“Listen up,” said Rachel as she arrived in front of the group. “We’ve got a good thing here, we’ve got a system down. But as far as I’m concerned, the longer we wait to go after Martha and Carol, the more we’re seriously letting them down. The stevedores have them. Who knows what they’re doing to them right now. We owe it to them to be devoting every waking hour to finding where they are and rescuing them. It’s super simple. We’ve been here two months. We can’t afford to wait another two.”
Several of the kids in the audience nodded. Michael stood with his hands in his pockets, alternately watching the girl as she spoke and surveying the crowd.
“I say we do a show of hands. Who wants to start organizing a search-and-rescue party now? Huh? No more waiting.” Rachel’s head was held high as she spoke, the machete sitting comfortably in her hand as if she’d been born to wield it.
Elsie was about to raise her hand in agreement—she had the sense that she would be in the majority, weighing in—when the alarm was sounded: a single, shrill whistle from the perch above the warehouse. It was the unmistakable whistle of Cynthia Schmidt, who was a practiced whistler; it came like a wren’s call. The room was seized with a sudden, palpable fear.
The stevedores were coming.
CHAPTER 4
The Spiral in the Trees;
A Finger on a Windowpane
They’d traveled for days, over mountain passes still stuck with snow, through craggy valleys where trees grew in the most unreachable places. They traversed hillsides and crossed grand plantations, where the farmers’ children ran from their work in the fields to meet the small, yet immediately recognizable procession. There were four travelers: two humans, a fox, and a coyote. One of the humans was a middle-aged woman, the other a boy of perhaps ten. They were all Mystics, of the North Wood. They wore identical sackcloth robes. They were on a journey that would bring them into the very heart of Wildwood.
The youngest, the boy, carried a small, bright flag in his hands.
They didn’t speak as they walked, choosing instead to pass the long spans of time in meditation, absorbing the spectrum of languages they received from the plants and trees that surrounded them on their journey. It was their gift: the ability to commune with the mute flora of the forest. They wore this incredible ability with solemnity, using it not so much as one might flourish some crass magic trick, but in a reserved and mindful way, so that their relationship with the plants and trees would be a model to the rest of the citizens of the Wood, that they might live in more perfect harmony with the organic world around them. For this reason, the people of North Wood revered them.
As they came down from the mountains, their surroundings began to change; gone were the little hovels by the road and the farmhouses and inns. Instead, the vegetation by the side of the single, curving road they followed grew heavy and cluttered with thick, wild greenery, fighting for supremacy on the uneven ground. Even the language of the plants and trees shifted; it became uneven and scattered, a white noise of garbled shouting, barraging the quiet minds of the Mystics as they traveled. They found they needed to stop and rest more often; carrying the weight of the forest’s belligerent voices was burden enough.
They broke camp early and traveled all day. As the final morning of their journey dawned, the young boy sat on the cracked stump of a storm-fallen hemlock and stared into space. The older woman came over to him and put her hand consolingly on his shoulder.
“Not long now,” she said. “We’re not far off.”
He acknowledged her with a wan smile. “I can feel it,” he said. “But there’s something else. . . .”
The woman looked at him curiously. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said. His finger, lazing at his side, began drawing a looping spiral on the grain of the tree trunk. “I’ve been having dreams.”
“About the tree?”
The boy cleared his throat; his finger continued to trace the pattern. “No,” he said. “I can’t say. I can’t quite see it.”
The other two Mystics had risen and were busily pulling down their canvas tents. The early morning sun was breaking through the tangle of trees; a mist had settled on the lower branches. The boy’s finger had finally traced to the center of the spiral he’d been creating, and it stopped there. He looked down at his fingertip and watched it, like someone monitoring an unmoving spider in the center of an elaborate web.
“Let’s go,” he said.
