100 Cupboards (21 page)

“That was you,” he said to the raggant, and poked it with his toe. “You had to start thumping in there.”

The raggant's skin quaked, like a horse shaking off a fly, and it sat up. Its black eyes stared at Henry, and then it yawned and walked onto Henry's legs. Henry flopped back again, and the raggant crawled onto his chest and curled up into a wheezing ball.

Henry smiled. “Your fault,” he said again. “I did nothing. I'm just scenery.”

Downstairs, Dotty opened her eyes. “Frank?”

Frank grunted.

She sat up and reached for her bathrobe. “Henry York, you'd better not be doing what I think you're doing.”

Frank's hand pulled her back down.

“He'll be fine,” he said.

EPILOGUE

The
cat was large, used to feeding on the rubbish and scrapings thrown out the kitchen window and occasionally on the also overfed and lazy rats. He was a tom, black, with a white face and tail. He had no name that he knew of, but someone was calling for him. That someone wanted him. Needed him.

He did not usually venture up into the room where the old man sat, the room with the gaping doors and the moon windows. The doors made his spine tingle and his pads cold. But this time he leapt up the stairs with his belly swinging below him. He passed the cold body of a young wizard sprawled at the top. And then two others, and between them, the body of a dog.

Once he was in the throne room, the calling thrilled him, filling his mind and all his senses. And there, standing inside one of the thickly curtained doorways and facing a young man, an orderly still on his feet, was a woman. To the cat's mind, she was both old and young, weak and strong. All-seeing but in need of his wisdom, his sight. He leapt into the woman's arms, and she was inside him, his mind was with hers, and then, in a moment, his was gone.

“What is your name?” the woman asked the man.

The young man did not look away from her. “Monmouth,” he said. “What is yours?”

The woman laughed, filling the stone hall with her echoes. “You are not even an apprenticed wizard, and you ask me this? I have fed myself on the lives of your masters who lie cold behind you, and you stand to request my name?” She stepped toward him.

“I do,” he said, and did not so much as shift his feet.

She stepped even closer, stroking the heavy cat's head. “Then wake your doddering master Carnassus, and tell him this, if your mouth will hold the words: Nimiane, dread Queen of Endor, last in Niac's line, whose voice destroyed the magic of FitzFaeren, boiled up the sea to shatter the strength of Amram, and laid Merlinis to rest beneath the wood, once bound by Mordecai, Amram's son, has shaken off her chains as her fathers shook off the blood of Adam, and comes to see if an old man remembers vows he made when he was young.

“New prey waits on the Witch-Dogs.”

GRATITUDE

Mark
B. for imagining. Neighbor Cousins for listening. Heather for being. Jim T. for hacking, shaping, sanding, and, eventually, liking.

Also by N. D. Wilson

Leepike Ridge

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

N.D.
Wilson is a Fellow of Literature at New Saint Andrews College, where he teaches classical rhetoric to freshmen. He is also the managing editor for
Credenda/Agenda
magazine, a small Trinitarian cultural journal, as well as the author of
Leepike Ridge,
an adventure novel for young readers. He married a girl stolen from the ocean, and the two of them now live in Idaho with their four children.

To learn more about the author, please visit his Web site at
www.ndwilson.com
.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2007 by N. D. Wilson

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/kids

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www.100Cupboards.com

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, N. D.

100 cupboards / N. D. Wilson. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

SUMMARY
: After his parents are kidnapped, timid twelve-year-old Henry York leaves his sheltered

Boston life and moves to small-town Kansas, where he and his cousin Henrietta discover and explore hidden doors in his attic room that seem to open onto other worlds.

[1. Doors—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Space and time—Fiction. 4. Cousins—Fiction. 5. Family life—Kansas—Fiction. 6. Kansas—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: One hundred cupboards.

PZ7.W69744Aac 2007    [Fic]—dc22    2007000164

eISBN: 978-0-375-84986-2

v3.0