“Cary, I think? Something like that,” said Curtis. “I don’t know. It’s been so long and I’ve been so intent on my own survival here, that I’d kind of forgotten about him.”
“But he was blind?”
“That’s what the bear said, anyway. Had his eyes taken out by the Governess.”
An awed silence fell over the two sisters as they swiveled aside and looked at Carol Grod; the old man had been listening in and began walking toward the young bandit.
“Indeed, she did,” he said. “But I made these old wooden ones, didn’t I? Suit me just fine.”
“No. Way,” said the rat at Curtis’s shoulder.
“That’s it. Carol Grod,” said Curtis, staring at the old man. “You’re the other machinist. The one who made Alexei.”
Both Elsie and Rachel let out an amazed gasp.
“That’d be me,” said the old man matter-of-factly, before correcting him: “But I couldn’t have done it alone.”
“No, you couldn’t have,” said Curtis, dazed. “You needed another. Esben Clampett, the bear.”
“That’s right. Don’t know where he ended up. For my part, they sent me to the Periphery. Exiled me there.”
“That’s where we met him, Curtis,” said Elsie. “We were there, stuck in the Periphery.” She then turned to Carol and said in a stunned voice, “That was why you were exiled, huh? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Didn’t come up, really,” the old man said coyly, before adding, “It was a touchy subject, dear. I don’t particularly like talkin about it. What she did left more than just physical scars. I was tryin to forget, there in that place.”
“How did you get out?” asked her brother, awash in all this bizarre new information. “And how did you get in—here—now?”
“Same way you did,” put in Rachel.
“Woods Magic,” said Carol, hobbling over to them with Martha’s help.
“We must have it,” said Curtis. “I was never sure. I mean, I seemed to pass through the boundary fine, but I just couldn’t ever figure why. We must have it, in the blood.” He turned to Carol, his intention renewed. “We have to get you to Prue. She’s got Esben.”
The old man’s eyes opened wide, and the wooden orbs goggled in his skull. “He’s alive?”
“He was exiled, too. Sent to the Underwood. We found him, Prue and I. Another sort of crazy coincidence.” He looked around him, as if taking in the thatchwork of trees surrounding them. “Though I think Prue would say otherwise. She’d say it’s the workings of the tree. In any case, Esben is with Prue now.”
“No, he isn’t,” came a voice from the dark. The gathered crowd looked over at Roger Swindon, sitting cross-legged on the leafy ground, his arms pinioned behind his back.
“What did you say?” asked Curtis, waving the torchlight in his direction. A few sparks erupted from the flame.
“She doesn’t have the bear. We have the bear.”
“Who’s we?” asked Curtis, dumbfounded.
“The Synod. The Caliphs of South Wood.”
“What happened to Prue?” pressed Curtis.
“She’s gone.”
Nico gave the captive a swift kick to the ribs. Roger toppled sideways with an anguished shout. “Stop being difficult,” said Nico. “You’re our prisoner now.”
“Hey,” said Elsie. “Go easy.”
“Sorry,” said the saboteur.
“What do you mean, she’s gone?” asked Curtis.
“Gone, gone. Forever gone. Marooned on the Crag. She won’t last out the week. I’d say your best bet is to simply let myself and Carol go. You are all, in one way or another, Outsiders who are simply out of your depth. This is much bigger than you.” The man shifted in his bindings awkwardly as he spoke. “As we speak, the Synod is expanding their control over the Wood. You will all eventually be assimilated, should you choose to stay, or simply be pushed out of the way.”
“Assimilated?” breathed Nico.
“Yes,” said the man as he, with some difficulty, righted himself back into a seated position. “Like your fellow bandits. They’re part of the Synod now.”
“What?” shouted Curtis, suddenly walking toward the man as if he were intent on setting him on fire with the torch. The man flinched to see the boy approach. “You know where the bandits are?”
“Oh yes,” said Roger, clearly amused that his words had stung. “They’re with us now.”
Curtis stumbled a little; his face slackened with shock.
