Chapter Three

THREE

The train arrived right on schedule, early on a Sunday morning, a black steam engine with half a dozen blue-and-green carriages in tow. The sky looked angry, the sun’s rays casting the thin clouds in a furious shade of red. It appeared a storm was brewing as the children gathered before Arthur and Linus to say their goodbyes.

“You’ll listen to Zoe, yes?” he said with an undercurrent of nervousness unlike anything he’d ever felt before. “You won’t give her any trouble?”

Lucy smiled prettily. “Oh, we wouldn’t dream of it. Cross our hearts, hope to die.”

“That’s what we’re concerned about,” Linus said. “No death. No destruction. And I’d better not hear from Zoe that there were explosions of any kind.”

“I’ll make sure nothing blows up,” Sal said, Theodore on his shoulder, nipping at his ear. “Shouldn’t be too hard, now that Talia doesn’t have grenades anymore.”

“I still haven’t forgiven you for that,” Talia said, glaring up at them.

“You have to miss us,” Lucy demanded. “And you have to call me every hour so I can tell you what I did the previous hour. In great detail.”

“You have to bring us back presents,” Talia said. “And if one of the presents—say, for a beautiful, talented gnome—happens to be twice as expensive as the others, then we’ll just have to deal with that.”

Theodore growled, and Linus assured him if he found any discarded buttons, he’d bring them back for the wyvern’s hoard. Theodore was so pleased he took to the sky, wings spread wide as he circled above them, his shadow stretching along the ground.

While the others continued to tell Linus what he and Arthur could and could not do, Sal looked at Arthur and jerked his head. They stepped off to the side of the platform, near an orange courtesy phone that hung from a post.

“What is it?” Arthur asked. “Did something happen?”

Sal shrugged. “No, it’s not like that. It’s…” He looked away out onto the rolling dunes rising beyond the platform, thin reeds bending in the warm breeze. “I just… I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Anything,” Arthur said with a nod. “Always.”

Sal took a deep breath, and said, “We’re going to listen to your testimony. On the radio. We talked about it—”

“Did you?” Arthur asked. “All of you?”

“Yes.”

He should’ve expected this, and though a prickle of unease danced along the back of his neck at the idea of them listening, it was no match for how proud he felt. He knew how hard this must be for Sal. For all the progress he’d made, Sal still had moments of extreme doubt.

“And you’re all in agreement?”

“We are,” Sal said firmly, even as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He sighed. “You confuse me sometimes.”

Arthur chuckled dryly. “It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.”

Sal arched an eyebrow. “Might want to work on that, then.”

“Cheeky.”

“You want to protect us from the people who don’t like us, and I get it. I do. But then in the next breath, you tell us we need to use our voices because those same people should know who we are.”

“A conundrum,” Arthur agreed.

“You can’t protect us forever,” Sal said, and the sorrow Arthur felt was sharp, a dagger through the heart. “I know you want to, but how else are we supposed to learn? How am I supposed to help you fix what’s broken if you shield us from everything?”

“You are a child, ” Arthur said, that unease changing from a prickle to a full-on thrum. “All of you are.”

“I’m fifteen,” Sal reminded him. “If that’s a child, fine. But even then, I— we won’t be for long. You say you trust us. Doesn’t that mean you should trust us to make some decisions for ourselves?” He glanced over Arthur’s shoulder at the others, Chauncey’s vibrant voice echoing across the platform. “This is about us, Arthur. Don’t we have the right to know what’s being said?”

“You do,” Arthur said quietly. “Sal, I…” He shook his head. “Yes, you do have the right.” He laid his hands on Sal’s shoulders. “If this is what you want, then I’ll support it. All I ask is that you allow Zoe and Helen to be present to help you all make sense of it. And any questions you have for me or Linus, we’ll answer them upon our return.”

Sal nodded, obviously relieved.

“Is that all?” Arthur asked carefully.

