Dandelion Fire

by N. D. Wilson

  “Zeke,” Frank said. “Help me up.”

  Zeke came over, gripped Frank's hands, and leaned back. When he was on his feet, Frank creaked from side to side and walked slowly over to the sergeant.

  “We've got to go back inside,” Frank said. “He's got Richard. Doesn't much matter if he's waiting for us.”

  Simmons nodded.

  “No backup coming,” Frank said. “Not even crickets, judging from the silence.”

  Simmons nodded again. “I don't pretend to understand any of this,” he said. “But I don't need to. I'm just waiting to wake up.”

  “Tell me when you do,” Frank said. “How's your foot?”

  Sergeant Simmons snorted. “Still there.”

  “Um,” Zeke said, and he pointed. “Is that water on the porch?”

  They watched as the screen door gently swayed, and water rushed out from beneath it.

  Frank hobbled over to his shotgun and picked it up out of the grass. He fitted two more shells into the barrels and levered back the hammers.

  “Give the boy a gun,” he said, and nodded at Zeke. The water was spilling off the porch.

  Sergeant Simmons pulled out his handgun, chambered a round, and showed Zeke the safety. “Point at what you want to hit,” he said. “And nothing else.”

  “Not your feet,” Frank said.

  The two men limped, carrying the shotguns at their hips. Zeke followed with the gun pointed at the ground.

  The grass around the porch had become a fast-growing swamp, and more water poured out the front door every second.

  Frank pulled the screen wide and stepped into two inches of water. The living room was a pond, the stairs a waterfall.

  “Zeke,” he said. “Stand right here and keep your eyes on the back of the house.”

  Zeke took up his station inside the door as Frank began climbing the flowing stairs. Sergeant Simmons limped behind him.

  Halfway up, Frank could see what he'd already suspected. The water was coming out of the attic, romping down the stairs. He took another step and craned his head around the landing. A black cape and tall hat had been dropped by the girls' room. Richard was sitting with his back to the bathroom door. His arms clutched his knees tight to his chest. He was soaking wet, and he was shivering. His wide eyes, watching the flood, wheeled toward Frank in fear.

  Frank smiled, but Richard showed no recognition.

  “Don't let the hair and face fool you,” Frank said. “C'mon.”

  Richard blinked and jumped to his feet, grinning. His bare feet slapped into the moving water as he lunged down the stairs and threw his arms around Frank.

  Frank squeezed his shoulder, but kept his eyes on the attic. “Head right outside,” he said. “Go to the car.”

  Richard didn't say a word. He let go of Frank, slid past Sergeant Simmons, and splashed down the stairs.

  Frank didn't think Darius was in the attic. He didn't think he was anywhere around, not with the water running. He'd gone off to someplace. Still, he kept his gun up as he climbed and swept the attic with it before he turned to what had been Henry's room.

  The two doors were open, and water was gushing out of them.

  He stepped into the doorway, with the water frothing over his feet, and looked at the wall of cupboards—every last one gaping wide. Simmons stepped up beside him.

  Neither of them said anything.

  The water was surging out of a small, diamond-shaped cupboard by the upper corner of the compass door, splattering off the end of Henry's bed, and washing over the floor.

  Frank stepped over to the wall, braced himself, and shut the door against the water, leaning his full weight against it. After a moment, the pressure disappeared, and he let go and stepped back.

  The door to Endor was open as well. He squatted down, picked it up out of the puddle, and looked at the screws. They had all snapped. He fitted the door back in place, pushed the bed leg against it, and stood up.

  He left the rest of the doors open.

  “C'mon,” he said. “Let's go talk to Richard.”

  On the way back down, he looked over at Grandfather's door, thrown wide open.

  Not that it mattered. The front windows had shattered, too.

  Two police cars and one ambulance were parked beside the hole. The barn was still there, and Frank's old truck was parked beside it, but the house and a chunk of the front yard had been replaced by a smooth-sided hole. For a while, water had poured in from a spot at the back, and the bottom had filled. It was slowing now.

  “Smells funny,” one of the officers said.

