The day bore down, harsh and brilliant, a blinding light rising over the flat, watery horizon to the east. Prue and Seamus lay huddled in the protection of a south-facing wall, and the light hit them as the rays of sun made a sharp angle against the flagstones and the ropes and the bones.
Hours passed, achingly slowly. The day ebbed into evening.
The two captives immersed themselves in an all-consuming silence.
Prue found herself in a kind of steely mediation, haunted by the premonition she’d had the night before that Alexandra, the Dowager Governess, had somehow returned. It wasn’t something she could really put her finger on—it was as if the void left when Alexandra had been swallowed by the ivy had always stayed with her, a kind of notable, tangible absence. And now she’d felt that absence filled again. It felt different, for sure, but she was certain that the Dowager Governess had awakened and had returned in some form. She could only imagine how or why this had transpired—had it been the aim of the Synod? What kind of magic could possibly have brought back the spirit of a soul gone for these many long months?
Seamus, at her side, rubbed his eyes with his weathered hands. He, too, gazed out at the field of human and animal remains that stretched out before them and, like Prue, seemed to slowly and deliberately reconcile himself to their very sad fate. A flock of scavenging seagulls wheeled about in the air above them, perhaps excited by the new additions to this hopeless place and the promise of a fresh meal.
“Hi,” he said, finally breaking the long silence between them. His voice was an aching creak.
“Hi,” said Prue.
“Still get that feeling?”
She knew what he meant. “Yeah,” she said. “Still got it.”
The two of them lapsed back into silence, both of them wrapped in the sad, brutal realization of their current situation, which, charitably, could be called unfortunate. It seemed to Prue, for one, that everything that could’ve gone wrong, did go wrong—though the mind-bending set of terrible events that were now currently overshadowing the people of the Wood paled in comparison to her own, terrible circumstances: She was stuck on a rock in the middle of the ocean, wondering exactly how long she would survive before she became just another addition to the scattered refuse on the ruined fortress’s flagstones.
“Hungry for dinner?” asked the bandit, attempting a smile.
“What, gnaw on some bones?”
From the pavers beneath them, Seamus picked up a healthy-sized chunk of stone, what had once been a piece of the broken wall, and weighed it in his hand. “Been a while since I was reduced to this,” he said, feeling the knobby, heavy thing. “But I expect it’ll come back to me.” With some difficulty, he pushed himself up from his seat and began kicking the bones aside, clearing an area in the middle of the veranda. He then began searching the sky, watching the circling seagulls. He held the rock at an easy angle away from his body, a baseball pitcher loosening up on the mound.
Prue looked up to the sky, shielding her eyes from the sun, and guessed at the bandit’s intentions. “Really?” she asked.
“Really,” said Seamus.
“I’m not sure I’m that hungry.”
“You will be,” he said. “Might as well get our larder going. We’re gonna be here a while.”
“I’m a vegetarian, you know,” said Prue.
“A what?”
“Someone who doesn’t eat meat. You don’t have those in bandit-world, vegetarians?”
“Nope. Sounds awful.” His eyes were still trained on the milling seabirds.
To be honest, ever since Prue had gained the extraordinary ability to confer with the plant world, she started to see her vegetarianism in the same stark light she saw meat eating; she’d had a revelation when she was young, having read Charlotte’s Web, and had vowed to never touch animal matter again. But she’d never actually spoken to Wilbur, a kind of communication she’d shared with any number of her fellow organisms of the green, leafy variety. Still, one had to survive.
“Well,” said Prue, “I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself. We’ll see how many days go by before you ditch the vegetablism and enjoy some lean”—he cocked his shoulder—“dreamy”—he flexed his wrist—“SEAGULL MEAT!” The rock launched from his hand and sailed up into the crowd of flying seagulls above their heads. It missed one of the large ones by mere inches, flying over the side of the ramparts and down into the churning ocean below. Seamus shook out his hand, smiling, and began to scout the ground for another projectile. “Out of practice,” he explained to Prue.
Prue’s eyes felt as if they’d developed a crust of salt, and it took some time, with her carefully rubbing them, before her vision was unblurred. She let her renewed gaze sweep their present living quarters. The castle had been the sort of structure one would expect to be built atop an inhospitable rock in the middle of the ocean: small, squarish, and, were it not for the fact that the entire roof had caved in long ago, it would’ve been completely devoid of natural light. A broken staircase was cut into the far corner of the structure, and it climbed a few, meandering flights before it, too, ended in a crumbled ruin.
A rock suddenly fell, with a loud crack, just inches from her fingers. She jerked her hand back and glared at Seamus, who was standing in the middle of the veranda, searching for another rock.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Watch it!”
“Oh,” replied the bandit. “Sorry.” He found another stone and began choosing his next target among a seagull flock, which seemed to be suddenly mindful of their predator; they were scattering now, cawing madly, flying just out of reach.
Momentarily defeated, Seamus put his hands on his hips and looked at Prue. “Buck up, lass,” he said. “We’ll get off this thing.”
“How?”
“Time. Patience. Bandit-sense.”
“Bandit-sense? How’s that going to help us?”
“Nimble thinking. Stuff like that. Goes a long way. Been in worse scraps, myself.”
Squinting up at Seamus in disbelief, Prue said, “Worse? Like, what?”
“Spent three days in a tree, whilst a hungry bear sat at the bottom.”
“Doesn’t really compare.”
Seamus thought for a second before saying, “I got caught by the Mountain King, once, when I was trying to burgle his scepter—took it up on a bit of a gamble, actually. Brendan bet me I couldn’t do it, and you know, a good bandit never passes up a wager. Got the scepter, so there’s that.”
