Dandelion Fire (27 page)

“Sorry,” Henrietta whispered, and rubbed the horse's neck.

Caleb didn't look back. “Why would I call them down?” he asked. “You have nothing hidden left. Nothing worth hiding.”

“They are over our land,” the voice said. “Call them down.”

“Do you still clutch after these dead valleys?” Caleb's voice was even.

“They still clutch me.”

Caleb stood silently for a moment. Then he uncrossed his arms. “Unveil yourself, and the birds descend.”

Henrietta blinked. Magdalene, looking just like she
had seated in her house with gardening gloves on her lap, sat primly on the edge of the fountain. Benjamin and Joseph stood on either side of her, and at least ten others like them. They wore short swords tucked into fat belts. A few carried bows.

Magdalene smiled. She did not look at Henrietta.

Caleb raised his right arm and held it out from his side. A huge bird swooped down over Henrietta's head, flared its wide wings, and came to rest on his glove. Its back was dark. Its legs and chest and head were white. It swiveled its head and eyed Henrietta, and maybe Magdalene at the same time. A black stripe ran up around its golden eye and into its black beak.

Henrietta was staring at it, when another flared and landed on the paving stones beside Caleb's feet. Another perched on the fountain peak, bobbed its head into the bowl of water, and shook streams down its back. Two more dropped to the square, before Magdalene finally spoke.

“You have someone who belongs to us,” she said.

Caleb laughed. “If you mean your brother Eli, I will cheerfully give him back. He should be in a sack and on his way here already.”

“We have no brother.” Magdalene's voice was crisp. “We speak of the girl.”

“The girl?” Caleb looked back over his shoulder at Henrietta. He moved his arm, and the dark bird flapped up and joined its brother in the fountain. “What ownership do you have of the girl?”

“She trespassed in the Lesser Hall of FitzFaeren. Her grandsire stole certain talismans of the FitzFaeren, of which we are now greatly in need. She is to be held against their return.”

“Her grandsire did this?” Caleb asked. He moved back to the horse, took Henrietta by the waist, and lifted her down easily. With his hand on her shoulder, he walked her over in front of the queen.

The queen ignored her, her eyes fixed on Caleb. Henrietta watched the lines on the old woman's well-sunned face. Her white hair was pulled back so tight, it left her forehead smooth.

“You have vision I do not,” Caleb said. “Look. Tell me what runs in her veins.”

Magdalene licked her lips. Her eyes traveled nowhere near Henrietta's face.

Caleb stepped around beside the queen and examined Henrietta. Benjamin, standing below his shoulder, shuffled to the side.

“I do not doubt you, queen.” Caleb pulled off his gloves and rubbed his jaw slowly. “Her grandsire may indeed have taken things without warrant. But have you not seen other blood as well? What vintage runs on her father's side?”

“Keep her,” Magdalene said quickly. “For the sake of her father's line. Though her trespass was real.”

Henrietta wanted to talk. She wanted everything explained. Why would her father matter? Caleb straightened
back up and walked her to the horse. He reached into a pouch at his side and pulled out a brown nugget of coarse sugar. Placing it in Henrietta's hand, he nodded at the big horse and turned back around.

“Now tell me, queen,” he said. “Tell me why you would send my sister, Hyacinth, a dream, asking me to come. I have traveled ways best left unstirred, and even now the land dies beneath our feet. My city has need of me. But I have come, through cold mountain tombs, so speak plainly.”

Henrietta broke the sugar into pieces. She rolled the smallest one into her palm and held her hand out flat beneath Chester's flaring nose. His lips swallowed up her hand, and his tongue swabbed away the sugar. Henrietta wasn't exactly sure what Caleb had been saying, but she knew she was staying with him. And that was good. Or she thought so. She hesitated with the sugar, and Chester nearly knocked her over with his nose.

“Endor rises,” Magdalene said. Henrietta didn't take her eyes off the horse, but she listened. She had a feeling that if she were to tell the whole story about her involvement with the cupboards back in Kansas, Magdalene would be demanding her back. And not just to keep her around.

