Prue must’ve fallen back asleep; she dreamed of Alexandra, the Dowager Governess. The woman stood over her, a motherly smile on her face. Alexandra reached out her hands to Prue, lovingly, and Prue was shocked to see them transform, slowly, into long vines of ivy. The horrible vision was soundtracked by the ever-present ticking noise she’d heard coming from the silent Caliph in the hold. In her dream, the ticking suddenly transformed itself into a language, clear words that were both English and not English. She woke with a start and saw that a plate of food had been slipped beneath the bars of her door. A dim light was shining through the gray of her porthole; dawn was breaking.
Prue sat up and saw that the Caliph had remained unmoving from his position, a strange statue holding guard, throughout the night. Prue grabbed the plate of food—rice and beans, it appeared—and began shoveling the savory stuff into her mouth. She was famished, she suddenly realized. Adventuring really had a habit of throwing off one’s eating schedule.
The ticking noise continued unabated after she’d finished, and she set the plate down, remembering her brief dream. Rather than speak to the Caliph, she instead chose to quietly address the ticking noise itself.
She found that it was responsive.
She breathed a gasp of surprise as she began to almost converse with the noise; it suddenly dawned on her that the sound was some sort of vegetation inside the Caliph himself. Something caught her attention; she looked up and saw that the Caliph’s shoulders had twitched, just slightly.
She tried again, addressing the tick: WHO ARE YOU?
The noises she received in response were unintelligible. The Caliph twitched again, his shoulders jerking slightly on his frame.
The tone of the noise suggested it was some kind of organic living thing, but decidedly not human. It had all the cadences she was accustomed to hearing from the plant world, just in a different dialect—if such a thing could be said. And then she realized:
She was speaking to the Spongiform.
WHERE ARE YOU?
Ticking. Ticking. The Caliph shook his head slightly.
She took that as a sign. IN THE SKULL?
YESSSSSSSS, the ticking codified into a word.
She recalled learning in life science about the strange and delicate relationship between parasites—particularly fungi—and their hosts. There were bacterial parasites that could change the makeup of someone’s thinking—certain parasites that transformed action and behavior, drawing the host toward more environments where the parasite might be better distributed and ingested by other organisms. The whole class had chittered with disgust and disbelief; now Prue found herself face-to-face with such an example.
COME, she thought. COME FORWARD.
She channeled her language, commanding the noise forward. She used the same tone she did when she found herself able to make grass weave around her toes, to make branches bow in still air. COME.
The Caliph, still silent, shook in his chair, as if an earthquake had erupted just below his feet. And then: a noise, a human noise: a cough, a sputter.
The ship tilted in the wind, the crewmen shouted from above, and the Caliph on the chest went spilling to the floor, his hands grabbing for his face mask.
Prue leapt up from her cot and pressed her face between the bars of her cell door: FORWAAARD!
The Caliph on the floor made loud retching noises, and his hands flew to his face and whipped off his headgear, the mask and the cowl, as if he were suffocating and his strange outfit was the cause of all his discomfort. The silver mask went skittering across the floor of the belowdecks and Prue was surprised to see, revealed beneath the mirrored thing, none other than Seamus, the Wildwood bandit. His beard was matted with sweat, and his skin looked as if it had been deprived of sunlight for a long time. His eyes were wild and bloodshot as his dirty fingers scraped at his face, like he was trying to peel his own skin away.
“Seamus!” shouted Prue, reaching her hand between the bars. “Seamus, it’s Prue!”
But the man couldn’t hear her. He was too busy writhing on the floor, jamming his fingers into his mouth and nostrils. His chest spasmed in great gasps as he dry-heaved repeatedly, his knees jammed firmly into his chest. Finally, something seemed to give as there was a kind of liquid choking noise from his throat and something very brownish green and viscous, the size of a walnut, was ejected from his right nostril. Wide-eyed, he grabbed it and began to pull; little tendrils ran away from the greasy little object, a tangled mesh that connected it to the inside of his nose. Carefully pulling at the stringy lattice, retching all the while, Seamus managed to extract a veritable spider’s web of mucus-covered tendrils that, when collapsed into a ball, resembled a leftover pile of mutant brown spaghetti. It lay there in a quivering lump, ticking away in Prue’s brain.