“Why is that worse?”
“Fell in love with his daughter in the process. Tried to take her along. Didn’t fare so well. A lot of extra weight. Got nabbed, spent a week dangling by my big toes in a cavern filled with poisonous spiders. Hence the name, Long Toe Seamus.”
“Didn’t know that you had that name.”
“Doesn’t come out much. Sore subject. But I cleared that scrape just fine.”
“What happened to the princess?”
Seamus scratched at his beard and replied, “Funny you should ask: After I escaped, she ended up running away from her father—awful guy, the Mountain King—and finding me in the bandit camp. Nice woman, we married. Turns out bandit life wasn’t to her liking, and she ended up going back to her father’s fiefdom in the caverns below the Cathedral Mountains and overthrowing the Mountain King’s regime with an army of rat soldiers. Good story, that. Miss her from time to time. I get the occasional letter. Gotta hand it to her, the woman made a really good borscht.”
“That’s heartening,” said Prue lightly. “You ever been captured by a power-hungry religious sect and stranded on a deserted rock in the middle of the ocean? If so, how did you escape using your bandit-sense?”
Seamus shook his head at Prue’s sarcastic tone. “Listen up, lass. You might be some chosen apostle for the Council Tree and a half-breed Outsider with the ability to chat with plant life, but you’re a far sight removed from banditry. It’s all about remaining limber, opening yourself up to the possibilities. And the like.”
“I’m open,” said Prue. “Look, I’m open.” She held her palms out to the bandit.
“No. I’d say you’re not. I’d say you’re rather closed, actually, lassie. Time is our friend here. It’s one resource we currently have a very lot of. Let’s use that time wisely. We can start by cataloging our problems. Organization is the bandit’s best ally.”
“Is that a bandit saying?”
“Should be. Now, naysayer, Gloomy Gus, let’s go down the list. First off, we have our fellow bandits, captured, assumed brainwashed.”
“Infected by a parasitic fungi,” added Prue.
Seamus cringed at the mention. He rubbed his nose. “Right,” he said. “Assimilated into a religious sect of dubious morality. Correct?”
“Aye,” said Prue in her best bandit voice.
“That’s the spirit. Secondly, one of our team has experienced a, shall we say, premonition about the possible rise and return of the Dowager Governess, someone who was last seen making an evening meal for a patch of animated ivy. Correct?”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” said Prue, getting into the spirit of the exchange.
“That’s a pirate voice. There’s a fine distinction between bandits and pirates, I’d have you know. Show a little respect.”
“Sorry.” And then: “Aye.”
The bandit continued. “So that’s two fairly dire predicaments. Before we begin managing the solutions to them, do you have anything else to add?”
“You forgot ‘marooned on a rock in the middle of the ocean.’”
“Right, that. I figured that was, you know, assumed.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
The bandit smoothed his beard and began juggling the rock he held in his right hand. “Right. Now, a good bandit sizes up his obstacles and sees them for the trivial things they are, in the grand scheme of things.” Prue was about to interject and challenge him on the “trivial” bit, but Seamus waved her away. “Stick with me here. Consider, for a moment, the vastness of the universe.” He looked at Prue to make sure she was, in fact, envisioning this. “Consider the untold stretches of space, the unexplored and unknown lights that glint in the skies. The watching eyes of deities? Perhaps. Sand grains kicked into the heavens by the Great Sky Crab? There are those who believe that.”
Again, Prue was set to interject and explain to Seamus what several generations of forest-living bandits had apparently failed to grasp, that those shining lights were, in fact, shining suns burning in far-off galaxies of their own, but it seemed a lot to put on him now, when he had such a head of steam going. “Go on,” she said.
“Now, stand up. Come over here, in the middle of these flagstones.”
Prue did as the bandit instructed, pushing herself up from her seated position against the ruined wall, and joined him in the center of the courtyard.
“Perspective is key. Imagine yourself one such celestial being, for whom human and animal existence, in its entirety, is one strand of hair on their knuckle. One such celestial being for whom time and its passing is such that a million years pass in the blinking of a single eyelid. Now, once again, let’s, in our minds, catalog those few trivial events that transpire against us from the perspective of such a being. And how we and our struggles must appear to it. These flagstones, these bones. Our very bodies. The wheeling seabirds in the sky—how little they must appear! How infinitesimally small!”
Prue was really falling for this bit; she had her eyes closed and was gently swaying to Seamus’s calming tone of voice. She let herself be lost in it, envisioning herself watching everything that had happened to her, all these tumultuous events at this perspective-transforming height.
“Very small . . .” A pause.
“Just, really, really small . . .” His voice trailed off. Then: “Though you have to admit, that’s a pretty big bird.”
Prue opened her eyes and saw, just on the horizon, amid a flock of swooping seagulls, a birdlike shape. At its present distance, it seemed to be roughly the same size as its neighboring birds, except for the fact that it was even farther off than the little shapes amid the flock; indeed, it appeared that it dwarfed its fellow seabirds by a good amount. As it drew closer it became clear that it was not just a big bird, but a massive bird, a gigantic bird, unlike Prue had ever seen before.
Or, actually, she had—once before.
“Is it . . . ?” she began, but stopped for fear of dashing her expectations. Instead, she grabbed Seamus by the hand and together they ran up the ruined staircase to the top of the ramparts. From here, it seemed, they could see to eternity. Clouds, lit red and pink by the setting sun, swept the distant horizon. The large, dark shape flew through the flock of seabirds and scattered them in a torrent of frightened cawing. Prue could now make out the little spikes at the top of the figure’s silhouette: the horns of a great horned owl. It was, without a doubt, the Crown Prince of the Avian Principality, Owl Rex.
