The Chestnut King

by N. D. Wilson

  “You disrespect your emperor.” James’s voice was cold.

  “My emperor?” Monmouth laughed. “I have no fealty to him. My father is a king in the west. He is petty but un-conquered, and he is no better.”

  “Enough,” the captain said. He looked at Frank. “Shall it be pleasant, with the ladies of the city tossing flowers at your departure? Or shall we take you trussed up in a wagon?”

  Frank smiled. “Flowers make me sneeze. But I should warn you, the folk in this town aren’t over-sophisticants when it comes to trussing up the mayor and his family—no mentioning the family of their favorite hero. They might not realize that it’s all friendly and diplomatic and get a bit testy.”

  The big man snorted. “Fishermen and farmers do not concern us.”

  A yelling erupted outside in the square. Frank turned to the window and looked down three stories at two bodies rolling on the ground. A boy and a man dressed in black. Hyacinth stood up behind Frank.

  “Henry?” she asked. The bodies separated. She gripped Frank’s shoulder. “That’s Henry.”

  The yelling grew to a roar as the city guard broke ranks and rushed to their weapons. Soldiers in red moved forward to meet them.

  The big man in black rose from his chair. “Now,” he said to the captain. “We do it now.” He turned to the soldiers along the wall. “Tie them.”

  Monmouth leapt from his chair and a blade flicked from his fingers, but the big man cupped his head in one hand and slammed him against the wall. The young wizard slumped to the floor, unconscious, but his knife was buried in the man’s gut. He picked it out and dropped it on the floor. “Only the boy must be taken alive. Get all you can of the rest, but kill any who resist too long. We must be on the ships before the anthill swarms.”

  In the south, nearer to the world’s belt, a woman rose from her dreaming and stepped out from between four trees. She walked into the sun, a cat in her arms, her eyes unfocused. A man, suspended between two trees, moaned softly behind her.

  “Mordecai,” she whispered, smiling. “You would walk again in Endor?”

  Near a black pool, a woman waited, kneeling with her head down. A velvet chair had been set on the grass. Beside it, a wicker cage busily peeped with young birds.

  Nimiane sat. “This is for the emperor,” she said, and dropped a small scroll in front of the woman.

  “Mistress.” The woman crawled away backward before standing and hurrying through the arbors.

  The heir to Nimroth the Devouring, Blackstar, half-human, reached into the wicker cage and pulled out a bird. It blinked in the sun, wobbled, and slumped on her palm. She closed her fingers around it.

  “The boy has grown,” she said. “But not enough.”

  She opened her hand and released a small pile of ash into the wind. It swirled and descended, dusting the surface of the lifeless pond. It was a small life, but she savored it. Greater lives would come.

  Inhaling slowly, she reached for another bird.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Henry slumped into a doorway, panting. His second sight was gone, his head was throbbing, and something sharp had nicked his calf. His jaw was ice-cold. Henry touched it, and his fingers came away sticky and red. The old burn was bleeding.

  He hadn’t been able to touch the man again. Coradin, or the one who worked through him, had been far too strong. Henry thought about what he’d seen, the thick, gray, spinning ropes on the back of the man’s head. They were like his own, like the fine webs that twisted out of his jaw. Is that what his would look like in the end—huge, braiding serpents? Would the witch be able to control him, too?

  Henry knew Coradin could have killed him. But he hadn’t. He’d wanted to take Henry alive. And he would have succeeded if the city guard hadn’t swept over them both in their rush to meet the soldiers.

  In the square, the guardsmen were drawing back now, scattering. The soldiers, disciplined in the extreme, moved through them in a dense phalanx, guarding a small group in their core.

  Henry sat up, straining to see. A lean man bobbed along in the center. Uncle Frank? It was his uncle, and his mother was beside him. Henry scrambled to his feet and limped forward. But what could he do? They were surrounded by more than two hundred men.

  He didn’t care. He had to do something. And then, pushing out from the soldiers, came two tall men, both in black. Both looked straight at him.

