And then, her son appeared from the curtain of shadow: a boy of fifteen summers, fourteen winters.
The garlands of ribbon had only just been taken down the day before; a banner, thirty feet wide, had proclaimed HAPPY 15TH BIRTHDAY ALEXEI! and it had stretched between the twin spires of the Mansion’s gabled roof. Gifts had arrived in droves. Emissaries from far-flung provinces had been announced every quarter hour, it seemed, bearing presents of blackberry cordial and hand-carved wooden toys the boy had long outgrown; they came with quiet entreaties as well, which Grigor received stoically, leading the requester away with a patient arm around a shoulder. A parade had been arranged by the townsfolk, and a band played a marshaling tune while the family sat on a raised platform and witnessed it all, an outpouring of love for the heir apparent to the Mansion’s seat. Alexei had sat through it with such resolute patience, with such enduring focus, that Alexandra found herself looking to her son every time she felt the spark of boredom flourish in her gut; his sweet, handsome face with its direct gaze and relaxed brow renewed her. He would make an excellent Governor-Regent. Of this there was no doubt.
And once the parade grounds had been cleared and the July sun had passed its apex and was beginning to arc toward the far, green hills to the west, then came the coup de grâce. Back at the Mansion, the staff all a-tizzy in preparation for the evening’s feast, Grigor had enticed his son to follow him to the carriage house to help, ostensibly, with some trivial chore. Alexei, his voice already betraying a weariness for the day, gamely bore his father’s request, and the two of them exited the front doors. Alexandra had heard her son’s tremendous shout—hadn’t a bit of his childhood shown there? a squeak at the top of his range, despite his age?—and she walked quickly to the window to see Grigor standing proudly while the stable master presented the boy with his own horse, his first horse: a pitch-black mare with a brilliant white diamond between her brown eyes.
And now: Here he was. The fifteen-year-old boy. No longer a child. A boy. A growing boy. Soon to be a grown man. A politician. A statesman. A husband. A father. Her son.
“Mama!” said the boy again. “I wanted to ride Blackie, but Papa said I should ask you first.”
“Oh?” she said, toying with him. The heat had dissipated. The glass of water seemed a distant need. The boy’s arrival had quenched her. “Did he say that?”
Alexei knew the game. “Yes, he did. And I said I would. So here I am.”
“And?”
“And . . . ,” said Alexei, his smile growing. “Can I?”
“Did you speak to Mr. Cooper?” The stable master.
“No, but Papa said I could ask him if he wasn’t too busy.”
“And have you finished your algebra?”
The smile disappeared; he became astute. “Yes, Mama. Miss Brighton said I did well enough.”
“Well enough?”
“That’s what she said.” He paused, searching his mother’s expression. “That’s good, right?”
Alexandra strove to retain her motherly concern. “And your father said it was okay?”
“Yes,” said Alexei, loosening a bit, knowing that the prospects had suddenly turned for the better. “He said it was okay, but I should ask you.”
“Very well,” said Alexandra. “Speak to Mr. Cooper. As long as he’s not too busy.”
The boy beamed. “Yes, Mama!” A sudden energy then overtook him, and he practically leapt from where he stood and bolted for the other side of the Mansion.
Alexandra called out her son’s name. The boy stopped, just in the shade of the house. She said something then, something she couldn’t later recall, later when she replayed the entire exchange in her mind, over and over again, like a film taped in a tight loop, always stopping when the boy had reached the shelter of the building’s shade, connecting smoothly and flawlessly with the image that had preceded it, with him approaching, there in the same rhombus of dark. She said something: perhaps a word of caution. A token of motherly concern, in the hopes he might carry it with him, like a guarding charm. Or was it something unimportant? An impotent demand, a suggestion that these sorts of privileges were conditional, dependent on his good works. It never was clear. She tried, later, to conjure from that mist, that long patch of shade, a simple declaration. That she had told him that she loved him. That he was everything to her. But then he was gone, and the film replayed: the heat, the light, the block beneath her foot, the sound of his voice.
