Dandelion Fire (46 page)

The animal staggered on its hind legs, and for a moment, Henry thought it would topple.

“Henry!” Eli jumped out of a shadow.

The small old man ran after him.

The horse stamped, regaining itself. Darius's hood had fallen back, and the woman in him laughed a rich, long laugh.

“I have braved the arrow of the Old King, the Old Dead King, and I live. I will always live. I have stood your blow. Can you stand mine?”

Henry ran onto the bridge with Eli behind him.

Darius looked at him and smiled.

“That blood I have tasted,” she said. “Shall we begin with the young and move on to the vintage?”

The blow fell.

Air as hard as rock crushed Henry from above, and he crumpled on the cobblestones. His body slid forward, toward the wizard. His life was being drawn out through the burn on his face. His blood, his newfound fire, was being taken from him. Henry struggled. He could see the gray lines of his life, dying green and gold, straggling toward the wizard, and they dragged him behind. Suddenly, another strength stretched above him, purple and rich, twisting and green, his father's vines drawing him back, intertwining with his own.

Eli jumped over him, yelling, racing toward the wizard.

Henry was released.

His father and uncle were above him, pulling him back off the bridge.

“Here,” he said, and he handed Caleb the arrow.

Eli screamed, and Henry rolled over in time to see his small body fold and tumble in the street.

Caleb placed the bent and rotten arrow on the string. Mordecai stepped forward, drawing strength from the wind, from the river and the stones, pulling down the cold breath from the cloud-mountains. Henry saw it all. He saw the serpentine wind rush down in bands thicker than trees. He saw twisting river words rise from beneath the bridge like a waterfall undone, and a wall of seamless, roaring strength climbing in from the sea. His eyes burned with the sight, and pressure built in his skull. It was too much. His eyes were teetering toward blindness, overpowered. His ears were going to burst and bleed with the crackling magic. But Henry leaned his mind against it, fighting to stay conscious. He knew that it had to be more than his father could bear to hold.

Darius rode forward to the center of the bridge, smiling at Caleb. “And where is this one from?” Nimiane asked.

“Ramoth Gilead,” Henry said. He saw shock on Caleb's face, and a single flash of fear in the tall wizard.

Suddenly, Darius hurled his strength toward them and pounded down lightning at Caleb. But Mordecai had thrown his own. Wind struggled with wind, lightning tangled with lightning and fell to the bridge, thunderless, crackling stone.

In one motion, Caleb drew the arrow to his lips and let it fly.

The arrow veered and twisted. But Henry saw another, white-hot, fly true through the crackling wind.

The two arrows met, and together, they drove into Darius's throat.

The wind died, but the rain continued on.

Darius slid from the horse's back and landed in the road. Henry blinked. He could barely see the wizard's body for all the ghostly, tangled web of stolen life that swirled around him beginning to unravel. All of it gray, like the strands on Henry's face, it expanded, jerking loose, snapping fear, struggling free, accelerating, growing. In a flash, Henry realized what would happen. He saw all that was about to explode, and he knew that he, his new life, his family, would all be washed away. Henry raised his hands and pushed what little strength he had against it.

Mordecai stumbled toward the fallen wizard.

Darius sputtered. Something in his mind drew back. A waterfall, a deluge of strength, roared inside him. He could hold it no more.

All the power gathered, all the life stolen and poured into Darius, burst out in a rushing spirit-wind of death.

With the last of his strength, Mordecai threw himself against it, dropping to his knees with both hands raised. Cobbles cracked and aged to dust in front of him. Henry watched his father's twisting vines grab his own and spin into a wall against the fury, but they were bending back,
unable to hold, dying and joining the gray. And then the storm of death turned, pouring away down the street, through the wizards, through the flames.

What was left of the eastern wall collapsed. Trees fell, and in the darkness, the ridge rumbled, and its face slid down to the plain.

The sea crashed on the cliffs, but struggled against no thunder. Rain fell faster, stronger than fire.

Uncle Frank climbed up from the river, and Henry crawled toward the body of Eli FitzFaeren. Onetime traitor, onetime friend.

The bridge around the body of Darius of Byzthamum, seventh son to a priest, was covered with mushrooms. They'd spread through and down the street and over the bodies of the wizards.

The dead horse was covered with them, and they were growing on Eli.

Henry brushed them off.

His father crouched beside him. His face was white, bloodless, but the struggle was over, a weight was lifted.

He smiled at his son, slid his arms beneath the small body of Eli, and stood up.

He turned back. Hundreds of men and faeren drifted out of the shadows.

“Who will carry him to the house of Hyacinth?” Mordecai asked.

Through the rain, a crowd moved forward. Henrietta walked in front of them.

Uncle Frank stepped over the railing, nodded at Henry, and turned to look for Sergeant Simmons.

Caleb stood tall over the body of Darius and looked at the ivory chin and the warped and rotten arrow beneath it.

The mushrooms had not gone near the shaft. The chipped-stone point stood out of the wizard's neck. Caleb bent, gripped it, and pulled the rest of the arrow through. Then he shrugged off his cloak and wrapped it carefully around the shaft.

Mordecai watched Eli being carried up the hill, and then he turned to his son.

“Well done,” he said. “I had wondered where you'd gone.”

Uncle Frank called for them as he helped a thick Sergeant Simmons to his feet.

Zeke, Richard, Henrietta, and the fat faerie came and stood by Henry, and no one said anything until Uncle Frank and his two tall brothers returned with the policeman limping between them.