“What’s the Synod, anyway?” asked Rachel, staring curiously at her brother.
“The Holy Mystics of the Blighted Tree,” said Roger. “Or some such rubbish. Doesn’t matter. Now that the Synod has imposed its rule, there’s little to stop us. The Spongiform is all-powerful.”
“I don’t really have a clear idea what you’re talking about, but I don’t particularly like it,” said Nico, staring down at the man. He looked back to Curtis. “Can I kick him again?”
“Wait,” said Curtis, shaking himself from his reverie, holding up his palm. He knelt down beside Roger and grabbed him by the scruff of his robe. “Tell me,” he said. “What happened to the bandits? What did you do to them?”
“Oh, it was all fairly innocent,” said Roger. “We’d known you were looking for the makers. We discovered where you were hiding. We assimilated your friend first. I believe his name was Seamus? The emissary, left behind after the revolution. To ‘represent’ the Wildwood bandits. Needless to say, he didn’t do a very good job. We fed him the Spongiform and then commanded him to do the same to your fellow bandits. It’s quite miraculous how that little fungus works, actually. It spread so easily—”
He was interrupted when, on Curtis’s signal, black-bereted Nico gave him another kick in the ribs. He let out a groan and toppled over again. Curtis dragged him and held his face within inches of his own. The talking rat perched on his shoulder stuck out his snout so that he, too, was staring down the captive.
“I don’t know who you are or what your master plan is here,” said Curtis. “But you’re going to take me to the bandits, and you’re going to make this right.”
“What he said,” said the rat.
The spectral figures in the trees, the ones the Unadoptables and Nico had seen surrounding them when they’d still been in pursuit of Roger and Carol, had been a particular challenge. Curtis had apparently started with one—he’d named him Jack after one of his departed fellow bandits—and slowly expanded once he’d gathered enough resources. It was hard, he said, finding the right shape tree branches and trunks. Moss could be used to mimic the scraggly beards that were a hallmark of the bandit style; the right angle of maple branches made apt arms, resolutely crossed at the chest. He’d decided, in the bandit band’s absence, that at least a show must be made. Like the extinction of some vital organism, Curtis believed that were the Wildwood bandits to disappear altogether, it would upset the delicate balance of Wildwood’s ecosystem.
This was the story he told as the group made their way, in the dark of night, toward South Wood. Their goal seemed simple, if somewhat challenging: to free the bandits, rescue Esben Clampett, and hopefully, save Prue from her harrowing sentence on the Crag. They were an interesting group: The boy with the brocaded uniform and the talking rat led the way with his two sisters, dressed in identical black turtlenecks, at his side. Directly behind him was the blind man, Carol Grod, who was being guided along the road by goggled Martha Song. Their captive walked slowly in the midst of the group, his head solemnly downcast, while Nico and the other three Unadoptables kept a wary eye on him, lest he should escape into the surrounding woods.
The traps were another matter altogether, Curtis explained to the group, and he hadn’t taken on the challenge until he’d found that he was becoming more and more handy repurposing the salvaged flora of the woods. He’d expected to catch food or intruders; he had not, in a million years, thought he’d nab his sisters.
“But why?” It had been Elsie’s nagging q
uestion, all along. “Why’d you go through with all of it?”
“I made an oath, Els,” replied her brother. “The Bandit Oath. I swore to uphold the band. I figured this was the way to do it.”
The story went like this: He’d returned to the Wood, crossing through metropolitan Portland in the dead of night. He’d left Prue to her own devices, having decided, once and for all, that his loyalty remained with the Wildwood bandits. He’d witnessed the scene at the bandit camp, that day when Darla and her fellow Kitsunes had attacked the two children and sent them spilling into the depths of the Long Gap, and was longing to get back to investigate the bandits’ disappearance.
“You walked through Portland?” interjected Rachel. “You were there?”
“Yeah,” said her brother, a little sheepishly. “I walked by the house. Everyone was gone. Figured you guys were on, like, vacation or something.”
