“But we’ve already lost,” was Prue’s anguished reply.
“But we’ve got Carol! Carol Grod, the blind man! He’s with Esben. They’re making the cog!”
This news buoyed Prue’s spirits considerably. She blathered a little, as overwhelmed by her present situation as she’d ever been. “But how? Where did you find him? And where have you been all this time?”
“Can we talk about this later?” It was Septimus the rat, sitting at Curtis’s shoulder. He pointed a single spindly finger at the ground below them.
There was no need for further explanation; Prue looked away from the Council Tree and saw, for the first time, the ivy giants. There were seven of them now, and they were falling into position in a circle around the tree. Their heads were each obscured by a long, tangled mop of ivy, and their gargantuan legs sent waves of vines out into the meadow with their every crashing footstep. The air was filled with a flurry of massive birds, each one carrying a mounted rider, who dive-bombed the ivy giants, harrying their movements with swift attacks to their arms and heads. The bandits who’d stayed behind to muster arms had arrived; they attacked the ivy giants with swords and muskets, their every attack receiving great, throaty cheers from the farmers, who were still armed with garden tools and farming implements. Still, those carrying scythes and shears managed to cut away large chunks of ivy that made up the giants’ bodies; with every attack the birds’ talons took away even more, dropping the dead vines to the covered meadow below.
Watching the whole thing with a cold, measured grace was the Verdant Empress herself. Prue knew her as soon as she laid eyes on her. Even though Alexandra’s body stretched yards above her height as a living human and her flesh seemed to be made of the ivy itself, there was no doubt that this was the woman who’d abducted Prue’s baby brother and attempted to sacrifice him on the Plinth, those many months before. The same woman who’d raised an army of coyotes to wreak havoc on Wildwood; who’d plotted, in her despair over the death of her son, to reduce the entire Wood to nothing.
And it appeared she was succeeding.
She stood some yards off from the action, callously watching it transpire, her attention fixed, as the Mystics’ had been, on the Council Tree itself. She was watching the brutal efficiency of her dark handiwork.
“Bring me low!” shouted Curtis to the heron, and the bird dove swiftly down from its heights to graze the neck of one of the ivy giants. As they passed, Curtis gave an impassioned yell and swung his saber, cutting away a huge lock of the giant’s ivy tresses. The creature lowed in anger and swung one of its trunklike arms in the direction of the bird, but the heron’s swiftness outmatched the lumbering movements of the giant, and they were soon flown to safe airspace.
“There’s no use!” shouted Prue, her eyes still intent on Alexandra herself. With every chunk the flying fighters took out of the ivy giants’ hides, the woman simply raised her arms and more ivy climbed from the meadow’s surface to graft itself onto the giants’ wounds. “They’re made out of the ivy! It keeps just growing back.”
“Then we go for the queen!” shouted Curtis, and the heron, marking the boy’s words, banked sharply to the left and carried them, in all swiftness, toward the Verdant Empress.
She watched them come, this tall, green, reborn form of Alexandra. Her dark, empty eyes narrowed to see them approach.
She lifted her arm, a supplicating gesture, a greeting between old friends; vines shot out of her fingers and ensnared the talons of the heron.
The bird cried loudly and they began to plummet; Prue, thinking quickly, commanded and the ivy fell away. The heron regained its bearings, and they looped around the back of the Verdant Empress in a tight, dizzying circle.
“Watch her fingers!” shouted Curtis as he leaned away from the bird’s torso, his saber extended.
The Verdant Empress whipped around to confront them, and no sooner had she done so than Curtis’s saber came bearing down and struck her in the shoulder. She let out a scream of anguish as the limb fell away, the bundled stalks of its musculature rending at the shoulder joint, and was dashed to the ground in a shower of deadfall.
They hadn’t had much time to enjoy the afterglow of their successful attack, however, when Prue tapped on Curtis’s back and pointed her finger in the direction of the angered creature. She had bent low and a new clutch of ivy vines had clambered up her legs from the meadow’s floor, binding itself at her shoulder to grow a new limb.
“Oh,” said Septimus, seeing Prue’s gesture. “Well, that’s going to be a trick, isn’t it?”