The other three Mystics followed him wordlessly. They knew not to question his leadership, even though his selection as the Elder Mystic, a role once reserved, as its name would suggest, for the eldest of the sect, was wholly unprecedented. After the death of the prior Elder Mystic, Iphigenia, the tree surprised everyone by selecting the young boy—a Yearling—as the old woman’s successor. As long as anyone remembered, as long as the histories had been written, there was no record of anyone but the eldest being selected for this highest responsibility; the change was enough to cause confusion among even the most sage and learned of the robed sect. But, as was clear in the teachings of the tree, all was flux; nothing was determined or permanent. Change was the only certainty of life. Perhaps, they decided, the descriptor Elder did not so much refer to the individual’s physical age as their spiritual age. And so the boy was raised from Yearling to Elder Mystic; the boy himself seemed neither surprised nor flattered by the election. He seemed suited to the calling.
And this was their first task: to make the pilgrimage to the Ossuary Tree, in deepest Wildwood, where vicious animals lived freely and bandits made easy prey of the unwary traveler. There to hang a flag on a bough in remembrance of the departed Elder Mystic, Iphigenia. Because the journey was only made on the occasion of an Elder Mystic’s death, each generation of acolytes and Mystics were forced to relearn the journey from the writings of the Ancients and their guidance from the trees. They could follow the road for only so long; eventually they would need to break away and traverse Wildwood itself.
Here there were no roads, no paths. Occasionally a game trail would open up to them, but often they chose instead to follow the guidance of the trees and the plants, ferreting what information they could from the jumble of voices they produced, snaking carefully through the maze of branches and brambles made by the forest.
Now, on the eighth day of the pilgrimage, they arrived at their goal, having broken through a ring of blackberry bushes into a wide, sweeping glade. In the center of the clearing stood the Ossuary Tree.
The Ossuary Tree, one of the three Trees of the Wood, was neither living nor dead. It seemed to hover in some in-between place; it had no leaves, though its bark was a deep, lively brown and its boughs strived skyward and it stood taller by several lengths than any of the other trees in its proximity. Fastened to the ends of its long, gnarled limbs were little colorful flags; each one had been tied there in remembrance of Elder Mystics past. Some of the fluttering scraps of fabric were centuries old, and while they all endured the ravages of the seasons, they remained as perfectly intact as when they first were tied. They became, essentially, the leaves of the Ossuary Tree and were imbued with its life.
Wordlessly, the four Mystics sloughed off their bags. They sat for a moment at the base of the tree, wondering at its height and sharing a few good-natured handshakes in celebration of a successful journey. The sun was shining now; it was clear the season was ebbing into the next, and the May day felt fresh and alive. The young boy, the Elder Mystic, had elected to do the tying himself, though this was unprecedented as well; typically the Elder Mystic, often infirm from age, deferred such a challenging duty to the young and agile. The boy, without saying a word, his face still etched with a strange, contemplative stillness, took the little red flag, the flag that would hang for Iphigenia, in his teeth and began scaling the trunk of the great tree.
The others stood at the base of the wide trunk and watched him climb. Like most of the citizens of North Wood, he had a deep connection with his natural su
rroundings, his nonhuman neighbors, and he scaled the tree’s rough bark with the agility of an ocelot. Before long, he’d disappeared from the sight of the spectators on the ground.
In the higher boughs, bedecked with snapping pendants, the view was breathtaking. The world splayed out before the boy like a dappled carpet of green and brown and blue. A tussock of clouds migrated slowly eastward, across the distant horizon. The Cathedral Mountains, which they’d crossed only days prior, presented themselves like magnificent knuckles of earth, all snowcapped and tall. The boy found a bare branch and, pulling the flag from his teeth, tied the memorial to the deceased Elder Mystic Iphigenia on the stalk of one of the branch’s thin fingers. It joined its fellow pieces of fabric on the tree, rippling unanimously in the wind.
