“What’s too late?” Prue shouted back.
“The Blighted Tree. It’s been consumed.”
Sure enough, as the owl settled down onto the ivy-strewn meadow and Prue and Seamus hopped from his back, they saw that the imposing tree, that ancient tree, which had demanded the attention of the clearing for centuries untold, was now nothing more than a small heap in the center of the meadow. Little lesser heaps dotted a circle around it, and Prue guessed these to be the meditating acolytes, put to sleep by the plant. While the great owl stood, seeming paralyzed by the scene, Prue rushed to the nearest ivy mound and began communing with the hissing plant, calling it away from its purpose.
LET, she thought.
She could make out the following word, issuing to her from the farthest depths of her hearing: WHOOOOOO.
LET GO, she thought. She could feel her energy peeling away, like she was treading heavy water.
She suddenly felt the ivy slacken; she reached out and began to pull its webbing apart to reveal a hooded, masked figure beneath. “Seamus!” she yelled over her shoulder. The bandit came running to her side. “Help me get this stuff off.”
The two of them began yanking aside the figure’s smothering shroud; the ivy yielded to their hands, seemingly under the trance of Prue’s demands. Before long, they had the Caliph partially freed of the vines. Seamus grabbed the figure’s cowl and threw it aside before carefully removing the silver mask, revealing the peacefully sleeping face of the bandit William.
“Willy!” shouted Seamus, his voice breaking with excitement. “Wake up there, lad!”
The bandit’s eyelids fluttered, and he stirred in his sleep. His long yellow mustache twitched a little as he slowly woke. Once again conscious, he stared at Prue and Seamus blankly, as if they were perfect strangers. As if his eyes saw nothing. Just then, a look of fear overcame his face and he began struggling in his bonds, as his hands and legs were still confined by the ivy.
“Willy!” Seamus yelled again. “It’s me, Seamus!”
But there was no shine of recognition in the bandit’s eyes. That was when Prue heard the ticking noise. She reached out her hand and pressed it against Seamus’s chest. “Hold up,” she said. “There’s more to do here.”
Seamus, clearly distraught at his brother-in-arms’s amnesia, stumbled backward while Prue held her palm up to William’s face.
COME, she thought. She cleared her mind. She addressed the ticking noise. She addressed the organism inside William’s skull.
The bandit sputtered, his bloodshot eyes thrown wide. He began to cough, and his hands struggled in their bonds. Prue continued to coax the weird life-form that had nested inside the bandit’s nasal cavity; she cajoled it, rooted it out. It ticked louder, unhappy to be disturbed, while snot gushed from the nose of the bandit, who was by now buckled over in the throes of his dry heaves.
“It’s all right there, laddie,” soothed Seamus, at the bandit’s side. “It’s unpleasant, but you got to just let it out.”
The hacking grew more intense, and Prue felt the parasite relinquish its power and fall under her command. Again, she felt her energy being sapped, and she fell back on her heels as William the bandit pitched forward and his retching came on again, renewed. From his right nostril bloomed the grayish-green stuff, and Seamus shot his hand out and grabbed it. His face contorted into a disgusted grimace as he eased the fungus and its web of connected hyphae, the meshy filaments that branched out from the central glob of the organism, out of his comrade’s nose.
The ticking had grown deafening in Prue’s mind, now that the Spongiform had been released from its host, and she could feel it longing to attach itself to another human. “Destroy it, Seamus,” she managed.
Holding it out like it was a poisonous snake, Seamus backed away from William’s prone, coughing form and tossed it unceremoniously into the ivy. The ticking seemed to ebb in Prue’s mind, though she was suddenly alerted to the sound emanating all around her. She scanned the horizon; identical lumps in the blanket of ivy gave away the location of more Caliphs, more ticking parasites.
“Let’s get a fire going,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.”
Meanwhile, William had lifted himself up from his knees and was pawing at his face, wiping away the remnant mucus that had smoothed the fungus’s exit through his nostril. He looked around himself, dazed, until his eyes fell on Seamus.
“Seamus!” he said hoarsely. “What’s happened? Where am I?”
