The Chestnut King: Book 3 of the 100 Cupboards Read Free Page B

to act or talk or touch. He was still closer to his cousins than his two sisters. And it wasn’t his sisters’ fault.
    Henrietta stepped past him and turned around. “Just be normal,” she said. “You’ll be fine. And now tell me where you were. Because I know you can’t have been in that shed.”
    Henry licked his lips. Crusting blood. “I have to clean up.”
    “Were you in Badon Hill?”
    Henry shook his head, put his hand on his cousin’s shoulder, and stepped past her. “I need to hurry.”
    Henrietta didn’t follow him. “You do that,” she said. “I’m going to have a look around.”
    Henry sighed and moved across the roof to the low, arched doorway that held more stairs. The raggant, no longer offended, snored in the shadows behind him.
    In his room, Henry dipped his hands in a porcelain bowl on his dresser and splashed his face. Then, looking in his small mirror, he rubbed at the blood. Had it been worth it? He’d seen Zeke. He’d pitched. But now his head was drumming, he’d lost his glove, and Henrietta was suspicious. And when Henrietta was suspicious, life could be terrible.
    Blinking away water, he leaned forward and examined his face. First, his eyes. A little bloodshot but fine. His hair had been cropped short a month ago, but now brown tufts stood out awkwardly above his ears and on the back of his head, where his baseball hat had left a crease. Where was his hat? Had it fallen off in Kansas? Was it on the roof? He didn’t have another one.
    Henry reached up and touched his jaw, where the witch’s blood had marked him. For a moment, he let his eyes relax, and he watched the gray spiderwebs float out of the scar, twisting slowly. And then he pressed his palm against it and shut his eyes. Inside, his bone grew cold, and his teeth ached. But his skin was hot. A shifting, twisting, growing warmth pushed in, struggling against the witch’s deathless trace, forcing her cold away. The brand on his palm, the mark of his second sight, the mark given to him behind a barn in Kansas, where his blood had mingled with the soul of a dandelion, turned his itch into pain. A better pain. For a moment, the pleasant burning was all hefelt, and then he dropped his hand, his warm jaw cooled, and the gray death strands reappeared, Nimiane’s strands, trailing away from his face in their slow dance. His scar had been growing, the strands had been thickening, and Henry didn’t want to think about what that might mean.
    Shivering, he turned from the mirror, pulled off his T-shirt, and kicked away his jeans. Someone, probably his mother, had laid a white shirt with half a collar on his bed. Dark trousers and a matching coat lay beside it. He hadn’t seen them before, and they looked new, a change from all the altered clothes his brothers had outgrown. His brothers. He hadn’t met any of them. Three of them, he never would. He had seen the dead trees in his mother’s orchard, where his own sapling had been planted. One he would meet tonight.
    Henry swallowed and jumped quickly into his clothes. His white socks were dirty, and cheatgrass seeds pricked his skin through the ankles, but he didn’t bother to change them. He forced his feet into the brown leather things that he’d been given for shoes and hurried out his door.
    In the hall, he was met by laughter. His sisters’. His cousins’. He could hear his aunt Dotty, his uncle Frank, and then the big voice of his uncle Caleb. His father’s laugh was absent. One more flight of stairs lay between him and a brother. He tried to descend them with confidence, but Henrietta was leaning against the wall at the bottom. She looked up at him, and her eyes were sparkling. Her brows went up, and she flashed him a tight smile. She was holding Henry’s hat.
    “You look nice,” she said.
    “Shut up.” His voice was flat.
    “Great socks.”
    Henry stopped beside her. “Shut up,” he said again. He hadn’t seen her look this happy in a month.
    She leaned over to