The bear smiled. “No matter,” he said. “Takes some practice.”
Two other figures appeared behind the girl, a short-statured badger and a lumbering hulk of a man sporting a nappy brown beard.
“This is Neil, who you met earlier,” said Prue, gesturing to the badger. “And this is Charlie. They’re going to help us.”
“How do you do?” said Esben.
“Very well, thanks,” said Charlie. “Nice fire you got there.”
“We have a moment, anyway,” said Prue. “If you want to take a load off. It’s been a long day.”
“What happened?” asked the bear.
The man, Charlie, put in enthusiastically before Prue could answer, “Oh, you wouldn’t have believed it, if you’d ’a been there. A glorious return, it was. The Bicycle Maiden, come back to the Mansion. I’ll be tellin’ my grandkids about that.”
“Oh, please,” demurred Prue, her cheeks showing their blush by the light of the campfire.
“It’s true!” continued Charlie. “Quite a show. Even those Caliphs were quakin’ in their boots to see her show up.”
“Charlie’s a fan,” said Prue, by way of explanation. Remembering herself, she shrugged her bag from her shoulder and let it fall with a thump to the ground. “I got you some more food. A little dried fruit and some bread. Some jerky and potted meat, too. It was all I could grab.”
“That’ll do very nicely, thanks,” said Esben. He easily unpeeled the top of one of the cans of meat and began dishing the pink stuff into his mouth. “How’d it go?” he asked between bites.
“As well as you could expect, I guess.”
“And it was a big deal, you coming back?”
Again, the bearded man answered before Prue had a chance. “As big a deal as you could—”
Prue waved him off. “At first, yeah,” she said. “But things got a little ugly. It turns out a lot of those people don’t really like the idea of bringing Alexei back from the dead.”
“Didn’t I say that?” said Esben, looking back and forth between all the figures present around the campfire. “I said that. I said that would be tough. Alexei himself wasn’t too keen on the idea. I mean, he removed the cog himself once he found out he’d been remade. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Even I have some ethical quandaries about what we’re supposed to do.”
“Well, maybe you’re right,” said Prue. “But I still can’t ignore what the tree said. There must be a reason.”
“Did you find out what happened to Carol?” asked the bear.
“No,” she said. “But I have a clue.” She pulled from her pocket the note that had been left in Carol Grod’s file and handed it to the bear. He set his tin down and fumbled with it, his twin hook-hands clanging together until Prue had the good sense to reach over and just stab the paper through his right hook like it was a spike file.
“Thanks,” he said. He peered at the piece of paper, at the writing on the paper, in the light of the campfire. “Meet tonight, huh? What tree?”
“The Blighted Tree,” said Neil, the badger. “It must be.”
“That old relic?” asked Esben, shocked. “I though people had given up on that thing long ago.”
“The Synod’s back,” said Prue. “And seems pretty strong from what I saw.”
The bear scratched at his chin with the point of his left hook for a moment before saying, “My grandpa had a thing for the Blighted Tree. Still had a shrine in his house when he died.”
“Oh, yes,” said Neil. “It’s a regular revival. Unfortunately, and I say this as a true patriot and supporter of the revolution”—he said this with some deference toward Prue—“the Spokes haven’t done that good a job of running the place.”
Charlie frowned a little at this statement before saying, “Those are strong words, Citizen Badger. But true. The revolution’s all about freedom, personal freedom. That works great as a jumping-off point, but it’s no good at making for a safe and just society.”
The badger nodded, now fanning his little hands in front of the crackling fire. “I have to say, I’m getting a little tired myself of being harangued by the hard-line Spokes.” Saying this, his head suddenly darted side to side, scanning the immediate vicinity for secret listeners.
“It’s okay,” said Prue, noticing this. “You’re safe here.”
“It’s the kind of talk that could get you written up,” said the badger. “I mean no disrespect to the revolution, Maiden, you know that.”
Prue nodded.
“I gave up my casquette,” said Charlie, “after I saw what was happening. Those hard-liners were taking the idea of the revolution and turning it into just another reason to justify gang vigilantism. At least the Synod’s looking out for the people, not just their own selves.”
