“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.
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 indivi
dual’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.
CHAPTER 24
The Last of the Wildwood
Bandits
Elsie had never known what it was like to be speechless before; she’d read about it in novels and heard people refer to themselves as such (though it seemed to her there was something problematic in someone saying they were speechless) but had never known what the feeling was truly like until that moment, in the deepest woods, caught in a handwoven trap net, and seeing her long-lost brother for the first time in many, many months. She’d shouted his name, first, but then all speech was robbed from her and she sat there in the captivity of the net, staring at the lanky boy as he walked into the clearing, holding a lit torch. Always a little skinny, he seemed to have only grown more so; his face looked unbelievably older. There also seemed to be some sort of rodent sitting casually on his shoulder.
Her brother appeared to be similarly shocked, as he lifted the torch hesitantly and peered up into the netting, saying, “Els?”
And that was when Elsie became really, truly speechless. In that she could not manage a single noise in response to her brother’s call. Thankfully, her sister, just up and to her left, her hair dangling in Elsie’s face, was not so affected.
“Curtis!” she shouted, not adding much to the dialogue.
“Rachel?”
Suddenly, Elsie got her speech back. “Curtis!” she yelled.
“Elsie!” shouted Curtis, as if just now understanding what this conversation was about.
“You guys know each other?” asked Nico, breaking up the monotony of the exchange nicely.
“He’s our brother!” said Rachel loudly, with a good deal of uncharacteristic enthusiasm.
“Mreally?” This was Harry; his face, Elsie realized, was planted firmly in her rear end. She could tell because she more felt the word pronounced than heard it.
Just then, to the great surprise of everyone present (except perhaps Carol and Roger, who were swinging in their own net just ten feet away from the Unadoptables, and were accustomed to the strange ways of the Wood), the rodent on Curtis’s shoulder opened his little mouth and spoke. Words. In English.
“These are your sisters?” said the rat.
Before anyone had a chance to answer the question, Nico, apparently deciding that a talking rat was more shocking than the incredible coincidence he was witnessing—that these three siblings should be united after so many months of wondering and searching in the strangest possible circumstances—said, “Did that rat just say something?”
“Yes,” said the rat, sounding affronted. “I did. Do you have a problem with that?”
“None whatsoever,” said Nico. He then looked down at Ruthie, whose forehead was jammed beneath his chin. “The rat talks,” he said.
“I think he does,” said Ruthie, similarly bowled over.
Curtis, meanwhile, was sputtering. He was sputtering like a broken faucet. “You—” he started. “How—What did you—Where’s—” Finally all his momentum ended in the question: “Where’s Mom and Dad?”
“Russia!” shouted Elsie. “They’re looking for you, stupid!” Elsie found that during her speechlessness, she had overcome her shock and was now feeling a little angry. She heard her sister join in, heaving a string of vitriolic curse words at their brother like she was breathing fire.
“Wow,” said the rat. “Charming siblings.”
Curtis began to defend himself, shouting back his meager defenses to the two girls, who were now yelling at him in loud unison. “But I . . . ,” he sputtered between the girls’ invectives. “You know, I could . . . It’s just all really complicated!”
Finally, Nico raised his loud, grown-up voice above the yelling children and said, “STOP!”
They did.
The saboteur, whose right leg had been unfortunately caught in the webbing of the net when it was tripped and was now currently positioned slightly upside down with his knee linked around one of the ropes, like a practiced trapeze artist mid-performance, said, simply, “Can you get us down, please?”
“Can we get some reassurance that those two girls won’t attack us?” asked the rat.
“Shhh, Septimus,” said Curtis as he turned from the two dangling nets. “Those are my sisters.” He climbed into the nearby brush and began working at some unseen mechanism; soon, Elsie felt the net loosen and shake and they were lowered slowly to the ground. Before he’d gone to do the same to the other trap, Rachel shouted out to her brother as she tried to untangle herself from the grounded webbing and the other bodies:
“Don’t let them go yet, Curtis!” she yelled, pointing desperately at the other net.
Curtis popped his head out from behind a bush. “What?”
“One of them is very bad,” was the best she could do on a moment’s notice.
