Dandelion Fire (5 page)

She sighed and flipped the paper away from her. Henry had been trying to go through the cupboards by himself. What else could they mean by “tampering and transportation”? Of course he'd been trying. He got mad at her when she did anything on her own, but he would never include her in anything if he didn't have to. The only reason she even knew about the cupboards at all was because she'd caught him chipping the plaster off his wall in the middle of the night.

But she had the key. Henry may have tried to get through the small doors, but it wasn't possible. He needed her. And now he was either blind or going nuts or both or faking everything but his swollen eyelids. She could have helped him. They could have gone through dozens of cupboards by now.

She wondered where he kept Grandfather's journal. Probably tucked under his socks, where he kept everything.

Henrietta slid down the bed toward his nightstand-dresser and reached for the top drawer. Before her hand touched the handle, three sharp cracks burst from the cupboard wall behind her. She jumped and turned, scanning over the cupboards' formation. None of the doors were open.

Three more cracks rattled in the wall, and on the second, her eyes caught something behind the glass in the little post-office box. She moved back to the foot of the bed, crouched, and stared at the cloudy panel. The end of a stick, a cane, slid up against it from behind and rapped sharply. Then it withdrew. After a moment of silence, a folded piece of paper replaced it.

“Henrietta?” Anastasia's voice came up the stairs. “Do you want to come down? What are you doing?”

Henrietta twisted and spoke over her shoulder. “No thanks,” she said. “I'm just thinking.”

“What about?” Anastasia asked.

Henrietta stood up and moved to Henry's dresser. His sock drawer was empty. Socks only. “Just Henry!” she yelled. One drawer down, beneath Henry's T-shirts, she found what she was looking for: the two volumes of Grandfather's journal rubber-banded together and a small key.

“Zeke called for Henry,” Anastasia said. “Penny's talking to him.”

“Good,” Henrietta said. She moved quickly back to the post-office box and inserted the key. With nervous hands, she pulled out the heavy paper and reshut the door quietly.

“Have you seen the raggant?” Anastasia asked. “I don't know where he is.”

“Dad says he leaves sometimes. He always comes back.” Henrietta looked down at the folded paper in her hands. “I just want to think right now, Anastasia. Why don't you look for him? Check the barn. He likes the loft.”

Henrietta waited. Anastasia would come all the way up, or she would go away. She couldn't just keep yelling up the stairs.

“I don't know,” Anastasia said. “Maybe I will. I hate it when Penny talks to Zeke. It's so boring to listen to, and I don't want to just sit around thinking about Henry being blind. It makes me feel sick.”

Henrietta bit her lip and didn't say anything.

“Fine,” Anastasia said. “I'll go bug Penny.”

Henrietta turned the paper over in her hands. It was rough, almost fuzzy around the edges, and its surface was textured like a window screen. It had been folded and was sealed with a sprawling tree in black wax. She slid her finger beneath it.

The page was asymmetrical, and a stamp of the same tree was set near the top. The note was sloppily handwritten and spots of ink were flecked throughout.

Henrietta didn't know what
ablution
was or
ansbettment
or
the morph,
but she didn't need to. Henry had been talking to someone, and she knew who it was. She'd seen one of his letters before, and it had sounded just as halfway nuts as this one, wicked even.
Fork tungs
were probably lightning, and that meant that Henry had been talking to him last night, last night after he'd sent Henrietta away. And whoever this weirdo was, he was going to try to help Henry leave.

Henrietta was confused. It would have been easy to think that Henry was doing his own exploring and trying to make his own way out of Kansas without her help. The two letters looked that way. But his eye panic had been real. He had no reason to fake blindness. Unless he was working on some kind of plan.

Chewing her lip, she looked around the room. She needed to stop thinking. She needed to make a decision and do something. If Henry was being a weasel, she had every right to explore on her own. If he really was sick and couldn't explore himself, he would need her to do it for him. If he was dumb enough to trust the letter guy, then she should intervene.

Henrietta picked up Grandfather's journal and turned to the diagram of the cupboards. Then she stepped back and looked up at Henry's wall and down at the ink on the page. Grandfather's key was in her pocket. She could do it right now if Anastasia didn't catch her. She would.

She picked a door on the wall, a small, almost diamond-shaped door near the compasses in the center. It was labeled 18 in the journal. She looked at its name. Treb/Actium/Constant. She would just go through far enough to get a feel for the place. She wouldn't do a full explore. That would mean loading a backpack and getting ready and everything, and she didn't want to wait and end up changing her mind. She had to do it right now.

Henrietta flipped pages until she found the combinations. Then she knelt on the end of Henry's bed, inhaled slowly, held her breath, and twisted the left knob through all the symbols until its large arrow was in place over the horseshoe-looking thing with little circle-ends. And then she turned the right knob, clicking slowing through the Roman numerals until it was on IX. She
double-checked the combination and slid back off the bed. She picked up the two pieces of paper and, along with the journals, tucked them under Henry's pillow. Then she turned and hurried down the attic stairs.