Sal cleared his throat, gaze darting around. “I know… we talk about it. About you adopting the kids.” He winced. “And I know I’m probably too old for—”

“It wouldn’t matter if you were one or one hundred,” Arthur said. “You would still be mine as much as I am yours. Nothing will ever change that.”

Sal exhaled sharply as he sagged. When he looked back at Arthur ( at, not up, seeing as how he was almost as tall as Arthur now) his vision was clear, sure, and he said, “I didn’t know my parents. They were gone before I could remember anything about them. But you’re here. You said you would be, and you’ve kept your word.”

“And I meant it,” Arthur said.

The train whistled sharply, signaling an imminent departure. Arthur turned toward it, only to jerk his head back when Sal blurted, “We love you, you know? We don’t say it very much, but we do.”

Arthur pulled Sal toward him, wrapping his arms around the boy as tightly as he could. Sal gripped his back, forehead on Arthur’s shoulder. “I know,” he whispered. “And I—”

An attendant—a burly fellow in a snappy uniform with two rows of gold buttons down the front—leaned out from the train and called, “All aboard! Final call for those leaving Marsyas!”

They hugged the children for the last time and lifted their luggage—two suitcases between them—as they headed for the train to find their seats.

But as the train began to pull away, Arthur did not sit. He hurried from carriage car to carriage car as the train picked up speed, waving frantically to the children as they ran next to the tracks, Theodore coasting on the wind. Soon, the train proved to be too fast, and the children stopped. He leaned out the window and shouted, “I love you! All of you!”

Whatever they said in reply was lost to the sounds of the train and the warm wind.

Bowing his head, he struggled to control his breathing. He looked up when a gentle hand squeezed his shoulder. He didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. “I’ve never left them before,” Arthur whispered. “I didn’t expect it to be so hard.”

“Leaving is never easy,” Linus said, laying his forehead against Arthur’s back. “But knowing they’ll be waiting for us to come back will make it that much sweeter when we do.”

Arthur turned and gathered Linus up in his arms. “It’s as if I’ve left my heart behind.”

He felt Linus smile against his throat. “I’ve never seen you so out of sorts before. You delightful man, they will be well because you taught them how to be. Come, now. Calm, even breaths. The sooner we arrive, the sooner we can return home.”

Midway through their journey, the first raindrops began to fall.

The city was as Arthur remembered from his youth: extraordinarily loud, cars trapped in gridlocked streets, people bustling on the sidewalk, umbrellas up against the rain that fell in droves, the black and gray of the metal buildings gloomy under a darkened sky. Stepping off the train, Arthur entered a different world, one where he was a stranger. He couldn’t smell the salt of the ocean, couldn’t hear the crashing of waves against rocky cliffs. The stench of petrol and rubber mingled with the sounds of honking horns, and part of him—the child trapped in the cellar—screamed at him to get back on the train.

Linus bumped into him from behind, grumbling under his breath about the never-ending rain. “Remembered my umbrella for once.” He glanced up at the clock hanging against the far wall of the train platform. Arthur did the same and saw it was the middle of the afternoon.

“The hotel, then?” Arthur asked, taking Linus’s suitcase so he could open the umbrella.

With the umbrella sorted, Linus took his suitcase back. He looked at Arthur, that funny little wrinkle in his forehead making an appearance. “I… I have something to show you first. Will you come with me? We’ll have to take the bus.”

Arthur would follow him anywhere and told him as much. Linus rolled his eyes (though he couldn’t hide his smile) and said, “Besotted fool. Come on.”

The trip on the bus took almost forty minutes. Linus promised the journey to the hotel wouldn’t take half as long after. Arthur, for his part, didn’t mind, fascinated by the way everyone standing swayed each time the bus came to a stop at a light. They were, for a brief moment, all the same. The farther they went, the more the bus emptied, and though they had seats available to them, Arthur told Linus he preferred to stand after the long train ride, for some reason enjoying the simple act of being on a bus, something he hadn’t done in years.