By the time Curtis had paused in his undoing of the ropes that held the second trap in place, Nico, Martha, Rachel, and Harry had leapt to the open space below the dangling net and readied themselves. Elsie stood up and stared at her older brother, still in disbelief at his sudden appearance, here in the Impassable Wilderness.
“Okay,” said Nico. “Lower ’em down.”
Curtis did so, apparently undoing some hefty knot on the forest floor, and the net began descending with an aching creak. Roger’s and Carol’s arms and legs, pretzeled ridiculously in the ropes, stuck out from the bulbous trap like tendrils on a sea anemone. When they’d touched the ground, Nico and Harry dove into the scrum, nabbing Roger by his arms, and held him back while Martha grabbed Carol and lifted him to safety.
“Thank you, dear,” said Carol.
Curtis tied off the anchor rope and began to walk back into the clearing when he was set upon by Elsie, who jumped on him, her arms thrown around his neck in a strangling hug. “Curtis!” she yelled. “I knew it. I knew it! I just knew we’d find you. I missed you so much. So much. But I was also so, so angry at you.”
Curtis returned the hug, wrapping his arms around his little sister. “You too, Els. I’m so sorry. So much has happened. There’s so much to tell. I don’t even know where to start.”
They were drawn away from their conversation by the impassioned objections coming from Roger Swindon, who was held fast by Martha and Nico. “Rope!” called the saboteur.
“Right, one sec,” replied Curtis, and he dove into the trees, retrieving a short length of what looked to be hand-spun rope. He rushed over to the squirming man and, within a few scant seconds, had deftly manacled his hands.
“Nice,” said Nico, impressed by the boy’s ability.
Rachel and Elsie watched their brother, agog. He seemed to be suddenly embarrassed. “It’s one of the first things you learn,” he said, by way of explanation.
“What do you mean, first things you learn?” asked Rachel.
“In Bandit Training,” said her brother. A brother who, Rachel recalled, had been given a note from their mother so that he could sit out his gym class’s mandatory presidential fitness test.
“Bandit Training?” repeated Rachel. “What are you
talking about?”
“That’s what I am, guys. That’s what I’ve been doing in here. I’m a bandit. A Wildwood bandit.”
“Cool!” shouted Elsie, letting the weird explanation wash over her. She’d never imagined she’d have a bandit for a brother. Not that that was something she’d ever expected; it was just a pleasant surprise.
“Wildwood bandit?” questioned Rachel skeptically, ever the big sister. “What’s that? Does that even exist?”
Curtis was strangely shamed by his sister’s comment, and he seemed to inwardly collapse until Carol said, “Oh, it does. They do. I did not expect to run into a band of the Wildwood bandits, but it’s a good thing we did. What’s more, one that seems to be an ally. Where are the rest of your brethren, good bandit?”
“They’re watching from the woods,” said Nico, peering into the greenery. “Why don’t they come out, your fellow bandits?”
While Curtis seemed to be heartened by the old man’s defense, his voice lost some of its previous color when he said, “Because those are just dummies. Mannequins. I made them. The Wildwood bandits are . . . gone.”
“Oh,” said Carol, frowning. “That is very strange.”
Martha stood at Carol’s side. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Just fine, dear,” the blind man said, blinking his two wooden eyes. “We’re free, at least.”
“Yep,” said Martha, squeezing the old man by the waist. “I knew we would be.” She turned to the assembled crowd and spoke, smiling widely. “Thanks, guys,” she said.
The children, reunited with Carol and their fellow Unadoptable, swarmed one another, high-fiving and trading quick remembrances of their hair-raising ordeal in Titan Tower. Carol beamed down, unseeing, on the children, the proud godfather to an impressive brood.
Once they’d regained themselves, Rachel and Elsie quickly besieged their brother, and the long telling of his incredible story was unspooled to his disbelieving siblings. Elsie stood with her hand at her mouth the entire time, her eyes filled with tears, marveling at the extraordinary adventures her brother had experienced since they’d last seen each other, walking to school that early fall morning like they had untold mornings before. When he got to the point about the City of Moles and Prue’s quest to reunite the strange machinists to bring back the mechanical boy prince, Elsie let out a little shout. “What was his name, the other machinist you were looking for?”