Because what came next was nothing.
It almost seems pointless to recount it.
She is in the gardening shed, peeling the gloves from her hands. She is hanging the sun hat on a hook. She is speaking to the master gardener, briefly. She is remembering the glass of water. She is walking through the back door, through the glassed-in sunroom. Across the checkerboard of the foyer; she is greeting a staff member bent at some task. She is entering the kitchen, acknowledging the kitchen staff quietly, trying to be unseen. An empty glass under the tap. And then: a shout from the courtyard, loud, through the window. Looking up to see a wild black horse, rearing. Mr. Cooper struggling to hold the bridle.
Her son, Alexei, fifteen summers, lying on the ground.
She dropped the glass in the sink, its crystalline shatter a tiny explosion, and ran for the front doors. She threw them open, her thin limbs imbued with a new strength, and tore out into the courtyard, her every heartbeat a fresh tremor in her ears. Mr. Cooper was shouting, wrangling the horse as it kicked and whinnied. No obstacle could stop Alexandra from getting to her son, and she felt the air the horse moved all around her and felt the pebbles spat by the horse’s hooves shower her.
There was blood. A lot of blood. The boy was pale and still as a stone, as still and pale as a white stone. The red blood seeped onto the courtyard and welled about his head. His hair was matted with fresh blood, and his eyes were closed.
She grabbed him by the shoulders and held him to her chest. She shouted his name. She threw her arms around his limp body and embraced it with all the energy and love she could muster. She thought, maybe, she felt the last few thrums of his heart. Little phantoms. Little wisps of smoke: gone as quickly as they’d appeared.
She felt him disappear. Fourteen winters, gone.
The horse had been spooked, they said. A flash of light from the bright summer sun against a leaded pane of glass. A thrush startled from its hiding. His little body had been thrown from the horse’s back like a doll. He’d hit the cobbles headfirst and was gone before he could utter a cry. The boy couldn’t have felt a thing, they reasoned, they reassured. But no amount of reassurance could placate the demon inside Alexandra’s breast. She stayed by the lifeless body of her son for days; she bade the funeral director teach her how to clean the body. She performed the ablutions lovingly, as she had when the boy had been alive: A sallow yellow sponge carefully ran along his abalone skin. He had put up such a fuss, hadn’t he, when she’d done the same thing when he was alive? She’d practically had to wrestle him down, in a torrent of water and bath suds, to wash his feet, his shoulders, his little fingers: him laughing ecstatically, she trying to keep her composure, the placid mother. The picture of calm. But now he lay still and raised no objection to her washings.
Maybe it was then that she decided that this was not her son. This still thing. That there was something else, something elusive, that had animated this dead vessel. They interred the boy with full honors, the same band that played for his birthday playing for his funeral. Grigor, of course, was in bed, having heaped enough blame on himself for his son’s death that he could barely rise under the weight. She became disgusted with her husband as the demon inside her breast grew larger and noisier. She stood silently as the casket was entombed and ignored the hushed words of sympathy from the surrounding mourners.
She’d had an idea. Something that occurred to her one night, as she lay beside the sleeping body of her idle, bedridden husband. The film unspooled in her head, the loop of film that ran from Alexei’s arrival
to his departure in that same piece of shade by the Mansion wall. It was as if, suddenly, after reviewing the same piece of film for the hundredth time, without an inkling that anything new would reveal itself, she’d caught a glimpse of something. Something only she could see.
She had a plan.
Grigor died, the fool. Shortly after the funeral. She woke up one day to find him dead, and that was that. Poor Grigor. His heart simply became too heavy, there in the cavity of his chest. She loathed him for his cowardice. The funeral players had barely been disbanded when they were called again for the Governor-Regent’s burial, to be laid in state in a tomb not far from his departed son. The government was thrown into confusion; no sooner had the man been put in the ground than his silent, seething wife was crowned the Dowager Governess, to reign over South Wood in her husband’s stead; but this new ruler had different concerns on her mind.