“That much is true,” said Neil.
“But can you trust them? The Caliphs?” asked Esben, now masticating a particularly tough hunk of beef jerky. “Assuming that’s who you’re going to meet.”
“I suppose I’ll have to,” said Prue. “They’ve got Carol. Or know where he is, anyway.”
“Well, I think you ought to be careful,” said the bear. “We still don’t know who sent those Kitsunes, for one. Could’ve been them, the Synod.”
“But they want to help,” said Prue, frowning. “Why would they want me, you know, out of the picture?”
“Complicated times, Maiden,” said Charlie, stroking his beard. “Everyone’s a friend and everyone’s an enemy.”
The four individuals around the fire lapsed into a kind of contemplative silence as the flames crackled and leapt from the pit and a bag of dried mangoes was passed from badger to bear to human. Finally, Prue took a deep breath and said, “Shall we?”
“I think we shall,” said the badger.
Esben stood up to see Prue off, giving her a protective pat on the shoulder. “Careful,” he said. “Keep your wits about you.”
“Will do,” was her reply.
“And work on your whistle a bit,” he said.
She smiled and turned away from the campfire. The three of them, the badger, the bearded human, and the Bicycle Maiden, all walked off into the gloom of the forest.
The bear returned to his position, gamely stirring the fire with his hooks, and his mind drifted, his belly somewhat sated by the rations Prue had brought him. After a time, he lay back with his head against a log and watched the wheeling stars above his head, trying to pick out Ursa Major, the Big Bear—it was his favorite constellation. Finding it, he followed the tail toward the bright point just above it—it was the belt buckle of the Toy Soldier, a constellation his father had shown him as a cub. His father said it was a guiding light for the makers of things, for the tinkerers and the riveters. The bear felt himself drift off as he began to imagine the task before him: the re-creation of his greatest achievement, the mechanical boy prince. It would be hard, granted, but he was up for the task. He only needed hands, gifted hands, and he guessed that the girl Prue was bound to find them for him. Sleep stole over him as he recalled his old compatriot Carol Grod, the Outsider machinist; their hours of toiling in the Mansion garret. He recalled the old man’s complexion, the cadence of his voice; a kindred spirit.
The bear had only been asleep a few hours when he heard the whistle. It was shrill, practiced. Impressive, he thought. A little woodshedding goes a long way. By the time he’d gained enough consciousness to realize how faulty this logic seemed, it was too late.
They kept to the road; that was the strategy. Staying out in the open. Still: The wrought-iron gaslights that began appearing along the side of the road did little to dispel the gloom that seemed to hover just beyond the trees. Prue found herself darting quick glances out into the dark, imagining an army of shape-shifting life science teachers emerging, claws bared, shifting interminably between human and fox.
Reflexively, she focused her mind and listened.
The plants and trees, the bushes and the shrubs, all spoke in a collective ratt
le. It’d been something she’d been able to do for a while now: Prue could hear the voices of the living vegetation around her. Only once had the voices codified into any kind of language she could understand, and that happened at a moment of extreme duress. On the other hand, it seemed that they were able to understand her, which was something, anyway. But she’d heard a word—a clear, concise holler of GO!—when Darla, the assassin, had been in hiding, preparing her attack. Prue had been waiting, these many months since that occurrence, to hear another word, another English word, spoken. But nothing had come—just more humming and whispering. It had something to do with the intensity of the situation, she assumed. Something in her had clicked; she guessed she didn’t quite have the discipline to make it happen again. And now: Could the rattling of the surrounding forest be a kind of warning in its own right? Was another assassin, bound to her task, waiting for the precise moment to attack?
No answer was forthcoming.
The fox-women of her imagination continued their advance.
She blinked the image away and faced forward in the seat of the rickshaw, watching Neil the badger’s bobbing head as he skillfully piloted the little vehicle over the cobblestones of the Long Road. Charlie gamely trotted alongside, keeping a guarded watch on their surroundings as they traveled.
“How’s it going up there?” she asked Neil, trying to drive the fear from her mind.
“Oh, fine,” said the badger between labored breaths.
