The Boss’ den consisted of little more than a short, weathered door stuck into the side of a hidden rise in the terrain. Briar noticed some puffs of smoke wafting from a hole at the top of the ridge. Two nearby boulders obscured anything from view until they were all well on top of it.
There was some worried chatter about the carriage giving away their location, so they camouflaged it with some of the giant black tumbleweeds that rolled across the plains.
Once they were all safely inside and the door shut, the Boss showed them around, though his den proved to be uncomfortably snug for them all. The ceilings hung quite low, so that Briar and Dax had to bend in half to fit. The coachman decided it was better to spend the night in the relative roominess of the carriage than to sleep with his limbs cramped. This left additional space for everyone else, for which Briar was grateful.
The den was a crudely hewn dugout. Dead black roots, left by whatever grew there before, decorated the unevenly formed walls. An ornately carved table with filigree touches and matching chairs, a few masterful works of art hanging on the crude walls, and a glittering gold candelabra, all the glorious remnants of previous heists, sat at one end of the room. The Boss and his posse seated themselves around the table, allowing Briar and the others to cozy up to the smallest fireplace Briar had ever seen, which had a miniature fire burning bundles of black offcuts and loose root fragments. On the floor before the fire was an embellished rug, plush, with fancy images woven into it, upon which they laid Sherman.
The Boss offered Briar and the others some flat brown bread that looked to Briar and Dax like pressed dirt. But they hadn’t eaten since they left Myrtle, Poplar, and Ash at the birdhouse and they were starving. Leon unfortunately had, on instinct, snapped up another insect that looked like a small black pellet that the Boss called a scatter bug. So now he was full—and nauseous all at once. Tarfeather was happy to scratch out a few choice stones from the walls and crunch on them.
They all sat in the dim flicker of the fire for a long time before the Boss spoke. “We didn’t always live like this.” Briar had been looking down at Sherman, who shivered and twitched, and she was surprised when the Boss spoke. She did not respond, except to look up at him.
“No tellery this to Briar Blackwood,” Tarfeather said. He sounded cross. “Now why would you go and say such a terrible thing?” he asked in the voice of a black-and-white film ingénue.
The Boss then pulled one of several brown bottles from the roughly made shelves set in the wall just above the table. He uncorked it with his prominent buckteeth and spat it out onto the floor. “You gotta be kiddin’ me. She doesn’t already know?” he asked.
He took a big swig. He passed the bottle to Blessfang, who tried his best to imitate the Boss’ manly swagger but couldn’t hold on to the bottle with his hooves. Most of the distilled drink ended up soaking and staining his matted pelt.
“What don’t I know?” Briar asked. The faces of the animal gang were somber and their eyes, full of old wounds.
“We once lived in a great wood that went from the Ice Cap Mountains to the Ink Sea. It was the greatest forest of the Realms,” the Boss said. He grabbed for the bottle and drank again. Dax looked at Leon who sat on the rug nearby Briar and he shrugged.
“Then why are you here in the Black Waste?” Briar asked.
“The woods were burned to the ground,” he said. He directed the statement to Tarfeather and squinted his pink rabbit eyes. “Only ashes and memories remain.” The room fell silent, save the spark and sputter of the burning roots. Transfixed by the thought, he gazed into the fireplace for some time before continuing. “Orpion, of course.”
“That’s…terrible,” Briar said.
“It was terrible,” the Boss shot back. It almost seemed like an accusation. But Briar couldn’t understand it. He reached for a charred child’s toy made of wood and metal that he kept near the bottles. “Everyone gone.” He wiped a tear away. “That is except for these mooks here.” He laughed bitterly and took another swig from the bottle.
“I’m so sorry,” Briar said. It was unfathomable, senseless really, that Orpion would burn her own world.
“Yeah, me too,” the Boss said. He looked down with his ears drooping.
Briar felt a surge of anger at the injustice. “Why would Orpion do such a thing?”
“That’s the funny thing,” he said.
Tarfeather sprang up and landed in one bound on the table. “I say enoughery! No tellery more!”
Briar spoke to Tarfeather calmly. “I want to know.”
The dwaref hopped down from the table and lighted across the floor. Once he faced Briar, his eyeholes began to shed tears. Then he spoke in one of his television voices. “There’s no one to blame, darling. There’s just no one good to blame.”
“Go on,” Briar said to the Boss.
“Orpion came to burn down Blackwood Hall, which was hidden by charms in the deepest recesses of the forest,” he said. An uncomfortable silence filled the room. “But the story is that she couldn’t find what she came lookin’ for. So instead, she decided to scorch everything else.”
“You mean the Black Waste is what’s left of the Black Woods?” Briar asked. She was hardly able to speak.
“My home,” the Boss said. “And theirs, too.” The bluebirds and the deer all looked down at the table; one of the birds spat upon the floor, hoping to avert further evil.
“She wants the twin kingdoms to herself. The Lady Orpion— the selfish old cod,” Vilesight said. He held up one of his small talons. “I’d like a turn at her eyes.”
“That will be a pretty day,” Thrash replied.
“What two kingdoms? I thought Murbra Faire was the only kingdom of the Realms,” Briar said.
“Scarlocke, the Lady’s palace, is its twin,” the Boss said. “Once, the two lived in peace. But a wickett who saw no use for the Grand Design, rose to power. Her magic was so great—her force was so dark that none could stop it, neither by magic nor by might. That was when once good Realmsmen abandoned their homes, as if under a spell, and went to serve the Dark Lady.”
“Wicketts?” Briar asked.
“They’re bad. Real bad,” Blessfang said.
“And the Black Woods?” Briar asked. “Why would she destroy them if all she wanted was one hidden thing?”
“It is almost sixteen years to the day that she went looking for the hiding place of three dillywigs and a baby—the girl-child whom the Omens foretold would end her reign and destroy her.”
Briar couldn’t swallow or breathe for a moment. It was she who had brought pain, horror and death to the Realms, not only for Thrash, Vilesight, and Blessfang, but for countless others whom she would never know.
“That’s horrible. I…I don’t know what to say,” Briar mumbled.
The Boss took several more swallows and then slammed the finished bottle on the table. He stared into its emptiness for a moment, looking for something that might make things right. “There’s only one thing left for us to do,” he said. “Blessfang, bolt the door.”
The deer stood up with an angry scowl, knocking over his chair. He muscled his way past Briar and the others and put a wooden bar across the door. As he stomped past, Briar backed away and huddled with Dax and Tarfeather.
Leon hopped forward, forgetting his size. “Now wait a minute,” he said to the Boss. Trying his best to assert the tough-guy demeanor that worked so well for him on the school campus wasn’t working out so well in his present condition. “This is Briar, you guys. The girl from the Omens. You said so yourselves.”
The Boss sat in his chair and fixed his gaze upon the group of travelers. Briar couldn’t read his rabbit face to understand what he might have planned. Then the Boss spoke. “That’s why we’re locking you in for your safety.”
“Huh?” Dax blurted out.
“Get a good night’s sleep. And in the morning,” the Boss continued, “we will do whatever we can to help you.”
Briar let go of the breath she found herself holding. “Thank you,” she said.
“Nothing would please me more than to see the Lady Orpion’s head stuck to the end of a sword,” said the Boss.