Wildwood (Wildwood Chronicles 1)

Alexandra directed her glare toward Brendan. “And what kind of king abandons his people at the slightest intrusion, hmm? Your compatriots should know that you were intercepted trying to retreat into the woods, away from your precious hideout. The first sight of the enemy, and you’re off to save your own hide.”

Brendan laughed. “Tell them what you will, Dowager. Your words ring hollow.”

Curtis, in despair, had thrown himself down on his cell floor. He stared dolefully into space. “I can’t believe it,” he murmured. He felt abandoned.

Brendan glanced sympathetically over at Curtis before shouting down to Alexandra, “What have you done with the girl’s brother? The baby?”

“The baby is safe,” said the Governess. “He is well kept.”

“She’s going to feed him to the ivy!” said Curtis. “On the equinox!”

Brendan stood in his cage and stared down at the Governess, his hands gripping the bars. His face was blank. “Oh, Dowager,” he said softly. “Say it’s not so. Not the ivy.”

Alexandra smiled up at Brendan, almost beaming with accomplishment. “Oh yes, Bandit King. We’ve arrived at a deal, myself and the ivy. The plant requires infant blood. I require domination. One thing for another, quid pro quo. Seems like a decent partnership, yes?”

“You’re mad, witch,” said Brendan. “The ivy won’t stop till everything is wiped out.”

“That’s precisely the idea,” responded Alexandra. She calmly waved her hand, a horizontal slice through the air, a dismissal, a negation. “Everything. Gone.”

“We’ll stop you,” said Brendan, the emotion rising in his voice. “We have numbers yet, the bandits. We can still bring you to your knees.”

“Unlikely,” said Alexandra. “What with their ‘king’ being imprisoned. However, since I do expect that your remaining ragtag group will continue to harry my forces, I would insist that you give me the location of your little hideout. Posthaste.”

Brendan spat on the ground. The glob of spittle landed feet away from an observing coyote soldier, who grimaced and stepped away. “Over my dead body,” said the King.

Alexandra smiled. “That can certainly be arranged.” She then turned to her cohort of soldiers and barked a command: “Bring the King to the interrogation chamber. Elicit the location of the bandit camp. By whatever means necessary.” She began to walk from the chamber but stopped at the tunnel entrance. She turned back to the cages and smiled. “Good-bye, Curtis,” she said. “I don’t expect that I’ll see you again. This is where you will find your end, sadly. I wish it could’ve worked out differently, but alas, such is the way of the world.”

Curtis stared, aghast.

“Good-bye,” she repeated, and left the room.

At the Governess’s instruction, the warden pulled the ladder from the wall and, braced by a coterie of coyotes, removed the Bandit King from his cage. Proud and defiant, he climbed down the ladder to the floor below, quietly allowing his captors to place manacles at his wrists. The bandits in the cages watched the proceedings wordlessly, and Brendan cast a single steely look up at them before he was led from the room.

“Be strong, boys,” was all he said, and he was gone.

CHAPTER 18

On Returning;

A Father’s Admission

The poultice, a thick layer of a yellow

-green paste enclosed in a wrapping of oak leaves, felt cool against her ankle as Prue was led from the warren by two silent soldiers. The remedy appeared to be surprisingly effective; she was able to walk, albeit with a slight limp, almost immediately, and didn’t require the arm of one of her attendants.

The coyotes wordlessly led the way; they traveled for a time down a shallow gully where a path, worn into the bracken, wound through the hanging ferns and blankets of wood sorrel on the forest floor. The light had grown dark since they’d first arrived at the warren; a layer of clouds had blown in from the southwest, and the air was cool and damp. The patter of a first wave of raindrops could be heard, assailing the outstretched leaves of the trees and the ground cover. After a while, the path opened up onto the Long Road, the muddy gravel of the surface speckled with rain, and Prue followed the coyotes along the road. They arrived at the Gap Bridge, spanning the dark void below it, and crossed. At the far side, the coyotes left the road and began following a hidden trail, imperceptible to Prue’s eyes, down through a wide field of enormous sword ferns and into a glen suffused with the spidery branches of vine maples. Prue fell into a kind of rapt meditative state and began to lose her sense of direction entirely.

Finally, after what must have been several hours, the coyotes arrived at a break in the trees and there, looming darkly over the span of a wide gray river, were the twin spires of the Railroad Bridge. The little wooden houses of St. Johns could be seen on the far banks of the river, snuggled cozily within the manicured trees of the surrounding neighborhood. The soldiers stopped at the tree line and gestured for Prue to continue. She nodded and took her leave from her escorts, scrambling down a slope, brambly with blackberry vines, to arrive at a shallow gully that ran along a stretch of railroad tracks. She gave a quick look over her shoulder to see if she could still see her entourage—she wondered how many soldiers would be stationed here, watching over the bridge—but saw nothing. If they were there, they were safely camouflaged by the trees.

She walked along the tracks toward the Railroad Bridge and, after a time, came upon the wreckage of her bike and the Radio Flyer wagon. They lay untouched in the tall grass of the gully. She groaned at the pain in her rib as she pulled her bike from the ground and set about untwisting the frame from the wagon. Her initial estimate had been true: The front wheel was hopelessly bent, but the rest of the bike seemed to be in decent condition. She righted the wagon, straightened out the stem that attached it to the bike, and began walking the entire ensemble through the Industrial Wastes and back across the Railroad Bridge. A loud, distinct shhhhhh noise came from behind her, and she turned to see a gray wall of rain descend on the hill of trees above the bridge. Within seconds it was upon her, and she was almost immediately soaked to the skin.

“Figures,” she murmured to herself, and continued pushing the bike and wagon across the bridge.

Reaching the other side, she made her way up a gravel road that switchbacked down from the bluff. Following this, she soon arrived back in the tidy maze of cordoned streets, fresh-mowed lawns, steady humming traffic, and quiet dark houses of her neighborhood. She breathed a long, sorrowful sigh of relief.

The world seemed to have continued on without her fairly handily; the few pedestrians to be caught in the sudden shower were huddled beneath umbrellas and were jogging briskly to their destinations. A few cars whispered over the wet pavement, their windshield wipers busily in motion, but no one gave Prue so much as a second look, despite her haggard appearance, her torn clothes and tangled hair.

It was awhile before she arrived at the front door of her house. She briefly considered going to Curtis’s house first, to check on him and see how he’d made it out, but decided it would be best to find her parents. She only hoped that her sudden reappearance would somehow temper the inevitable trauma they would experience upon learning of their son’s vanishing. Prue knew she would have to tell the truth, no matter how crazy it would sound.