The Chestnut King

by N. D. Wilson

  Thick smoke rose up from the gates. Fire danced around the canals.

  “What’s happening?” Henry asked. “Is this Dumarre? Is it burning?”

  His grandmother shrugged, pulled his hand, and again led him forward through the dream, down into the city.

  The two of them stood on a city wall wider than a Kansas street. Above them loomed an enormous statue of a man, straddling the wall, a dolphin beneath each foot. He wore a helmet and a loincloth, and in each hand he held a ship. Henry stared up at him and then down inside the walls. Soldiers in red rushed by, carrying double-bladed pikes. Bodies lay scattered in the moonlit streets, bodies of men and women and soldiers, bodies of oxen and horses still hitched to shattered wagons. Phalanxes of soldiers blocked the gates, and archers stood behind them. Men ducked through the shadowy streets, hurling stones or torches at the barricade and slipping away again as arrows rattled in the streets and off the walls behind them.

  Henry ignored the gray trail he had been following. Dropping his grandmother’s hand, he turned and moved along the wall, scanning the city, watching canal barges burn and rioters creep in silent mobs through the streets. He looked up at the towers with their lamp-lit windows, and out at the sea, crowded with anchored merchant ships, corralled by galleys. The harbor within the sea gates was full of smaller craft, crawling with anxious sailors. The gatehouse on the wall was surrounded by soldiers standing firm against the knife-armed anger of seamen.

  Henry didn’t understand. Did they know about the witch? What had she done? And then he froze. Walking tall through the streets, unarmored and unafraid, came two men in black, both with oiled hair knotted in the back. Four broad men walked behind them, with swords at their belts and whips in their hands. They wore wizard robes, brown with hoods hanging large on their backs. Each held a wolf on a chain. Where they went, crowds scattered. And when they didn’t, the wolves ran free, maddened by the whispers of their masters.

  The witch was no longer hiding herself, and the lovers of darkness had crept out from their corners. They had found their queen.

  Even in his dreaming, Henry’s skin was cold. Everywhere, he could feel the witch and her endless leeching, her theft of life and strength. She had no need to hide her traces now, no need to shrink in shadows. This was her new Endor. Her game had been played and played well. This was no imagining of Henry’s. He knew that his dreaming eyes saw truth, just as he knew that his stomach had curled into knots inside him. Fingerlings and witch-dogs patrolling the emperor’s city. Citizens dead in the streets, held in by their own defenders. How long until all life was gone? How long until the streets were paved with ash?

  He turned to his grandmother. Her eyes were wet, but as hard as river stones.

  “This is real,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “This is where they are bringing my mother?”

  She nodded again.

  “Where is the witch?”

  Henry’s gray strand was thicker here, and taut. They followed it down off the wall, and together they stood in the carnage of the streets. From his jaw, the trace of the witch stretched away from him and up into the towers.

  “How do we find our way?” Henry asked.

  His grandmother took his hand.

  “Do I really want to?”

  She half-smiled and pulled him up through the dream, up through the city, above the shouting and the ducking and the torch-carrying panic. They stood on a small, un-railed balcony, hugging the shoulder of a tall palace tower. Across from them, a greater tower strained for the sky. Between the two, suspended from chains thicker than trees, there hung a walled garden.

  Henry blinked. Treetops stretched above the walls of the hanging garden. A narrow rope-bridge led from the balcony to a small, peaked door. He could feel the pulling now, the pulling at everything, though the walls and trees in front of him were still. He knew what lay inside those walls. There would be a pool and a fountain. There would be four trees set around a couch where the witch slept. He knew what would be hanging between two of those trees. He moved forward onto the bridge, expecting it to sway beneath him, expecting to feel fear, but his dream-body was not heavy enough to move anything. He could have walked across the gap without the bridge, or jumped unharmed to the courtyards below.

  When he reached the door, he hesitated, and then shut his eyes and stepped through the heavy planks.

  The garden was as still as it had been in his earlier dreams, and a little different. The fountain of the tortured man was larger. The black pool was smaller. The trees were alive, but not with their own strength. They were ungrowing, undying, unchanging, and their branches were overdelicate—real trees, corrupted and molded and filled until they were hardly trees at all.