“You’re in South Wood, brother,” replied Seamus. “You’ve been made a slave. But that’s over now. It’s all over now.” The bandit’s voice welled with emotion as he spoke; it was clear that Seamus heavily wore the burden of having brought this fate on the bandit band.
And so their early morning progressed, there under the mantle of cloud that hung low over the forest: Each mound of ivy was discovered to be hiding some slumbering person or animal within its mesh cocoon and they were each, in turn, freed and revived. Those who’d been given the Spongiform, the silver-masked Caliphs, were left confined up to their necks until Prue could make her way to them (her energy ebbing with every case) and coax the spidery fungus from their nostrils. With each one, a new bandit was unmasked and awakened. A new flurry of questions and celebrations and sad, guilty explanations from Seamus were shared among the reunited bandits at every turn. A dozen sleeping Caliphs had been roused and set to rights—some of them were local South Wood citizens, innocently caught up in the Synod’s promised revival—before they arrived at the acolyte whose silver mask, once removed, revealed the sleeping face of Brendan, the Bandit King.
Once he’d been unslept and the fungus coughed up from his skull had been added to the blazing fire they’d started in the center of the meadow, he stood uneasily and, saying nothing, surveyed the crowd that was now surrounding him. Seamus rushed forward, seeing his long-lost sovereign, and threw himself at the Bandit King’s feet.
“Oh, King,” said Seamus, letting loose a torrent of sobs, “this is all my doing.”
Brendan looked at his most uncertain, there in the center of the crowd. Prue had only ever seen him steadfast and regal, in his sylvan element, his forehead tattoo a totem to his strength. But now he looked muddled and confused as he stared down at the bandit who was prostrating himself before him.
“Rise,” he said finally.
Seamus did as he was instructed, his head still bowed.
“What has happened?” asked the Bandit King. He held his hand briefly at his temple, massaging the skin.
“I was here, as an emissary,” started Seamus.
Brendan nodded, as if to say, This much I remember.
“They took me in, the Synod,” said Seamus. “The Mystics of the Blighted Tree. I don’t remember much past that point. Just hazy recollections, really. I was fed that stuff—the Spongiform. It’s a parasitic fungus; makes you do the will of the Blighted Tree and its disciples.”
The Bandit King remained silent; his brow was placid and his eyes stayed fixed on his comrade. His hand fell to his side.
Seamus continued haltingly, “I came to the camp. Under the influence of that . . . stuff. I fed the rest of the camp the fungus, and you all fell in line.” Seamus began to cry, big tears rolling down his nose and into the tuft of his brown beard. “We all marched back . . . here. And were made part of the Synod, doing the bidding of the tree.” He sniffed a few times, collecting himself, ran his finger under his nose, and said, “I’ve failed the band. I’ve broken the oath. I will recuse myself from my brothers and sisters. If it be your will, I’ll be a bandit no more.”
Silence followed; Brendan searched the bowed head of his fallen brother for a moment before replying. “Seamus,” he said, resting his arms on the man’s shoulders. “I’d as soon let you leave the band as throw myself into the deepest pit of the Long Gap. You are no more at fault than any of us.” He then surveyed his gathered subjects, his fellow bandit brethren, smiling, until his eyes fell on Prue.
r /> Prue instinctively gave a little curtsy.
“Why is it that I’m not surprised to see you here, as well?” said the Bandit King. “Prue of the Outside. It would seem that trouble follows you like campfire smoke.”
He’d given her a wry smile, which Prue took as a hopeful sign that the bandit had returned to his old, sardonic self.
“Smoke follows beauty,” replied Prue, smiling sheepishly. It was one of her dad’s old saws, always hauled out during camping trips. Just then her vision swam and her knees gave out. The bandit Angus, who happened to be standing next to her, grabbed her arm and steadied her.
“Are you okay, lass?” he asked.
“Just a little . . . worn out, I guess,” she replied. The work of freeing all the ivy’s captives had been more exhausting than she’d anticipated.
Owl Rex walked through the crowd of the thirty-odd bandits and townsfolk; they all parted to let the giant bird by.
“Owl,” said Brendan, acknowledging the Avian prince with a bow of his head. “What did you know of this?”
