The Chestnut King

by N. D. Wilson

  “How long does the water take?” Zeke asked behind him. Henry looked around. His friend was holding a crowbar and standing on the bed beside a small diamond-shaped cupboard. Number 18. Henrietta had fallen through it into a shipwreck. It had flooded the whole house. Now it was open again, and the wood around it was splintered.

  “I don’t remember,” Henrietta said. “It seemed fast.”

  “Why?” Henry asked, still breathing hard. Instead of an answer to his question, a long blade, hissing like a snake, slid through the Endor cupboard and twisted around, searching for flesh. Zeke jumped off the bed and brought the crowbar down on top of it. The head of the crowbar tumbled off and bounced against the wall. The blade slid back through.

  “Oh no,” Henry said. “He saved the cupboard. It didn’t burn. They can follow us.”

  Still kneeling, he put his head in his hands. He had burned the books and manuscripts but not the door.

  “Burn this one,” Henrietta said. Her thick hair, cut with the kitchen knife, stood out in uneven curls around her head. Her face was filthy. “Burn it on this side. I saw your hand. You could light anything.”

  Henry held out his palm. His anger, the heat inside, was gone. His mark was faint, tired, and slow. Henrietta wouldn’t be able to see it at all.

  He looked at the doorway. It would be dangerous. The sword could come slashing back through. Stretching forward, he put his palm down on the bottom of the black cupboard. He tried to pull strength to himself, to build up the heat that had exploded out of him in Nimroth’s old library.

  Dandelions sprouted between his fingers, blossoms glowing. Broad-bladed leaves twisted around his wrist.

  “I’ll get some matches,” Henrietta said, and she ran downstairs. Henry tore his hand free and slid back. He glanced at Zeke. Beo was on his side, panting in the corner.

  “Grab some of the papers,” Henry said. Zeke hurried out into the attic and came back with a slim stack. Henry flipped through them in the dim light. The language was nothing he could understand, and the writing looked like something that should have been chiseled in sandstone rather than inked on paper. Where there were drawings, they all looked more like engineering illustrations than anything magical. One picture, blotchy, looked like a floor plan.

  As Henrietta thumped back up the attic stairs, Henry wadded the old papers and crammed them into the cupboard around the dandelions. His cousin stepped into the little room and tossed him a small pack of cardboard matches.

  She ran her hands through her choppy hair. “How about next time we don’t cut my hair,” she said. “Just cut off his hand or something.”

  Zeke laughed.

  Henry lit a match and slid it into the cupboard beneath the paper. While it flamed up, he scooted back toward Zeke and the dog, laying Coradin’s long, sheathed blade across his knees.

  “Now,” he asked, “how do we keep it from burning the whole wall?”

  “She’s way ahead of you.” Zeke pointed at the little cupboard he had pried open. “She says water comes through that one.”

  As smoke crawled out of the Endor cupboard and the wood began to crack and pop, the three of them looked at the little diamond-shaped cupboard above the bed.

  “Oh no,” Henry said, looking back down at the growing flame. A trickle of water ran out of the higher cupboard and down the wall. The trickle grew. It grew quickly, and seawater from some distant world and distant time surged out of the wall.

  Henry jumped up and grabbed the end of his old bed. “We can’t let the water put it out too soon.”

  Zeke and Henrietta scrambled to help him, and they tipped the bed onto its side and butted it against the cupboard wall between the flood and the fire, accidentally slamming a few of the small doors as they did. The other end of the bed stuck out the doorway and into the attic.

  “Papers!” Henry yelled. He slipped over the top of the bed into the splashing water and ran out into the attic. A few pages were already floating, but most of the water found the attic stairs before traveling too far into the room. Grunting, he managed to slide most of the piles down to the end of the attic, beyond the spray and the sea-river once again running through the old farmhouse.

  Back in the little room behind the mattress, sheltered from the splashing, he crouched on the wet floor and watched a doorway burn, a doorway that he had always feared. Flames licked the faces of the other cupboards as the black wood crackled.

  “Should we put it out now?” Henrietta asked.