“Endor sleeps in its own dust and madness,” Caleb said. “It is Nimiane that rises, and she does so in the halls of Carnassus in the far north. I have spent these last weeks pursuing death and its currents. How she is free, I
cannot tell you, for I stood beside my brother when she was entombed. But I felt her curses in my bones then, and they recognize her voice now. This news is easily spoken, and did not require me to come so dangerously. What more? What that I do not know?”

“We shall fall,” Magdalene said quietly. “FitzFaeren goes to its final grave.”

Henrietta could hear a general rustling and shifting of feet. She glanced over at Benjamin and Joseph and the men around them. Their faces were red and their jaws were set. In some she saw anger, in others, emptiness.

Caleb said nothing.

“And after us,” Magdalene continued, “every mountain people and village. The forests will fade until she has drunk her demon-fill. Your city will crumble into the surf, and your people with it. And after us, the greater kingdoms, the empires of the three seas, they are easily seduced by strength. She will turn her eyes toward them. She will find a throne again, a higher dais, new lands to reduce.”

Caleb sighed. “There is a mourning dove nested above my window who sings such songs of death to me every dawn because the sun has risen, and every night because it has set. Will you dig your graves and make your beds inside?”

Henrietta watched the short men squirm. What their queen was saying was making them angry. Caleb was pushing them further. And they were allowed to be angry with him. They glowered, but remained silent.

“Do you deny that she is drawing more power than she alone can hold?” Magdalene asked.

“I cannot say.”

“There is another with her,” Magdalene said. “We must stand together or each receive our own slaughtering day in turns. And if we fall, we will fall at once, at least embalmed in glory.”

Caleb rubbed his stubbled chin. Magdalene said no more, and so he spoke. “Of course you will have all the support we can provide. But that is sparse indeed. What had you in mind?”

Magdalene rose from her seat, and as she did, every man around her dipped their heads. “Make your stand here,” she said, “within the halls of old FitzFaeren. We are the farthest north. You are well beyond the mountains and deeper south. If you make your stand there, with your backs to the sea, you will be abandoning us to an early and lonely fate, and only postponing your own defeat. Here, together, we may turn the witch back, or find a quick end.”

“Queen,” Caleb said, and his voice was strained. “Do you know what you ask? Even now, unripened crops are being gathered within our walls, and villagers struggle in from the mountains with their lives on their backs. We have been preparing for a siege since Nimiane's star rose in a new quarter of the sky. I could not give you twenty of my eldest men, to say nothing of erasing all of our preparations. There is not time. I have traveled through the mage roads to get here, but I would not bring all my
people through those ways, nor are they mine to command.”

Magdalene looked around at the houses and at the hills behind them, lost in her own thoughts, sampling old memories.

“The blow falls here first,” she said quietly. “It has fallen here before.”

“I do not think it will,” Caleb said. “You are nearer, but many of the ways are still open in the mountains, as you can feel and I have come. Five hundred miles to our foothills is as within her reach as your fallen outposts along your forgotten northern border. Hylfing stood against her once. She was turned back at its walls. There are no old grudges waiting for her here, but no doubt she has filled her dreams with pictures of our blood darkening the sand.”

Hooves pounded into the square, and all heads turned. Eleven heavy horses trotted and slowed to a walk. Men dressed like Caleb sat on each one. A bouncing sack dangled over a horse rump behind the leader. Beside them all loped a tall black dog, the size of a small pony. To Henrietta, he looked like a Dane, but his chest and head were broader.

Caleb whistled, and the dog broke into a run. The remaining birds lifted off the ground and found perches on the fountain. When it reached him, the dog lay down at Caleb's feet.

“Queen,” Caleb said, and he bowed slightly. “Come to us instead. The council would welcome your people.
You have strengths that we do not, and our walls have never been breached. Now we must go. I would be inside my city's gates before the blow falls, and dark ways lie ahead.”

“We will stand or fall in FitzFaeren,” Magdalene said.

Caleb lifted Henrietta up onto the horse, pulled out his bow, and swung up behind her.

“May heaven stand with you,” he said. “And may it never fall.”

Caleb turned Chester away, but quickly turned back.

“Would you have us leave your brother?” Caleb asked. “Or shall we take him?”

“We have no brother,” she said again.

The sack squirmed.

