiane’s strands, trailing away from his face in their slow dance. His scar had been growing, the strands had been thickening, and Henry didn’t want to think about what that might mean.

  Shivering, he turned from the mirror, pulled off his T-shirt, and kicked away his jeans. Someone, probably his mother, had laid a white shirt with half a collar on his bed. Dark trousers and a matching coat lay beside it. He hadn’t seen them before, and they looked new, a change from all the altered clothes his brothers had outgrown. His brothers. He hadn’t met any of them. Three of them, he never would. He had seen the dead trees in his mother’s orchard, where his own sapling had been planted. One he would meet tonight.

  Henry swallowed and jumped quickly into his clothes. His white socks were dirty, and cheatgrass seeds pricked his skin through the ankles, but he didn’t bother to change them. He forced his feet into the brown leather things that he’d been given for shoes and hurried out his door.

  In the hall, he was met by laughter. His sisters’. His cousins’. He could hear his aunt Dotty, his uncle Frank, and then the big voice of his uncle Caleb. His father’s laugh was absent. One more flight of stairs lay between him and a brother. He tried to descend them with confidence, but Henrietta was leaning against the wall at the bottom. She looked up at him, and her eyes were sparkling. Her brows went up, and she flashed him a tight smile. She was holding Henry’s hat.

  “You look nice,” she said.

  “Shut up.” His voice was flat.

  “Great socks.”

  Henry stopped beside her. “Shut up,” he said again. He hadn’t seen her look this happy in a month.

  She leaned over to him and whispered in his ear. “I can’t believe you. Does your mom know you’ve been going to Kansas?”

  Henry didn’t answer.

  “Your dad?” Henrietta examined his face. “Fine.” She turned, grabbed his arm, and pulled him into the room. “Come meet your brother.”

  The room was full, and James was seated at the far end of it, beyond the long table. His hair was the same shade of brown as Henry’s, but his jaw was much broader. His skin was dark and sea-cured, though he still looked young. Barely eighteen.

  Henry’s sisters were clinging to him. Isa, tall, with straight, shimmering auburn hair, stood at his shoulder, laughing. Una, with her black hair piled up on her small head, sat on her brother’s lap.

  Henry stopped and ignored Henrietta’s tugging. He wanted to take in the room. He loved it when the table was set, when people, his family and friends, gathered around it and seasoned the meat with laughter. Uncle Frank stood by the door, looking as he always had, though his clothes had changed and his eyes were more focused. A heavy gold chain hung around his neck. A plain carving knife stuck out of the wall above the doorway beside him. Caleb leaned against the wall on the other side of his brother, wine in his hand. Henry wondered if Frank liked the chain. He didn’t think so, but he had to wear it now. This whole evening would be a celebration of that gold around his uncle’s shoulders. Monmouth, the pale, young wizard, sat limp and smiling in a chair against the wall. Richard, with his thin legs crossed, sat perfectly upright to one side of him. He waved at Henry. Penelope and Anastasia, his other Kansas cousins, were bustling around with drinks and aprons and shining, oven-warmed faces that reminded Henry of Aunt Dotty. Anastasia’s hair was even straggling out of its braid. Penny smiled at Henry and dropped into a chair on the other side of Monmouth. Various strangers and couples that Henry had seen before but could not name milled through the room, picking at the table’s offerings and filling plates. His mother and aunt must have been in the kitchen. Grandmother Anastasia slept soundly in a corner chair, buried beneath a patched-together blanket. Her mouth was open, and thin white hair clung to her cheeks. She spent most days asleep, resting her blind eyes, and when she was awake, she rarely spoke, instead passing the time pinching and kissing whomever was closest. She had given Henry York Maccabee his new name in this room, at this table, and Henry loved her.

  The smells were as varied as the voices, the smiles as broad as the table. Henry felt hungry and somehow already fed. This was his tree. He loved Kansas and parts of his other life. But his branch, cut off from this trunk for twelve years, had been grafted back in. That didn’t mean he was used to it. Henry sighed and turned toward the kitchen. He would see his mother before meeting James.