“See?” said Seamus, his voice steeped in disbelief. “See what a little bandit-sense gets you?”
The owl, its huge wings splayed, came up near the rock and lengthened his mighty trunk, his wings all mottled gray and white and his large black eyes wise beyond their years. His long body cast a wide shadow over Prue and Seamus as they backed away from the top of the fort’s balustrade; they found themselves cowed by the bird’s size and majesty, and not a little bit of fear was struck in both of their hearts at the sight of their rescuer.
When the giant bird made landfall on the top of the broken staircase, his weight set chunks of rock falling to the bone-strewn courtyard below. Settled, he shook his wings and curled them against his body, nicking something out of the corner of his shoulder with a quick peck of his beak. He then looked down at Prue and Seamus and smiled, if a bird could be said to do so.
“Hello, friends,” he said.
“Owl!” shouted Prue. She let go of Seamus’s hand and ran to the bird, wrapping her arms around his feathery chest.
The owl, returning the embrace, enfolded his wings around the small girl, enshrouding her completely. Seamus the bandit came up behind the two, giving a low bow.
“Hello, Seamus,” said the owl. “I’m a little surprised to see you here.”
“Very long story,” replied Seamus. “One that I myself am just sort of clear on.”
The owl seemed to frown then, and looked down at the girl in his wings. “We have much work to do,” he said simply.
“Where have you been?” asked Prue, her face still burrowed in the bird’s chest feathers. “I’ve been through so much. So much. And you were . . . gone.”
“An unfortunate turn of events, I’ll admit,” said Owl Rex. “But I found I was needed elsewhere. I knew you could manage on your own.”
The girl pulled away from their embrace and looked up into the owl’s eyes. “You did? I’m not sure I have managed very well.”
“Oh, you’ve done fine,” said the owl reassuringly. “As fine as anyone, considering the circumstances. I got the occasional report, from some migrating bird here and there, while you were out adventuring. It seems to me you’ve handled things perfectly well.” He looked around their present environment: the weathered flagstones, rife with bones, the courtyard below, the broken ramparts, the churning sea. “Just fine, I suppose, till now. Some kind geese alerted me to your imprisonment at the hand of the Synod, your conveyance to this forsaken place. Have to admit, this is a bit of a sticky one, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Prue, feeling sheepish. “It is.”
“No matter,” said Owl. “That’s precisely why I’ve returned. No doubt you felt the tremor last night. There are many, many things unfolding in the Wood at present. Some good, some extremely bad. Such that it doesn’t quite behoove one as important as you to just be sitting here, moldering away, on this heap of rocks. You’re needed, Prue McKeel.” He looked over at the robed bandit and said, “And you too, Seamus, I suppose. Though I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a bandit in such a strange getup. Robes don’t necessarily lend themselves to forest crawling. If I’m not mistaken, I’d say that those were the robes of the Synod, the Mystics of the Blighted Tree.”
“You’d be right, there, mate,” said Seamus.
“Then things have taken quite a turn. No matter. For every action there is a counteraction. We may find that the domination of the Synod did not enjoy much time in the sun. A new era has begun, my friends, and if it is not directed properly, it may have dire consequences for the coming generations.”
“Of the Wood?” asked Prue.
“And beyond. Even now, as we speak, the very ribbon of magic that separates the world of the Wood from the Outside is being challenged. The time of the First Trees is passing. A new One Tree is being born.”
“What does that even mean?” asked Prue.
“No time,” said the owl. “Suffice it to say, you’re needed in South Wood. Immediately.” He moved away from Prue, and, spreading his wings wide, he proffered his back to the two humans. “Get onboard. We have a long way to go.”
The two gingerly climbed on the owl’s back, Prue at the bird’s neck and Seamus just behind her. The owl, surprisingly, seemed little encumbered by their weight. He crouched low on the pinnacle of the broken stairs and shook his wings out to their full span; Prue could feel Seamus’s grip around her belly go suddenly taut. “Oof,” she said.
“Can I tell you something?” asked the bandit as the owl cocked his head, as if waiting for the wind to shift.
“What?”
“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“Sure.”
“I’m afraid of heights.”
Prue stifled a laugh. “Better close your eyes, then,” she said. And just at that moment, the giant bird gave a heaving push and took flight from the ruin on the Crag, sending chunks of rock spiraling to the ocean water below, his two riders working desperately to stay astride. Prue heard the bandit behind her gasp loudly; she felt the sea wind rushing through her hair, and the sky opened up above her as the lonely rock where she’d been sentenced to live out her days grew smaller and smaller below her.
Though she’d done it now twice in her life, Prue could not escape the feeling of wonder while riding on the back of an airborne bird. Even Seamus had loosened up into the ride and had let go his grip on her midsection. The owl’s long wings beat against the rising air currents, and he deftly steered them through the whipping air. A low bank of clouds had settled over the ground below them, like a thin layer of cotton batting, and they flew unseen in the lofty springlike sky.
They were to travel all night, the owl said. They would follow an ancient migration pattern that connected the ocean to the Wood. It had been used since the time of the Ancients, when spots of Woods Magic appeared everywhere, before the need to shore up their defenses against the encroaching tide of Outsiders. As if underscoring this claim, a group of squawking cormorants came buzzing up from beneath them, briefly flurried around their airspace before disappearing down below the bank of clouds.
The night overtook the day, and little stars revealed themselves in the dome of sky. Prue nuzzled up against the owl’s feathery nape and drifted into sleep. Dawn was glimmering in the east by the time she was awoken by the owl’s booming voice. “Not far now!” he shouted.