  Henry turned, and with tears of anger in his eyes, he bit back the pain in his leg, and he ran. He had to get to the house, to his sisters and his cousins.

  From the roof, Henrietta watched the wagon roll up the street and stop. She watched soldiers take up positions at every door and every window.

  “What are they doing?” Anastasia asked.

  Dotty sighed. Her arms were wrapped around Penelope. She wasn’t crying. There was no use in it. “They are coming to get us,” she said.

  Una glanced over the wall. “I don’t want to go,” she said, and leaned against her sister.

  “I don’t think we have much choice.” Isa’s voice was surprisingly calm. Henrietta looked at her and then back down at the street.

  “We can fight,” she said.

  “And we can be killed.” Richard still wore his nightshirt. “It is in our best interest to go peaceably.”

  “Mom?” Penelope asked. “What are we going to do?”

  Dotty buried her face in her daughter’s hair. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they will take us to your father.”

  In the street, two men with axes walked to the front door.

  Henry heard the shouting before he could see the house. The rain was still spotty but falling enough to make the cobbles slick. He had ducked through side alleys after crossing back over the bridge, and he knew it had slowed him down. But it had also kept him out of sight.

  Once again, breathing hard and digging a knuckle into the stitch in his side, Henry glanced over his shoulder. No one was following him. At least no one he could see.

  He staggered on. Another corner. A final crooked alley, and he slowed down. He was at the top of the hill, approaching his own street.

  Angry voices shouted insults. He could hear glass breaking and a man giving orders. A mob of men and women pressed toward his house. Some were throwing stones. Others carried simple weapons, and others merely shouted. These were not guardsmen or soldiers. These were townspeople, pushing against the red of the emperor’s fighting men.

  Henry dug into the back of the crowd, worming his way forward. His house was surrounded by a double row of soldiers. Inside them, a wagon was being loaded. Dotty sat in the front, with her arms tied behind her back. Anastasia and Penelope sat beside her. Anastasia was yelling at the soldiers. Penelope was crying. Richard, with a swollen eye and a cut lip, sat perfectly upright. Isa and Una, both bound, were led from the house, lifted up, and shoved roughly in. A wave of anger rolled through the crowd, and they surged forward but broke against the pike fence of the soldiers.

  Two more soldiers stepped out of the house, carrying a tied Henrietta between them. Twisting, she managed to pull a leg free and kicked one of the men in the chin. The crowd cheered while she got her footing and drove her head into the other man’s stomach. Henry squeezed out from the front of the mob and tried to duck under a soldier’s pike. He cracked Henry on the head, knocked him to his knees, and kicked him backward into the press of bodies.

  “Leave her!” a big voice said, and two men in black stepped out of the crowd across from Henry. The frustrated soldiers picked Henrietta up, one clubbed her on the head with the butt of his sword, and they threw her limp body back into the house, pulling the front door closed.

  While Henry watched, they ran to the wagon. Six other soldiers joined them, all huddling together, receiving orders from the men in black. Flame sprang up between them, and the eight men in red turned back to the house, carrying lit torches. Women screamed, and men pried cobbles up from the road and heaved them at the fence of red-shirts, at the fire bearers. Three t
ownspeople with short swords broke through the circle and were pushed back.

  Henry looked at his sisters, both sitting straight and proud, both with their eyes on their home and tears on their cheeks. One of the men in black climbed onto the wagon. Henry didn’t care where the other one had gone. Panic froze his limbs, his mind. His sisters, his aunt, and his cousins were being carted away.

  Henrietta was being burned alive.

  Flames licked out of every window, and still the soldiers held their circle. The planks of the old front door crackled.

  Where was his grandmother?

  The world went silent. From his knees, Henry saw the angry crowd surging against the pikes, but noiselessly. He saw cobbles bounce and flames lick and two soldiers stumble under blows and fall. He saw his sisters crying and Aunt Dotty writhing, now fighting her ropes, struggling to fall from the wagon, to go to her daughter through the fire. He saw the wind rise up above his burning house, and he saw blue sky crack between the clouds.

