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.