“You walked by the house,” repeated Rachel plainly.
“Yeah.” The boy seemed to suspect what was coming.
“Well, we weren’t on vacation. Actually we were in an awful orphanage-slash-factory and Mom and Dad were in Turkey and Russia and wherever else, looking for you,” said Rachel.
“C’mon, Rach,” chided Elsie. “We’ve been through all that.”
Rachel mumbled something grumpily in response while Curtis, thankful for his younger sister’s defense, continued.
He’d then retraced his steps, back when he’d first followed Prue into the place he’d always known as the Impassable Wilderness and his life had changed so precipitously. He crossed the Railroad Bridge, thankfully avoiding any sort of run-in with another southbound locomotive, and crossed over the thick mantle of trees. He found himself, very quickly, back in Wildwood.
“It’s where we are now,” he explained, gesturing to the darkened trees around them, lit by the bare throw of the torch’s light. “It’s the frontier, the wild part of the Wood. Everything that goes on here, it’s still kind of a mystery. Even the oldest bandits would tell stories about ghosts and sprites living in the trees.”
The mention of his fellow bandits, his lost comrades, always came with a softening of his voice. The loneliness of the search became all-consuming for the two searchers: Curtis and the rat Septimus. The rat would spend his days climbing through the high boughs of the trees, scanning from this aerial perch for any sign of the bandits, while Curtis trudged through the bracken of the forest floor. They’d assumed that whoever had survived the attack on the camp would strike out and build another hideout. Bandits were known for their secrecy and their ability to completely conceal any trace of their habitation, so it was no wonder Curtis and Septimus had had a hard time tracking the survivors down.
Days passed. Weeks passed. Still no sign. They subsisted on what meager provisions they could scavenge from the forest, taking shelter in whatever crude lean-to their exhausted limbs allowed them to construct. They spoke little; they woke early and fanned out, combing the nearby woods with an obsessive scrutiny, not moving on until they were certain that no bandit tread had left its footprint.
But as the days piled on, it became clear that the Wildwood bandits were, in fact, gone. Extinct. It was over a low campfire, one clear evening, that Curtis and Septimus decided to rebuild the band anew. It seemed to Curtis that in the event of a total decimation of the Wildwood bandits, the oath required the survivors to carry on. “To live and die by the bandit band” was the final line of the oath, and Curtis intended to stay true to that, to the letter. There was no indication about whether the band should be dissolved in the case of their numbers being whittled down to two. They were now the Wildwood bandits, he and Septimus, from first to last. They alone would uphold the code and creed.
Brendan being absent, assumed dead, Curtis performed the rite of fealty for Septimus, who’d up to this point not taken the oath. He figured Brendan would approve. The rat was a little leery of the bloodletting part, but beyond that, he seemed to take on his new position with a stoic resolve.
And then? Curtis had to put the memory of his bandit brothers and sisters behind him. There was something in that, something that made the whole situation easier to swallow. No longer was there that question mark etched in his mind, following him around like some thought-balloon from a comic book. He put the Wildwood bandits, the old Wildwood bandits, away. He steeled himself in his new role as one of two sole survivors of a long-lost tribe.
They built a new hideout, high in the trees. They built wooden walkways connecting the platforms they’d built in the highest limbs of the oldest cedars. And, in a moment of genius, Septimus suggested they build mannequin bandits to guard the pale of their hideout; so that anyone or anything venturing into these woods would see the shapes and retreat, knowing that the territory belonged to the bandits. The Wildwood bandits, as strong as ever.
They even mounted a few Long Road holdups, which was difficult considering their number and the fact that they did not have horses. Several coaches went flying by, undaunted by their presence in the road, before they managed to stop one. Their first robbery was a South Wood merchant, returning from a successful market day in North Wood. It was getting on in the evening and the coachman was thankfully daunted by the weird, spectral figures that stood resolutely alongside the road. When Curtis and Septimus had appeared from the depths of the forest, the driver assumed that he’d been jumped by an usually large raiding party.