  The other tipped his hat to the back of his head. “Septic, you think?”

  “No,” the first one said. “Salty. Smells like the ocean.”

  “I wouldn't know. I'm a Kansas boy.”

  Neither of them noticed the small, very confused crab appear at the edge of the hole and then tumble in.

  He had been in tide pools before, but nothing like this. Still, the tide would come. It always did. He could wait.

  wrists were bruised, and she had a scrape on one knee. She twisted her hands slowly, flexing her fingers, grateful that they were no longer tied. The room was small, but it didn't feel dirty. She was sitting on the floor, and the only thing to look at was the thin band of daylight beneath the door.

  Before they'd grabbed her, she had screamed and tried to run. But the small men had been faster on the broken floor. When she'd fallen, they'd grabbed her arms and carried her between them. She'd kicked and tried to bite. She'd yelled for Henry and Richard. Finally, she'd tried to talk to the men. She'd begged and explained, but they hadn't responded. They'd never even looked in her eyes.

  Through the big doorway, they'd taken her to a small flight of collapsed stairs, where they had left a ladder. One of them had climbed down the ladder first while the other held her arms pinned behind her back. Then she had been made to climb before being repinned at the bottom.

  They'd led her through collapsed hallways, over tumble-down doors, and through gaping windows. Finally, they'd come out into a courtyard, and Henrietta had stopped in her tracks. The two men, each holding a wrist, had stopped beside her. They'd let her look. They'd looked as well, and to Henrietta, it seemed like they were more affected than she was.

  With crumbling walls and missing roofs, even in ruin, the city that loomed above her dwarfed anything she had ever seen. Arched walkways soared from tower to broken tower. Armies of pale statues lined rooftops in gapped rows. Windows big enough to swallow barns gaped from still-smooth walls, near seamless to any eye. A belfry, missing its crown, still held its bells aloft where no Kansas silo could have reached, and a slow swirl of crows moved around them. A web of wide paths and rubble was strewn through what had been the courtyard lawns. Fallen gutters and cornices, stone horse heads and angel wings were swallowed by waist-high swaying grass and tangles of flowers. In the center, rising up out of the green, there sprawled a fountain.

  The men had led Henrietta toward it.

  Marble, shaded with dirt, lichen, and grime, in places painted green with ancient water stains, was frozen in a moment of glory taller than Henrietta's house. Men and women, horses and creatures that she couldn't have imagined were all pulling themselves out of a mountain of rock. Some were laughing, others wept with what had once been joy, but now, hooded with stains and moss, could have been something else.

  Perched at the very top, a bearded man sat on the back of a straining ram. Stone vines and leaves wrapped around him and curled through the ram's thick horns.

  “A human shaped the font long ago, in the rich times,” one of the men had said. His voice was thick, but she'd understood. It was the first thing either man had said. “A man with senses in each fingertip. It has never been defaced.”

  “A human?” she'd asked. “You're not human?”

  He hadn't answered, and the other hadn't even glanced at her. They'd pulled her on, past the fountain, across the courtyard, and out through a narrow breach in a wall t
o a waiting wagon, loaded with timber. A large but lazy ox had been grazing in his harness. Her wrists and ankles had been twined together, and she'd been seated on and leg-tied to a beam on top of the pile.

  And now she was here, after long miles on a near-invisible road, through rolling hills, sometimes wooded and sometimes grassed but always hot and dry.

  She'd asked where they were going. If they knew Eli FitzFaeren. If they could take her to him. If they could tell him she'd come. But they'd ignored her and had spoken to each other in low voices she hadn't been able to understand.

  Through the entire slow-jolting ride, she'd tried to take note of landmarks—bent trees, stones beside a stream, small, rotten houses, or barns mounded over with brambles. But as the sun had climbed and begun to drop, bent trees had been followed by more bent trees. The streams were always full of stones, and the hills were spotted with brambles chewing on leaning walls and gapped, gray, and fraying timber.

  With the sun pounding down on her face and burning her already watering eyes, she had been forced to squint. But squinting had brought no relief, so she'd lain back, put her arms over her face, and shut her eyes tight.