“Nothing, I assure you,” was the reply. “I’ve been gone these many months, adventuring elsewhere. Suffice it to say, this is a once-in-a-lifetime cock-up, one that is unlikely to be put to rights anytime soon. We can but do our best. The Blighted Tree is no more. It has been torn apart by the Verdant Empress’s wrath. She seems to be making good on her earlier threats.”
“Who is this Verdant Empress?” asked the Bandit King. “She’s no monarch I bow to.”
“She is the living ivy itself, imbued with the spirit of the dead. Or near dead.” The owl then turned to address the gathered crowd. “The woman you thought you slew on the field of battle, there on the ivy-strewn basilica during the Battle for the Plinth—she has returned. Indeed, she was never more than in hibernation, her spirit swallowed by the ivy itself. She has now come to finish her terrible rite and reduce the Wood to a desolation.”
Brendan seemed to be regaining his strength, and he put in, angrily, “She’ll not get far. Cover the Wood in ivy if she must, we’ll still send her to the devil.” His hand reached for a saber at his side that was not there. Instead, he clutched at the strange gray robes he wore and cursed.
The owl shook his head at the comment. “It’s worse than that, much worse,” he said. “The Blighted Tree has been torn down. This tree, standing for centuries, though much maligned by its detractors, has served a very important purpose. Along with the Ossuary Tree in Wildwood and the Council Tree of North Wood, it maintained the fabric of the Periphery Bind.” The owl paused so as to let what he next said fall with the appropriate weight. “And without the Bind, the boundary between the Wood and the Outside is null.”
“Null?” said Prue, suddenly panicked. “What do you mean, null?” She found a reserve of strength and pushed herself away from Angus’s arm.
The owl turned to her and frowned. “Yes. Alexandra—the Verdant Empress—will move beyond the Periphery. Once she’s done wreaking havoc on the Wood, she will consume the Outside as well.”
While none of the individuals present, besides Prue, could truly envision what this statement suggested—none of them having ever set foot in the so-called Outside—it immediately conjured a very stark and terrifying picture for Prue. She found, while in the Wood, that she cared very little for the Outside; for its mundane realities and trivial concerns—but there was something in this, this suggestion that the boundary between the two worlds would be overrun, that made her almost protective of her home-world.
“Over here!” came a voice; they all looked to see one of the bandits standing some yards off, on the edge of the clearing. “Prue! You’re needed!”
Rushing to where the bandit stood, they immediately saw the cause for concern: A small hut was in the process of being crushed under the weight of its thick mantle of ivy. Inside, a voice could be heard, crying for help.
“Esben!” shouted Prue, suddenly recognizing the growly timbre of the voice.
She threw her hands up to the surface of the structure and began coaxing away the ivy vines; the bandits fell in around her and started stripping the plant away once it had been controlled. The door was soon located; they were dismayed to find its latch was affixed with a heavy iron padlock.
“Hold tight there!” shouted Brendan as he turned to his fellow robed bandits, waving his hand. “One of you’s got to have the key. Search your pockets, lads!”
The hut’s strained framework wheezed as the ivy continued to constrict, bending the structure into a weird, oblong shape. Inside, something cracked. Esben let out a yell of surprise.
“We’re going to get you out of there!” shouted Prue, her hands held to the living surface of the hut, willing the ivy to let up its pressure. The mass seemed too great; she was having a hard time communing with it all.
The bandits, almost comically, were it not for the gravity of the situation, were simultaneously patting the sides of their identical gray robes, searching for the key, before Brendan spoke up. “Look at that,” he said, producing a brassy skeleton key from his pocket. “Had it all along.” The lock undone, they threw open the door.
Inside, pressed up against the far wall, was a bear with two golden hooks for hands. He smiled sheepishly to see his rescuers. “Hi, there,” he said. “Mind the ivy.”
Indeed, the plant had made its way through the chinks in the hut’s log walls and was busily crawling across the floor toward the bear. Prue leapt forward and, issuing a word of warning to the creeping plant in her mind, grabbed Esben by the hook. She rushed the bear through the door frame, squeezed as it was into a vexed rhombus, while the hut groaned and shivered around them.