  Not one cricket chirruped as Henry walked, not a leaf rustled. He walked past the pool and through the trees, into the small clearing where fingerlings had been made, and beyond, to Nimiane’s grove, her bed.

  The pale man hung limp between the trees, sleeping. Where his hands were buried into bark, Henry could see gray strands growing, twisting like lazy smoke into the sky. There were only six, two from one hand and four from the other. Something inside Henry smiled. Four had been killed now. His father and uncle must have ended two in Endor. But there was something odd about one of the strands. It was thicker than the others, stiffer. And it wasn’t all gray.

  Henry moved closer, letting his eyes relax on the trunk where the strands emerged like ghost branches. One of them was a braid, gray blended with tendrils of green and purple. In places, tiny leaflets sprouted. Grapevines. Panic rocketed through Henry. Did one of the fingerlings have his father? Was his father being made a fingerling?

  He stepped around the tree and stood, seething with anger, above Nimiane’s bed. His grandmother grabbed his arm from behind, but Henry pulled it away.

  The cat was asleep in the witch’s arms. Nimiane, the beautiful horror, lay on her couch, limbs and fingers relaxed while the streets of Dumarre ran with blood. Her eyes were shut in sleep, but her brows contracted. Her lip curled in dreaming anger. She was emptiness. Life, drifting in from the city, lost its colors and piled and coiled around her, graying, and then falling into her. Fading. Disappearing completely. The man between the trees was tied to her, and a tangle of lives—his own, the trees’, the fingerlings’, and hints of Mordecai—stretched out from his spine and into the sleeping witch, into the dark, empty hole that was her soul.

  Henry bent over her. He could feel pain building inside him, building inside his distant, sleeping body. His own gray strand, his rope, felt like it had been set in his jaw with hooks of ice. The pull was strong, and he watched as flickers of gold passed from himself and into the witch, into the back of her head—as if she were herself a fingerling—where Zeke’s bat had once been ruined saving Henry’s life, or at least postponing his death. The witch had been weak then, freshly released, barely able to maintain her false appearance for all her coughing. Tensing, Henry leaned closer, ignoring his grandmother’s hand squeezing on his elbow. How could he kill something like this? Where any other creature—fish, bird, bug, plant, or man—would have a soul, a glory, even if twisted or damaged, she had only devouring nothingness. Would she feel it if he touched her? Would she feel a brush, a breeze, a whisper? Would she know he had come, that somehow his dream-walking self, his soul, had found her roost, had bent over her? Her breath, as cold as death itself, as cold as loneliness, brushed against Henry’s face. The hooks in his jaw pulled harder. The tie between them grew faster, broader, more golden than gray. Henry closed his eyes.

  His body, his grandmother, were gone.

  He was looking at himself back in Nimroth’s library. He was looking out of Coradin’s eyes. In her dreams, the witch walked the minds and rememberings and visions of her fingerlings. Henry, nothing but consciousness, walked with her.

  Henry saw the blade part the skin on the back of Henrietta’s neck and felt the witch’s goading, her frustration that Coradin had not taken her
whole head. He watched his own flaming hand, the little kitchen knife, Beo’s snarling attack, and he felt pitiful. He was so small next to the fingerling, small even next to Zeke and the dog. The room burned, and as Coradin’s own memories crowded in like old pain, the dream faltered and disappeared.

  Coradin and two others, all of them armed, were climbing through the moonlit hills. Ahead of them, set in a looming cliff, there was an ancient wizard door. Henry felt his physical heart jump. Where would they come out? How close would they be to Hylfing?

  But he calmed himself. Something strange was pulling the witch’s dream, something she at first resisted.

  And then they were behind another fingerling’s eyes, in a big room bursting with a light whiter than the sun. It was a circular throne room, vaulted, domed, ornate even in its dust. A white throne of pale, nearly translucent stone sat in its center.

  On it, with his legs sprawling and his arms draped over the sides, sat Mordecai. He smiled and leaned forward slightly. Caleb stood beside him, leaning on his black horn bow.

  “Nimiane,” Mordecai said. “I have been waiting. Such an old friend should have come sooner.”