  If she escaped, she would just follow the road.

  Henrietta could hear voices. She didn't know how long she'd been sitting in the dark, but she was getting hungry. And thirsty. What she really wanted was an ice cube to pinch between her lips, or rattle on her teeth and stretch inside her cheek. But she knew she'd drink pretty much anything.

  She was thinking about screaming, and maybe kicking the walls, when the door finally opened. Turning her head away from the light, she scrunched up her eyes. No one grabbed her. No one even came in to get her. The door was just open. After a moment of blinking, she stepped through it and into the little hall that led back to the front of the house.

  One of the men was standing at the other end. He nodded his head at a doorway in front of him and crossed his arms. She walked toward him, a little warily but hoping she didn't look too nervous. She could try to run through him. He wasn't really taller than she was, but she'd already felt his grip. He could probably break her in half.

  Instead, she smiled at him. Or leered. But he wasn't provoked. He waited, and when she slipped through the doorway, he followed her.

  The room was bright, but a breeze was moving through the open windows, so it wasn't entirely sweaty. Two chairs sat across from a small couch, and a table squatted between them. Behind the chairs, paned windows opened out onto a garden. A goat's horns and eyes were just visible through one of them. The animal was standing in rosebushes.

  A woman, with hard lines on weathered cheeks and shot-white hair, was sitting on one of the chairs. A pair of gardening gloves sat on her lap. She looked up at Henrietta and gestured toward the little couch. Her face expressed nothing, but Henrietta thought she caught a smile in her eyes.

  “Joseph,” she said suddenly. “The ivy has come in the window again. Be kind enough to remove it.”

  The man moved toward the window, lifted two straggling tendrils of ivy off the sill, and bent them outside.

  The old woman looked directly into Henrietta's eyes. “Ivy is a curse,” she said. “Doubly so because I find it appealing when it destroys my walls.”

  Henrietta smiled, but the woman did not smile back.

  “There's a goat in your roses, too,” Henrietta said.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “But he won't eat them. He has done so once before and once is always enough.” Turning, she addressed the man again. “Joseph, where is your brother?”

  “Gone to drop the timber, ma'am.”

  “Join him.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  Without a glance at Henrietta, Joseph left the room and shut the door behind him.

  When the door was latched, the old woman relaxed in her seat and looked Henrietta up and down. Her face moved into a smile as bright and contagious as it was unexpected. Henrietta couldn't help but smile back.

  “My grandsons are so serious,” she said. “They feel safer when I am as well. Please”—she leaned forward and lifted a cloth off a tray on the table—”eat if you are hungry.”

  “Thank you,” Henrietta said. Somehow, though she'd been tied up and carted off by this woman's grandsons and then locked into one of her rooms, she couldn't really manage to be rude. Not to this lady. There was something about her, a complete ownership of her surroundings, a soft strength with a hard edge. Something. Maybe it was just the twinkly eyes, or the white hair on such sun-dark skin. Just looking at her made Henrietta feel oafish. Without meaning to, she found that she was sitting up straight with her hands on her lap and her legs tucked together and crossed at the ankles.

  On the tray in front of her, there was a brown piece of wide-grained fish, a bowl of what looked like large curds of cottage cheese, and another bowl of football-shaped olives with the pits still in.

  “I apologize for the fish,” the woman said. “Joseph believes that every meat should be smoked, and smoked extensively. I suspect him of smoking apples when unattended. He may have even smoked the olives. I haven't yet sampled them. The cheese, however, I can assure you, is all my goat's doing and has had no tainting contact with Joseph and his hickory smoke.”

  Henrietta leaned forward, bent off a corner of the fish, and popped it in her mouth. It tasted like burnt salt, but she was hungry. She tore off a larger piece, held it on her palm, and picked at it. There weren't any napkins or plates.

  “Your name is Henrietta Willis?” the old woman asked.

  “Yes,” Henrietta said. “How did you know?”

  The woman squinted. “It's written on your forehead.”