“Take what you need,” he’d said, his voice quavering. “Just let me live!”
In truth, though, the chest of gold doubloons they’d liberated from the merchant’s possession did little by way of easing Curtis’s melancholy. He found that the only reason he’d even staged the holdup was to keep up appearances. He hated the idea of word getting around that the Wildwood bandits were no longer a threat when passing through this most inhospitable part of the Wood.
And that’s how he’d been, that evening when the fog was heavy on the river basin and the stars were blotted out and his two sisters had come running into his territory, just a few scant miles from his tree-bound camp, and tripped his two biggest traps. He’d just returned from another vigil on the Long Road, scouting out for traveling coaches, surprised that none had come in several days, when he’d felt the strange earthquake-like rumble and the undulating wave that had upset the forest floor as it passed.
“I felt that too!” said Elsie, when he’d mentioned it.
“I couldn’t figure it out,” said her brother. “I assumed that there was some attack being staged somewhere. I imagined that maybe the coyotes had regrouped and had set out to go after us. That’s why I went out to check the perimeter of the hideout, and I saw you guys had been caught in my nets.”
It turned out that they’d all felt the quake, but were so consumed with their chase through the mysterious forest that they hadn’t really processed the feeling.
The rat, Septimus, leapt from Curtis’s shoulder and scurried over to the hem of Roger’s robe; before the man had a chance to flinch, the rat had climbed up his leg, rounded his hips, and was whispering into his ear. “I don’t suppose you have any knowledge of such a thing. Are your minions on the attack?”
“Can you call your rat?” the man asked Curtis. “He’s crawling on me.”
“Hey, he’s not my person any more than I’m his rat,” said Septimus drily.
“I don’t like rodents,” said Roger Swindon.
“Well, I don’t much like despotic theocrats,” said Septimus.
The man took a deep breath before saying, “This is a lost cause. It won’t be long before we are overtaken by the Watch. Even now, as we speak, the North Wall is being deconstructed and the Avian Principality is being dissolved into a united One Nation, under a One Tree. You’ll all be held as betrayers of the one true religion and will likely be joining your friend the Bicycle Maiden in her lonely existence on the Crag. If you’re lucky. As the Elder Caliph, I can say that how quickly you capitulate will determine what sort of sentence you will r
eceive.”
“Well,” said Septimus, unperturbed, “I’d say you’re a pretty valuable hostage, then.”
The man said nothing. The rest of the group seemed thankful for his silence. Nico turned his attention to the rat at the man’s shoulder.
“How long have you been able to do that?” he asked.
“Do what?” asked Septimus.
“You know, talk.”
“How long have you been able to?” shot back the rat.
“Point taken.” The saboteur paused, thinking. “Do all animals in here do that?” he asked finally.
“Do try to keep up,” chided Septimus, traveling back to Curtis’s shoulder at the front of the pack. “You’re in Wildwood now.”
“Welcome,” said Curtis, putting his hand proudly on the base of the ladder, “to Bandit Hideout Deerskull Dragonfighter.”
“I helped come up with the name,” said Septimus.
“Cool,” whispered Harry breathlessly.
They’d traveled many miles in their journey, and morning had come to the wild forest; the air was cool and bright and lit up with birdsong.
“A few things you should know before we head up,” continued Curtis. “It’s not super entirely safe yet. Like, the banisters are mostly temporary, so don’t go putting all your weight on them.” Curtis looked at each member of his small audience, as if to underscore the importance of his words. They all looked attentive, though incredibly tired. “You guys are beat, aren’t you,” he said.
Elsie nodded emphatically. The rest murmured their yeses. It’d been a long night; they’d all agreed that they should stay a day or two before they made their way to South Wood, there to confront this strange religious sect that had enslaved Curtis’s bandit brethren. Elsie was still floored by all that had happened the night before. She’d been part of a miraculous rescue mission, a daring chase through this mysterious world and, in the end, been a part of a dramatic reunion with her brother. It was about as much as her nine-year-old mind could take.