Once they’d made the safety of the outside, Prue threw herself on the bear, wrapping her arms around his massive midsection and only managing to cover half the distance. The bandits looked on, marveling at the sagging structure of the bear’s former prison cell.
“And I thought it’d cave in just as we got him out,” said Seamus.
“Only works that way in stories,” said another bandit nearby, Gram.
Seamus gave one of the doorjamb posts a kick, and the entire structure blew to the ground in an eruption of noise, dust, and ivy. “There we go,” said the bandit, satisfied.
Prue, momentarily jolted by the hut’s collapse, turned back to Esben; she began busily pulling the last bits of clinging ivy from the bear’s fur, motherlike, while she spoke. “I’m so sorry, Esben. I had no idea what was happening.”
“They must’ve followed the badger,” said Esben, still regaining his bearings. “They came at me quickly; I couldn’t have escaped. Hooded things.” He shivered then. “And then the ivy; it came on so fast. And the terrible crashing noises. I’ve been trapped in that cabin for who knows how long!”
“You’re safe now,” said Prue.
“Am I?” asked the bear, taking in the surroundings. Indeed, his environment had changed so drastically since he’d been taken prisoner that there was barely a resemblance remaining to that diverse forest he’d left when they had first locked him up.
“She’s back, the Dowager Governess. Just in . . . some other form,” said Prue. “She’s taken control of the ivy.”
“What does she plan on doing with it?” asked the bear, confused.
“She means to rend the very fabric of the Periphery Bind,” answered Owl Rex. “She means to tear down the Trees of the Wood.” The bird’s head feathers were ruffled by a flurry of the wind and he looked southward, to the lowering banks of clouds on the horizon. “If it is her wish,” he said, “she now rides for the Ossuary Tree, the second tree, to break it to its roots. Then, only a third tree will stand in her way.”
“The Council Tree,” breathed Prue. Her mind flashed on the peaceable folk of North Wood, on the chain of quiet Mystics, practicing their meditations around the gargantuan trunk of the great tree. “We have to go. We have to stop her.”
“We can perhaps hold her back,” said the owl gravely.
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?But what of the girl’s power?” put in Brendan. “She can control the ivy. Could she hold the tide at bay?”
The owl looked to Prue, frowning. “Even with your estimable powers, the Verdant Empress would overrun you.”
“But the Mystics—if we rallied them, they could help. We could work together,” said Prue.
“Perhaps . . . ,” began the owl.
Just then, a thought occurred to Prue. “The cog,” she said. “What about the cog?”
Owl Rex looked curiously at the girl. “Surely such a thing cannot help us now.”
“But it’s what the tree said—it said by reconstructing the mechanical boy, the true heir, it would unite the Wood. It would save it!” Prue’s face became vexed, working out the intricacies of the plan. “I mean, if it knew what was happening all along—maybe it wasn’t the Synod it meant to save itself from—but this Verdant Empress woman—Alexandra!” She turned to Esben and looked at him sharply. She understood, plainly, that perhaps her quest must, at some point, reach its stopping point. Its searcher must come to rest eventually, even if the desired outcome had not yet been achieved.
“We need you to start making the cog,” she said.
The bear gulped, once, loudly. He held up his two hooks and said helplessly, “That woman robbed me of my tools. Without Carol, I’m not sure I can.”
“You have to try,” pressed Prue. She looked around her, surveying the gathered crowd. “Someone will need to be your hands.”
Seamus, the bandit, stepped forward. He held out his knobby, weatherworn fingers. “I’m as good as any at molding a horseshoe or a hobnail,” he said. “Not entirely sure what sort of cog needs be made, but I can give it a shot.”
“Maybe,” said the bear, somewhat unsteadily, his voice lacking the sort of steely pluck one typically expects at times such as these. He studied his prosthetic hands, uncertainly, in the wan light of the day before saying to the congregation of bandits, “We’ll need a bigger fire, a hotter fire.”
Just as the gathered bandits had all raised a collective “Aye!” and set about collecting what loose branches they could find from beneath the worming ivy, Esben the bear turned his solemn eyes to Prue and said plaintively, “I’ll do my best.”