Henry was cold. Very cold. His pants were wet and clinging to his legs. His blood had been replaced with frigid water, and greasy coils of brown rope were digging into his cheek. His eyes seemed to be working again, but not well. He tried to push himself up, but his hands were tied behind his back. The floor was rising and falling beneath him, and he could feel water puddling and spilling around his stomach and legs.

Groaning, Henry tried to roll onto his side, at least to get his face off of the rope. He lifted his head up and set it on a gray bag.

The bag kicked him in the cheek.

Behind him, men laughed. Hands reached around
him, and Henry blinked when he saw metal flick toward the bag, and a thick string fall away.

“Faerie,” a voice whispered. “Bide a while.”

Henry was rolled onto his back, and he propped himself up on the rope. The wind was blowing around him now.

The small wizard was crouching in front of him. His brown hood was up and inflating in the wind. Pale gray eyes stared out of the shadow. He was looking over Henry's face and put two fingers up to the burn scars on his jaw.

“I have a burn like the one on your hand,” he said quietly, “but none like these. Are you strong?”

It wasn't a hard question. Henry never felt strong, but especially not when he'd been knocked out, tied up, and frozen in the bottom of a boat.

He shook his head.

“Keep your arms behind you,” the young man whispered, and Henry felt a blade slide between his wrists, nicking his skin. The rope fell loose.

The small wizard backed away from him, ducked beneath the sail that flapped above them both, and huddled down in the boat. Henry could see three of them, all hooded. The fourth must be behind him, steering.

The boat itself had only one sail and no deck. It wasn't much longer than twenty feet. Now that Henry could actually see the water around him and watch the prow rise and fall with the waves, he immediately felt ill. An island in the distance climbed and sank with the horizon. Shutting his eyes, he swallowed. He didn't want
to start throwing up. Not ever. But especially not now. He didn't know what the young wizard was planning, but vomiting wouldn't help, no matter what it was.

A gust of wind parted the hair on the back of his head and bit into his neck. He shivered as the sail snapped and the boat surged up a wave and dropped.

The gray bag erupted beside him.

A very small man with a pronounced belly bounded up, yelling. He booted Henry in the ear and leapt to the rail, balancing perfectly with the ship's motion.

Henry fell over and covered his head.

The three wizards jumped to their feet, grabbing at the rail and at the mast for balance.

Henry watched flame sprout from beneath the faerie's feet and flare around the ship rail. The wizards yelped, staggering and pulling away their hands even as spray from the bow doused most of the flame.

The fourth wizard jumped forward from the back of the boat and stood facing the fat little man where he balanced.

“Faeries sink like stones,” he said. His face was as sharp as his voice. “Drown, or slink back into your sack.”

The faerie rolled his eyes in his head, stuck out his tongue, and folded it. Both of his rather thick ears stood out from his wet and tousled brown hair.

As the wizard raised his hand, Henry could already feel the violence of the words in the man's throat. His own body tensed like it was waiting for a blow.

The curse came out of the man's mouth and became
thunder in the air. Guided by the wizard's upraised hand, it tore out a bite of the ship's rail and wall where the faerie had been standing. The faerie was gone.

Henry blinked. The faerie, with puffed-out cheeks, had dropped to the ship bottom and curled into a tight little ball. The air shimmered around him.

The men all spun, looking for the faerie, while he began crawling to the mast with bulging cheeks and a red face. When he reached it, he shinnied quickly up to the top. Henry looked from him to the confused wizards. The small one could obviously see the faerie, and he was stealing quick glances up. The rest hung on to the ship rail for balance and scanned the boat around them.

The young wizard looked at Henry and nodded toward the man that stood closest to where Henry was lying. Then he looked back up the mast. He pointed. “Up there!” he shouted.

The men all looked up. The big bald one leaned back against the rail, and his hood fell away. Suddenly, the smaller wizard hit him in the ribs and flipped him into the sea. Black-beard turned, surprised, and a knife flicked into his chest, burying itself up to the hilt. His legs collapsed, and he slumped into the bottom of the boat.

Only one remained—the one with the icy voice. He turned toward the smaller wizard and smiled.

“Monmouth,” he said calmly. “You are only fit for kitchens if you need a blade to do your killing.”