On the landing, she waited, listening. She could hear Penny talking downstairs, but no Anastasia. She checked the bedroom that she shared with her sisters, and when she was sure Anastasia was either downstairs or outside, she went to Grandfather's door.

Though her father had thoroughly mulched its surface trying to get in, it was as solid as it had ever been. Henrietta ignored her shaking hand and slid the key into the small hole in the wood. It turned, and the door swung open silently. She stepped inside, put the key in her pocket, and shut the door behind her.

Henrietta swallowed hard. The last time she had been in the room, both of her parents had been unconscious on the floor. A stain as dark as oil marked where her father had bled. The room was silent and dusty, books lay on the floor where they had fallen the last time she'd gone through the cupboards alone, and the end of a short rope stuck out from beneath the bed. Against the wall, beside the bookshelves, was a plain cupboard door, halfway open and large enough to crawl through.

Before she could change her mind, Henrietta got on her hands and knees and crawled into the door. The inside of the cupboard was dark and silent, and her breath tasted like dust. She inched forward, waiting.

* * *

The rank smell hit her in the face, the smell of sewage and hot salt water, of burning wood and tar and flesh. Voices followed, screams and yells, commands and curses. Splitting timbers.

She felt the floor moving beneath her, and her hand found the back of a small door. She pushed, and the door swung open. Golden heat struck her in the face as she squinted out over hundreds of men scrambling across the deck of a heaving ship. Some were armed with swords or bows, and others were stripped down to loincloths, wearing blood and sweat while they crawled around huge-timbered catapults. While she watched, frozen in shock, a storm of arrows ripped through the crowd of men. A crash like subterranean thunder shook the ship, and the deck roiled and lurched. A huge galley, spined with oar blades and twice the height of the deck in front of her, ground its way through the prow, first rolling the smaller ship almost on its side, and then plowing its bow beneath the water. The ship dove, levered forward beneath the weight of the galley, and Henrietta bounced and slid head and shoulders out of the little door. Splaying her legs, she wedged her arms against the cupboard walls. She could feel the deck writhing beneath her and the crackling of enormous beams, twisted to explosion. She had to squirm backward, back up the increasing incline. Back to Kansas. Back to now.

A man, glistening in his bloody skin, landed on his stomach in front of her, a broken arrow sprouting from
his neck. He clawed at the deck as he began to slide, and his fingers grazed her face. Then, with the last strength of the dying, they closed around her hair.

Henrietta grabbed at his wrist, but the man's weight had already done its work. Her feet slipped free, and together, the two slid down across the slimy deck, down to the hungry water.

collided with something solid, and she gasped for air. She was hanging on to the beamed base of a catapult fastened to the tilting deck. Her legs were underwater. Her hair was free, and the man who'd dragged her into this world had disappeared. Drums were beating, men were groaning, and the wood beneath her still crackled in its contortion. The huge galley's five rows of oars were backing water, leaving the smaller ship to find the bottom.

Looking up the inclined deck, Henrietta could see where she'd come from. A small door hung open in the housing of another catapult on the other side of the shattered mast. That's where she needed to be, before she was shot, stabbed, or the entire ship sank beneath her.

The deck was mostly clear. The unwounded living had taken to the sea, and Henrietta could hear them praying and cursing behind her in the waves. She refused to look in the water around her, or to think about what was bumping against her back.

The big galley pulled its ram free, and Henrietta felt
herself, felt the entire ship, sink farther into the water. The wreck was becoming more vertical by the second.

She couldn't grip the deck with her hands, and her feet slid all over the planks. Henrietta turned, unwillingly, and looked at the bodies in the water around her. Most wore very little, but one man, floating facedown, had a knife handle sticking out of a belt in the small of his back.

Henrietta hooked the corpse with her toe. She tugged the little bronze-colored knife free and gripped it tight.

The water was at her ribs.

She drove the knife between two planks, as high above her head as she could reach. Then, scrambling her wet shoes over the deck surface, she managed to get most of the way out of the water. She found a splinter with her left foot and pushed higher, ignoring the pain as the deck shard dug through the sole of her shoe and into the ball of her foot. Working the knife loose, she reinserted it above her and pulled up again, kneeling on the steep deck before finding another painful foothold. She was climbing. She could do this. Her arms were shaking, and she might puncture her foot any second, but she could do this. She was closer to home.

The open door she had fallen through looked surprisingly small. Too small. But she refused to think about it. She had come in, so she could go back.

Halfway there, with another fifteen feet to climb, she stopped, relaxed her body against the still-crackling
deck, wrapped her arms around the base of the mast, and panted. Looking out over the sea behind her, she realized that the ship wasn't in the open ocean. Islands dotted the horizon, and hundreds of ships were moving around them, crawling like centipedes on their oars.