  Henry shook his head. Reaching forward, almost burning the skin on his knuckles, he picked up the old lid to the Endor cupboard, now damp, and threw it into the flames. The dandelions were long gone. The papers were nothing but shrunken, glowing balls. Henry blinked and picked up the handle to the broken crowbar. He could see something. Three of the papers hadn’t burned. They had tightened, and the flames that danced around them were white.

  Henry knocked one of the papers out of the cupboard onto the floor. It hissed for a moment, and the floor dried around it. He knocked out the other two and shoved the crowbar all the way into the cupboard. It thumped against the back. It thumped against the wall of an old Kansas farmhouse now rooted in an empty world.

  Henry scooped up the three balled, burned parchments, and Henrietta slid the bed away from the wall. The fountaining salt water sent its fingers spraying across the face of the Endor cupboard. Zeke cupped his hands, filled them, and splashed the water into the ashen gap where a world-seam had once lived.

  When the fire was out and steam had replaced the smoke, Henrietta tried to shut the little diamond door against the water. Soaked for her troubles, she was unable to close it. Zeke joined her. Together, the two of them pinned it to the wall, but the latch wouldn’t catch. Water blew it open whenever they stepped away, and it squeezed out the seams when they didn’t.

  “Did I break it?” Zeke asked. His eyes were shut, and he was spitting salt water.

  “You must have,” Henrietta grunted.

  Henry wasn’t listening. He didn’t care about the water. He was carefully unfolding a piece of paper in his hands. It was warm, fragile, and white. There were no chiseled-looking letters and no building plans. Ink, pure and black, formed a perfect circle. Around it, formed from the same hungry, light-eating ink, there were flames.

  The flames were moving on the page, and three strange words, twisting in place, were set in a triangle around them. As Henry blinked at them, the paper fell into ash and drifted toward the floor. Quickly, he began to unfold another, but it crumbled with his first tug. The last snowed down between his fingers before he could even begin. Ignoring the water and the discussion behind him, Henry hurried out into the attic. Picking up the first dry piece of paper, he flicked another match. The paper caught fire, blackened, and curled like any other. He dropped it into the moving puddle behind him, and it floated down the attic stairs. Picking up another, he scraped a match and waited.

  This page did not blacken. It shrunk in his hand, tightening around the edges first, whitening from antique yellow, to snow, to the pale fire of the Blackstar. The same circle appeared, the same moving ink flames, the same indiscernible words, and the paper fell in tiny pieces to the floor.

  “Henry!” Zeke yelled. “Henry, we can’t do this!”

  Coradin stood in the flames of the home he had shaped with his own hands. The roof crumbled around him. The body of his wife, of his soul, lay in front of him. Death had beaten him home from war. His king was dead in the field. His family dead before him, his daughters and son, lifeless in their beds with flames for blankets.

  The city was falling. The empire of the treble-serpent would consume the world. While the floor crackled, he dropped to his knees beside the body of his wife. He pulled the cloth down from his mouth and lay beside her with his arm around the one he had loved. The one he still loved.

  And then shouts and hands gripping his ankles.

  Coradin opened his eyes. Black smoke clouded the sky. Again he had been pulled from the
flames. Two men stood near him, each helmed in silver. He wore a helmet as well, and the back of his skull throbbed with heat and pain. These men, they were his brothers, or so his aching head declared. But he had no brothers. He sat up slowly in the ashen street and watched the palace burn.

  One of the helmed men looked at him. “Two of our brothers killed,” the man said. “One taken. The green man and his blood escaped. The children—” The man looked away and down, at a small, smoking, wooden cupboard in the shape of a pyramid sitting in the street. “The children closed the small way with fire.”

  While Coradin watched, confused in mind and body one of his brothers hefted an ax.

  Black splinters tumbled through the ash. The cupboard was gone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The sun hung low over the western sea, gilding crystal blue tides as they lapped high against the sea walls of the great city. The eastern sea, at low tide, already darker, already angrier, seethed in the shadow of the city.

