Wildwood (Wildwood Chronicles 1)

“Don’t mention it,” replied Penny. “I know you’ll find him, your brother.” She smiled and turned to leave, the halo of light cast by her candle fading into the darkness of the tunnel.

Prue began walking down this new passageway. Before too long, she arrived at the ladder Penny had described. Its rungs were splintered and worn, and they bowed with the weight of Prue’s feet as she gingerly climbed. The ladder carried her up through a long cylindrical duct in the ceiling of the tunnel that ended at what looked like a manhole cover. Bracing herself against the rungs of the ladder, Prue heaved the cover up and slid it to the side of the opening. A brisk breath of fresh air caught her by surprise, and she inhaled deeply. She cautiously pushed her head up through the opening and looked around.

She was back in the woods.

CHAPTER 11

A Soldier Distinguished;

Audience with an Owl

Curtis, lifting himself up on his elbows, surveyed the damage he had wrought. The coyote soldiers who had, just moments earlier, been in the throes of battle stood frozen in surprise, their adversaries having miraculously vanished. The course of the cannonball had ripped a tidy pathway through the underbrush, crossed the gaping ravine, and continued its path onto the other side. Several bandits, immobile, lay in its wake. Curtis blinked rapidly.

The soldiers raised their sabers in a brief cheer before a new wave of bandits appeared over the ravine edge, and they leapt back into the fray. Curtis heard the sound of hoofbeats behind him.

“Curtis!” came the voice of the Governess. “Come with me!”

He turned to see Alexandra above him, her hand extended. They locked hand-to-forearm, and he was carried over the horse’s flanks. Curtis’s hearing was only now returning

“Did you see that?” he shouted over the ruckus of the ongoing battle. He could feel himself beaming, as much with astonishment as with pride.

“I did!” was Alexandra’s response. “Very nice work, Curtis! We’ll make a warrior out of you yet!”

One hand holding her sword, the other holding the reins, she urged the horse to a gallop as it deftly slalomed through the trees. Her horsemanship was second to none, and woe betide the bandits who attempted to raise a rifle or saber to her as she rode: They were certain to be cut down.

“Where are we going?” asked Curtis, his face nuzzled into the fur of her stole.

“You’ll see!” shouted Alexandra.

They arrived at the far end of the ridge, where the wash was at its deepest and the gully’s walls rose from the bottom like the sheer face of a canyon. The ridge was all a-tangle with bandits and coyotes, toe to toe, their bayonets and swords clashing. Alexandra leapt from the horse, quickly dispatched a charging bandit with a thrust of her sword, and ran to the edge of the ridge. Curtis gulped loudly and followed. When he had arrived at her side, the Governess pointed to the trough of the draw, where a group of bandits was laboriously pushing a giant howitzer up the gully.

“There,” she said softly. “If that gun gets much farther, our battalion will be at the mercy of these savages.”

The massive howitzer made the coyotes’ cannons look like Roman candles; its mouth was easily three feet in diameter and the bore was of such a length that two men, end to end, could lie inside. The iron of the gun was ornately decorated with the vicious form of a dragon, the gun’s maw framed by the dragon’s barbed fangs. One shot from that, Curtis surmised, and you could take out an entire hillside.

“What can we do?” Curtis asked.

“Start shooting,” Alexandra replied. She thrust a rifle into his hands before hefting her own to her shoulder, squaring her sights with the howitzer crew below.

Curtis blanched, and the pit in his stomach grew. He had fired the cannon, sure, but it had felt so anonymous and random. He wasn’t sure he’d actually be able to shoot a gun at someone. Paralyzed, he simply stood, holding the rifle in his arms.

The Governess, meanwhile, had fired several shots into the crowd surrounding the giant cannon, felling two bandits who were quickly replaced as more reinforcements came hurrying up the draw. Stamping the rifle butt on the ground, she cursed as she unscrewed the ramrod from the rifle and busily began repacking a round.

Desperate for an alternate strategy, Curtis scanned the ridgeline. His eyes fell on something that made his heart catch in his throat. “Hold on!” he shouted to Alexandra, dropping his rifle to the ground. He sprinted over to a mossy outcrop overlooking the gully, where a massive cedar tree had fallen, its rough bark overgrown with ivy and ferns. It lay in the underbrush, perilously balanced on the edge of the ravine, its midsection cantilevered on another fallen tree. Curtis gauged the distance and height of the overhang, all the while looking back and forth between the bandits and the dead tree. Satisfied, he vaulted back over the tree and threw himself to the ground, lifting his feet to find purchase against the bark of the tree’s trunk. With a pained grunt, he began pushing with all the power he could muster. The trunk began to tip on its axis, the living earth below it ripping away, before he exhausted his energies and the tree tipped back to its resting place. He took a deep breath and, grunting louder, began pushing again. The trunk lifted a little farther this time, but still not enough to be unanchored from its perch.

“Alexandra!” he shouted. “Come help me!”

The Governess, who had been firing her rifle into the amassing bandits below to no appreciable effect, looked over and, catching on to Curtis’s plan, ran over to where he lay. Dropping to the ground, she too began pushing at the tree trunk with her moccasined feet.

“One . . . two . . . three!” counted Curtis, and they both pushed with all their might. The tree trunk gave a terrific groan before it toppled from its moorings and pitched over the edge of the ravine with a deafening crack. Alexandra and Curtis leapt up from the ground in time t

o see the giant tree go crashing down the steep wall of the gully, gaining speed with every roll. A scant few of the bandits, those that were alert, managed to dive out of the way before the tree collided with the howitzer, sending a spray of splinters and bark into the air. The howitzer collapsed from its carriage and tipped over onto the ground, the massive cedar trunk finally coming to rest on top of its muzzle. The bandits who made up the howitzer crew, the few that remained, ran off down the gully and disappeared into the bush.

Curtis started jumping up and down. “Holy . . . holy . . . ,” he sputtered. “Holy SMOKE! Did that really just happen?” Alexandra looked on and smiled.

The inimitable sound of a conch shell being blown distracted them from their celebration, and suddenly the tide of bandits was retreating from the hillside, desperately scrambling up the far side of the ravine and back into the woods. The surviving coyote soldiers gave brief chase, picking off a few of the stragglers as they went, before raising their arms in a collective cheer. The ravine was theirs.

Prue pulled herself from the manhole and, sitting on the edge, surveyed the landscape; the knot of the forest’s canopy loomed over her, and the few stars in the early evening sky glimmered through the branches above. She found she was in a small clearing, surrounded by a dense weave of trees.