“Seamus,” she hissed. “Throw it out the window.” It seemed imperative that he do this; it was sucking at the air, it was ticking loudly in her mind.
Pulling himself together, as one does when painfully sick yet desperate for a drink of water or access to the television’s remote control, Seamus grabbed the slimy stuff in his hand and crawled to the nearest porthole. Heaving himself up onto an obliging crate, he opened the window and tossed the contents of his fist out into the fog-covered river basin.
The ticking stopped. The creaking of the ship, the whining of the rigging, was all Prue could hear.
“Where . . . ,” gasped the man in the robe. “Where am I?”
“You’re on a ship. Bound for the Crag.”
He looked up at the speaker; his sudden recognition of his old friend Prue seemed to fall on him like a barrel of rocks. “Prue!” he shouted. “Prue McKeel! What are you doin’ all locked up?”
“Well, to be honest, you sort of had a hand in putting me here.”
“I did?” He was busily wiping a layer of snot and grime from his face. He held a strand of it at arm’s length. “What was that stuff?”
“Spongiform. The blight on the Blighted Tree. Someone fed it to you.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Someone from the Synod.”
Seamus seemed to search his memory; he stared at his feet for a moment before saying, “The Synod. The Blighted Tree. I’m remembering. I was in South Wood, wasn’t I? I was there.” The memories now seemed to be flooding back, a deluge of lost time. “I was the emissary. The bandits’ emissary. Left in South Wood after the Battle for the Plinth. The Synod; they reached out to me. Took me in. I didn’t know what was happening, Prue, swear I didn’t.”
“It’s okay, Seamus. It’s not your fault.”
“But what did I do? Where are the others? Where’s Brendan? What’s become of the other bandits?”
Prue curled her fingers around the bars of the door and said, “I think they’ve done the same thing. I think they’ve eaten that stuff. And become part of the Synod.”
“But how?” The realization slowly overcame him. “You don’t think . . . did I? Did I convince them?”
“Do you remember anything?”
“No, the memories go foggy at a point.” He squinted in concentration. “I remember meeting with the Synod. Those masked fellows. Something about reparations for the battle. Then everything goes hazy. Though maybe . . . Oh gods.” His chest sank in and his head fell. “I do remember now. A trip to Wildwood. Sent by the Synod. A package of food. Supplies. Provided by the Synod.” He looked up blankly at Prue, his eyes shot through with tears.
“I did it, didn’t I?” he managed. “I fed it to them.”
Prue could only stare, her hands gripping the bars. The idea seemed ludicrous; and yet she’d seen the effect of the Spongiform. The parasite, growing inside the cavity of the host’s skull, seemed to reduce the host to a catatonic stupor, highly suggestible to the Blighted Tree’s authority.
“It’s not your fault, Seamus,” she said. “You were duped. You were poisoned.”
“And now what? How did I—how did you—end up on this ship?”
“Long story. I’m being sent off to the Crag, which is like a rock in the ocean. I’m sentenced to be marooned there. Forever.”
“But why?”
“I guess I’m the enemy now. In the Synod’s eyes, anyway. Oh, Seamus, so much has happened since I last saw you. I was there, at the bandit camp, right after everyone had left. Me and Curtis. We thought that you’d all been wiped out by these Kitsunes—shape-shifting monsters—but it turns out everyone had abandoned the camp only the night before. That must’ve been when you’d gone there, fed them the stuff. . . .” She was piecing everything together in her mind as she spoke; she didn’t see Seamus smart at the mention of poisoning his fellow bandits. “I came back to Wildwood to have Alexei, the heir to the Mansion, rebuilt. It’s what the Council Tree told me to do. And now . . . And now . . .” She paused here, trying to wrangle her colliding thoughts. She remembered her revelation from the night before, when the wave had buffeted the ship and she’d felt the strange presence. “I—I can’t be sure,” she said, “But I think Alexandra has returned.”