“Are you sure you want to drive me? I could easily walk.”
“No, no, no.” The badger shook his head vehemently. “The road is rough, Maiden. You might throw your ankle. And then where would we be?”
“I’ve actually done that before and—”
“Besides,” Neil continued, “no one knows these roads like me. I can get you there in half the time.”
“Okay,” said Prue. She knew better than to argue with the badger. In any case, riding in a rickshaw did give her a kind of aura of importance—they seemed to collect hangers-on wherever they went. Riding from the Mansion, after the debacle in the Archives, had been like wading naked through a cloud of mosquitoes: No sooner had the mob been dispersed by the Synod when a new congregation of admirers appeared, previously hard-liner Spokes who now adopted the slogans: “REANIMATE THE PRINCE ALEXEI!” and “BRING THE ROBOT BACK!” The boy’s last name, Svik, was conspicuously absent from these shouted mantras; Prue suspected there was a kind of cognitive dissonance going on—a phrase her dad had once defined for her as being the ability to believe in two radically conflicting beliefs at the same time, despite the illogic of it all. She could see how these political movements got their steam.
And now: She’d barely finished flipping through these series of thoughts and recollections when she found that the rickshaw was once again surrounded by a small crowd of Spokes and admirers, citizens roused from their beds when Prue’s arrival had been announced by some overexcited witness. They came teeming about the rickshaw, some still wearing their pajamas, climbing on top of its canopy and dragging along the back. Initially, Charlie made an effort to keep the carriage free of hangers-on, but soon the collective momentum of the crowd was so great that Neil didn’t even have to pull the cart—it was carried along like a paper boat in a swiftly flowing stream. Needless to say, the specter of Kitsunes creeping in the bushes seemed a concern of the past.
“We’re with you, Maiden!” shouted some from the crowd. “It’s time to bring back the mechanical boy prince!”
“Peace! Peace in our time!”
The crowd carved their way into the populated districts of South Wood, past the storefronts and the houses, around the wide path that bowed away from the glow of the Mansion’s lit windows. Here, the forest grew darker. The canopy of the trees seemed to hang lower over the road, and the gas lamps were fewer and fewer. Many of the crowd that followed the rickshaw seemed to stray, and the throng grew thinner.
“Where are you going, Maiden?” one follower, a teenaged bear in a bicycle cap, inquired.
“To the Blighted Tree. I’m supposed to meet someone there.”
“Who would want to meet you there?”
“Gonna find out, I guess,” said Prue.
“Ooh,” said someone at Prue’s left. She turned to see it was a middle-aged woman, dressed in a kind of flowery-patterned dress. “They speak to the trees, you know. They can hear the plants talk.”
Prue smiled, though the idea made her all the more confused: Were these Synod members simply the South Wood’s answer to the Mystics of the North? She thought of Iphigenia, the dear departed Elder Mystic, and wished she could be here now to guide her. She didn’t know who to trust, what to believe. She listened for the trees, again, and noticed a marked change in their tone: The noises were lower and almost throatier. What’s more, she could now discern a kind of hum occurring just on the fringes of her hearing. Something big, like the lowing of somebody’s car stereo, just down the street and out of view.
“Here we are,” said Neil, drawing up at the top of a little rise in the road where two gnarled and ancient hemlocks made a kind of gateway. “The Blighted Tree’s just beyond there.”
“Will you come with?” asked Prue.
“Only those who are called can cross the threshold to the Blighted Glade,” said Charlie. He nodded his head, gesturing to the road ahead, and Prue saw two figures appear from behind the hemlocks. They wore identical gray hooded robes that covered their bodies entirely. As they came closer, a bright spark of light, a reflection from a nearby gas lamp, revealed that their faces were covered in silvery mirrored masks. The look was alarming, and Prue stared in disbelief at the two approaching figures.
The few stragglers of the crowd around the rickshaw fell away, bowing reverentially to these strange newcomers. Prue stepped down to the road and greeted the figures, saying, “Hi.” When there came no response, she said, “I’m Prue. I’m supposed to meet someone? At the tree?”
