The Chestnut King

by N. D. Wilson

  The bathroom was cool, despite the shower. The mirror over the sink was perfectly clear, no steam.

  “Henry?” Henrietta asked, and she rattled the shower curtain. “Henry!”

  She pulled the curtain back.

  Henry was curled up with his knees to his chest. His eyes were shut, and his mouth was frozen open. His skin was the color of paper. A thick black liquid, unaffected by the water, had oozed out of the center of the burn on his jaw.

  Henrietta dropped to her knees and grabbed her cousin’s arm. The water was frigid. Henry’s right arm flopped limply over the side of the tub, and his hand opened. A fat wad of wet dandelion down fell out onto the floor. The same fuzz had mounded up around the drain.

  “C’mon, Henry,” she said. She slapped his hand; she slapped his cheek. She stuck two fingers on his neck, but she wasn’t patient enough to feel around for a pulse. “Wake up!” she yelled. “Wake up!” She reached out and tried to wipe the black goop off Henry’s jaw.

  He jerked and knocked her hand away.

  Blinking in the cold water, he looked from Henrietta to Zeke. Mrs. Johnson stepped into the bathroom behind them.

  Henry snatched at the curtain and threw it closed. “What are you doing? What?”

  Shivering, he managed to slide forward and turn off the water. Then he slipped to his feet, wincing. His ankles were tender.

  “Um,” Henrietta said. “Well, you looked dead.”

  Henry’s irritation warmed him slightly. His embarrassment warmed him more. “How’d you know how I looked?” he asked, shivering. “Until you looked? Would someone hand me a towel, or I might really die.”

  Henrietta sniffed and shoved one in. “Grandmother started yelling for you in her sleep, Henry. She sounded scared. I knocked, I yelled, I even shook the shower curtain first.”

  Henry didn’t say anything. The bathroom door shut, and he was left in cold silence. The towel was rough and felt even rougher against his goose bumps. He cinched it tight around his waist and threw back the dripping plastic curtain.

  Facing himself in a wide mirror, Henry stepped out of the tub and moved closer.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off his own face. He looked tired and thinner. Dark circles framed his eyes, and his cheeks had sunk. How could this much change in two days? Slick his hair back and notch his ear …

  “I look like Coradin,” Henry whispered, and he turned his head to check his jaw.

  The gray scar had grown. At the very first, it had been a pock the size of his pinkie tip, a burn from a drop of the witch’s blood, and much smaller pocks around it where the blood had spattered. Now there was just one scar, more than an inch across, and blood had leaked out of the center.

  Henry licked his lips and swallowed back the beginnings of panic. He’d find his father, and they’d find the rest of the family, and his father would find the witch, and someone would find a way to kill her. The witch had to die. Somehow. What he had seen in the witch’s dream wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Not yet. It was what she wanted to be real. Had she sent the fingerlings into Endor? Henry picked at the blood spot on his jaw. It was awfully black. He got a fingernail underneath it and tried to break it off. It was rubbery and wouldn’t break. He pinched it between his fingers and pulled.

  Gasping, trying to catch his breath, Henry watched the thing lengthen, stretching, pulling more out from his jaw, sloppy and wet after the dry tip, the texture of an earthworm.

  Three inches of it fell away from his face and dangled between his fingers, dead and black. He dropped it in the toilet, flushed, and turned his back quickly, again facing the mirror. A single drop of blood perched in the center of his scar. Red blood. Normal red blood. He controlled his breathing, slowly, steadily.

  He didn’t really want to know, but he had to check. Leaning toward the mirror, Henry let himself see, and looking at his burn, he saw it twice.

  The gray, slow-spinning strands were there, ghostly, twisting away from his face. But they were no longer spiderwebs. They were the thickness of yarn.

  Henry shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and turned away from the mirror.

  He dressed quickly in the clothes Zeke was loaning him—an old, worn pair of jeans, striped tube socks, a Boy Scout T-shirt, and a plain black hoodie. Then he picked up the necklace his father had given him, slipped it over his head, and tucked it under his shirts. The metal was cool against his already-chilled skin. He stepped out of the bathroom and moved down the narrow hall.