But a new enemy had been dispatched; waving her newly sprouted arm over the thick blanket of ivy in the meadow, the Verdant Empress made a conjuration and little smooth lumps began to emerge from the bracken, looking every bit like eggs made from ivy vines. Prue watched with horror as these ovoid bunches began to shake and break open, revealing distinctly birdlike shapes within. They opened their viny wings, just babies in their nests, and raised their ivy beaks to the sky. Their growth was then spurred as their little bodies gathered more of the plant, and soon they were each as big as any of the large birds that were currently thwarting the ivy giants’ advance in the meadow. They sprang into the air, scores of them, and giving a terrible cry, lit into the flying corps of bandits and farmers with flashing talons and gnashing beaks.
One such ivy bird flew for Prue and Curtis, and the heron deftly dodged a grab the thing made for her neck. Gliding sideways, she quickly outflew the fledgling creature and circled around for another attack on the Verdant Empress.
“They’re fast!” shouted the heron.
Just then, they heard a scream from below them; Sterling Fox, astride an egret, was engaged in a full airborne tussle with one of the ivy birds; the egret had reared up and was tearing at his spectral foe’s underside with his talons. Sterling was holding on to the egret’s neck desperately, swinging his pruning shears impotently at their attacker.
“Hold tight!” shouted Septimus. He looked back at Prue, gave her a quick wink, and leapt from Curtis’s shoulder.
They watched him fall headlong into the ivy bird, his quick fingers grasping hold deep into the viny innards of the thing. Then, with the tenacity only a rat could muster, he began laying into the creature with his teeth. It let out a hollow, woody cry and fell away from Sterling’s egret, but not before Septimus had jumped from its rapidly decomposing body and onto the fox’s shoulder.
Curtis let out a heroic whoop at the rat’s clever action before turning his attention back to the Verdant Empress, raging at the edge of the circle of giants.
“See if you can’t get us closer to the woman!” shouted Curtis to the heron.
Suddenly, Prue felt two sharp pincers stab into her shoulders; she jerked her head upward to see that one of the ivy birds had dropped down on them from above and had clamped its talons on her back. She screamed and tried to evaporate the specter, like she had the tendrils the Verdant Empress had shot from her fingers, but her mind grew confused. The heron had banked sharply in an effort to lose the attacker, having heard her rider’s call, and it sent Prue’s mind spinning in vertigo; she couldn’t muster the focus to dissipate the animated ivy. She felt her body lift from the back of the heron; the ivy bird was intent on carrying her away!
“Hold up there, lass!” came a voice. Suddenly, the talons were torn from her shoulders, taking a good portion of her peacoat with them, and she dropped heavily back onto the heron. Looking up, she saw that her attacker was being carried, its claws grasping at thin air, by a very large eagle. On the eagle’s back rode Brendan the Bandit King; a young girl who looked very much like Curtis’s younger sister Elsie was clutching his midsection with one arm and wielding a small saber with the other.
“Mind your flanks there, lass,” he called again. “A good bandit always does!” And then he had veered off, his eagle pitching sharply away to do another flyby at one of the giants. Prue thought to ask Curtis if that had been, in fact, his sister, but the chaos of
the moment did not allow such trivial questions.
The incredible aerial battle waged on. The ivy birds crashed headlong into the avian defenders—the reborn Wildwood Irregulars—who held their ground with courage and resolve. The sky was alive with their zipping and plunging; the birds and their riders quickly learned that an eagle’s talons, properly applied, could tear these ivy creations to shreds, and the vines were soon decorating the air like so much confetti at the New Year’s stroke of midnight. It wasn’t long, however, before the Verdant Empress, seemingly unassailable, would raise her hands and more such hatchlings would birth from the very ground.
But Prue’s attention remained on the Council Tree. She saw that the Irregulars, for all their smarts and bravery on the aerial battlefield, could not hold back the ivy from consuming the ancient tree. It was now completely enveloped, as more waves, one after another, piled onto the last. The shape of the tree—the huge trunk, the wide canopy—was now totally lost. The thing had become unrecognizable, just another lump of teeming ivy in a world covered in the virulent plant.