The figures, their shiny silver masks obscuring their faces, their long gray cowls covering their heads, said nothing. Instead, they waved the way forward, beneath the boughs of the twin hemlocks. Prue gave a quick look over her shoulder: All that remained of her former retinue was the tall bearded man, the badger, and his bright, baubled rickshaw. “Go ahead,” said Charlie. “Be safe.”
The road became rough here, its cobbles all buckled and broken from years of use with few, if any, repairs. Clumps of grass and moss defaced the surface, and the roots of trees plowed up great sections in lumpy furrows. Prue walked between her two chaperones as they led her down the hill. Having received no response to her last few questions, she decided it would be rude to keep asking more. Perhaps some vow of silence was involved here; she hated the idea that she might be somehow offending their sensibilities.
She couldn’t tell if they were animal or human, male or female. Their shrouding getup all but erased any kind of distinction. One was a little shorter than the other; that was really the only discernible difference between her two chaperones. She turned her attention to the greenery around her, wanting to suss out some kind of guiding information, but she was, as before, unable to coax anything but humming murmurs from the surrounding forest. Still, the hum, the low hum, remained. It pulsated somewhere off in the distance, a sound without a knowable source, and it seemed to be growing louder as they approached. Another sound presented itself, suddenly, to Prue: some kind of needling tick from the two Caliphs at her side. Strange, she thought. It was no sound a human would produce; what’s more, it seemed to be originating in her mind, which would lead her to believe that some kind of vegetation was the source. She didn’t have much time to contemplate what this meant when the three of them arrived at a point in the road where the trees fell away and an immense meadow presented itself, bathed a glowing white by the rising moon.
The scene was eerily familiar: A group of hooded, robed figures stood in a wide circle in the center of the meadow around a gigantic tree. Behind them, making a large
r circle, was a ring of burning torches. The shadows of the robed figures cast by these torches grew distorted and tall, clambering at the tree’s raw and twisted trunk. Prue could now see why the tree was called blighted; it was as if someone had taken a healthy, thriving tree of immense proportions and proceeded to mangle it, deform it, shedding it of its leaves and twisting its hulking trunk into a contorted, knuckly thing. The tree’s bark folded and gaped like ancient flesh and its branches corkscrewed skyward, reaching higher than any other tree in the vicinity. Prue caught her breath; she suddenly realized that this was where the lowing, the distant hum, was coming from. It was coming from the Blighted Tree. It was calling her.
Seeing the approaching three, one of the figures in the circle broke away and walked toward them. He, too, was entirely covered in the gray robes and gray cowl, but his face mask was a shiny, brilliant gold instead of silver. The masks themselves were unremarkable—a neutral human face, nondescript. When the robed figure drew closer, Prue could see the shadows of the man’s eyes, catching the torchlight in the twin cavities of the mask.
“Prue McKeel,” said the figure once he reached them. “I’ve long desired to meet you. This day has been in the making for some time now. Surely, you know this as well.”
A man’s voice, it was slightly muffled by the presence of the gold mask. He nodded to the two figures at Prue’s side, who silently stepped away and walked toward the circle around the tree.
Prue watched them go. “They don’t speak? Is it a vow or something?”
“They choose not to speak,” said the man. Prue felt strangely comfortable in his presence, and his tone of voice was almost fatherly, despite the filter of his mask. “The teachings of the Blighted Tree are enough language for their contemplation. The noise of people is merely a distraction.”
“Why do you talk, then?” She hoped the question didn’t seem rude; the man’s aura invited a certain level of familiarity. In fact, she could swear she’d met the man before, somewhere.
“I’ve ascended beyond acolyte. I’m the Elder Caliph. My name is Elgen. Welcome to the Blighted Glade. Your path has been long, Prue McKeel of the Outside, but it has inevitably led you here. It has been leading you here from the moment you set foot in the Wood.” The lights of the torches gave a sparkling glow to the man’s mask; Prue found it mesmerizing. She could see herself, lit by the pale light, reflected in the mirror of the mask. She looked wobbly, disjointed. “Come,” said Elgen. “I’d like you to speak to the tree. It has long desired to speak to you.”