  In the living room, Mrs. Johnson took Henry by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes. Henry stared back into hers. She smelled like peanut butter.

  “Henry York Maccabee,” she said. “You all need a rest before you go and do something this crazy. Now I’m not trying to put my foot down and keep you from going. But look at you, look at the day you been through. Rest your bones for a bit.” She let him go, straightened up, and crossed her arms.

  Henry shook his head. “I slept a bit just now. And I slept back in the old house.”

  “You were unconscious,” Henrietta said. “Not sleeping. You’d been crushed in the cupboard. You look horrible.”

  “So do you,” Henry said. Henrietta rolled her eyes.

  “We don’t have enough batteries for the flashlights,” Zeke said. “The bait shop opens in a couple hours. Rest now, then we’ll pick up stuff and go.”

  Henry looked around the room. Exhaustion rolled over him. His bones didn’t want to hold him anymore.

  He nodded and walked to the other mint recliner. It felt bigger than his bed. Without opening her eyes, his grandmother reached over and felt his face.

  “No dreams,” he said quietly. “No dreams.”

  Frank Fat-Once-a-Faerie stood in the street and wiped a sooty arm across his forehead. The sun was down, but the clouds had cleared, and a sliver moon was climbing. Richard was breathing heavily beside him with his hands on his hips. He was wearing pants now and oversize boots—a gift from one of the neighbors.

  Una and Anastasia were picking carefully through the rubble, along with a dozen or more of the townspeople carrying lanterns. Three of the house’s exterior walls still stood.

  Fat Frank had heard the story, a muddled version first from Anastasia, clarity from Una, and then again from several who had been in the crowd.

  “Would you like to hear how it happened?” Richard asked.

  Frank snorted. “I have heard, and no, I don’t like.” He rolled the kitchen knife over in his hands. The knife that had been thrown at the christening, the knife that had gotten him unfaeried. He tucked it into his cloak. He’d found the finger, too, but after matching it to the bald spot on the big corpse, he’d thrown it to a crow. Now the crow was probably dead.

  There had been no bodies in the rubble. No Grandmother, no Henry, no Henrietta. No second large man in black.

  Anastasia and Una picked their way back toward Fat Frank. Una moved carefully, with her hair pulled back and her face down, scanning each shadow and gap. Anastasia scrambled, tripping. She held something up.

  “Raggant feather,” she said. “But no raggant.”

  Una looked up. “Henry’s alive,” she said, and she smiled broadly. “And if he is …”

  “How’s that?” Frank asked. “The stars up and tell you?”

  “Henry is capable of a great deal,” Richard said.

  Fat Frank spun and looked up into Richard’s narrow face. “So I know, and so I’ve seen. But he’s no fire salamander, nor a phoenix, not at my last inspection.”

  “It’s my mother’s trees,” Una said. “In the courtyard. They’re all alive, even Henry’s sapling.”

  “It has some dead leaves,” Anastasia said. “They’re ashy, but the tree’s alive.”

  Fat Frank puffed out his cheeks.

  “When my older brothers died, that’s how my mother knew. Their trees died in her courtyard.” She reached out, poked Frank’s cheek, and grinned. “So smile, Fat Faerie. Henry’s alive.”

  Anastasia tucked the
raggant feather in her hair and laughed.

  Frank scowled and rubbed his nose. “I’ll come back in the day’s light.”

  “Do you want them to be dead?” Anastasia asked. “They aren’t, so stop grouching.”

  “Dark truth shines brighter than lying hope,” the faerie said. “And that’s the dark truth.”

  “Franklin, formerly Faerie?”

  The four of them turned. Another faerie, taller and fatter than Frank, stood in the center of the street. He was bald and had a purple patch over his left eye and a thick black mustache, waxed at the ends. He nodded at the burned-out house and moved closer.

  “That your work?”

  Frank said nothing.

  “Franklin, formerly Faerie, now waning, sometimes known as ‘Fat’?”

  Frank nodded.

