The Chestnut King

by N. D. Wilson

  “So Thorn told me, and so I read.” The king stroked his beard. “But the queene is no more than a girl, controlled by committees, though few even know that the elder queene, my own bride, has passed from this world. The queene has no strength.”

  “Then you have to help me,” Henry said. The king raised thick eyebrows. “You read my letter. You know what Nimiane is doing. She’ll make a new Endor, and it will be Nimroth all over again. You have to help us stop her.”

  Nudd sighed. “Nimiane. Nimroth. Endor. What does a green boy know of these things?” He leaned his bulk over the side of his chair and came back up with a small basket. He held it out to Henry.

  Henry took it and looked inside. There was bread and crusty cheese and a small corked bottle. His hunger, a day and a night without food, flooded back over him. He tore off a chunk of the bread and held it.

  “I have been to Endor,” he said. “I have seen Nimroth in his crypt and held his marble. I burned his house. Nimiane’s blood is in me, and she must be killed or I will die. That is what I know.” He shoved the bread into his mouth.

  The big king chuckled. “Little green, you please me. I will tell you more of Nimroth, but first, I grow weary of waiting for my gift.”

  Henry swallowed. “I stole thousands of pages from Nimroth’s library before I burned it. They are all gifted to you.”

  Nudd chewed slowly on his lip. His stiff beard wobbled as his jaw moved. “Where would these pages be, and why should I want such a gift?”

  “They are stored in an empty world. I brought a few with me. They might help us learn how to kill the witch-queen.”

  “Ah,” Nudd said. “We are back to killing the witch-queen. You who have been to Endor and held Nimroth’s marble. You who are dying with Nimiane’s blood in your face. Do you not know that the Endorians cannot be killed?”

  For the first time, Henry felt irritation toward the old king. He looked at the broad belly and the big beard. He looked into the deep eyes. “That’s what everyone says.” His voice was flat. “But their power started somewhere. If we knew where, then maybe it could be stopped.” He pointed at the pages on the table. “Burn one of those.”

  Nudd stared at Henry, then picked up the pages with thick fingers. There were only two. He held one out by the corner and whispered a single word. The page burst into flame and crumbled in black ash to the grass.

  “The other one,” Henry said. While the king held up the other, Henry took a deep breath, hoping that he hadn’t messed up again, that he hadn’t burned too many. The second page floated away like black feathers on the breeze. The king brushed off his fingers and looked at Henry.

  “Burn my letter to the queene,” Henry said, pointing. “It’s useless anyway.”

  Nudd peeled off the limp dandelion leaves and held up the page. This time, the parchment tightened in the flame and grew white. Black lines took their twisting shape on both sides of the page, and the three words appeared and faded as the paper fell to ash.

  Rubbing his fingertips together as if they’d been stung, Nudd looked at Henry, and his eyes were empty of their laughter.

  “It’s the Blackstar,” Henry said. “I don’t know how to read those three words. Do you? What do they mean?”

  “Son of Mordecai,” the king said. “I know a little of your story. Your father betrayed by low faeren, and you a foundling in another world. I know of your christening and a spell broken, your father’s release. I know that Fat Franklin betrayed the magicking of his people so that a knife might be thrown. More than that, I have heard in the praise and the boasting of your sister and the insults of your young cousin.” Nudd smiled. “Your small friend, the one called Richard, even threatened me with your coming.”

  “Where are they?” Henry asked, but the king held up his hand.

  “These charmed words around a cursed image are not new to my eyes. They will help you with nothing.”

  Henry puffed out his cheeks and slumped. “But what do they mean?”

  “Putul Animisti Evrihilo—the well of daimons, of undead souls. The incubi. The Blackstar was like a mother to Endor and to Nimroth a father. It was used for the change in their flesh.”

  Something was happening. As the king had spoken those three strange words, the ash had stirred at his feet. Now the feathery particles were climbing, drifting around the faerie’s knee. Henry watched Nudd blink in surprise. The ash quickened, tightening and winding around itself until it looked like a ball of gray string floating in the air. Its surface smoothed and darkened.