  But he heard nothing. The blood and panic in him calmed. He knew what he needed to do. A man in black stepped in front of him. A big man, with a deep scar on each cheek.

  Henry jumped to his feet and pushed backward into the crowd. The man shoved through the soldiers and came after him, but Henry was smaller and could move faster through the seams.

  And he wasn’t being pummeled by an angry mob. The man in black was like an earwig among ants. Stones and clubs and fists all found their marks, and Henry doubled back, back toward the line of soldiers but closer to the house. This time, no soldier’s pike would stop him.

  He pulled a stone from a woman’s hand and slipped to the front. Breathing slowly, he gathered strength, his muscles overflowed, and the world changed in front of him. He changed it.

  The stone hit the serpent on a soldier’s chest, and an explosion of blades and tongues both gold and green drove him to the ground. The men on either side of him staggered and fell, and the line was broken. In shock, the crowd held back.

  Henry stepped through a dense, rising cloud of dandelion down and rushed to the burning house. Flipping up the hood of his cloak, he slammed into the crackling door and tumbled through the flames.

  At the foot of the stairs, Henrietta lay on her side. Grandmother Anastasia, on her knees, rocked and sang beside her, drowned out by the angry death of burning timbers.

  The heat hit Henry like a solid force. He scrambled forward, feeling his body lose its moisture, his lungs filling with poisonous heat.

  Was Henrietta dead? It didn’t matter. Henry grabbed her under the arms and, holding his breath, began dragging her toward the stairs.

  “Grandmother!” he yelled. “Upstairs! We have to get upstairs!”

  But his grandmother still swayed with her pale eyes open, her skin red, every thin white hair curling out from her head. “The puppet’s strings,” she said. “Cut the puppet’s strings. Take his finger.”

  “What?” Henry yelled. He had Henrietta halfway onto the stairs. He dropped her and jumped over her body, down to his grandmother. “Come now!” he yelled, and he dragged her to her feet. “Upstairs! Upstairs!” He was shouting in her ear.

  “The strings,” she said.

  And a black shape stepped through the burning doorway.

  “No!” Henry yelled. “No!” He pushed his grandmother toward Henrietta, but before he could turn back around, thick arms wrapped around his waist and lifted him to a shoulder. He grabbed for his grandmother, he grabbed for the beamed ceiling, but he was moving away too quickly. Henrietta’s body slumped on the stairs, where she would burn. His grandmother stood blind and helpless beside her.

  “No!” Henry yelled again, and he pounded at the man’s back. He tore at the man’s hair, ripping his black knot loose, trying to reach back for his eyes. They were in the flaming doorway. He was almost outside. Henry rolled and hooked his left arm on the top of the door. Beside his elbow, sticking out from the wall with a blackened blade and smoking handle, there was a simple carving knife, the knife Henry had thrown at his christening. In a single motion, Henry ripped it free and plunged it into the big man’s back. The man didn’t flinch. His grip tightened, and he jerked Henry down and forward, but not quite loose. “The strings!” Grandmother shouted. “Take his finger!” Scrambling to free his legs, to brace his arms, Henry saw it. Nested in the oiled black hair where the knot had been, a single, pale finger twitched, as if in pain. There was no time to wonder, no time for confusion or revulsion. Henry unhooked his arm and grabbed the finger. Henry raised the blade, and flesh seared as he jerked the hot edge down through scalp, through the fusion of finger and skull. Together, he and the man burst into air and wind and sunlight and tumbled to the ground.

  But the man was limp. Henry stood, and in the split second before he turned and lunged back into the smoke, he looked down into blinking, confused eyes set above scarred cheeks, and he saw the life leave, carried away with the ash of his father’s house.

  Inside, Grandmother had climbed over Henrietta and was straining at her arms. She was staring up and smiling.