  The fatter faerie pulled his mustache, then put his arms behind his back. “Franklin Waning Faerie, formerly of the Island Hill of Badon Chapter, who knowingly rebelled against the policies of District R.R.K., trampled upon the letter and spirit of the Book of Faeren—all rise—and disregarded the ruling of the queene’s—may her eyes never squint—duly appointed committee? Franklin ‘Fat’ formerly Faerie, who is to be considered a danger to all parliamental faeren and a consorter with villains, who has been cast out from the mounds and severed from the source of his soul, the faeren peoples, and the protection of the queene?” He stopped, looked Frank up and down, and blinked his one eye.

  “Aye,” Frank snorted. “Keep talking if you fancy a brawl.”

  “I have a package for you.” The faerie dropped a small wooden box into Frank’s hands, took ten steps backward, and pulled at his mustache. “A response is required,” he said, and turning on his heel, he walked proudly down the center of the street. He pointed up. “By moon’s noon!” he yelled, and disappeared into the shadows.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Frank Willis shifted his weight in the darkness and leaned forward, trying to ease the pressure of the shackles on his wrists behind his back. And trying to breathe through his mouth. The stench belowdecks in the galley was like nothing he had ever experienced, and he’d once fallen into a septic tank. When they’d been brought on board the hulking five-tiered galley, heavy with chains, the soldiers had plugged their own noses with wool before dragging the prisoners down through the stacked rows of slaves.

  More than three hundred slaves slept in five outward sloping tiers, hunched over the oars in the belly of the big ship. Chained to their benches and to the oar grips, the night moans of the slaves mingled with the popping and creaking of the great timbers as the ship shifted in the waves.

  Frank stared at the men’s backs and then tried to shift again. He and the others had been chained to timbers in the bow, in a small open room stacked with provisions for the slaves. Isa and James were wedged together between the sacks. Poor Monmouth had been laced up in a kelp wizard bag to contain his magic, and then hammocked from the ceiling. Dotty and Penelope and Hyacinth slept in a cluster, chained to the same ring in the same timber. Frank had his own, but with the ring and his arms behind him, he could only slump forward.

  Slumping was about all he felt up to.

  Had Henrietta burned? His mother? Dotty had told the story in spurts. Henrietta had been knocked on the head and thrown back into the house before the soldiers had torched it. And then Henry …

  Somewhere deep inside Frank, wrapped up in worry and grief, there was a spark of hope. Dotty said Henry had killed the big man who’d dragged him out and then jumped right back in. She’d also said that no one had come out again.

  But Henry could do things. Sometimes.

  “Not like me,” Frank said quietly. “Mayor for a day.”

  Footsteps crossed the floor above Frank’s head. He listened as they found the ladder and descended. Two soldiers, white fluff sticking out of their nostrils, stepped down into the room and approached Frank. Without a word, they unlocked his chains and pushed him in front of them, out of the little room and up a steep ladder. They passed out of the slave hold, through the middle deck—a forest of hammocks and sleeping soldiers—and on up into the night and its cool salt air.

  Frank filled his lungs, gasping with relief, and looked around at the easy seas, up past the loudly ruffling sails at a clear sky full of stars and a sliver moon not yet at its zenith. Sailors moved quietly through the rigging and across the deck, around the housings and barrels of the four enormous brass guns the galley carried. As long as a wind blew, the ship would not be anchoring. Land stood out in a thin shadow on the horizon.

  The soldiers took Frank’s arms and led him down the deck and around the monstrous sleeping guns, each scaled like brass serpents. Viperous heads gaped around barrel mouths large enough to swallow and spew men. And then they climbed up steps, and up again until they stood on the stern.

  There was no wheel. Twin tillers had been joined by a beam, hinged at its ends, and two men stood inside them, guiding the ship. The captain leaned against a rail, his arms crossed and a short, fat-bowled clay pipe smoking beneath his nose.

  He pulled the pipe out of his mouth. “For the smell,” he said, and tapped his foot on the deck. “All that filth belowdecks.”

  Frank rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know,” he said. “I sense a bit more filth up here. I prefer dirty humans to, well, dirty humans. But that’s just me.”

  The captain nodded at the two soldiers, and as they turned and walked back down to the lower deck, he took Frank’s arm and moved him to the rail. The two faced out to sea.