  Henry’s mouth hung open, and Nudd’s chestnut face flushed red. He muttered a quick curse, and the sphere shattered, snowing ash gently across his knees.

  Henry dropped his basket of food back onto the couch beside him. “Was that the Blackstar? Will the ash show us where it is? Can we find it and smash it with a hammer or something?”

  The big king sighed and shook his head. He lifted a heavy finger and scratched his cheek. “My little green brother, the Blackstar cannot be destroyed. Not like that.”

  Henry stood up and put his hands on his head. “Why? Why does everyone keep saying that? I’m sick of hearing it.” He looked up into the sky and watched the clouds slide by, and the wind they were riding brushed against his face. He hadn’t realized that he was sweating, and the breeze chilled his skin. He dropped his arms and looked down into the grained face of the Chestnut King. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to try. I can’t just believe you. If I went straight back to Endor, if you sent a thousand faeries with me, and we found the Blackstar, how do you know that we couldn’t destroy it?”

  Henry looked at the king’s knees. The ash was moving again, reassembling.

  “You might destroy it,” the king said. “With enough strength. I cannot say how much. More, at least, than I can hold. But you should not destroy it. There is great danger there.”

  The ashen Blackstar was complete. It drifted toward the king’s right hand. Nudd moved it quickly, and the image of the Blackstar followed. Henry watched, confused and curious. Finally, the broad faerie levered his bulk up and sat on his hand. The ash spun against his thigh.

  “Curse me for a fool and farmer,” Nudd said. “I’m a nit and no faerie king.”

  Henry sat back down and leaned forward. The two of them were eye to eye, the faerie unblinking.

  “Why is that ash following your hand?” Henry asked.

  For a moment, Nudd was still. His chest rose and fell, and his eyes searched Henry’s. Suddenly, sputtering frustration, he leaned back in his chair and held his right hand out for Henry to see. The spinning ash found his palm.

  “Know the truth and no twisting,” Nudd said. “Henry York Maccabee of the little gold lion, the ash reveals a thief. I possess the Blackstar.” He pointed at the basket on Henry’s couch. “Eat. You set your feet on the darkest of paths. I have much to say to you.”

  Henry blinked in surprise. His mind raced, and his mouth fell open. The Chestnut King had the Blackstar. Or he was lying. Henry bit back his flood of questions. He tried to settle down, to find the calm that his grandmother had given him.

  Nudd shifted in his chair and dangled his right arm over the side, trying to keep the spinning ash out of view.

  “I’ll not be telling you everything,” the king said. “Everything is not mine to tell. I do not have eyes to see it all, nor a mind to grasp it. But I’ll tell you what I know, and I’ll speak the sweetness of truth—even if it grinds hope to mush beneath its heel. And I’ll tell you as quick as I’m able, for time is not your friend.

  “There are evils older than Endor, green Henry. Evils as old as the stars.” The king tugged on his beard. “The old stories call them many things—devils of influence, powers, forces, thrones, dominations, gin, daimon, and incubi. They were said to be fleshless—dark spirits—and many even muddled them with imps and faeren. The first sorceries were built on their powers. Men made alliance for the dark strengths and paid those tutors with what they lacked—flesh, blood, the
service of minds and souls that can grow and change. The old kings struggled against them, and paupers and greens and prophets bound them in lifeless stones or glass or gems and sealed them in with names of power, for they could not be destroyed, merely bound and sealed up.”

  “The Blackstar,” Henry said.

  The king nodded. “That was all long ago, before the First World first died. Wizards and sorcerers, evil and tame and half-good, lived on, but the great source of their first power was chained and lost and forgotten, at the beginning by purpose and plan, and then by the short rememberings of flesh.

  “Ages crawled by on their bellies, and civilizations rose and fell to dust before Nimroth was born to a cursed mother. He was a seventh and a green. Poison vines brought the morph to his flesh, though he’d have been as evil if his palm smelled of roses. He had no contentment in his mind or body and searched the world for old secrets and buried murderings to find what he wanted—a prison of incubi.