Prue’s eyes blinked open and she scanned the ground below. How he could know where they were, Prue wasn’t sure. The world beneath them looked like a tufted white blanket.
The owl shifted the angle of his right wing and the trio pitched sharply down and to the right; Prue heard the bandit behind her let out a little hoot. Within moments, they were skirting the layer of clouds, and Prue looked down to see her foot, hanging just below the owl’s underbelly, disappear into fog. The world whited out for a moment, and then they reemerged on the underside of the clouds and saw the wide stretch of the Wood splayed out below them.
A Wood that, from this height, looked remarkably changed.
“What’s happened?” shouted Prue.
The owl made no reply but instead swooped lower, and Prue saw the change that was occurring.
The ivy was laying claim to the forest.
Like a thick covering of moss besieging a mottled rock, so the ivy was consuming the woods. The plant seemed to expand from some central point, draping the surrounding forest in a heavy shroud of viny brown and green. There was nowhere on this patch of earth that Prue couldn’t see the effects of the plant’s ravaging. As they flew closer, she could actually see the stuff moving, stretching out and staking new territory in its march northward, topping the tall fir trees and spiderwebbing from treetop to treetop. What’s more, Prue began to hear a sort of virulent hissing rising up from the vines.
“The ivy!” she shouted into Owl’s ear. “It’s happening!”
From where they were positioned, they could see the boundary demarcating the border between the lands of the Outsiders and the Woodians. Prue recognized the distant skyline of Portland’s downtown; she saw the puffing smokestacks of the Industrial Wastes. She saw to her horror that the ivy seemed to have lapped up against the invisible line separating these two worlds, like plants in a terrarium pressing against the glass of their enclosure. It was clear that the Periphery Bind was the only thing holding the ivy back from claiming more than just the territory it had conquered in the Wood.
The owl circled a few times before angling in on a wide meadow overtaken by the plant. Within moments, his talons had touched the ground and his riders leapt from his back, taking in the scene.
“It’s worse than I feared,” said the owl, adjusting his footing on the strange surface.
“Where are we?” asked Prue. The landscape was, indeed, changed beyond recognition. The trees that marked the boundary of this clearing stood like shrouded ghosts, like covered furniture in some unused wing of a castle, rendered unidentifiable by the organism that smothered them. The ground below their feet heaved and shuddered under their weight; it seemed that they were not actually touching the ground, so thick was the layer of vines. A few lumps presented themselves here and there throughout the clearing, and some kind of mountainous pile of the stuff held the center: a towering hill of writhing ivy.
“South Wood,” replied the owl. He lifted his wing and pointed at the gigantic lump of greenery that stood some yards from them. “Behold, the Mansion.”
Prue gaped to see it, but she soon confirmed the owl’s declaration: She could just make out the shapes of the building’s two towers. The hissing was nearly deafening by now, and it took all her mental efforts to keep it at bay. Seamus, taking a few trial steps out into the new, living surface of the Mansion’s estate, said, “Why isn’t it covering us?”
“I expect it’s being controlled from somewhere farther afield,” said the owl. “It appears to be slightly dormant here, in the trough of the wave.” He looked about him, at the strange, apocalyptic scene playing out before them. “Here, the damage has been done. The Verdant Empress marches northward.”
“The Verdant Empress?” asked Prue. “What’s that?”
“The reborn form of Alexandra. Born of ivy, she has taken the form of the plant itself.”
“Isn’t that what she’d set out to do before? With Mac?” A feeling of gloom had come over Prue, remembering the awful rite the crazed woman had attempted to complete.
“Oh, no,” said the owl, his voice steeped in sadness. “That was a mere shadow of the power she now possesses. Her body was sacrificed to the ivy. She is the ivy now.”
Seamus, some feet off, was inspecting a little lump in the greenery, about the size of a small chair. He’d just pulled aside a few handfuls of the plant that had encompassed the object when he let out a short scream.
“What is it?” shouted Prue, rushing to his side.
“Look!” said the bandit, sounding petrified.
She peered into the parted curtains of the ivy vines and saw, there beneath the veil of green and brown, a bit of auburn fur.
“It’s someone!” she shouted as the two of them began desperately to pull the ivy aside. It clung, stubbornly, to itself, its woody tendrils locked together, and when they pulled, the plant only seemed to cinch tighter around its cocooned subject.
“It’s stuck, the shifty stuff,” said Seamus, releasing his grip on the vines. He stepped back and as he did so, the ivy collapsed across the small gap they’d made, once again transforming whatever object it surrounded into a lonely protuberance of green leaves and woody stalks.
“Hold up,” said Prue, now focusing her mind to address the ever-present hissing, which sounded in her ears like she was standing in the middle of a circle of televisions, all playing static.
The plant life below their feet gave a sudden jerk, seemingly surprised to be spoken to. Prue knelt by the ivy-enshrouded figure and held up her hands; it was a useless gesture, but she found it helped concentrate her thoughts on the thing she was asking the plant. It hissed back at her, affrighted by her presence, before it slowly relented. The taut vines slackened and began to fall away, a horde of retreating snakes. Soon, the thing it had swallowed was revealed: a homely brown beaver, sleeping restfully on a park bench.
Seamus dove in as Prue let her arms fall to her side—she found that the communication had sapped a small part of her strength—and the bandit began gently shaking the beaver awake.
“Mm-hello?” said the animal, surprised to be grasped at the shoulders by the bearded, robed man.
“Wake up!” said Seamus.
