Dandelion Fire (15 page)

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 wasn'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.

The white shirt slipped back off his chin, and Henry left it. It hadn't been helping, anyway. He pulled in a deep breath of the foul air. It was time to do something.

Henry looked down at the street below him, and he looked at the two intersections at the building's corners. It was a full city block. If his legs held out, he would try to walk the ledge all the way around to the other side. There could be fire escapes or ladders or something. If his legs couldn't hack it, or if the ledge stopped, then he would look for an open window. Or break one.

Henry continued sliding in the same direction. Immediately, he knew that sliding wouldn't be enough. He'd reach the other side of the building by tomorrow morning. Breathing slowly, he turned, squaring his feet on the ledge. In order to fit and not overbalance, he had to keep his shoulders angled, one palm against the wall in front of him and the other dragging behind. But at least he could walk, and walking made the building feel less monstrous.

Every twenty feet or so, he had to duck beneath another bank of windows, and each time, the backpack on his belly rubbed against his knees while he shuffled forward. Those were the slow times. But in between the windows, his speed was almost the same as it would have been on the sidewalk. Faster, if the sidewalk was in this city.

Stooping beneath the final windows, he reached the first corner, straightened, slid to the edge, and peered around it. The road below him was hardly a back alley.
But he couldn't see how long the building was on this side because the ledge ended. At least for a while. A huge metal pipe, tarnished green and crusted black, was mounted against the wall, and the ledge had been smashed out to fit it. Henry slid toward it and put out his hand.

The pipe was warm, almost hot. Henry looked up and saw where it cut through two more ledges above him, and where it wheezed steam into the sky. There were two other pipes beside it, each as thick as a large tree.

Henry put his hand behind the first one, between the warm metal and the wall, and he leaned out. The base of the far pipe bent into the wall six feet from where Henry was standing. The middle pipe ended and burrowed into the second-story wall below him. The one closest to him, the one he held, reached all the way down to the first floor, still tucking into the wall well above the heads of the people on the street.

Henry ran his hand up and down its surface. It wasn't slick. The soot scraped off at first, but beneath it, older layers had hardened on. And the metal itself, where bare, wasn't smooth against his palms. The pipe was segmented. Every four feet or so, there was a lip, maybe an inch thick, where the segments were riveted together.

It wasn't a ladder. But it might be possible. Henry looked down at the street. He was a lot higher than the pigeon roost in the barn back in Kansas. This pipe
probably ended that high above cobblestones. And he was wondering if he could dangle from it and drop.

Well, even if he didn't do that, at least he might be able to reach a lower ledge and climb in a first-story window.

Sixty or seventy feet off the ground, three hundred in his mind, Henry moved his backpack to its rightful place, wedged his hand deeper behind the warm pipe, bit his lip, and swung his bare foot around to the other side. There was no ledge there between the pipes, but he worked his hand into place, hugging soot and warmth to his chest.

Bending his one supporting leg, he felt for a toehold with the other. Lower and lower, he squatted, until his leg was shaking in panic and sweat dripped off his forehead. His toes splayed out on a hot rivet lip, and he relaxed for a moment. Then, shaking, he fished his other leg off the ledge and braced it on the lip as well.

He'd just committed. There was no way he'd be able to get back up on the ledge. Down was all there was.

Hugging the pipe tight, he tried to look for the next lip. Bending carefully, he reached for it, realized how impossible it was, and straightened back up. What had he done? It was four feet below him. He could reach two, maybe, and that would be an adrenaline-fed stretch. Just to make sure, he tried to squirm back up. It wasn't going to happen.

He didn't have any choice. He was going to have to slide the pipe four feet at a time.

He was going to die. In a city as beautiful as an oil refinery. In a world he didn't like. Barefoot. With his head knocked open on cobblestones. He'd probably land on someone really nice and kill them, too. The only nice person in this place. At least the factory girl wouldn't get to watch.