  “Have you heard the stories of gin, Henry?” the king asked.

  “Gin?”

  “Aye. The spirits in jars or lamps or stones that will set you on a throne if you only grant them freedom.”

  “Like genies?” Henry asked. “You mean like three wishes?”

  “Wishes?” The king laughed. “All lies. If you freed yourself a gin, you’d find your skin turned outside in and an evil cloud on your family and clan. Nimroth sought the incubi, and he found them in a stone, fallen from the sky and polished to a prison, by who can say what triumphant hand. In it, he found his evil.

  “Henry, death comes to us when soul is stricken from body. Nimroth struck his own soul down and imprisoned incubi in his blood. He had no life of his own, but the strength to forever live on the lives of others. For those he claimed to love, he did the same, parceling out the blood of death that could not die from his foul well of evil. Between those of the undying breed, litters—I will not call them children—were born of a new race. And so Endor grew, even while the world around it drained to gray and the people in the streets and markets faded and fell, sucked to nothing by a thirsting swarm. Princes and queens flocked to Endor to purchase the incubi blood and immortality at any cost, and the nobles stored and flavored lives in their cellars like so many bottles of wine. They were holes, devouring holes, draining life and releasing it into nothing.

  “In that day, I was a new king, and I thought to take the ax to the root of that evil tree. Four of us set out to steal the Blackstar from Nimroth’s own hand. Only I returned with life still in my blood and bones, the well of incubi in my hands.” Nudd paused. “I have spoken, and now you are the only soul that knows it. But in the end, it meant nothing, and I had stopped nothing. Nimroth denied his loss to his court, but went mad searching for the thief—torturing and imprisoning family members, executing every mortal servant in his palace. Death was impossible, but minds still decayed. Endor, empty of all life, became the city of undying madness. The evil devoured itself. They bound and sealed their own children and parents and lovers when madness came, just as the incubi themselves had once been bound, only now the flesh was sealed in as well—in crypts and coffins and beneath the streets of Endor in the tomb cities.”

  The king shut his eyes and held perfectly still. He looked grown from living wood, an addition to his chair, with lichen for his beard.

  “How long ago was that?” Henry asked.

  “You ask my age,” the king said. His eyes were still closed. “I have been king for more than three centuries.” He snorted. “And only now have I walked into one of Nimroth’s snares.” Opening his eyes, he once again lifted up his hand. “A charm to identify a thief. How many pages did he burn, I wonder, before the madness came? How much ash did he sprinkle on the wind? But I have been discovered in the end. Even here.”

  “Here?” Henry said. “Where is here?”

  “The Second World, the world of faeren, where we do not hide ourselves from men.” The king’s cheeks puffed. “The world you should not leave.”

  “What?” Henry asked.

  Nudd gripped the arms of his chair, and it sank a little lower. He stretched his legs out in front of him, then reached over to the table and picked up Henry’s baseball. He slapped it through the ash against his palm.

  “The Blackstar is no bigger than this, but if you found the strength to shatter it, I cannot say how much evil you would free. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the blood of Endor would turn to dust, and the undead would die. And perhaps a thousand incubi would ravage the world. Better to let the evil run through Nimiane’s blood and addle her mind. In the end she will gibber, but her flesh in any rot and stink will still be prison to a darker thing.”

  “But I’ll die,” Henry said. His tongue thickened in his mouth, and his stomach turned slowly before he could speak again. “The same blood is in me.” He touched his face, the place where ash had fallen.

  “Stay here,” the king said. “And that hole will never grow. Stay as I have stayed, and your life will be as long.”

  “But my father,” Henry said. “My mother.”

  “You will never see them again. But you will live.” The king’s voice was hard. His eyes were pointed and narrow.

  Henry shook his head. “I can’t.”

  “Why is this? Do you not fear death?”

  Henry’s head was spinning. “Of course I do. I don’t want to die. But my father, my family … the witch will kill them.”

  “She will. But you will live.”