  “Henry?” A hand gripped his shoulder and twisted him back around. He was suddenly looking into a hard, friendly face in some ways like his own. Apparently, he would meet his brother now.

  Henry smiled and realized that his brother’s other hand was hanging in the air, waiting to be clasped. He gripped it, winced at the sudden pain in his fingers, and then coughed as his brother wrapped him up. Henry’s already sore ribs creaked, and a series of pops rolled up his spine. Henry slid his arms around his brother and held on, grimacing, waiting to be put down, inhaling salt and sea from the cloth of his shirt. Muscled knots moved beneath his fingers, knots he wasn’t sure that he would ever have over his own ribs.

  And then he was free and breathing again. James stepped back and looked him over.

  “So, you’re the seventh, the one with double eyes. Our sisters say we resemble, but I can’t see it. What do you think, little brother, are we alike?” James lifted his eyebrows, strained his neck, and preened, turning his head side to side. Isa smiled, demure like her cousin Penelope. Una burst out laughing. Even Monmouth’s smile grew.

  “A little,” Henry said.

  “A lot,” Hyacinth said behind him. “All of my sons are cast from the same earth and shaped by the same hands.” She kissed Henry’s cheek, and then James’s, and put her arms around their shoulders, bringing their heads together with her own. “You may look like your brother, Henry,” she said quietly. “But you are not so much the rooster.”

  James laughed and pulled away. Henry smiled. “I saw your ship,” he said suddenly. “It’s huge.”

  “Oh.” James turned to the table and began piling cold meat and olives and spiced apples onto a plate. “Well, it’s not mine. I was taken from my own ship and ordered on this one.”

  “Why?” The voice was Caleb’s. He no longer leaned on the wall, and his pale eyes had sharpened. “That flag has not been in this sea since my childhood. Not since your father and I went into the south as boys.” Caleb looked at Grandmother Anastasia in the corner. Henry was surprised to see her blind eyes open, her smile gone. “Not since the sea rose and took your grandsire.”

  The feel of the room had changed. Henry stepped backward. Caleb looked a great deal like Mordecai, Henry’s own father. He was tall and dark-haired with light eyes—blue with green centers when the light was bright. He could laugh as easily as he could breathe, but there was a hardness inside him, in his bones, that could make him seem as tough and unbreakable as one of the ancient trees he tended in the hills. For the first time, Henry wondered if Caleb and his father were twins.

  James was the only one eating in the room. A few of the guests sipped nervously at their wi
ne.

  “I was summoned to one of the imperial galleys,” James said quietly, “and the commander told me that my father lived. But the word that Mordecai had returned was already being whispered in every inn and in every harbor along the continent. Green man to the northern imps, keeper of Hylfing, barbarian, savage, ape, witch-bane, what have you. The rumor men and storytellers flavored it as they liked. Mother tells me that she sent a letter, but I never received it. A dozen different times, and in a dozen different ways, I heard old sailors entertain the mess with tales of how you, Uncle Caleb, and my father imprisoned Nimroth’s heir when you were only children. I heard every breed of lie and truth and mythic tale that could be told. And then I began to hear a new story about Mordecai’s return and his missing son and a wizard shattering the walls of my mother city and the golden flight of a magical arrow. Some said it was the Arrow of Chance, the shaft of Ramoth Gilead itself, and others that Mordecai had woven it from lightning and fitted it to his brother’s bow. All told of how the earth shook and the mountains heaved up fire when the arrow found the wizard’s throat. I had already resolved to request early leave to return to Hylfing when the emperor’s men came aboard in Lahore and claimed me for their own service.” James grinned. “The mates and crew—some tale-tellers themselves—were shocked to learn my pedigree. Only the captain had known.”

  Caleb had not looked away from his nephew’s face. His voice was quiet but stone-hard. “What service did they require?”

  “Delivery and introduction,” James said. “The stories were not only about my father’s return. There were dark stories about Endor and a new life for it as well—the return of the deathless queen. I have a parchment with the emperor’s seal to give to my father. And I was to introduce him to an imperial liaison, but the man was not on our ship. He may arrive within the week.”