Dandelion Fire (11 page)

Henry vomited, choked, and vomited again.

The seizures rocked him, contracted and strained and twisted every sinew, tore through his senses, and he knew nothing.

Henry was pain. He was lying on Badon Hill. Below Badon Hill. A chalky cliff rose above him, and beyond that, trees. He was on a beach of stones, and he couldn't move. He heard a man laugh and a dog bark. Beyond his feet, he saw them, the man and the dog, the man smiling and carrying a small, squirming bundle with one tiny, bare foot kicking freely, the big black dog running above and behind as they climbed a narrow trail up the cliff.

He knew that dog. He'd dreamt it before, and he'd seen its bones by the big gray stone at the top of the island mountain. Sadness overwhelmed him. Dogs shouldn't have to die. People should die. People had to. He already had.

Henry opened his eyes on a cloud of confusion. Light and sound and smell all swirled around him. He blinked dry eyes, and widened them.

He could see.

A ceiling above him was struggling into focus. Black beams. The walls were stone. Despite the acid burning in every muscle, he tried to sit up and found that he was still in straps.

“You live,” a voice said.

“Unstrap me,” Henry said. His mouth tasted like vomit and rags, but it had been swabbed out. His face had been wiped clean. “No more cutting or potions. Just unstrap me.” Windows were set high up in the wall, and Henry stared at the white light that streamed through them. He would have smiled, he would have laughed and grinned, if his jaw hadn't felt broken and if his belly hadn't been stinging. If he hadn't been strapped to a table in a madman's world.

The man stepped into view. He was small, middle-aged, and normal-looking for any world. He wore glasses that would have made him look like a math teacher if there hadn't been blood on his shirt. His face was without expression.

“Forgive me,” he said. “The warpspasm, less powerful than Darius had hoped, came too early. It has passed, and the naming rite, half-prepared, is impotent. It is better for me if you had died. Darius will kill us both.”

“Well, I'm glad I didn't,” Henry said. “And I have a name already. Can you unstrap me, please?”

The man leaned forward, holding a vial over Henry's mouth. “Drink this,” he said.

“Why?” Henry turned his head. “What is it?”

The man didn't answer. Instead, he pressed the glass to Henry's lips. Henry clamped them shut and shook his head, staring blearily into the man's eyes. The man sighed and stood up.

“You're trying to kill me,” Henry said.

“It is the only way. I do not desire Darius's wrath, but then I do not desire him to supplant me with you. I'd hoped you would die. I still hope.”

Henry was fighting back panic. If the man wanted to kill him, he could. “Listen,” Henry said. “If you kill me, Darius will know. Just let me go. Make it look like an escape.”

The man laughed. “No one shakes those straps.”

“Darius could,” Henry said quickly. “And he thinks I'm powerful. He thinks this whole thing started when I was struck by some magic lightning or something. But it didn't, it was just a dandelion. But let him keep thinking. He wants to already.”

“A dandelion?”

“Yes. A little weed. Not lightning.”

“And you will never return?”

“Not if I can help it.”

The little man crouched out of Henry's sight, and then the sound of heavy pins rattling on the floor echoed through the room. Henry felt the leather loosen and pulled one arm free.

The man stood back up and jerked the straps loose one by one. Then he took Henry by the hands and helped him sit up. Henry winced at the pain and looked down at his belly, at the shallow symbol carved into his stomach. It looked almost like a tree, not at all like what he'd glimpsed on the big man's hand.

“It's not bleeding.”

“No,” the man said. “The first mixture stops it. Darius would have rubbed another one into the wounds during a later rite.”

“I need bandages and a shirt,” Henry said.

“Sorry, there is no time. I have released you, and that is all I can do. You are three floors above the streetway You were brought into this world through the Sulie Post Management Station, two milongs from here. Keep south, and luck be with you.”

The man turned quickly away from Henry and walked back to a small table buried beneath jars and bottles and bowls. A lumpy orange sponge sat on one corner. Henry watched the man choose a jar and dip one finger carefully inside. Then he turned around.

“Begone,” he said, and dabbed his finger beneath his tongue. For a moment, he stood, staring Henry in the
eye before his legs began to quake. He staggered back, grabbed at his table, spilling bottles and bowls to the stone floor. Glass splintered, and shards spun toward Henry's bare feet. The little man collapsed into the wreck, kicking. After a moment, the man was still—his slow breathing the only sound in the room.

Henry's eyes were burning, tears streaming down his cheeks, but he didn't mind. He could see again. And he had other things to worry about. He shifted his weight on tender feet.

He had to find stairs. He had to get down three flights of them without being caught and get out into the street. Then he needed to figure out which way south was and find a post office two milongs away. More problems would present themselves then. He didn't need to think about them now.

He couldn't remember what he'd been wearing when he went to bed, but now rough canvas trousers hung just past his knees. The waist, big enough for two of him, was cinched tight with a string. He wore nothing else but the bruises where straps had held him through his seizing and the cuts on his belly.

Henry tried to walk, but his joints felt compressed, slow and full of fluid. His head was ringing, his heart was pounding, and the cold stone floor looked to him like the softest, sweetest bed in the world. He had survived the warpspasm, but he felt dead enough. The whole second-sight thing was nonsense. If anything, his vision was worse. He looked down at his burnt palm.
The life stood out from his scar, golden and bright, moving in its story with all the personality of fire. He watched green bursting growth, watched it flame and burn to feathered ash. From the ash came green again, again and again, flaming and dying and being born. This story, this life, was embroidered in his skin.