  Henry blinked. His mouth sagged open. “That’s awful.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, it is.” Anger was returning. “My grandmother gave me everything she had left. My father will die for me, because he wants to save me, even if it means doing something impossible.”

  “What will you do for him?” The king’s face was still. His eyes, piercing. “Will you die?”

  Henry swallowed and shifted in his seat. Where was the strength his grandmother had given him? He felt clammy and foolish. “If I have to,” he said.

  “You do not have to,” the king said. “I have said that you do not have to. You can stay in this world.”

  “If I stop the witch,” Henry said quietly, watching his feet, “I can die. And I’ll keep trying until she dies or I do.”

  The king let out a long breath. “Your grandfather said the same.”

  Henry looked up. His hand slid toward his collar and the necklace beneath his shirt. “When?” he asked.

  “Before he was swept into the sea.”

  Henry shut his eyes and knuckled them hard. “Why hasn’t Nimiane gone crazy? What’s different about her? And don’t tell me she’s stronger.”

  “She’s smarter,” the king said. “She has better control of herself. She saw the madness in others. The more they consumed and held in themselves, the faster their minds splintered apart. She has gathered more strength and drawn more life than any, but she stores it up in tools and men like clouds full of lightning. She used wizards and witch-dogs and filled them to their bursting destruction but held for herself no more strength than her mind could master. Even so, it, too, will shatter in the end.”

  “Will you help me?” Henry asked suddenly. “Believe what you want, but help me.”

  “Help you walk to your death?” Again the king’s heavy brows rose.

  “If you were going to try to kill her, what would you do?”

  The king picked up Coradin’s sword, and for a moment, the ash scattered. “Was this your only plan?” he asked. “A fingerling’s sword?”

  Henry nodded.

  The Chestnut King drew the blade and squinted at its vicious edge. “Nimiane is a guttering hole. This blade is like her. You cannot fight a hole with a hole, nor outdevour the devourer without becoming a greater evil. A hole must be filled and sealed.” He stuck the sword in the ground in front of him and watched it sway. A gray circle grew in the grass around it. “In the land of my childhood, there was a story of a great armored beast, trebly scaled, with fa
ngs the length of a man’s arm. Its armor could not be pierced, and it devoured whole villages and dozens of knights and soldiers who thought to slay it. But one man, a farmer, took nothing but his scythe and went to face the beast. When it rushed at him, he leapt into its mouth, curled into a ball, and was swallowed. There was no armor on the inside of the beast’s belly, and the farmer slew him from within.”

  Henry smiled. “I think I heard a story like that. And then he cut his way out?”

  The king shook his head. “Perhaps when it was told to children. The farmer died within the carcass.”

  “Right,” Henry said. “But he won.”

  “May you do so well.”

  Henry stood up. “Will you help me?” he asked again. “I mean really help me.”

  “What is it that you want?”

  Henry looked down the steep hill and across the green pastures. He turned and looked at the tower that spiked its corners into the sky, parting the wind as it passed. What did he want? What didn’t he want? He wanted the witch dead and his family safe. He wanted Endor forgotten. He wanted his mother’s house back and her voice in the courtyard. He wanted to know his brothers and love his sisters. He wanted to live. He wanted to play baseball.

  “I want you to send faeren to Dumarre. Put Fat Frank in charge of them. There are witch-dogs and fingerlings and thousands of soldiers for them to handle. I want you to take care of my sister and cousin and friend until I get back or … as long as you need to. I want you to give me a better idea than jumping inside the witch’s mouth and curling into a ball. I want a sword that might work and …” Henry trailed off. He stared into the king’s eyes. “I want the Blackstar.”

  “Son of Mordecai.” The king raised his voice. “You ask me to send faeren to die in a world that is not their own, under the command of one formerly of the lesser faeren, cut from his magic, now in chains in the mound beneath us for disrespect to their king and their ways. You ask me to violate the law of this world and keep humans beyond the time allowed without bonding them to this world. You ask me for an answer that does not exist and a sword that cannot be, and for an ancient relic, the missing star of Nim-roth, devourer of souls, purchased to myself with the lives of friends and brothers.”