“We’re approaching our stop,” Linus said, reaching up to pull the cord hanging from the ceiling. A bell sounded from somewhere near the front of the bus, which began to slow, turning into a pullout off the road next to a small stand.

The rain hadn’t lessened. Linus and Arthur had to jump from the last step on the bus to the sidewalk to avoid a large puddle. As the bus pulled away, Arthur waved. No one waved back.

“They don’t care,” Linus said.

“Perhaps,” Arthur replied. “Still, it’s only polite.” He took in their new surroundings. The buildings of the city rose in the distance, hulking giants reaching toward a slate-colored sky. Around them, a neighborhood of middle-class housing, single-story homes made of brick and wooden paneling. It was much quieter here, the traffic nowhere near as severe as it’d been closer to the city center. The only sound came from the splatter of rain and a dog barking somewhere.

“This way,” Linus said, the umbrella open. They began to move down the sidewalk, Linus quiet, tension making his shoulders stiff.

Arthur wanted to ask where they were going but got distracted by the trees that lined either side of the road. They didn’t look like the trees back on the island. Even though it was summer, the leaves were dull, dark, as if all the color had been sapped from them. It was off-putting in ways he couldn’t describe, and he was about to tell Linus as much. But before he could, he saw a street sign that led farther into the neighborhood. HERMES WAY , it read.

“This is where you lived,” he said.

“It is,” Linus said in a clipped voice, as they turned onto Hermes Way, a boxlike lorry driving past, splashing water near their feet. Arthur found it odd that no lights seemed to be on in the darkened houses. Even if people were at work, wouldn’t they want to come home to brightness rather than shadows?

It didn’t take long for them to reach their destination. Linus stopped in front of a house. Eighty-six Hermes Way. It wasn’t much: small, brick at its base, with paneling in a dark shade of blue. A porch with white railings, complete with a rocking chair tucked away safely out of the rain. And there were flower beds, but they held no flowers, just misshapen bushes that could use a trim.

“This is it,” Linus said quietly, but he didn’t look at Arthur. He stared at the house with an expression Arthur didn’t like, a tinge of sadness that made him look older than he was.

“It’s… lovely,” Arthur decided.

“Is it?”

“It’s small,” Arthur admitted, looking back at the house. “I don’t know how it could contain all that you are.”

Linus was startled into laughter, eyes bright. “I’ll have you know I’ve lost half a stone.”

“I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it. I happen to love those stones, lost or found. It’s just… it’s not you.”

“It was,” Linus said. “Perhaps no longer, but this was my home.”

“You’re still the owner.”

“I am.” He nodded toward the house next door. “Mrs. Klapper lives there. Her nephew is in the process of purchasing the property, but he and his new husband went abroad, and we’re waiting for him to get back to finalize everything. We don’t need to go inside, but there’s something I need to do.”

“What’s that?” Arthur asked as they made their way up the walkway toward the house.

Linus ducked his head. “I made a promise.”

“We do that, don’t we? Make promises.”

“We do,” Linus said as they stopped in front of the porch, the rain tick, tick, ticking against the umbrella. “Could you set our luggage on the porch out of the rain? According to Talia and Phee, this shouldn’t take long.”

“And a promise to those two is one to keep,” Arthur said, having an idea of where this was going. He took Linus’s suitcase from him and climbed the steps, setting it near the door. When he went down the steps, Linus held a small cloth pouch in his left hand, the other gripping the umbrella. He looked up at the house, shook his head, and stepped off the walkway into the overgrown grass. Arthur followed him, stopping when he did in front of the empty flower beds.

Linus handed Arthur the umbrella and pulled the green string that held the pouch closed. Inside, Arthur could see a pile of seeds, some oval in shape, others square, all black with speckles of white on them.