“I’ll do that on me own time, tanks very much,” the beaver sputtered. “I’d just nodded off. No harm in that.” He was wearing an overcoat, stained with oily smears; the remnants of a half-eaten meal were laid out, in stasis, on a napkin on his lap. He looked around, affronted, as if to say, Can you believe the indignity?
“You’ve been covered in ivy,” said Owl Rex, approaching them from behind. “You’ve been frozen there for some time, it would appear. You’ve quite forgotten your dinner.”
The beaver looked down at the food in his lap. He then looked out over the ivy-covered landscape, his little mouth falling open when he saw the hilly lump of green that was the Pittock Mansion. “Is that . . . ,” he began.
Seamus nodded.
“Oh,” said the beaver, suddenly reconciling himself to the situation. His face, just then, took a precipitous fall as his memories seemed to return to him: “I remember now,” he said.
“What?” prompted Prue, kneeling by his side. “What happened?”
“Ain’t you . . . ,” he said, seeing Prue. “Ain’t you the Bicycle Maiden?”
Prue nodded. The beaver, dazed, looked up at Owl Rex. “And ain’t you the Crown Prince o’ the Avians?”
Owl bowed his head regally. The beaver shook his head in disbelief. “Well, I never,” he said.
“And I’m the bandit Seamus,” said Seamus, apparently feeling left out of the beaver’s starstruck reverie.
“You don’t look much like a bandit,” said the beaver. “What’s wi’ the dress?”
“It’s not a dress,” Seamus countered, offended. “It’s a robe. Long story.”
The beaver looked down at the food on his lap and began speaking, slowly, haltingly. “I was just sittin’ down to my lunch. My midnight lunch, that is. I’m a gas-lamp tender, ain’t I? And I feel this crazy rumble, like a earthquake or some such. That’s what happened.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “I had to grab me lunch, din’t I, lest it spill about. Nearly threw me off the bench. Well, then I look up and see, in the gaslight, this figure just spiral up from the trees, yonder.”
“A figure,” repeated the owl. “What did it look like?”
“Couldn’t see much, it being dark an’ all. At least at first. But I’m, like, frozen in place, right? Can’t even lift my hands from my lunch. Then a couple more figures appear, giant like, just through the trees.” The beaver shook his head, as if trying to dispel the image from his mind.
“Keep going,” prompted Owl. “You’re safe now.”
The beaver’s small black eyes seemed to be tearing up. “Awful things. I can only see their legs in the light of the gas lamps. Tall as any tree in the forest. Made o’ ivy, they are. And that’s when the vines came. Like a wash o’ water, they came. Saw ’em come over the Mansion, there. Like an explosion. ’Fore I could get out of me stupor, though, they came over me and I promptly tuckered out, din’t I? Must’ve put me straight to sleep.”
While the beaver spoke, Prue found her attention diverted to the far treetops, imagining the horrible scene as the poor, distraught animal described it. What horrific shape had this disembodied woman taken in order to inspire such fear, to wreak so much ruin? The firs and the cedars, the hemlocks and the maples, all of them sported a writhing new growth of ivy vines, clinging to their topmost boughs and making their crowns sag under their weight. Everywhere she looked, she saw the telltale signs of the innocent, somnolent victims of the ivy’s spread: squat mounds in the cloak of green that lay over the landscape.
“Quickly,” spoke the owl. “To the Blighted Tree.”
“Yes!” shouted Prue, remembering the parasite-infected bandits.
Just then, a loud noise diverted their attention to the mountain of ivy in the center of the meadow, the enshrouded shape of the Pittock Mansion. Some of the ivy had fallen away as one of the brick walls let loose a shower of debris, crashing to the ground; a broken hole was, for a moment, revealed in the building’s facade before a new surge of ivy crept up and covered it. Prue shrieked to see the destruction.
“It’ll tear down the whole building!” she shouted. She remembered, then, how she’d managed to make the ivy retreat from the sleeping beaver. “Maybe I can stop it!” she said.
“No, Prue,” said the owl. “It is beyond even your powers. The Mansion is lost. Perhaps there will be time to save the Blighted Tree.”
“The Blighted Tree?” asked Prue, nonplussed. “Why would we save that awful thing?”
“The fabric of the Woods is a complex weave of many different energies. All must be preserved. It is too much to discuss presently, when your powers are needed elsewhere.” The owl proffered his back to Prue and Seamus, and they both climbed onboard. “Hold tight,” he said before unfurling his vast wings and leaping into the sky.
Again, they were afforded a harrowing view of the devastation from the owl’s back as he flew. The spread of the ivy was rampant; everywhere they looked they saw what appeared to be houses and buildings being torn apart by the infestation. Whole trees, sky tall and centuries old, were cracking and bending under the weight of the plant that was consuming them. The sounds of their breaking echoed through the misty air. Prue stifled a sob in her chest to see such desolation, to see the entire ancient forest being slowly swallowed by this greedy invader.
Soon, they were flying over the clearing where Prue had been abducted, those few days prior: the Blighted Meadow. There, as on the Mansion’s grounds, the ivy was widespread, covering the entire area like a wriggling sheet. The owl, in midflight, shook his head sorrowfully as he taxied around the center of the clearing, saying, “It’s too late!” in a voice loud enough to cut through the whipping wind.
“What’s too late?” Prue shouted back.
“The Blighted Tree. It’s been consumed.”
Sure enough, as the owl settled down onto the ivy-strewn meadow and Prue and Seamus hopped from his back, they saw that the imposing tree, that ancient tree, which had demanded the attention of the clearing for centuries untold, was now nothing more than a small heap in the center of the meadow. Little lesser heaps dotted a circle around it, and Prue guessed these to be the meditating acolytes, put to sleep by the plant. While the great owl stood, seeming paralyzed by the scene, Prue rushed to the nearest ivy mound and began communing with the hissing plant, calling it away from its purpose.