He straightened up as best he could, head ringing more than ever. The room was out of focus, gray, swimming beneath his feet, walls rippling and falling in place, and he knew that life like the life in his palm was everywhere, that it was moving all around him, words and stories writhing and telling and being told. He could step into it and be carried away. If he did, he would be ripped in two. He would be stepping into a waterfall, a raging river, trying to catch Niagara in his skull.

Henry shut his eyes, balancing carefully, and breathed, listening to the ringing in his ears and his heart pounding in his temples. He was pain all over, and watching his burn had made it worse. But he had never felt or seen anything like it, anything so heart-stoppingly beautiful and so dangerous, a towering cliff calling him to jump, a sleek serpent calling him to touch, an ocean swell calling him to sink. A story to carry him away and erase him.

He had to move his bruised body. He limped away from the table. He needed to get back to Kansas first, and then he could pick dandelions. Or go to Badon Hill. Anywhere but here. He stopped.

Had he come through with his backpack? Grandfather's journals, all of the combinations, would be here forever if he left it. Struggling to keep his eyes focused on the right plane, he looked around the room. For the first time, he noticed charts, painted with diagrams and hung like tapestries all along one wall. They were layered thick on top of each other, and they reached the floor. Chains were draped over them, perhaps to keep them flat in a breeze when the high windows were open. A huge iron box squatted in a corner.

The man was breathing loudly, but a puddle of blood had formed beneath his head and was already skimming over, thickening in the air. There were no closets, unless he counted the iron box, no shelves beyond the cluttered table and the table where he'd been strapped. But beneath the potion table, beyond the man's legs, there was a box with slatted sides.

Henry picked his way through the broken glass and tipped the box so he could see inside. A pair of gray sweatpants were wadded on top, along with his underwear. Beneath them, he found a white T-shirt and his backpack. No shoes.

He pulled the T-shirt on quickly, wincing as it rubbed against his cuts. Not because they hurt, the pain was only slight, but because the sensation of the cloth flapping them open and shut seemed like it should hurt. A lot. He unzipped his backpack and glanced inside. Grandfather's journals were rubber-banded together,
and a flashlight was cozied up next to them. Henry slung a strap over his shoulder and began to tiptoe back to the door.

His hand was on the latch when he heard voices. One voice.

“My son will be called Xerxes. I give no thinking to another. And every fratre must be in presentia regale.”

Henry looked frantically around the room. He could slip behind the charts. The iron box was probably locked. The latch moved in his hand. He jumped into the corner, and the door was flung open into his face.

A servant, short and robed in gray, stepped into the room and placed his back against the wall next to Henry, holding the door open. Henry was breathing onto his shoulder. He couldn't slide any farther behind the door, so he bit his lip and waited to be found.

Darius, hatted and caped, strode into the room.

From behind the door, Henry could just see half of the big man's head and his left shoulder. He wanted to shrink, to disappear into the wall or the servant's robe. If the wizard turned, if he looked back at his servant … Henry didn't finish the thought.

“What is it?” a voice asked from the hall.

Darius said nothing. He took another step, further into view, and froze. He turned sideways, and Henry watched the man's hawked profile, his curling sideburns and enormous chin. He took off his Pilgrim hat and ran a gloved hand through his thick hair.

Henry blinked. There was a glimmer around Darius,
around his face, his legs, his entire shape. Henry blinked again, felt his eyes singe, and he saw.

Darius shrugged off his cape and threw it against the wall in fury. But he was not enormous. He was tall, and his skin was stretched tight over his bones. His hair was thin, straggling away from his bald crown, and his ears stuck out from his head. His nose hooked long and low, but below it, there was no chin. His mouth simply drifted back into his neck, and where a chin should have been, there was a large piece of bone, or ivory, carved in the shape of a protruding jaw and held on with a strap around the back of his head.

“Up! Rouse him!” Darius yelled, and a fat man, the voice from the hall, hurried into the room and over to the body.

Henry watched Darius's legs as he paced. They were not the full, muscled things that Darius projected. They rattled in his boots, and at his rear, the seat of his trousers flapped empty.

“He will not wake,” the fat man said. “Still, the boy cannot have flown far.”

“He is no boy!” Darius roared. “He is my son. My blood runs in his veins!”

“Not just yet,” the fat man said quietly.

Darius ignored him. “His former blood, his yester-people did this. He cannot have so freed himself. I did not think of a rescuing.” Darius stepped back out of Henry's view, back into the doorway. “Come,” he said, “and fetch the pink slave.”

The fat man hurried after Darius. “Collect Seer Harmon,” he said as he left. “Have him bathed and examined.”

The robed servant nodded and walked toward the now-snoring body.

Henry swallowed. Adrenaline pulsed through his abused joints. He stepped out from behind the door and slipped into the hall. The spindly shape of Darius, without his cape and hat, strode around the distant corner. The fat man scurried behind him.

Henry put his hand on the latch of the neighboring door and quickly let himself in.

had been many horrible days in Frank's life, but this was the worst. When he lost his own way in the cupboards and came to Kansas, he had been the one who had suffered most. Though he'd felt awful for his mother. When as a kid he'd nearly gotten Dotty killed in Endor, they'd been rescued by her father. When Henry and Henrietta had disappeared the first time, he'd felt sick. He could have stopped them. He could have nipped Henry's plaster chipping. But he hadn't.