  Henry clambered over his cousin and pushed his grandmother up the flight. “The roof!” he shouted. Then, grabbing his cousin and trying to hold his breath, he dragged her quickly up to the second-story landing and around to the next flight of stairs. Passing his bedroom, the door rattled, and a bellow like a whole flock of angry geese echoed behind it.

  Twisting the knob and shoving it open, Henry moved on as quickly as he could. The raggant plowed into the hall with red, angry eyes. His nose and face were scratched and cut from breaking through a closet door, but his voice was louder than ever.

  “Sorry,” Henry said, backing into the next stairwell. “I’m sorry, I didn’t want you getting in the way.” Henry grunted his way up and up onto the top floor, licking sweat and ash off his lips as he pulled. The raggant followed Henrietta’s feet with its wings flared, bleating and groaning in irritation.

  “Last flight,” Henry said. The door to the roof was open at the top, and he could already see the blackened sky. Willing his legs enough strength for another reverse climb, he pulled himself and his cousin up onto the rooftop. His grandmother stood waiting for him, wobbling on her feet with her face toward the clouds, ignoring the exertion, the smoke and flames, the roar of the crowd in the street.

  Henry lowered Henrietta to her back. She groaned and then coughed, the sweetest sound Henry could remember hearing in a long time, but he couldn’t wait and hope she’d come to. He looked at the stairs to the upper roof and knew that his legs were done. He couldn’t get Henrietta up there.

  Smoke surrounded the walls. The one patch of blue sky was gone. Raindrops, not nearly enough raindrops, were falling. Henry staggered up the narrow stairs to the shed. He kicked the boards free around the little cupboard, picked it up, and hurried back down.

  “Another puppet comes,” his grandmother said.

  Henry’s heart sank. He ran to the doorway, saw nothing but smoke, and slammed it shut. He had to be quick.

  He shoved the cupboard into a corner beside Henrietta and knelt in front of it. The roof was hot beneath his knees. Vibrations shivered up into his bones as beams and timbers weakened in the floors below. How was he supposed to concentrate? He wasn’t good at this by himself in a quiet attic, let alone now. He slapped his own face and stared at the little door. Nothing.

  “Do it or die, Henry,” he said aloud. “Do it or they die.”

  He could see. He could see the magic of the world, the living, changing words that made it all. Great towering souls of flame swung around him, battling with the cool breeze, chasing away the salty breath of the sea. Tangled anger and grief rose up from the unseen crowd and blended with their cries. In front of him, in all the madness, he could see the tiny swirling drain, a seam between two worlds held in place by a cupboard, by the small, twisting magic of wood and its grains.

  He reached into the drain with both hands, with his mind, with his self, and he forced the swir
l to grow, to push against the fire strength and smoke, to use it. He had to make the world-seam bigger than he ever had, big enough for three.

  Henry’s head throbbed. His mind felt crushed. He shut his eyes, and still he could see. He could see nothing but the hurricane of elements in front of him, a galaxy of smoke and dandelions and anger and stone widening a hole, a doorway into a battered old farmhouse and a world of grass.

  His eyes were still closed, but his grandmother’s strands came slowly into view. She swirled in front of him, between him and the doorway. Her threads were old and tired, like the roots of a tree grown on a cliff. They were slow and unafraid. Some were dead, gray and stiff. And then he could see it, a rift inside of her, a wound between her soul and her body, a split in the ancient tree that would never heal.

  In a moment, all of her stepped into the eye of the storm, and she was gone.

  Henry opened his stinging eyes, blinking, and looked at Henrietta. She was trying to sit up. He’d seen her before; he wasn’t tempted to study her threads. They were all fast and bright and as curly as her hair. He jumped up and hooked his arms under hers, boosting her to her knees.

  “Quick!” he said. “Crawl in the cupboard.” She moved forward, but not enough. The hole was already shrinking. Henry dropped behind her and put his shoulder in her backside. She kicked him hard and crawled on her own.