  The captain was shorter than Frank, though not by much. His hair, graying and long around his ears, tangled in the sea breeze. He wore no hat.

  “There are times,” he said slowly, “when I miss Hylfing.”

  Frank turned and looked at him. He looked familiar. Barely.

  The captain looked back. “How old were you when you left, Francis? Thirteen? Fourteen? It wasn’t too much later that your father and older brothers were killed, and your little brothers set out to trap the witch-queen. And they did, too, the little buggers. I was twelve, peeking out a window, watching your father out on the harbor jetty fighting back the witch’s storm. He had this sword that was all blackened and bent, and the lightning hit it, and the windows shook, and I ducked down because I couldn’t watch. When I stuck my head back up, he was still there, still doing whatever it was he did. All I could see was the rising water and the waves and the lightning striking again and again. Never have seen anything else like it. Never hope to.”

  Frank’s eyes were hot. His throat was tight. He looked back out to sea, blinking. “I wasn’t there.” He took a slow breath. “I was playing baseball. In Kansas.”

  “Whatever you were playing, wherever you were playing it, you’re lucky you weren’t in the city that night. Your brothers were already dead. Lady Anastasia, your mother, was the only one on the walls, the only one who could stay on the walls in that wind, her long hair all wet and cracking like a whip. When the waterspout took your father and the waves came up over the walls, she was still there. People said she didn’t budge till morning, when the storm broke.”

  “Roderick?” Frank asked. Roderick. He’d been a nice kid. No dad. No siblings.

  The captain nodded and then dropped his head. “I sat at my window all that night. I worshipped your father. And your brothers.” He puffed on his pipe and watched the smoke trail away on the wind. “And you. But you all never had much time for kids outside the tribe, did you?”

  Frank said nothing. Memory was grinding. Was that true? Maybe.

  The captain sighed and shook his head. “No, you didn’t. Your family had no use for the rest of us except as pawns, to be thrown into the fight and lost when needed. In the morning there were your crazy twin brothers…. I stood outside the walls with close on a hundred other boys, and we watched the two of them march off into the hills, serious as priests, Caleb with that enormous bow over his shoulder almost as tall as he was. A few tried to follow, but they got cra
cked and sent home. Your brothers said they knew the old mountain doorways and were going to trap the witch in her own lair. I thought your family was done.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Frank asked, and he spat over the side. Anger was growing in him, but he forced his voice calm. “Gettin’ all nostalgic about my family is a bit odd, what with the chains on most of them down in the hold.”

  The captain turned and faced Frank. “After your brothers left, I did. I hopped on the wagon my mother had been loading, and we went south. You know what she said?” He paused, as if Frank might actually answer. “She said, ‘We have to get away from this family. We have to get as far away as can be got. They’re like wands to death and evil, the same as towers to lightning.’” He knocked his ash out, and Frank watched the glowing leaves flutter down to the water. “She was right. Once we got away, all the trouble your family kicked up had a different effect. Funny thing, in the south, most good things came to me because I knew your family. Got my first ship’s berth easy enough as I was from Hylfing and a friend to Mordecai Westmore, the boy who’d buried the witch-queen. When her witch-dogs and wizards all scattered, he got the credit—rightly or wrongly—and I got promoted. After all, my friend had saved the empire. Learned a few parlor tricks to add to the mystique. Always said that Mordecai had taught me. That was good for free drinks. Truth is”—he tugged at a serpent on his sleeve—“when it came to the captaincy, Hylfing blood was no hindrance, and having eyes that had seen the great Amram taken into the sea, and his sons march into the mountains, well, that’s been a bit more than a help.”

  Frank spoke slowly. “Gratitude would put Mordecai’s blood and bone ashore. What are you doing?”

  The captain laughed, and his laughter had a hard edge. “Why won’t you say my name? Say my name. Am I beneath the great Francis? I shouldn’t be. You always were the least of Amram’s sons. As for gratitude, well, I took the benefits as something owed. My father was killed behind yours in one of his petty wizard skirmishes.”

  “Roderick,” Frank said. “My mother always liked you. Caleb and Mordecai always liked you.”