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

pulling the front door closed.
    While Henry watched, they ran to the wagon. Six other soldiers joined them, all huddling together, receiving orders from the men in black. Flame sprang up between them, and the eight men in red turned back to the house, carrying lit torches. Women screamed, and men pried cobbles up from the road and heaved them at the fence of red-shirts, at the fire bearers. Three townspeople with short swords broke through the circle and were pushed back.
    Henry looked at his sisters, both sitting straight and proud, both with their eyes on their home and tears ontheir cheeks. One of the men in black climbed onto the wagon. Henry didn’t care where the other one had gone. Panic froze his limbs, his mind. His sisters, his aunt, and his cousins were being carted away.
    Henrietta was being burned alive.
    Flames licked out of every window, and still the soldiers held their circle. The planks of the old front door crackled.
    Where was his grandmother?
    The world went silent. From his knees, Henry saw the angry crowd surging against the pikes, but noiselessly. He saw cobbles bounce and flames lick and two soldiers stumble under blows and fall. He saw his sisters crying and Aunt Dotty writhing, now fighting her ropes, struggling to fall from the wagon, to go to her daughter through the fire. He saw the wind rise up above his burning house, and he saw blue sky crack between the clouds.
    But he heard nothing. The blood and panic in him calmed. He knew what he needed to do. A man in black stepped in front of him. A big man, with a deep scar on each cheek.
    Henry jumped to his feet and pushed backward into the crowd. The man shoved through the soldiers and came after him, but Henry was smaller and could move faster through the seams.
    And he wasn’t being pummeled by an angry mob. The man in black was like an earwig among ants. Stones and clubs and fists all found their marks, and Henry doubledback, back toward the line of soldiers but closer to the house. This time, no soldier’s pike would stop him.
    He pulled a stone from a woman’s hand and slipped to the front. Breathing slowly, he gathered strength, his muscles overflowed, and the world changed in front of him. He changed it.
    The stone hit the serpent on a soldier’s chest, and an explosion of blades and tongues both gold and green drove him to the ground. The men on either side of him staggered and fell, and the line was broken. In shock, the crowd held back.
    Henry stepped through a dense, rising cloud of dandelion down and rushed to the burning house. Flipping up the hood of his cloak, he slammed into the crackling door and tumbled through the flames.
    At the foot of the stairs, Henrietta lay on her side. Grandmother Anastasia, on her knees, rocked and sang beside her, drowned out by the angry death of burning timbers.
    The heat hit Henry like a solid force. He scrambled forward, feeling his body lose its moisture, his lungs filling with poisonous heat.
    Was Henrietta dead? It didn’t matter. Henry grabbed her under the arms and, holding his breath, began dragging her toward the stairs.
    “Grandmother!” he yelled. “Upstairs! We have to get upstairs!”
    But his grandmother still swayed with her pale eyesopen, her skin red, every thin white hair curling out from her head. “The puppet’s strings,” she said. “Cut the puppet’s strings. Take his finger.”
    “What?” Henry yelled. He had Henrietta halfway onto the stairs. He dropped her and jumped over her body, down to his grandmother. “Come now!” he yelled, and he dragged her to her feet. “Upstairs! Upstairs!” He was shouting in her ear.
    “The strings,” she said.
    And a black shape stepped through the burning doorway.
    “No!” Henry yelled. “No!” He pushed his grandmother toward Henrietta, but before he could turn back around, thick arms wrapped around his waist and lifted him to a shoulder. He grabbed for his grandmother, he grabbed for the beamed ceiling, but he was moving