Dandelion Fire by N. D. Wilson

out.”
    “You going to get me a guide dog? I already have Richard. Just leave. I want to lie down.”
    Henrietta stood up quickly and backed out of his way. “Sure,” she said. She tucked the journal under his pillow, and then she dug in her pocket.
    Henry crawled onto his bed and sprawled out, facedown.
    “I'm really sorry,” Henrietta said.
    Henry snorted. “You didn't do it.”
    “No,” Henrietta said. “I'm not sorry you're blind. I mean, I am. But I meant that I'm sorry for lying. About the key.”
    Henry didn't say anything. Henrietta waited, but she didn't think he wanted to hear anything else. She would talk to him again later. Tonight, maybe. But probably tomorrow. She stepped out of his room.
    “Your stuffs under your pillow,” she said, and she shut the doors.
    Henry thought he'd done well. She might think he was weak, but he hadn't acted weak. He had acted tired. He hadn't acted. He was tired. And he had no idea what time it was. He hoped the dinner hour was past so he wouldn't have to refuse to go sit at the table.
    He slid his hand under his pillow. There were Grandfather's rubber-banded journals, but something else was on top of it, something cold.
    His fingers closed around the key.

rolled onto his back, clenching the key. He couldn't believe Henrietta had actually given it to him. Of course, she wouldn't be too worried about him using it. He was blind. She could afford to give it to him now.
    Without thinking, he lifted the key up to look at it. Frustrated, and more insulted by his blindness because he'd forgotten about it, he dropped his arm back to the bed. But as it fell, he saw something move. His eyes had captured motion. He waved his arm and caught the faintest blur where he knew his hand had to be. Dropping the key, he held his hand still in front of his face. It was his burned hand. He couldn't see his arm. He couldn't see his wrist or hand or the room. In the nothingness in front of him floated his burn. Only it wasn't just a burn. It was a symbol, and it was moving.
    Henry couldn't have taken his eyes off of it if he'd wanted to. There was nothing else to see, nowhere else to focus. The symbol held colors, every color, and they slipped out as it moved, not quickly, from shape to shape, crawling and morphing like a glowing snake spelling out some strange alphabet. But somehow, whilechanging, the symbol was never really changed. It was always itself, traveling through moods, and ages and times—speaking a life cycle, a patterned history of greens and golds and grays.
    Henry knew what it was. His head throbbed as he looked at it, and he remembered the pain. This was a picture, a word, a name, the life of a dandelion, and he was looking at it, seeing it in a way that he had never seen anything. Knowing it.
    Suddenly, in a burst of fear, Henry put his hand down and tucked it beneath his leg. His whole body ached from the pain of looking at it, and his hand throbbed. But more frightening than the pain was the sheer incomprehensibility of what had happened to him.
    He remembered everything. He remembered Henrietta digging for the key and the storm and the wind and the sun-gilded fields. He remembered seeing a flicker in a dandelion. He had stared and throbbed and seen, and then he had touched. And Henrietta had shaken him awake. And he'd gone blind.
    Henry had seen magic before. He slept beside little doors that couldn't be very well explained by anything else. He'd seen his uncle Frank's ax beaten back by magic. The blood of a witch had burned its way into his jaw. He'd watched a mailman's pant legs through his attic wall, and he'd smelled Badon Hill. But still, in Henry's mind, magic was something wrong, something bent, dangerous, something that could be kept someplace else if you remembered to screw the door shut.
    Dandelions were not magic. They couldn't be. They were here. They were normal. You couldn't shut them up someplace or even keep them out of your lawn. If they were magic, well,