The bandit gave her a wide-eyed look, seemingly cataloging, internally, everything she’d told him. “First and foremost, we’ll escape here,” he said, standing up. “We’ll get our revenge. We’ll free my brothers and sisters.” He paused. “Curtis is saved? Did I not poison him as well?”
“No, he was with me. I don’t know where he is now. We split up months ago; he went to find out what happened to you, to the bandits.” Prue pulled on the bars, testing their strength. “As for getting me out of here, I’m not sure how. There’s a whole crew of sailors up there. We’re miles from the Wood.”
Seamus stood up, a little rickety on his feet, and walked to the porthole. He peered out and confirmed Prue’s worst fears: “Water everywhere. We’re in the open ocean, Prue.”
“How does that even happen? Aren’t they beyond the boundary—the Periphery?”
“It’s been going on for centuries. Even I know about the Crag. It’s the ruins of an old castle, built on the top of a rock in the water. The Ancients built it, it’s said. It was a great achievement, the Crag. And then, like most of the Ancients’ creations, it fell into ruin. In the second age, folks started using it as a punishment for the worst offenders—the criminals who deserved the worst death imaginable: slow and tedious.”
“Why haven’t the Outsiders seen them? Like, all of Portland? Seems like a ship like this would be pretty conspicuous.”
“Like all ship trade, they travel under the veil of fog.”
“Bizarre,” Prue whispered.
“But we need to free you, Prue,” said Seamus, walking to the barred door and giving it a rattle. “First thing. Do I have a key?” He’d asked it almost rhetorically; he was fishing through the folds of his robe. His hands came up empty. “Nope. Guess they wouldn’t entrust that kind of responsibility to the religious nut on the ship.”
“Plus, there are about a dozen men up there, as far as I can tell,” put in Prue.
“Yep. This is a sticky situation. No doubt.”
There was a scraping noise above their heads; the hatch was being opened.
“Quick!” hissed Prue. “Back into your outfit!”
Seamus was already on the job. Speedily picking up the cowl and mask, he was once again the silent watchman, sitting on the chest.
Light flowed in from the open hatch. A sailor climbed down the ladder. Arriving at the floor, he put his hands on his hips and looked at Seamus. “You ain’t moved this whole time?”
“He’s kind of weirding me out,” said Prue through the bars. It had just sprung to mind; she hoped it wasn’t overplaying things.
“Don’t blame you,” said the sailor. He snapped his fingers a few times in front of Seamus’s masked face; the bandit remained unmoving. Prue could see his chest rising and falling under his robe a little more rapidly than it had when he was a soundless Caliph, but otherwise he seemed to pull off the mimic fairly well. The sailor, a thin man with a spotty mustache, walked over to Prue’s cell door and said, “Gettin’ close, Maiden. We’ll be mooring at the Crag soon. I’ve been instructed to take you to the foredecks.”
But before the seaman had a chance to remove the key from his pants pocket, a meaty thunk sounded and his eyes rolled back in his head. Like a scarecrow loosed of his wooden frame, the sailor crumpled to the ground in a pile of wool clothing and poorly washed skin. Behind him was Seamus, his hands still held in the after-position of the Bandit Backblow, something that even the most junior bandit learns within weeks of receiving the oath. Done correctly, it can put its victim into a deep and fairly pleasant sleep.
“Wow,” said Prue.
Seamus whipped off his mask and breathed a silent curse at the thing, before fishing the key from the sleeping sailor’s pocket. In a moment, he had Prue freed from her cell and they were both standing amid the crates, bales, and snoring sailor of the belowdecks hold.
“Now what?” asked Seamus, seemingly at a loss.
“Good question,” said Prue.
Just then, the whole ship jerked and shuddered. Prue ran to a porthole and, climbing atop a box, looked outside. There, in the midst of a wide, gray ocean, she saw the Crag.