“Okay,” Linus said. “Phee and Talia told me that I don’t even need to plant them.” He poured a handful of seeds into his hand, bouncing them once, twice, before sprinkling them along the flower beds. After emptying the pouch, Linus stepped back from the flower beds with a frown, forehead lined. “They said it should only take a minute or two.”

“What should?” Arthur asked with great interest. He peered down at the seeds lying in wet soil. They rested where they’d fallen, and if anything was supposed to happen, he couldn’t see what it was.

Until, that is, one of the seeds began to wiggle. As Arthur looked on in amazement, he was reminded of sand fleas the children dug up on the shores, little gray crustaceans with tiny legs scrabbling for purchase. The first seed burrowed into the ground, followed by another and another until all of them were digging in near silence. When the last one disappeared, a little bubble appeared above the hole it had created. It grew and grew until it was the size of an apple. Then it popped, and in this insignificant explosion, Arthur felt a familiar rush of magic, a mixture of Gnomish and sprite, so green it felt like the birth of life.

The ground rolled beneath their feet, a low tremor that rattled the railings on the porch. Linus grabbed Arthur’s hand, pulling him back as the soil where the first seed had disappeared parted, a small stalk pushing through, a shade of green that was startling in this colorless place. He heard a groaning sound, and his eyes widened when more plants burst through the soil.

When all was said and done, it took less than a minute. Where once was a barren, muddy nothing now grew dozens of flowers in pink and blue and white and orange, the leaves and stalks so green, they looked plastic. The flowers rushed toward the sky, bursting open, soaking up the rain. The centerpiece was a large sunflower at least seven feet tall, the bloom wide. It was unexpected, stunning in its simplicity for something that was undoubtedly a complex piece of magic. He knew the children were powerful—wasn’t that why they’d been sent to him to begin with?—but having such evidence never failed to knock the breath from his lungs.

“I’m nervous,” Arthur said quietly.

Linus smiled as if he were expecting the confession. “You’re doing the right thing.” He leaned against Arthur, a warm, comforting weight. “Be nervous, Arthur. Be frightened. I am too.”

Knowing what they were to face the next day, Arthur and Linus decided to make it an early night. The return bus trip was mostly uneventful, with one particular exception: a newspaper, discarded on a cracked seat. Arthur’s own face stared back at him in black and white, though decades younger, his straw-colored hair longer, a cocky twist to his smile. Above the picture, stark words in black type: WHO IS ARTHUR PARNASSUS ? Below that, in smaller type: LANDMARK TESTIMONY FROM A MAGICAL BEING.

“Who indeed?” Arthur said to no one at all.

“All right?” Linus asked, coming up behind him.

Arthur turned, blocking the newspaper. “Let’s sit farther back.”

By the time they were back in the city, darkness had fallen. The rain had lessened to a miserable drizzle, and even though it was summer, the air had a chill to it that reminded Arthur of winter on the island.

They picked up takeaway, Linus shuddering when Arthur asked for extra brown sauce. “No accounting for taste,” Linus said with a sniff, as if he hadn’t gotten more ketchup than was necessary.

They took their meal to the hotel a couple of blocks down from the restaurant. The hotel—The Rose & Thorne—was an old thing. On a busy street corner, it loomed above, a white stone building with a black facade inlaid with gold designs of a rose surrounded by prickly thorns. The bellhop—a young lad with a unibrow and a crooked smile—opened the door for them, bowing as he welcomed them to the hotel.

They had chosen The Rose & Thorne for its proximity to Bandycross, the governmental building where Arthur would be giving testimony. It would make for an easy trip come morning.

Making quick work of getting checked in—tipping their young bellhop handsomely—they hurried to their room, laughing when both reached for the phone as soon as they’d set down their luggage. The call home lasted thirty minutes, given that each of the children wanted to give a complete accounting of how they’d spent their Sunday. Though heartened to hear their voices, Arthur felt a desperate urge to flee this place, to spread his wings and fly until the rain had stopped and the air smelled of the sea, especially when Chauncey asked if they’d met David yet, and if he was tall. The reason Chauncey asked, he explained, was because he’d read yetis could grow upward of ten feet, and he thought that would be extremely helpful when something was on the top shelf in the kitchen. Arthur replied that he would report back just as soon as he’d met David himself.

