The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards by N. D. Wilson Page A

eyes were sad. She shook her head slowly and then tapped her temple with a weathered finger. She reached over and tapped Henry’s temple.
    “My dreams,” said Henry, and he sighed. “My dreams. Iknow. My dad told me. You attached yourself to his dreams to keep him company, but now you’re attached to mine.” He looked back down at the ashen ruin. “I really have to go, don’t I? But what if
I
found my dad’s dreams? Could I do it? Could I find them?”
    A cat appeared on the hill beside them, a black cat with a white face.
    “No,” Henry said, and thrust it out of his mind. The cat was gone. He stared into his grandmother’s seeing eyes. “Could I?”
    Grandmother looked from Henry to where the cat had been. She shrugged and cocked her head.
    “Okay,” Henry said, facing the city. “I don’t want this.” He waved his hand at it and shut his dream eyes. “I want to see my father. Take me to my father.” That was wrong. There wasn’t any dream magic to take him anywhere. There wasn’t a guide. He had to find his own way.
    He thought of his father. He thought of the way he smelled of leather and forests and the cliffs by the sea. He thought of his laugh and the deep blackness in his eyes. He thought of the awkward wonderful moment when his unknown father had first kissed him on the head, and the scratching of his jaw.
    He opened his eyes, and he knew that he was not in his father’s dream. He was in a different kind. His father was in it.
    Henry stood on the side of a street. He had no body. He was part of a wall. Five men and five horses lay motionless, with limbs splayed in the dust. Ash drifted in the air abovethem. From a gaping doorway stepped eight men in black, with their hair in oiled knots. Between them they carried a glossy gray stone box, open and empty, the color of death, the length of a man. Black symbols had been inlaid along its sides, symbols that made Henry feel a sickness creeping over him, a cold sucking pulling at his strength. Into the end a black skull had been set, and black vines twisted out of its mouth and eyes and nose—the skull of a green man.
    The box was lowered into the street, and dust swirled slowly away from it. The eight fingerlings picked up a man, and as they lowered him into the box, Henry saw his face.
    Henry had no mouth to yell, no body to use in a fight. And then he did. He stepped out of the wall, ready to kill, ready to be killed.
    The fingerlings looked at him, and the world went black.
    Pauper son
, a soft voice said.
You would enter my dreams? You would brush your sour mortal soul against my immortal essence?
    Henry saw nothing. He sensed nothing but the voice. And then he was in pain.
    I had thought to save you for last
, the voice said.
To wait until your father was ash in my hands, but you die now, pauper son, dream-walker, pup to mongrels. You die now
.
    Henry struggled, but he had no arms to flail. A flash of gold spun in front of him, a living word, a defiant war cry, a weed. It twisted with green.
    I can see
, Henry thought. And then he heard, not the witch’s voice, not her anger or her deathly bitterness, heheard the dandelion’s burning song—a song of life, of laughter and death and life again, of wind and rain and sun, of ash and birth, of triumph and tragedy and victory in every defeat. He watched and he heard and he ached, not with a physical pain but with desire, with a yearning for everything the dandelion was, for everything it promised. Henry and the witch together watched the fire that guarded his soul, the place where a weed had taken root. Thick gray threads, arms, serpentine beams wrapped around the dandelion fire; they wrapped and contracted and smothered the burning weed song.
    While Henry watched, the dandelion died. The green went gray and joined the strands. The golden fire slowed and stopped and drifted away in ash.
    Grief, overwhelming loss, surged ice-cold over Henry as he watched the ash settle onto the witch’s gray rot.