With another wave, another push, the ivy began to tear the tree down.
A massive crack rent the air and Prue felt it in her chest, like a piercing needle. Through bleary, bloodshot eyes, she saw this massive, Paleolithic thing, this king among flora, this towering giant among the oldest, wisest trees: She saw it cracked mightily in two. The noise was explosive; it demanded the attention of every warring bird and rider in the vale. They all saw it, they all heard it—but only Prue truly heard the tree fall and die.
She heard the tree give a relinquishing sigh. She felt it lapse, then, into silence.
She also felt something snap, though she couldn’t know what. Her understanding of the thing that broke when the Council Tree cracked in two and fell was nil; even the oldest of the Woodians were ignorant of the inner workings of the spell that was woven into the trees, the thing that created a boundary between the Wood and the Outside. But at the moment when the ivy pulled the Council Tree down to the ground, the last anchor of the Periphery Bind was broken.
The ivy was loosed upon the open world.
CHAPTER 30
The Reluctant Resurrectee
She’d kept the teeth; she’d kept each of the items the Verdant Empress had asked her to retrieve. She’d rescued them from the floor of the ruined house after the spirit had been awakened, and she’d carried them with her when she sprinted for the safety of the boy’s mausoleum, the only place she knew would be spared the ravages of the ivy. The items were there in her pocket, in the pocket of her gray robe, and she held them out to show everyone gathered in the ivy-strewn meadow. An eagle feather, a white pebble, and yes: a full set of teeth. As Zita told the story, they all listened slack-jawed. Seamus, having recovered from his earlier fright, briefly raged at the girl for what she’d done, showering her with recriminations as if she was a misbehaving schoolchild, which she was, to a certain degree. As for Carol and Esben, they remained strangely silent during the retelling, understanding that Zita’s actions were just one part of an intricate web that was being woven before them. The girl wept a little in the telling and Martha gravitated to her side, resting a consoling hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” said Martha. “What’s done is done.”
“I just . . . ,” simpered Zita. “I just wanted to make things right. For someone.” She looked through her tear-blurred eyes at each of the individuals in the meadow: the old blind man, the bear, the bandit, and the little girl with the goggles. “It’s like, so much had gone wrong, you know? I mean, with me. It’s like—can’t I just fix things for someone, anyway? Like, relieve someone’s pain. That’s all I wanted to do, I swear.”
When she was done, the crowd remained in silence. Finally, Carol motioned to Martha, who walked to his side. Setting his hand on the back of the girl’s neck, he walked forward to Zita and said, “I understand your pain, child. We all have experienced loss. All of us. You’ve done what you could. And now, you truly do have an opportunity to set things to rights.” He held out his knobby, weathered hand, its palm open. “Let’s have those teeth, then.”
She set them, the boy’s teeth, in his hand, and the old man closed his fingers around them. He then had Martha walk him back to the fire, where he reached into a small groove in a rock and produced something shiny and spinning. He turned to Martha and smiled.
“Hold out your hand,” he said.
She did as he instructed, and the old man set the completed Möbius Cog in her palm.
It was a beautiful thing; all shining brass, its three concentric rings, wrapped one into the other, spun fluidly around a kind of glowing core. How two beings had managed to construct such an incredible thing was well beyond Martha’s ken, but she knew it was a thing of beauty.
“It’s . . . ,” she managed. “It’s wonderful.”
“Ain’t it?”
Esben appeared in their huddle around the cog, and he smiled at his creation. “An improvement over the first, I’d say,” he put in. “We made some extra embellishments.”
“And now, the final test,” said Carol.
The boy’s chassis, all shining brass and metal, lay naked by the fire, stripped of its regal uniform. They’d built an operating table for him, made of the salvaged boards from the collapsed hut at the edge of the meadow, and this was where he was laid, like a statue on top of an ornamental sarcophagus. Martha guided Carol to the boy’s side; Esben stood opposite him. Seamus and Zita stood quietly at the boy’s feet, watching the transpiring surgery in a hushed trance.
“Screwdriver,” said Carol.