She consulted ancient texts, sought the teachings of market conjurers, reviled necromancers. She invited them into the Mansion, braving the scorning eyes of her staff. Soon, the air in the stuffy place breathed with the smell of sandalwood and sage. She started with simple conjures: a piece of red tissue, flourished correctly, could become a songbird; a table could be set to dance on its legs. They taught her the magic sigils to ease rain from a threatening cloud, they showed her which mushrooms provoked the greatest visions—they even taught her the steps required to gain command over the ivy. But she always pressed her teachers for the ultimate incantation: to call a soul back from the land of the dead.
An itinerant herbalist who claimed Wildwood as his home province was sought and retained. He was thought to be the greatest sorcerer in the whole of the Wood, more powerful than the Mystics of the North, all of whom had spurned her when she sought their counsel.
Savages, she thought. Witch doctors and savages. They would soon know true power.
The herbalist sat quietly in the Dowager’s study, glancing about the room with a disinterested air. He wore little more than rags, and a conical felt hat was perched on the crown of his head. A tremendous beard grew down to his knees, a white and stringy thing in which it seemed all manner of living things had taken up residence.
“No,” he’d said finally, once he’d had his fill of the Mansion’s poppy beer and cleaned his plate of the stew he’d been served. “This thing can’t be done. To return a soul to a body long dead idn’t possible. P’raps if I’d a-gotten to him right after ’is time of passin’. Maybes then. Now, no. Y’need a vessel to contain th’ soul. Not no rotted carcass.”
“What kind of vessel?” she asked, leaning in from her chair, smarting at this ugly man’s description of her son as a rotten thing. She couldn’t stand the image it summoned.
“A seed,” said the man slowly: a mentor doling out his wisdom. “Can be taken from th’ fruit and when its flesh is gone, be trick’d into life when placed in a simple glass o’ water.”
“You’re saying my son’s soul can be brought back in a glass of water?” asked the Governess in disbelief.
The man grumbled. “No,” he said. “I mean to say that th’ spark o’ life remains in the tiny bits o’ the body and can be tricked, with th’ right conjuries, into comin’ afresh if the right sort o’ en-vir-onment is provided.”
“But how? What do you mean, environment?”
“Y’ must build a new body for the boy. One that matches all th’ intricacies of the flesh-and-blood machine. Plant the seed there. Only then can the living thing grow again.”
She’d known toy makers who could build things of staggering complexity: little automaton dolls she’d been given on her own birthdays as a child. Surely such a thing could be built. “But what is the seed?” she asked.
The old man smiled, revealing an astonishingly ugly row of brownish-yellow nubs. “The teeth,” he said. “Y’ must retrieve th’ teeth.”
And so she did; the body was exhumed secretly—present were only herself and a short, muscular grave digger named Ned. She watched him break the seal and pull back the door of the mausoleum; she held the lantern for him to see. At long last, the body was recovered. Alexandra, by this point, was indifferent to the condition of the body, of her deceased son. She knew that it was simply his disused husk, a banana peel thrown on the compost heap. She removed his teeth one after another, methodically, as if she were plucking feathers from a chicken bound for the oven.
The grave digger, Ned, was exiled promptly the next day.
But to make the boy again, a machine replica of the living, breathing thing, special expertise would need to be engaged. This was no simple automaton, no blinking ceramic doll that wet itself when its left arm was raised. The task before her was to imitate the workings of the Maker, the Divine Being. For this, she consulted blacksmiths and machinists, toy makers and engineers. A bear, living in seclusion in the farthest reaches of South Wood, was known for his intricate metalwork. His family had repaired the Mansion’s clocks for generations; the bear himself was known for the construction of little trinkets: mechanical waxwings that aped the behaviors of their flesh-and-blood models and bellowed about in thick flocks, clouding the air of the market where he sold the things to ecstatic children. But he alone could not re-create a human child. To do so, he needed the aid of an Outsider machinist, a man who existed in legend only among the toy makers and tinkerers of the Wood. He explained this to the Governess in quaking tones while she stared at him from behind her desk in the Mansion’s office.