When they hung up—with promises to call again in the morning and again in the afternoon and again at night—Arthur sat on the edge of the bed, staring off into nothing, his meal half-eaten and now cold. Regardless, he didn’t have the stomach to finish it.

Linus went into the loo after the call, and when he came out he had a funny look on his face, button-down shirt half-open, revealing sparse hair on pale skin.

Arthur frowned. “What is it?”

Linus shook his head, bringing a finger to his lips. Moving quickly, he went to the radio sitting on the desk across from the bed. He flipped it on and spun the dial across the stations until he found Little Anthony singing about the tears on his pillow, the pain in his heart. Turning the volume up as loud as it would go, he motioned for Arthur to follow him. Arthur rose from the bed without question, Linus leading him to the hall closet. Opening the door, Linus shoved him inside, pulling the door closed behind him. He could barely make out Linus’s face in the darkness.

“A little light, if you please,” Linus whispered loudly.

Arthur brought up his hand, and a small bloom of fire rose from the tip of his index finger, flickering as if a wick had been lit. Linus’s face was illuminated as he leaned forward.

“Who knew we were staying at this hotel?”

Arthur blinked. “Zoe and Helen. The children. Why?”

“One of the lightbulbs over the sink was out. I thought it was dead until I saw that it wasn’t screwed in all the way. I tried to fix it, but it wouldn’t go in any farther. I figured something was blocking it, so I poked around in the fixture and found this.” He lifted his hand, turning it over so the palm faced the ceiling. Sitting in his hand were shards of black plastic mixed with silver, none bigger than the half-moon crescents on his fingernails. Next to the shards, a green wire, detached.

“What is it?” Arthur asked, peering down at Linus’s hand.

“A bug,” Linus muttered. “Or it was until I destroyed it. Someone wants to listen in to whatever we say.”

“Truly?” Arthur asked, shocked into a bright bark of incredulous laughter. “That’s a little much, don’t you think?”

“You don’t know the government like I do. I wouldn’t put it past them to do something insidious to try and get a leg up on tomorrow.” He bounced the plastic in his hand. “The reservation was in my name. They could easily have found out where we were staying. Which means—”

“That we were put into this room for a reason,” Arthur finished for him. He leaned back against the closet wall, mind whirring. “Could there be more?”

“I have no doubt,” Linus said. “We need to change rooms. No, we need to change hotels .”

“Or,” Arthur said thoughtfully, pushing himself off the wall, “we could give them a show.”

Linus’s eyebrows rose. “What did you have in mind?”

They stepped out back into the room, Little Anthony having given way to Patsy Cline. Perfect.

He took the pieces of the broken device from Linus, setting them aside on the desk. He turned slowly, right foot dragging along the floor in an arc before he snapped to attention, one arm across his chest, the other at his back. He bowed, never taking his eyes from Linus. When he rose, he asked, “May I have this dance, my good man?” He held out his hand in invitation just as Patsy began to sing about seeing the pyramids along the Nile, watching the sunrise on a tropical isle.

Linus rolled his eyes in exasperation, but his lips quirked. “Now? Really? But what about—”

“We can worry about tomorrow, or we can dance. I know what I want.”

Linus watched him for a moment. Then, “Who am I to refuse such an offer?”

Arthur pulled him close, hands on Linus’s hips. Linus put his own hands over Arthur’s shoulders, fingers in the back of his hair. They began to sway back and forth, feet shuffling on green carpet. Leaning his forehead against Linus’s, Arthur whispered, “Let them listen to what joy sounds like. Maybe they’ll learn a thing or two.”