In the crowd, voices were beginning to spread quietly through the memory of what had been lost.

The lower city burned. The eastern wall was gone. Hundreds of fallen waited burial. And yet, Hylfing lived on. Caleb no longer stood alone, but walked with brothers. Mordecai had returned.

Someone began ringing the bells, and they sounded new.

Silent, the brothers climbed the cobbled hill, and the others walked with them.

When dawn came, Henry was standing on the roof of his mother's house. She had stood with him for a while, under a cloak, in the rain and the now-slow sea breeze. Together, they had watched the clouds begin to break and part in front of the laughing stars. Dotty had come and held him for a moment, kissed him, and left him to his thoughts.

Zeke had stood with him, and Richard, but they had both gone inside. The house had been awake through the night, the women treating wounded, and Hyacinth had gone out through the dark to grieve with those who had lost.

After eating, Mordecai and Caleb had ridden up the ridge to the wizard door, and Caleb had carried the Arrow of Chance with them.

They had returned before the sun, beneath the graying sky. Carnassus and the remaining wizards had all been found dead, lying in the ancient, arched throne room. The witch was gone.

Now, as the sun rose through the scattered rain, only Henrietta stood hooded beside Henry, and the two of them looked out over the blackened lower city, out over the white-lined sea. They watched the sun rise over the ridge, above the shattered eastern wall.

After hours of silence, Henrietta shivered and spoke.

“You're different, Henry York.”

Henry swallowed and blinked away everything he was feeling. This was where he was from. This place that had almost been destroyed. This wounded family, now partly healed. This city by the sea.

But there were already things he missed, things he had only just found. The barn. The combine-combed fields and the smell of Kansas grain as it ripened. Baseball.

“I'm still scared,” he said.

Henrietta smiled and looked at him, wiping rain from her wet forehead, tucking back her hair beneath her hood.

“Yeah,” she said. “But now you're scary.”

Henry smiled and leaned over the wall. “If you have some dirt, I'll show you a trick.”

Henrietta laughed, and shivered.

Something was moving through the air in front of the ridge.

It was struggling.

“What's that?” Henry asked.

The animal grew in the air, wavering above the charred streets in the lower city, dragging its dangling hind end as it avoided houses and climbed above the hill.

It was Henry's turn to laugh, but not so loud that the raggant might hear him.

The creature circled the house and landed on the roof behind them.

Henry and Henrietta bit their lips, and neither turned around.

A moment later, the raggant sat on the wall beside Henry, spread its wings against the wet breeze, shut its eyes, and raised its nose.

Its job was done.

spent days in the streets, working like he had never worked. But those days were also filled with meals like he had never eaten, laughter and singing like he had never heard, nights full of stories, and the sleep of a body and mind used like tools and not like treasures.

He dreamed, but only one that he remembered after waking. In that dream, he sat with Ron and Nella on their balcony overlooking the city of Byzanthamum. Neither said a word, but they smiled, and together, in his dream, they sat for a lifetime and did nothing but watch the smoke slowly fade away until a new city breathed below.

Though his days were full of tasks, not one passed without a visit to the roof. There, the raggant always joined him. Together, they would choose a wall, or let the wind choose for them, and they would stare—at the sky, the sea, the trees, the city, the world—and Henry would listen to the raggant breathe, and to the wind breathe through its wings.

Sometimes, Henry was worried. Sometimes, he was afraid. Always, he knew he loved too much of the world,
of two worlds, and he knew that roots only belonged in one.

Soon after Darius's fall, Uncle Frank, Henrietta, Zeke, and Sergeant Simmons all followed Henry as he led them back to Grandfather's room in the old house.

When he led them downstairs, through the dining room, the kitchen, and out the back door into the bright Kansas sun, Uncle Frank had laughed, Zeke had whooped, and Sergeant Simmons had hurried out, wiping his eyes. Zeke and Simmons had walked off together, waving and laughing.

They would all see each other again. Soon. They'd even picked a day.

Eli, duke of FitzFaeren, was buried in Hylfing beneath the cathedral floor. Magdalene, her grandsons, and many others traveled through the wizard doors to attend.

Magdalene formally requested the right to remove the body if the Halls of FitzFaeren were ever restored.

She did not ask for the arrow. After her mother's death and before her coronation, the Arrow of Chance had been under the duke's authority.

Frank and Dorothy Willis gave it to her.

Tate and Roland were buried privately, according to a faeren custom nowhere established in the
Book of Faeren.
Not even Mordecai and Henry were permitted to attend, and Fat Frank would say nothing of it beyond
simply asserting that it had been the sort of affair that would have kept both reveling late, and that gamblers had been served.

When the settled day came, Henry rose in the predawn without being wakened and helped his mother plant a tree in the courtyard.

Then he and his father had walked out the south gate, found the local faeren hall, traveled to the distant regional mound—full of extremely respectful faeries— and from there to Badon Hill in the far north.

His father carried a long, narrow wooden box.

Beneath the young blue sky of a morning still hung with a waning moon, the two of them knelt on the wet earth of Badon Hill and felt for old, moss-covered bones with their hands, slowly filling the box. When they finished, the sky was lighter, and Mordecai pulled from his cloak a smooth red cloth Hyacinth had woven and laid it over the top. The box was closed, and Mordecai lifted it up and set it on the great gray stone. He leapt up beside it and sat down. Henry followed him, and there they sat, the sun warming as it climbed.