  “What?” Henrietta pushed her hair back and felt around with her fingertips. “Where? How?”

  The woman smiled. “There's nothing there. You told my grandsons, Benjamin and Joseph.”

  Henrietta put her hand back down. She could feel her cheeks getting hot. Being embarrassed always made her irritated, and being irritated made her cheeks hotter.

  “What am I doing here?” she asked. “I need to get home.”

  “You are a human who was trespassing in the ruins of the Lesser Hall of the FitzFaeren. Home is a long way off.”

  “I wasn't trespassing,” Henrietta said. “I was looking for my cousin, and he was looking for Eli FitzFaeren.”

  “Do you know Eli?” the woman asked quietly.

  Henrietta shrugged. “He lived in my house for two years.”

  “Did he?” The woman picked up her gardening gloves and slapped them against the arm of her chair. Henrietta watched dust rise up and be carried off on the breeze from the window. “Do you know that on the night of ruination, the first and only night that enemies of our people were able to breach our walls, Eli was there, and he had brought a guest? A human guest?”

  Henrietta didn't say anything.

  “The guest had been there before. He was known to all of us. But he stole—or was given by a traitor—some things of ours that weakened our defenses. Because of him, we were destroyed. Do you know who he was?”

  Henrietta swallowed. She thought she did, though she hoped she was wrong.

  The woman looked deep into Henrietta's eyes. “He was your grandfather. And to one with the gift of sight, that is written on your forehead.”

  Henry pressed his shoulder blades against the wall. He'd taken off his backpack and reslung it on his front. He was standing on a window ledge, three tall stories above a narrow, cobbled street. Across from him, there was a building that looked like the Boston Public Library, except that it had a dozen or so smokestacks puffing dark clouds out of its roof. Half of the clouds straggled up into an overcast sky while the other half drifted sideways, falling slowly down toward the street or crossing it in midair and filling Henry's lungs.

  Careful not to overbalance, Henry grabbed the neck of his white shirt one more time and pulled it up over his mouth and nose.

  He could see in the windows of the other building, it really wa
sn't that far away. The place was full of women, tending to tangled, steaming machinery. Some wore masks while others, men or women, it was impossible to tell, walked around in gray suits like beekeepers.

  He'd had plenty of time to watch. When he'd first climbed out the window and pressed his back against the wall, a young woman had noticed him. She'd moved closer to the glass and stared. After a few minutes, she gestured. Reaching high, her hand dove down and smacked on the windowsill. Then she shrugged, questioning.

  “Am I going to jump?” Henry had said out loud. “No.” He'd shaken his head hard, and she'd made a face and gone back to a pile of pipes.

  She still glanced over at him every few minutes.

  Soon he knew he would have to do something. Hiding indefinitely wouldn't accomplish much. Climbing out the window had seemed like such a good idea. Now he wasn't so sure. He could climb back in and risk the room and the halls in a quest for stairs. Or he could postpone that and keep walking the ledge, hoping for something. Those were the only options he could come up with. Other than dying or learning to fly.

  The city was big, sprawling off as far as Henry could see. Which wasn't actually that far, given the steam and smoke and foggy breath that seemed to be pouring out of every building and slithering around in the streets. And the streets, from where Henry stood watching traffic, seemed like total chaos. Crowds moved on foot. Four-wheeled bicycles rattled loudly on the cobblestones, occasionally by themselves and occasionally carrying some kind of litter between them. Strangest of all were the carriages. At least that's what he thought they were. They were brightly colored boxes on tall wheels, but instead of being harnessed to horses, they were harnessed to barrel-shaped machines that puffed black smoke or white steam out the sides. All of them had a driver, straddling the wheeled engines, and the drivers wore tall hats and coats that matched the carriage color. They were either unable or unwilling to slow down for people on foot, and there was a great shouting and cursing and scrambling wherever they went.

  Reaching street level might actually be the easiest part of what lay ahead of Henry, and he knew it. He had to get south, two milongs, through the bizarre ant farm below him, to one of who knew how many post offices in this city. And Darius would probably be there waiting for him when, or if, he did.