  The fingerling twisted. He was on his knees, and his arms were tied. A hand gripped his jaw, and another gripped his hair. He was being made to look at Mordecai, Henry could feel it. And he could feel something cold, a blade, pressed against the back of his head, just beneath a lump. A lump that moved. A finger.

  The fingerling opened his mouth, but it was Nimiane who spoke. Henry felt her thoughts shape themselves into words, and he heard them with the fingerling’s ears.

  “Friend?” the witch asked. “Your father’s jests were not so weak. You are not even an enemy. You are a blister soon to be lanced, one weed in a field ripe for the harvest.”

  “A blister? At what age did I imprison you in lifeless stone? How many years did you spend with your sister, your own flesh that you betrayed, dwindling in strength?” Mordecai straightened, filling the throne.

  “What are years to the immortal? Decades in stone or one night’s drowsing are of equal burden. But your own son released me and brought about his death. He opened the door that leads to my new kingdom, my new throne. The great Amram was worthy to face me, but you? You fell short of his mark, and your own son is a soft and hollow husk of what your line once was. The breed weakens and fades.” The witch laughed, and Caleb shifted in his stance. Mordecai was motionless. “Tell me, Mordecai, does Henry know what awaits him? My blood roots within him. It reaches for his mind. My grip on him grows stronger with each rising sun. Does he know that your hand will be the one to cut his throat when the madness comes, or will it be his mother? For madness it will be before his death, and the death of the northern green men. So ends the true line of Iothric and Amram. So ends the line of the Old King—in the death of a weakling.”

  “Look to your own madness, Nimiane.” Mordecai’s voice had grown an edge. His smile was gone. “These eyes will see your end.”

  Again the witch laughed. “Is that all you desired to say? What fear can you give me? Capturing a fingerling and flopping in a throne make you no danger to me. Do you want me to grieve for this dog from my pack that you hold? Kill him. Take his finger. Strike him down. I have no fear of you or any of your kind. Come to the emperor’s city. Face me and see if I quiver. Watch me take the eyes from your wife as your father took mine. Sit by and await your audience with Dumarre’s new queen while your sons are fed to birds.”

  “Nimiane,” Mordecai said. “I have the Blackstar. I hold its power for myself. I will come. I will strike you down.”

  “You lie,” said the witch. “You have nothing but words and false hope.”

  Reaching behind him, Mordecai brought out a stone, black and smooth, bordered by a halo of white fire. “Death stands by your door,” Mordecai said. “So it is. So it shall be.”

  Henry shocked, watched his father stand and his face harden as he stared at the fingerling. He expected the execution. He expected the finger to be sliced, the vision to end. He felt the blade press harder on the back of the skull, the edge slid up.

  Again, the witch laughed. “Order it, green man. His death will bring no harm to me. Play at the great king! Sit on Nimroth’s throne. Execute your first victim.”

  “Blindfold him,” Mordecai said, and hands slid a cloth in front of the fingerling’s eyes.

  “You will never rival me,” said the witch. “You haven’t the stomach.”

  Pain seared through the fingerling’s world, nothing but pain. Somewhere far away, Henry’s body writhed and arched its back in agony. The scream that echoed through the throne room was not Nimiane’s. The fingerling found his own voice, and his own memories, stifled by the witch’s influence, came rushing back. An old man, a smiling woman, girls laughing, treetops rustling in the sun outside a high bedroom window.

  And death came with silence. His life was consumed, even the strength of his final twisting shout, swallowed back into the witch.

  Mordecai was gone. The world was gray emptiness. Henry would have gasped if he’d had a body. There was nothing to feel—nothing but the witch’s boiling anger and, strangely, the beginnings of fear.

  The green filth lies. He cannot have found the true stone. He cannot hold it without being consumed.

  The anger calmed. The witch’s voice quieted. Mordecai, misty, flat, and imagined, knelt in the gray fog. Coradin appeared behind him and raised his whispering sword. Henry could not look away. He had no eyes to shut. His mind was within the witch’s. The sword dropped, and Caleb appeared, kneeling, and then Frank, and then an old man with a crown and baggy skin. Illness crept through Henry’s mind as execution followed execution. And then the shape of his own body appeared. The witch watched as Henry’s scar grew, as his skin dried and peeled away and his eyes rolled. His mouth hung open, drooling. Gray strands coiled around him like a dozen serpents.

