“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—”