The sky hung low, like a dropped ceiling oppressing a drab schoolroom, and the clouds splayed out in all directions, an unchanging ripple of gray light. The rough waters of the Pacific Ocean, equally gray, crashed wildly against the object in their midst: A giant, moss-covered rock, some dozens of stories high, was the rough pedestal for the stone structure that had, impossibly, been built on top of it. The structure resembled a castle, or a fortress, though its skyward-reaching battlements were toppled and its ramparts were in ruin, as if the thing had reached too high or defied the elements for too long; a long stone staircase wound around the side of the rock, a testament to the fact that this place had once been accessible, that it had once been a place people wished to reach. The ship pitched in the waves that drew it closer to the rock’s only visible landing spot: a wave-racked wooden jetty.
Prue turned back to report the sight to Seamus when she saw the bandit had drawn a cutlass from the sailor’s belt and was brandishing it, his eyes wild.
“Only one way out,” he said dramatically.
“Do I get one?”
Seamus frowned. A table leg, propped against the hull of the ship, would suffice. Prue gripped it and nodded. “Let’s do this,” she said.
What “this” was could be easily summed up in a short, and fairly sad, paragraph. The two of them, without much of a pregame conference, noisily climbed up the ladder, threw aside the hatch, and proudly presented themselves to the sailors, who, for their part, seemed a little surprised to see their prisoner freed and the man who they assumed to be a member of the silent Synod now sporting a raffish beard and a scimitar and howling things like: “Have at ye, scoundrels” and “This is a mutiny.” However, there were only two of them, scimitar and table leg notwithstanding, against a healthy dozen stolid seamen, and Prue and Seamus were quickly disarmed and bound against the main mast, causing only a slight ruffle in the sailors’ continued work getting the ship safely navigated into the jetty of the Crag.
“Wow,” said Seamus when it was all done and his back was pressed tightly against the solid wood of the mast. “They’re good.”
“That could’ve used a little more planning,” said Prue. At least she was enjoying some fresh sea air; it was one improvement that her current state of bondage had over her prior.
“Next time.”
“Don’t expect there’ll be a next time,” said Captain Shtiva, who had overheard their conversation. “You’ll be spending your days on the Crag. Rescue is unlikely.”
The broken fortress bobbed on the horizon; the sailors worked at their various tasks, wrangling the loping ship into the jetty. The air was full of seagull cries and ocean mist; the canvas sails whipped and cracked above Prue’s and Seamus’s heads. The sailors shouted commands and calls to one another. Before long, the ship had sidled angrily against the dock and the lines were figure-eighted around the dock’s rusty cleats. A plank was thrown over the gunwale, and Prue and Seamus were freed from their place at the mast. A sailor cohort escorted them at pistol-point over the plank and onto the dock. Captain Shtiva led the group.
Prue stayed silent. Her eyes remained fixed on the ruined battlements atop the rock. She and Seamus were led up the twisting stone staircase, made of a kind of yellowing sandstone, around the base of the rock. It followed the contours of its foundation, dipping and falling with the rock’s inconsistencies, until finally ending at a crumbled stone arch. Beyond the arch was a scene that nearly caused Prue’s knees to give out.
A weathered veranda, its flagstones littered with the remains of former convicts, stretched out before them, surrounded by walls in various states of ruin. Pieces of bone covered the ground like confetti on a parade ground.
“You can’t do this,” said Prue, in shock. “This is wrong.”
Captain Shtiva seemed to be mindful of the grim scene. “I’m sorry, Maiden,” he said. “These are my orders.”
“I spit on your orders,” said Seamus, which he did, his spittle flying over the piled remnants of some poor individual’s bottom half.
“You don’t have to follow them,” pleaded Prue. “You can follow your gut. You know this is wrong. You know this is not ‘for the revolution.’”
The captain remained silent. “Untie them,” he said.
They were led to the center of the veranda; the wind buffeted through the broken walls, chilling everyone present. The sailors held their pistols straight, their flintlocks cocked, and began to back away from the two convicted prisoners.
“Look what they did to Seamus,” shouted Prue. “They changed him. They fed him that stuff. Don’t think they won’t do the same to you.”
“Fools!” said Seamus. And again, softer: “Fools.”
The sailors said nothing; they were soon out of sight and away down the long staircase toward the Jolly Crescent, which was bucking in its moorings down at the jetty. Prue and Seamus remained standing in the center of the veranda, at the top of the Crag, ankle deep in a wide carpet of discarded bones.