  And then something changed. The false Henry raised his hand. A single dandelion bloomed on his palm, and the gray snakes twisted away from it. Dandelions bloomed on his wrist and up his arm, and then in a rush, the fiery weeds exploded down his torso and up around his head, crawling out of his ears and eyes and nostrils and mouth. Only a gray circle remained on his jaw, untouched by the fire. And then, from its center, there rose a tiny green bud, struggling, straining to expand, to root, to grow.

  The false Henry disappeared.

  Pauper son, the witch said quietly. How long have you been with me? Have you learned nothing? Are you such a fool as to try and walk my dreams again? Do you seek for death to avoid your madness?

  Henry said nothing. He tried to think nothing. He pulled away. He tried to retreat, to walk, to redream himself standing in the garden.

  You wish escape? It is too late. You have journeyed too deep. You have let too much of yourself go … your body dies where it sleeps.

  The gray world went black. His mind slowed. It wanted to stop, to let itself fall forever into cold nothing.

  Mordecai slumped back into Nimroth’s seat, the first throne of Endor.

  Caleb sighed beside him. “Will she believe?” he asked.

  Mordecai dropped the plain, small stone to the floor and watched it roll away. “Maybe through a fingerling’s eyes. Never through her own.”

  An ashen body lay facedown in front of them. Three men stood behind it, waiting. Caleb nodded at them, and they turned and walked out of the throne room, back toward the street and their horses.

  “What now, brother?” Caleb asked.

  Mordecai stood slowly. “She is right. It is time. We have no answers, no other moves. I must seek her in Dumarre. I must stand against her storm as our father did.”

  “You will die,” said Caleb simply.

  Mordecai nodded. “As our father did.”

  “And I beside you.”

  Together, the two brothers walked from the domed room, leaving behind the ash and the throne and the vaulted ceiling, alive with faerie light. Leaving behind the rock th
at had, for a little while, glimmered like the Blackstar.

  “What of Henry?” Caleb asked. “And the others of our bone?”

  “May the faeren find them,” Mordecai said. “May they keep them.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Henry drifted. Where was his body? He wasn’t sure he had one. He didn’t need one. Not for anything he would be doing.

  How would he play baseball?

  He didn’t want to play baseball.

  Yes, he did. Of course he did. Where was his body?

  You need nothing.

  I need hands. I need feet. Am I blind?

  What is blind?

  I … I’m not sure. The umpire is blind. I need to see the ball.

  Your body is nothing to you now. Stay here. This is peace. Here, you will never need to eat.

  I like to eat.

  I will feed you.

  What?

  Souls. Your brothers and sisters. Your mother and your father. You live within me now. You are my strength. You are part of me.

  No. I’m not. I have legs and eyes.

  No. You do not.

  No legs?

  No.

  No eyes?

  No.

  I like the sun. Where is the sun? It is warm. I am like it. Where is the dirt? I jump from it. I explode.

  You do nothing. Be at peace.

  I have a long neck and green fingers. I reach for the sun. He is my cousin. I have a thousand tongues of fire. I shout for him. He warms my leaves. We share our heat. Where is my heat?

  I have taken it. It is in me.

  It is gone.

  Be still. I can hold you. Stay with me.

  I am dying.

  Yes. You die.

  I am a thousand deaths. We are beneath the earth. We are cold.

  Rest.

  We rest. We will explode.

  No.

  Henry drifted. He wasn’t Henry. He was feathered ash. He was a secret, hidden in the cool darkness. He was a joke. He was pressure building.

  He was fire.

  Cold ice pressed in around him, and he weakened. He faded. And then something else, something clean and white, silk like his grandmother’s hair, hung above him. It pulled at him, and his heat rushed into it. He was rising, bursting from the ground and the cold. He had eyes and hands and legs. The air cracked, and he was out, standing in the witch’s garden, glowing with orange light, for a split second blinking at his grandmother’s face. Her hands gripped his, pulling him away, pulling him from something stronger than she was.