Dandelion Fire (7 page)

Henrietta sat up on the bed. She had been drifting off, but now her eyes were wide. She could have read this sooner, but what kind of a warning was it? You can drown in Actium? Moment of danger? Why not, “You'll crawl through onto a ship as it is crushed and sinks. Hang on or you'll be lost forever”? That would have been helpful. At least now she knew that her grandfather didn't exactly overstate things. And she knew she never wanted to find out what Topkapi was.

Still sitting up, she read on.

Henrietta had seen those halls. She had seen the dancing and heard the music. She had chased Eli, the short old man, out of Grandfather's bedroom and back to that place. Eli had called her grandfather a fool.

She wanted to set the knobs to FitzFaeren and go slither into the cupboard downstairs to watch the dancers. She wanted to look for her grandfather. Why had she let Eli leave? He could have explained all of this.

Downstairs, she heard loud voices. Her sisters'.

Henry was home.

“No,” she heard him say. “You're not helping me. I can do it by myself. I'm fine.”

Her father said something she couldn't make out, and the house was silent of everything but slow footsteps on the stairs.

Henrietta waited. Even if Henry was in a bad mood, she wanted to talk to him. His feet found the attic stairs, and she listened to them complain as he climbed.

After a minute, his doors swung open and Henry stepped in. He looked much better. His eyelids were only a little heavy. She smiled at him and immediately felt guilty for it. His eyes were wide open, but they rolled
around the room, groping for images they couldn't find. She swallowed, wondering what to say. Maybe she should cough.

Henry felt his way to the end of his bed, and then the cupboard wall. Running his hands over the cupboards, he crouched slowly, until he'd found the door to Endor. His fingertips sought out each screw and felt all around the edges of the door. He seemed satisfied and straightened up, breathing heavily, and groped for the door to Badon Hill. He levered it open and stuck his hand inside. Suddenly, gritting his teeth, he punched, hard, and Henrietta heard the crack.

Henry pulled his fist out and sucked on his knuckles.

“Hey, Henry,” Henrietta said.

Henry jolted and nearly tripped.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked quietly.

“I was—I was reading Grandfather's journal. I went through a cupboard today. While you were gone. It was really stupid, I know. I almost died. I thought we should read the journal before we did anything else.”

She waited for him to ask for the story, or repeat her own insult, or at least get angry that she'd looked through his drawers. He didn't. Instead, he sniffed.

“You're definitely not from number 18,” she said, and tried to laugh. “It's a sea battle. Listen,” Henrietta continued, “with your whole blind thing …”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Well, we'll have to figure something out.”

“You going to get me a guide dog? I already have Richard. Just leave. I want to lie down.”

Henrietta stood up quickly and backed out of his way. “Sure,” she said. She tucked the journal under his pillow, and then she dug in her pocket.

Henry crawled onto his bed and sprawled out, facedown.

“I'm really sorry,” Henrietta said.

Henry snorted. “You didn't do it.”

“No,” Henrietta said. “I'm not sorry you're blind. I mean, I am. But I meant that I'm sorry for lying. About the key.”

Henry didn't say anything. Henrietta waited, but she didn't think he wanted to hear anything else. She would talk to him again later. Tonight, maybe. But probably tomorrow. She stepped out of his room.

“Your stuffs under your pillow,” she said, and she shut the doors.

Henry thought he'd done well. She might think he was weak, but he hadn't acted weak. He had acted tired. He hadn't acted. He was tired. And he had no idea what time it was. He hoped the dinner hour was past so he wouldn't have to refuse to go sit at the table.

He slid his hand under his pillow. There were Grandfather's rubber-banded journals, but something else was on top of it, something cold.

His fingers closed around the key.

rolled onto his back, clenching the key. He couldn't believe Henrietta had actually given it to him. Of course, she wouldn't be too worried about him using it. He was blind. She could afford to give it to him now.

Without thinking, he lifted the key up to look at it. Frustrated, and more insulted by his blindness because he'd forgotten about it, he dropped his arm back to the bed. But as it fell, he saw something move. His eyes had captured motion. He waved his arm and caught the faintest blur where he knew his hand had to be. Dropping the key, he held his hand still in front of his face. It was his burned hand. He couldn't see his arm. He couldn't see his wrist or hand or the room. In the nothingness in front of him floated his burn. Only it wasn't just a burn. It was a symbol, and it was moving.

Henry couldn't have taken his eyes off of it if he'd wanted to. There was nothing else to see, nowhere else to focus. The symbol held colors, every color, and they slipped out as it moved, not quickly, from shape to shape, crawling and morphing like a glowing snake spelling out some strange alphabet. But somehow, while
changing, the symbol was never really changed. It was always itself, traveling through moods, and ages and times—speaking a life cycle, a patterned history of greens and golds and grays.

Henry knew what it was. His head throbbed as he looked at it, and he remembered the pain. This was a picture, a word, a name, the life of a dandelion, and he was looking at it, seeing it in a way that he had never seen anything. Knowing it.

Suddenly, in a burst of fear, Henry put his hand down and tucked it beneath his leg. His whole body ached from the pain of looking at it, and his hand throbbed. But more frightening than the pain was the sheer incomprehensibility of what had happened to him.

He remembered everything. He remembered Henrietta digging for the key and the storm and the wind and the sun-gilded fields. He remembered seeing a flicker in a dandelion. He had stared and throbbed and seen, and then he had touched. And Henrietta had shaken him awake. And he'd gone blind.

Henry had seen magic before. He slept beside little doors that couldn't be very well explained by anything else. He'd seen his uncle Frank's ax beaten back by magic. The blood of a witch had burned its way into his jaw. He'd watched a mailman's pant legs through his attic wall, and he'd smelled Badon Hill. But still, in Henry's mind, magic was something wrong, something bent, dangerous, something that could be kept someplace else if you remembered to screw the door shut.

Dandelions were not magic. They couldn't be. They were here. They were normal. You couldn't shut them up someplace or even keep them out of your lawn. If they were magic, well, then everything was.

Henry shivered, choked, and then crawled onto the floor. He was going to throw up. He'd done that in this room before, terrified by a world unlike anything he'd ever been told. He was going crazy, or the world was. There were no other options. And he didn't like either.

Crazy or not, he didn't want to puke. He sat up on his knees and tried to breathe like a sane person—long, slow, even breaths. It helped. Maybe he should see a therapist. He probably was mental. What kind of blind person could only see one burn? A dandelion burn.

His door creaked open, and he looked up.

“Henrietta?” he asked. “Richard?”

Something snorted, and he relaxed. “C'mere,” he said, and put out his good hand, waiting for the raggant's sagging side. Instead, something hard and blunt and a little frayed butted into his palm. He pulled on the creature's horn, slid his hand up its head, and scratched behind its twitching ears.

Fur brushed against his other hand, and he knew that Blake the cat had come upstairs as well. Blind, crazy, and with knots in his stomach, Henry still smiled. He scooped up the two animals, held them tight like charms against panic, and lay back on his bed to think.

With one hand, Henry kneaded the raggant's back.
Blake licked the other. The world was the crazy one. He hadn't given a miniature rhino wings, or cats sandpaper tongues.