  The young man, slim and pale, could see them both from where he stood, leaning against a casement in his father’s inner room. He could see the streets as well and hear the faint rumblings of anger and fear and fighting along the canals. He could see the red shirts of soldiers holding the gates, sealing in heaving crowds of the unwashed and superstitious as they fled with their possessions wrapped in blankets and balanced on their heads, or mounded on donkeys or the long-necked fur mules of the south.

  The man’s name was Phedon, though few called him by it. His older brother was gone, and he was now the Serpent Prince.

  “Father,” he said. “The city is under siege from within. You imprison your people.”

  The old emperor creaked in a tapestried chair. “They are cattle, believing every rumor and lie and whispered tale.” He rose slowly from his chair, gripping a thick wooden cane, scaled, with three heads intertwined at the knob, and made his way to the window beside his son.

  “They hear the truth,” said Phedon, and his pale eyes found his father’s face. “Death comes to Dumarre and is called her queen. You lose your people. Is she worth the exchange?”

  The emperor snorted. “Death,” he said. “She holds the keys to life. I have only one life, but many peoples remain to be ruled. New lands, new countries, new kings. New peoples have yet to spring from these street cattle. I will shrug off age and no longer fear the darkness of my bed, no longer fear that the light of morning will never find my waking eyes.” He coughed violently, and then, licking his lips, he spat out the window. “No longer fear that Dumarre, City of the Seas, will fade as I rot in some sealed tomb, or that my sons’ grips are not strong enough to hold it. I shall live, and with no fear of death. The kiss of Endor comes to your father.”

  Phedon shifted his weight and calmed the anger inside him. He had been forced to kneel, to kiss the cursed hand of the witch-queen. His voice was calmer than he felt. “Endor’s kiss is a horror, and the minds held by the undying blood are driven mad and left useless in undying shells. So say the stories and the old tales. Better to die than to live forever dead.” He waited for a moment, but his father merely rattled his breath through a moist and shrunken throat. “My brother would have held the city and its frontiers well. His wars would have been fierce.” He looked into the shadows of his father’s eyes. “Do you fear death so much? You who rode into battle with the vanguard, handled your own chariot, and commanded galleys? Does age make a coward of you? Better to have given your life up in its bloom.”

  The emperor twisted toward his son. Anger flashed in his hooded eyes. He had been a great man once, a head taller than his own bodyguard, shoulders broader than the throne his grandfather had set on the back of the world, eyes full of laughter, a voice to challenge thunder, anger in him to match the eastern storms. Now he was broken, a raisin of his former strength. His shoulders sagged, his back twisted, his skin hung off him like the skin of a giant, as it once had been. His slender son, born to him by a northern queen, his seventh consort, loomed above him, grass that had outgrown the oak.

  “Who are you?” the old emperor rumbled. “What manner of battles and wars and weapons have you tasted? Who are you to speak of cowards? You wage wars of whisperings for position in my court and seating at my feasts and rejoiced when your elder brothers fell in faraway fields. You are not my son, nor your brother. I have no need of sons. There is no inheritance for you. Death take you both. I shall reign on.”

  “Where is my brother?” Phedon asked. “What has been done with him?”

  The emperor laughed, the gurgling of slow-boiling water. “Your brother? Maleger knew my desires. He met my queen. I offered him life as well, but he spat at it. He wove a web for me and laced my wines with poison. His fingers have found a better use. He graces the queen’s garden.”

  “He lives?” Phedon asked.

  “He lives like you,” said the emperor. “For a time.”

  “Father—”

  The emperor turned away, moving slowly toward his chair. “She comes to me,” he said. “There are rites to be performed. Begone. Begone from my court, from my city, from the world itself. Do not again pollute my eyes with your presence. Go down to the street. Mingle with the rioting cattle. They are your kind.” He thumped his cane on the stone floor, and the door opened. Two men in black, hair knotted at the back of their skulls, stepped into the room.

  “Escort him from the palace.” The emperor slumped into his chair, coughing. “Leave him in the street.”