Watching his footing as he prepared to make his way down the tree, the boy noticed a change in the forest; it was something he couldn’t have seen from ground level. It was as if the texture of the wood changed very slightly in a distinct block of the greenery. Looking closer, he noticed that the pattern repeated itself in a slow, lazy curve away from the base of the Ossuary Tree. As he followed the pattern outward, it began to take the form of a very familiar shape.
The boy was greeted with uncertain smiles when he arrived back at the ground. They still found him unknowable. He barely spoke, and when he did, his speech patterns were stilted and strange and he never made eye contact. It was unnerving to the personable Mystics; they waited for the boy to speak now and he did not.
“How was the climb?” the woman ventured finally.
The boy was staring somewhere, just beyond her shoulder.
“Was it comfortable? Did you get very high?” The woman was keen on making a connection.
“There,” said the boy. “Just there.”
The woman looked over her shoulder. The other two Mystics followed his pointing finger.
“What?” asked the woman. “What’s there?”
The boy ignored her question, but instead began moving into the thick of the bushes, clambering over the bowed saplings that stood in his way. The other Mystics went to follow the boy but he moved too quickly; before they could even cross the threshold of bushes, the boy was gone.
The mirror rested against the wall on top of the girl’s dresser. She sat across the room from it, staring at it with her arms crossed. She was sitting upright in bed. Her bedside table light was on; the windows had gone dark. A gaslight flickered into life outside her window and she blinked at it, suddenly aware of the passage of time. How long had she been staring at the mirror? Long enough to have lost track of the hours; she could hear her father in the hall outside her door, shuffling his way toward bed. She could hear the wheeze of a wind gust. She could hear the absence of the songbirds. She could hear the rattle of a single, lonely coal cart.
The mirror, on the dresser, was not speaking. She was thankful for this. But she knew, when the tall grandfather clock in the sitting room chimed midnight, the words would appear on the glass.
It’d been this way for several days. Ever since the séance at the old stone house.
She’d already dismissed the first time she’d seen the letters, the scrawled writing, on the mirror’s surface as being something she’d dreamed up, something her overactive imagination had conjured out of her own desperate need to see the thing happen. It was a hallucination, pure and simple. It appeared that her friends, the ones who had been there that night, had taken a similar course—it was as if the incident hadn’t even occurred. No one spoke about it; in school, when they met before class, the conversation swirled around other topics, normal topics. No one dared broach the bit about the glowing aura, the distinct moan, the woman’s moan, that rose from the ground.
But they hadn’t seen the writing. The fogged-up mirror, the scrawl across the glass in the shape of a thin fingertip. The words: I AM AWAKE.
And that hadn’t been the last of it.
Every midnight, shortly after the chime of the grandfather clock in the sitting room, a strange mist would overtake the simple mirror sitting propped on her dresser, and the glass would become cloudy, as if someone had breathed over it, and the sound would come: the sound of a hand drawing over a wet surface, a sort of gasping scrape; and then the words would appear.
The first time it’d happened in her room, Zita had only seen the word GIRL appear before she’d dashed from her bed in a panic and slammed the mirror down on the top of the dresser. After she’d taken several pacing spins around her room, she was relieved to see, when lifting the heavy glass again, that the word was not there. A single hairline crack had crawled across the top left corner of the mirror, but the writing was definitely gone.
The next night, though, it happened again. Zita was an insomniac, had been since she was a toddler, and the second night after the séance found her trying a new braiding pattern in the mirror very late at night when the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed its chime and her face, lit by the kerosene lamp on the dresser, grew suddenly dim and fogged. To her terror, the writing came again: GIRL.
This time, she was frozen in horror, her fingers still tangled in her braid. The writing continued: BRING came next. Before the specter had a chance to write a third word, Zita had slammed the mirror down flat again and had leapt, shivering, into her bed. She lay tossing in fitful sleep the rest of the night. The morning came cold and a new realization dawned on Zita, the May Queen, and she ate her cereal in silence, reflecting on the change.