LET, she thought.
She could make out the following word, issuing to her from the farthest depths of her hearing: WHOOOOOO.
LET GO, she thought. She could feel her energy peeling away, like she was treading heavy water.
She suddenly felt the ivy slacken; she reached out and began to pull its webbing apart to reveal a hooded, masked figure beneath. “Seamus!” she yelled over her shoulder. The bandit came running to her side. “Help me get this stuff off.”
The two of them began yanking aside the figure’s smothering shroud; the ivy yielded to their hands, seemingly under the trance of Prue’s demands. Before long, they had the Caliph partially freed of the vines. Seamus grabbed the figure’s cowl and threw it aside before carefully removing the silver mask, revealing the peacefully sleeping face of the bandit William.
“Willy!” shouted Seamus, his voice breaking with excitement. “Wake up there, lad!”
The bandit’s eyelids fluttered, and he stirred in his sleep. His long yellow mustache twitched a little as he slowly woke. Once again conscious, he stared at Prue and Seamus blankly, as if they were perfect strangers. As if his eyes saw nothing. Just then, a look of fear overcame his face and he began struggling in his bonds, as his hands and legs were still confined by the ivy.
“Willy!” Seamus yelled again. “It’s me, Seamus!”
But there was no shine of recognition in the bandit’s eyes. That was when Prue heard the ticking noise. She reached out her hand and pressed it against Seamus’s chest. “Hold up,” she said. “There’s more to do here.”
Seamus, clearly distraught at his brother-in-arms’s amnesia, stumbled backward while Prue held her palm up to William’s face.
COME, she thought. She cleared her mind. She addressed the ticking noise. She addressed the organism inside William’s skull.
The bandit sputtered, his bloodshot eyes thrown wide. He began to cough, and his hands struggled in their bonds. Prue continued to coax the weird life-form that had nested inside the bandit’s nasal cavity; she cajoled it, rooted it out. It ticked louder, unhappy to be disturbed, while snot gushed from the nose of the bandit, who was by now buckled over in the throes of his dry heaves.
“It’s all right there, laddie,” soothed Seamus, at the bandit’s side. “It’s unpleasant, but you got to just let it out.”
The hacking grew more intense, and Prue felt the parasite relinquish its power and fall under her command. Again, she felt her energy being sapped, and she fell back on her heels as William the bandit pitched forward and his retching came on again, renewed. From his right nostril bloomed the grayish-green stuff, and Seamus shot his hand out and grabbed it. His face contorted into a disgusted grimace as he eased the fungus and its web of connected hyphae, the meshy filaments that branched out from the central glob of the organism, out of his comrade’s nose.
The ticking had grown deafening in Prue’s mind, now that the Spongiform had been released from its host, and she could feel it longing to attach itself to another human. “Destroy it, Seamus,” she managed.
Holding it out like it was a poisonous snake, Seamus backed away from William’s prone, coughing form and tossed it unceremoniously into the ivy. The ticking seemed to ebb in Prue’s mind, though she was suddenly alerted to the sound emanating all around her. She scanned the horizon; identical lumps in the blanket of ivy gave away the location of more Caliphs, more ticking parasites.
“Let’s get a fire going,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.”
Meanwhile, William had lifted himself up from his knees and was pawing at his face, wiping away the remnant mucus that had smoothed the fungus’s exit through his nostril. He looked around himself, dazed, until his eyes fell on Seamus.
“Seamus!” he said hoarsely. “What’s happened? Where am I?”
“You’re in South Wood, brother,” replied Seamus. “You’ve been made a slave. But that’s over now. It’s all over now.” The bandit’s voice welled with emotion as he spoke; it was clear that Seamus heavily wore the burden of having brought this fate on the bandit band.
And so their early morning progressed, there under the mantle of cloud that hung low over the forest: Each mound of ivy was discovered to be hiding some slumbering person or animal within its mesh cocoon and they were each, in turn, freed and revived. Those who’d been given the Spongiform, the silver-masked Caliphs, were left confined up to their necks until Prue could make her way to them (her energy ebbing with every case) and coax the spidery fungus from their nostrils. With each one, a new bandit was unmasked and awakened. A new flurry of questions and celebrations and sad, guilty explanations from Seamus were shared among the reunited bandits at every turn. A dozen sleeping Caliphs had been roused and set to rights—some of them were local South Wood citizens, innocently caught up in the Synod’s promised revival—before they arrived at the acolyte whose silver mask, once removed, revealed the sleeping face of Brendan, the Bandit King.
Once he’d been unslept and the fungus coughed up from his skull had been added to the blazing fire they’d started in the center of the meadow, he stood uneasily and, saying nothing, surveyed the crowd that was now surrounding him. Seamus rushed forward, seeing his long-lost sovereign, and threw himself at the Bandit King’s feet.
“Oh, King,” said Seamus, letting loose a torrent of sobs, “this is all my doing.”
Brendan looked at his most uncertain, there in the center of the crowd. Prue had only ever seen him steadfast and regal, in his sylvan element, his forehead tattoo a totem to his strength. But now he looked muddled and confused as he stared down at the bandit who was prostrating himself before him.
“Rise,” he said finally.
Seamus did as he was instructed, his head still bowed.
“What has happened?” asked the Bandit King. He held his hand briefly at his temple, massaging the skin.
“I was here, as an emissary,” started Seamus.
Brendan nodded, as if to say, This much I remember.