“His name is Carol Grod,” said the bear. “I believe together we could make such a thing.”
A pair of eagles was dispatched to fetch this machinist from some lonely hovel in the Outside. How easy it seemed, the Governess reckoned, to simply have a thing, a person, carried to oneself at one’s bidding. The man’s story was uninteresting to her, the demon having bloomed fully in her breast: how his creations had astonished and wowed Outsider children and adults alike for decades, little contraptions made of brass and copper with intricate inner workings that clicked and whirred. But his abilities became overshadowed by the wondrous worlds available by screen, by computer, and his inventions were forgotten and ignored and he disappeared into anonymity.
He had use here, though, here in the world his kind called the Impassable Wilderness. And so the two of them, the old man and the bear, working in seclusion, began to create the body that would house the soul of Alexei. The soul of her son.
CHAPTER 13
A Meeting at the Tree
Esben the bear stirred at the fire with the hooks of his hands and breathed in the dark around him. The night had come on quickly, here in the woods, where the tall shroud of trees acted as a kind of curtain to the sun. An owl hooted, somewhere, far off. He shivered, a reflexive shiver, as a slight uneasiness came over him. It’d been many hours since he and the girl parted ways; he’d expected her back before sundown. What’s more, he was getting a little peckish. He’d eaten through what food they’d had in her bag fairly quickly; his appetite did tend to get the best of him from time to time. Prue had promised to bring more food—she’d said that, hadn’t she?
He knocked over one of the burning branches in the fire, sending sparks in the air, and stabbed his hooks into a fresh log just to the side of the pit. It was one thing, he reflected, he was particularly good at now—fire tending. The hooks were kind of a godsend in that way: If he ever had to tend fires for the rest of his life, it’d be something he’d do well at. It’d been—what—thirteen years now, right? Since he’d had his paws roughly removed—a surgeon’s scalpel had done the job in a scant few minutes. He grimaced a little now, here at the fire, remembering the pain. The searing pain.
A noise startled him: a scratching somewhere beyond the throw of the firelight. “Who’s there?” he shouted. No response came. The scratching stopped. Esben adjusted the rake of his knitted cap and grumbled a little, there, angry at the invisible thing for disturbing his peace. “Fine,” he said to the darkness. “Don’t show yourself.”
Pr
obably a squirrel, he reasoned. He hoped it wasn’t some spy for the Mansion—some holdout from the old days who might catch him, accuse him of breaking his parole. He was supposed to be dead, exiled away to the deepest reaches of the Underwood. Even though Prue seemed convinced that he’d be safe—that the people responsible for his mutilation and exile were long gone, washed away in the flood of revolution—he still couldn’t fight the residual fear that he’d be thrown back into that dark world. Or worse. Surely, seeing he’d survived the most horrific disfigurement and exile they could devise, they’d want to try something more severe. He shivered, again, at the thought.
Another sound came from the surrounding woods, this time louder: It was indescribable to the poor bear; it was both airy and watery, if such a thing could be said to exist. It called to mind the angered battle cry of some terrible creature, something that perhaps had the body of a squid, all slippery tentacles and ooze, and the head of an owl. The noise came again: a kind of bubbling WHOOOO. A drowned ghost, perhaps, called to Esben’s position by the promise of a warming fire, where the wandering spirit might dry his soggy, moss-covered clothes.
“Who’s th-there?” managed Esben, staring off into the dark, his hooks held in a defensive position.
There came a pause, then the words: “Oh, forget it.” It was, unmistakably, Prue’s voice.
The bear let out a breath of relief when he saw the girl’s figure appear from out of the forest’s dark. She set her hands on her hips in a show of frustration and said, “I can’t whistle. I forgot.”
That was, after all, to be their signal that a friend was approaching.