Esben, with a little difficulty, pinched the handle of a small flathead screwdriver between his hooks and handed it across the table. He then guided the blind man’s hands to the first of the four screws that were set in the corners of a shiny, square plate in the automaton’s chest. Each one came out fluidly, and Martha caught them in her hands as they rolled out of their holes.
“Oil,” said Carol. Martha, holding a small oiling can, dutifully applied a few drops of the stuff to the two hinges that sat inlaid by the machine’s rib cage.
The plate was folded open. Inside, the boy’s innards could be seen by everyone present: a landscape of myriad cogs and sprockets, the workings of the most complex grandfather clock ever imagined.
In the center of the boy’s chest, amid the stationary workings, was a small, round, and very empty cavity, the size of a tennis ball.
“Cog,” said Carol. Martha handed the Möbius Cog to Carol. The thing glowed and whirred in his hand. With a little guidance from Esben, he found the empty spot in the boy’s chest and gently set the cog in place.
It slipped into the opening with a snug click, and the glow began to expand. It cast a warm illumination onto the cold metal of the surrounding gears. The miraculous orb’s three rings started spinning faster and the purring whir grew louder and soon the mechanics of the boy’s chest began to slowly shift into movement.
“Close it up!” instructed Carol, having heard the sound of the boy’s gears working, and the door in his chest was closed and its screws replaced. The whir of the cog became muffled behind the metal plate, but still discernible. Both Carol and Esben stood back, waiting.
Nothing was happening.
And then: The boy’s eyes fluttered open.
The crowd surrounding the table gave an audible gasp to see the machine come to life. The little blue irises in the boy’s opaline eyes flickered side to side, taking in this new onslaught of vision. His mouth rasped open; the hinges moaned.
“More oil!” Carol cried. “He’s trying to speak!”
Martha flew to the machine’s head and daubed grease on its mouth hinges. The eyes watched Martha carefully as she did this. A moment passed before the boy tried the mechanics of his mouth again; he clacked his jaws together a few times before issuing the first word of his newly remade life.
“Why?” he asked.
It was an odd picture, to be sure: th
e massive wall of ivy growing up on the edge of the Impassable Wilderness, seemingly contained by some invisible force field, but most Portlanders didn’t think much of it. They’d become so accustomed to ignoring this strange and inhospitable stretch of land on the border of their city that this phenomenon mostly went unnoted. The ivy had sprung up early that morning, growing larger and larger as it lapped against this transparent wall, but nothing much else had happened, so it was assumed to be relatively benign. In fact, by the following afternoon, it had been all but forgotten, and most Portlanders went about their day as they normally would.
“What’s that, Daddy?” asked one particularly precocious toddler, sitting in the back of her parents’ station wagon on the way home from day care. They were driving along the Willamette Bluffs and were afforded a good view of this forbidden no-man’s-land and its bizarre transformation.
“What, honey?”
The child was pointing to the squirming, wiggling ivy wall, just on the other side of the river, which by now had completely curtained off the typical view of the I.W.’s many tall and imposing trees. “All that plant,” managed the toddler, with what few words she had to describe a three-hundred-foot-tall screen of positively menacing-looking ivy vines.
The child’s father, who’s name was Foom (for reasons too strange and complicated to unpack here), simply said, “Oh, that’s nothing.”
“Is it mad?” pressed the child.
The girl’s father laughed. “You say the funniest things sometimes. I’ll have to remember to put that up on SocialFace later.”
“Will it get us?”
“Comedy gold,” was all her father said, and that was that. By the time the Periphery Bind, the magic ribbon that, for millennia untold, had kept the Outside safe from the impositions of the Impassable Wilderness (and vice versa, depending on your perspective), dissipated with its quick snap, the child in question was sitting on the floor of her room and removing the head from her Intrepid Tina doll while her father was in the living room, merrily broadcasting his daughter’s childish bon mot for the world to mindlessly skim. The ivy had built up so much force, pressing against the barrier, that when it was unleashed it was like some pent-up Mesozoic lake that had, after centuries, been finally made free to swamp the world in a flood that would transform the immediate landscape for centuries more to come.