That night, she lay in wait for the chime of the grandfather clock, determined to hear out the spirit that haunted her. She had decided that however she might resist this encroachment on her life by the supernatural, it would likely be no use. Better to give in, to not tempt the anger of the spiritual world.
And when the grandfather clock chimed, when midnight struck, she watched with halting breath as the disembodied finger scraped the word in the fog across the glass.
GIRL, it read.
BRING, it continued. But that wasn’t all.
The boy walked through the woods like it was second nature. He spoke to the plants and the trees as he walked, continuing an ongoing conversation with his mind, sorting through a vast snarl of disparate voices for a common thread. He followed the pattern that he saw in the green, a slight change in color and the timbre of the voices. It led him in a wide circle that steadily crept inward, as if affixed to a central point. It soon became clear that he was following a spiral. The voices of the other Mystics disappeared behind him, lost in the shroud of voices and the trees and the ivy and the trilliums, white and blooming.
As he grew closer to the center of the spiral, he felt the voices of the forest begin to soften, to arrive at a decided consensus: A hush overtook the warring voices and suddenly conjoined into a steady, meditative hum. The circle was tighter now, and it was as if he were retracing his own winding steps until he found the center of the spiral, the heart of the thing.
There, in a small womblike tuft of moss, a single green sprout grew. The sapling sported three identical branches; only one, however, bore a leaf.
A new tree was being born.
The boy reached out to touch the single downy leaf of the shoot, and the ground promptly opened up below his feet and he was swallowed by the earth.
The noise was unbearable: The friction of a finger against a windowpane, damp with dew, amplified a thousand times over in Zita’s mind, and she pressed her fingers to her ears in an effort to shut out the sound.
BRING ME, the words read. The noise continued.
BRING ME THREE THINGS
BRING ME THREE THINGS BY THE CHIME OF MIDNIGHT IN TEN DAYS.
Zita rasped with fear: “What? What should I bring?”
There was room only for two more words, scrawled on the bottom of the glass:
EAGLE FEATHER.
The glass went clear. The words were gone.
CHAPTER 5
Return to the Wood;
A Fugitive of the Wastes
“W
E ARE DOING WHAT WE CAN, WITH WHAT TOOLS ARE AVAILABLE TO US. THE WORKERS ARE SAYING THAT THE RECONSTRUCTION SHOULD ONLY TAKE A FEW MORE MONTHS, BUT I’LL BELIEVE THAT WHEN I SEE IT.” The inflection of the voice could only come from one species, the moles of the Underwood, and Prue had a hard time containing the happiness she felt to hear it once again. Besides, the despotic rule of Dennis the Usurper had long been washed away, and what had been left in its wake resembled nothing if not a peaceable and just society—something that Prue herself had helped bring into existence. She felt like she had a stake in the well-being of this strange subterranean civilization.
The speaker of the words had been the Sibyl Gwendolyn, the de facto queen of the Underwood, and she was describing the lengthy rehabilitation underway to bring the City of Moles back from the near rubble it had been reduced to during the Great Siege that had removed Dennis from power. The walls had been reconstructed, and the neighborhoods of houses and buildings, razed by a torrent of fire arrows, were in the process of regaining their old shapes. The Fortress of Fanggg itself, Gwendolyn said, was to be repurposed as a city park and public space—renamed the Fortress of Prurtimus after the city’s trio of saviors. “THE VIEW FROM THE TOP IS SAID TO BE EXTRAORDINARY.” The Sibyl smiled ironically; the moles of the Underwood were, of course, quite sightless.
Prue and Esben had been received with great pomp and clamor—it was Esben, after all, who had rebuilt the massive underground city the time before, after the destruction of the Seven Pool Emptyings War (it was clear that the moles of the Underwood lived their lives in a constant shuttling between states of war and peace). The bear’s return was welcomed with all the display that would befit a hero of state. In fact, he was currently helping rebuild a particularly complex suspension bridge while Gwendolyn gave Prue a tour of the scaffolding-laced city under construction.