  Frank Willis licked his teeth. They ached. The lace dangling from Monmouth’s sack was tattered from his chewing, but not so tattered as his wrists. He couldn’t feel his hands, and he was wishing that he couldn’t feel his arms, either. A black rat slipped out from beneath the walkway and scurried toward him. He spat at the rodent, but his aim was short. The creature paused, sniffed at the moisture, and then hurried on past Frank and into the sacks.

  Why? Frank asked himself, slumped against the post. Why hadn’t he rallied Hylfing’s guard against the imperial red as soon as the soldiers had arrived? Because he had only been mayor for a day. Not even a day. One night. Because they already had a fight on their hands, and they didn’t want another one, not with the emperor, not now.

  Well, Frank thought, they’d all gotten another fight. Only it hadn’t really been another one. It was all one fight. The heir of Endor had hidden herself in the serpent’s den. The dark ones had always been power lovers. It made sense. But not enough sense that anyone could have guessed it.

  Another day was gone. His chained family members were lost in restless sleep behind him, exhausted by the heat and hunger. Hyacinth whispered as she dreamed, quietly calling each of her children by name. In front of him, the slave backs bent, panting in rest over their oars, striped with red, still glistening with sweat and stink. The sun was not yet down, and its light slashed through the oarlocks on the starboard side. They had found a wind to carry them south to the great city, to where the serpent nested, listening to the lies of a dark, undying bird.

  James cranked his head around, exhausted, and looked at his uncle. Then he dropped it onto his oar. Frank watched the quick rise and fall of his nephew’s ribs.

  The masters were gone abovedecks to feel the breeze.

  “Monmouth?” Frank asked. The bag above him swayed gently. “Still with us?”

  “I am,” Monmouth said quietly. “For how long, I cannot say.”

  “Hold tight,” Frank said, and gritted his sore teeth. What good was his body? He couldn’t spin magic like his brother or his father or his nephew. No strange strength branded his skin and ran through his veins. He had only bones and skin and blood and muscle. “When I’m old,” Frank said, “I’ll give my wrists an hour or so to themselves every day for putting up with this.”

  “You are old,” Monmouth said.

  “Older by the minute,” said Frank. “But when I die, it’ll be from too much livin’, not the poking of some lump in a red shirt or spicy words from a witch.”

&nbs
p; “What about when I die?” Monmouth asked. “Will it be from thirst and starvation and overheat in a kelp sack?”

  Frank gathered his strained legs beneath him, held his breath, and lunged. He ignored the frayed lace. Metal carved down into the bones of his hands. His teeth closed on the wizard sack. He clenched and held.

  The sack bounced and swung. “Ow,” said Monmouth. “Did you just bite me?”

  Frank said nothing. He relaxed his legs. He let the chains pull his weight down, while his jaw tightened. He sank an inch. The wizard cloth was stretching. And then it ripped in one bursting, staggering seam. Frank landed on the ground, and Monmouth landed on top of him. Spitting out his mouthful, licking his bleeding gums, Frank laughed. Monmouth was even more pale than normal. Dirt and lines of salt had dried on his forehead and cheeks, but there was no sweat. He was out of sweat. The young wizard rolled off Frank’s lap. His wrists and ankles were bound tight with rope, and his eyes were all black pupil. Frank watched the boy mutter, and he watched the ropes become silver and green. Aspen leaves sprouted from them, and they straightened and unwound from his limbs. Two slender saplings rooted into the plank deck.

  Monmouth stood and stretched. His shirt and trousers were filthy. Looking around, he quickly stripped them off.

  “Monmouth?” Penelope asked. The others stirred.

  “Hi, Pen,” Monmouth said. He turned to Frank. “Up, old man.” He tucked his clothes under the seat of his rescuer. Then, pale and scrawny, with pink scars dotting his ribs and chest and shoulders, wearing only a pair of baggy linen underpants with buttons in the front, he grinned.

  “Those horrible scars,” Dotty said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Wizards aren’t kind to thieving apprentices, but everything they taught me, I learned by stealing. They didn’t do too much to me when I got older.”

  “You stopped stealing?” Penelope asked. Frank glanced at her. She sounded hopeful.