“They took me in, the Synod,” said Seamus. “The Mystics of the Blighted Tree. I don’t remember much past that point. Just hazy recollections, really. I was fed that stuff—the Spongiform. It’s a parasitic fungus; makes you do the will of the Blighted Tree and its disciples.”
The Bandit King remained silent; his brow was placid and his eyes stayed fixed on his comrade. His hand fell to his side.
Seamus continued haltingly, “I came to the camp. Under the influence of that . . . stuff. I fed the rest of the camp the fungus, and you all fell in line.” Seamus began to cry, big tears rolling down his nose and into the tuft of his brown beard. “We all marched back . . . here. And were made part of the Synod, doing the bidding of the tree.” He sniffed a few times, collecting himself, ran his finger under his nose, and said, “I’ve failed the band. I’ve broken the oath. I will recuse myself from my brothers and sisters. If it be your will, I’ll be a bandit no more.”
Silence followed; Brendan searched the bowed head of his fallen brother for a moment before replying. “Seamus,” he said, resting his arms on the man’s shoulders. “I’d as soon let you leave the band as throw myself into the deepest pit of the Long Gap. You are no more at fault than any of us.” He then surveyed his gathered subjects, his fellow bandit brethren, smiling, until his eyes fell on Prue.
Prue instinctively gave a little curtsy.
“Why is it that I’m not surprised to see you here, as well?” said the Bandit King. “Prue of the Outside. It would seem that trouble follows you like campfire smoke.”
He’d given her a wry smile, which Prue took as a hopeful sign that the bandit had returned to his old, sardonic self.
“Smoke follows beauty,” replied Prue, smiling sheepishly. It was one of her dad’s old saws, always hauled out during camping trips. Just then her vision swam and her knees gave out. The bandit Angus, who happened to be standing next to her, grabbed her arm and steadied her.
“Are you okay, lass?” he asked.
“Just a little . . . worn out, I guess,” she replied. The work of freeing all the ivy’s captives had been more exhausting than she’d anticipated.
Owl Rex walked through the crowd of the thirty-odd bandits and townsfolk; they all parted to let the giant bird by.
“Owl,” said Brendan, acknowledging the Avian prince with a bow of his head. “What did you know of this?”
“Nothing, I assure you,” was the reply. “I’ve been gone these many months, adventuring elsewhere. Suffice it to say, this is a once-in-a-lifetime cock-up, one that is unlikely to be put to rights anytime soon. We can but do our best. The Blighted Tree is no more. It has been torn apart by the Verdant Empress’s wrath. She seems to be making good on her earlier threats.”
“Who is this Verdant Empress?” asked the Bandit King. “She’s no monarch I bow to.”
“She is the living ivy itself, imbued with the spirit of the dead. Or near dead.” The owl then turned to address the gathered crowd. “The woman you thought you slew on the field of battle, there on the ivy-strewn basilica during the Battle for the Plinth—she has returned. Indeed, she was never more than in hibernation, her spirit swallowed by the ivy itself. She has now come to finish her terrible rite and reduce the Wood to a desolation.”
Brendan seemed to be regaining his strength, and he put in, angrily, “She’ll not get far. Cover the Wood in ivy if she must, we’ll still send her to the devil.” His hand reached for a saber at his side that was not there. Instead, he clutched at the strange gray robes he wore and cursed.
The owl shook his head at the comment. “It’s worse than that, much worse,” he said. “The Blighted Tree has been torn down. This tree, standing for centuries, though much maligned by its detractors, has served a very important purpose. Along with the Ossuary Tree in Wildwood and the Council Tree of North Wood, it maintained the fabric of the Periphery Bind.” The owl paused so as to let what he next said fall with the appropriate weight. “And without the Bind, the boundary between the Wood and the Outside is null.”
“Null?” said Prue, suddenly panicked. “What do you mean, null?” She found a reserve of strength and pushed herself away from Angus’s arm.
The owl turned to her and frowned. “Yes. Alexandra—the Verdant Empress—will move beyond the Periphery. Once she’s done wreaking havoc on the Wood, she will consume the Outside as well.”
While none of the individuals present, besides Prue, could truly envision what this statement suggested—none of them having ever set foot in the so-called Outside—it immediately conjured a very stark and terrifying picture for Prue. She found, while in the Wood, that she cared very little for the Outside; for its mundane realities and trivial concerns—but there was something in this, this suggestion that the boundary between the two worlds would be overrun, that made her almost protective of her home-world.
“Over here!” came a voice; they all looked to see one of the bandits standing some yards off, on the edge of the clearing. “Prue! You’re needed!”
Rushing to where the bandit stood, they immediately saw the cause for concern: A small hut was in the process of being crushed under the weight of its thick mantle of ivy. Inside, a voice could be heard, crying for help.
“Esben!” shouted Prue, suddenly recognizing the growly timbre of the voice.
She threw her hands up to the surface of the structure and began coaxing away the ivy vines; the bandits fell in around her and started stripping the plant away once it had been controlled. The door was soon located; they were dismayed to find its latch was affixed with a heavy iron padlock.
“Hold tight there!” shouted Brendan as he turned to his fellow robed bandits, waving his hand. “One of you’s got to have the key. Search your pockets, lads!”
The hut’s strained framework wheezed as the ivy continued to constrict, bending the structure into a weird, oblong shape. Inside, something cracked. Esben let out a yell of surprise.
“We’re going to get you out of there!” shouted Prue, her hands held to the living surface of the hut, willing the ivy to let up its pressure. The mass seemed too great; she was having a hard time communing with it all.
The bandits, almost comically, were it not for the gravity of the situation, were simultaneously patting the sides of their identical gray robes, searching for the key, before Brendan spoke up. “Look at that,” he said, producing a brassy skeleton key from his pocket. “Had it all along.” The lock undone, they threw open the door.
Inside, pressed up against the far wall, was a bear with two golden hooks for hands. He smiled sheepishly to see his rescuers. “Hi, there,” he said. “Mind the ivy.”
Indeed, the plant had made its way through the chinks in the hut’s log walls and was busily crawling across the floor toward the bear. Prue leapt forward and, issuing a word of warning to the creeping plant in her mind, grabbed Esben by the hook. She rushed the bear through the door frame, squeezed as it was into a vexed rhombus, while the hut groaned and shivered around them.
Once they’d made the safety of the outside, Prue threw herself on the bear, wrapping her arms around his massive midsection and only managing to cover half the distance. The bandits looked on, marveling at the sagging structure of the bear’s former prison cell.
“And I thought it’d cave in just as we got him out,” said Seamus.
“Only works that way in stories,” said another bandit nearby, Gram.
Seamus gave one of the doorjamb posts a kick, and the entire structure blew to the ground in an eruption of noise, dust, and ivy. “There we go,” said the bandit, satisfied.
Prue, momentarily jolted by the hut’s collapse, turned back to Esben; she began busily pulling the last bits of clinging ivy from the bear’s fur, motherlike, while she spoke. “I’m so sorry, Esben. I had no idea what was happening.”
“They must’ve followed the badger,” said Esben, still regaining his bearings. “They came at me quickly; I couldn’t have escaped. Hooded things.” He shivered then. “And then the ivy; it came on so fast. And the terrible crashing noises. I’ve been trapped in that cabin for who knows how long!”
“You’re safe now,” said Prue.
“Am I?” asked the bear, taking in the surroundings. Indeed, his environment had changed so drastically since he’d been taken prisoner that there was barely a resemblance remaining to that diverse forest he’d left when they had first locked him up.
“She’s back, the Dowager Governess. Just in . . . some other form,” said Prue. “She’s taken control of the ivy.”
“What does she plan on doing with it?” asked the bear, confused.
“She means to rend the very fabric of the Periphery Bind,” answered Owl Rex. “She means to tear down the Trees of the Wood.” The bird’s head feathers were ruffled by a flurry of the wind and he looked southward, to the lowering banks of clouds on the horizon. “If it is her wish,” he said, “she now rides for the Ossuary Tree, the second tree, to break it to its roots. Then, only a third tree will stand in her way.”
“The Council Tree,” breathed Prue. Her mind flashed on the peaceable folk of North Wood, on the chain of quiet Mystics, practicing their meditations around the gargantuan trunk of the great tree. “We have to go. We have to stop her.”
“We can perhaps hold her back,” said the owl gravely.
“But what of the girl’s power?” put in Brendan. “She can control the ivy. Could she hold the tide at bay?”
The owl looked to Prue, frowning. “Even with your estimable powers, the Verdant Empress would overrun you.”
“But the Mystics—if we rallied them, they could help. We could work together,” said Prue.
“Perhaps . . . ,” began the owl.
Just then, a thought occurred to Prue. “The cog,” she said. “What about the cog?”
Owl Rex looked curiously at the girl. “Surely such a thing cannot help us now.”
“But it’s what the tree said—it said by reconstructing the mechanical boy, the true heir, it would unite the Wood. It would save it!” Prue’s face became vexed, working out the intricacies of the plan. “I mean, if it knew what was happening all along—maybe it wasn’t the Synod it meant to save itself from—but this Verdant Empress woman—Alexandra!” She turned to Esben and looked at him sharply. She understood, plainly, that perhaps her quest must, at some point, reach its stopping point. Its searcher must come to rest eventually, even if the desired outcome had not yet been achieved.
“We need you to start making the cog,” she said.
The bear gulped, once, loudly. He held up his two hooks and said helplessly, “That woman robbed me of my tools. Without Carol, I’m not sure I can.”
“You have to try,” pressed Prue. She looked around her, surveying the gathered crowd. “Someone will need to be your hands.”
Seamus, the bandit, stepped forward. He held out his knobby, weatherworn fingers. “I’m as good as any at molding a horseshoe or a hobnail,” he said. “Not entirely sure what sort of cog needs be made, but I can give it a shot.”
“Maybe,” said the bear, somewhat unsteadily, his voice lacking the sort of steely pluck one typically expects at times such as these. He studied his prosthetic hands, uncertainly, in the wan light of the day before saying to the congregation of bandits, “We’ll need a bigger fire, a hotter fire.”
Just as the gathered bandits had all raised a collective “Aye!” and set about collecting what loose branches they could find from beneath the worming ivy, Esben the bear turned his solemn eyes to Prue and said plaintively, “I’ll do my best.”
“And that’s all we could hope for,” she replied, placing her hand on his arm.
Brendan the Bandit King stood apart, gauging the placement of the sun in the hazy sky. “She’s got some time on us. If she’s on to the Ossuary Tree, it won’t be long before this Verdant Empress will cross the pass and into North Wood.” He spat angrily at the writhing ground. “Us on foot, she’d long have laid the Council Tree to waste before we made Wildwood, even without all this damned ivy everywhere.”
Owl Rex offered up a smile. “Then we will not travel on foot,” he said, before unfurling his wings and leaping into the air. He wheeled about, some hundreds of feet above their heads, before spiraling upward and rending the air with the loudest birdcall many of the bandits and South Wooders assembled had ever had a chance to hear. It echoed through the still woods, among the ivy-crowned trees and the falling buildings and the sad, desolate landscape of this desecrated world: a resounding cry, a call to arms.