Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

“A little faster, you on the right,” shouted Prue from her seat. “You’re not really keeping up.” She nudged the badger. “Try it,” she said. “It’s very gratifying.”

“Oh, I couldn’t,” said the badger, clearly uncomfortable at being the driven and not the driver.

“C’mon!” pressured the girl at his side.

“Oh, all right,” he said, caving. He then addressed the huffing quartet at the front of the vehicle. “Not so herky-jerky, citizens! A true rickshaw driver measures his steps!”

A grumble arose from the four boys, the Spokes, but the ride did improve somewhat. “That was very satisfying, you’re right,” said the badger, smiling.

By the time they’d left the ramshackle houses of the drowsy suburbs and had entered the pell-mell of the town, the road now a cobbled thoroughfare, a modest procession had grown up around the rickshaw. Word was spreading fast that this particular carriage, one of many in the bustling town, was carrying none other than the Bicycle Maiden herself, she of song and story. Children, human and animal alike, came running after the carriage, offering to help carry the coach toward its awaiting goal: Pittock Mansion.

The streets wound up through the familiar tangle of brick buildings, though South Wood seemed changed since Prue had been here last. Many of the storefronts were boarded up, with indecipherable slogans scrawled across the plywood in angry red paint. A few beggars stumbled up to the rickshaw, desperately clawing at the dangling baubles at an effort to get at the passengers within. The boys at the yoke shooed them off, citing something about them being parasites; Prue watched them, disturbed by the beggars’ presence. It was a jarring sight and something she hadn’t remembered being present in the old South Wood.

With every block they traveled, they gathered more followers. Foxes, humans, bears, and mice—all clambering to get close to the growing procession. “The Maiden!” came shouts from the throng. “She’s here!” “Returned! She’s finally returned!” An impromptu chorus among the crowd started singing “The Storming of the Prison,” adding more verses than the ones Prue had heard; their inclusion did not lessen her discomfort with the song:

We will search out all the Svikists

We will tear them from their beds

We will drag them to the Mansion

And remove their sorry heads

O the blood of all the fascists

Will flow freely in the drains

Like a pair of moldy trousers

We will wash away the stains

More self-proclaimed Spokes, men and women wearing what appeared to be biking gear from a bygone era—pleated knickers, woolen vests, and short-billed casquettes—began falling in line with the parade, becoming a kind of cavalcade of like-dressed humans and animals, bright sprocket brooches pinned to their chests. When they crested the hill and broke free of the knot of buildings to arrive at the Mansion’s front gardens, the crowd was now hundreds strong, a tide of humanity, waving pennants and singing songs and blowing horns and shouting slogans and stamping feet and dancing on the margins and crying out and clapping hands. All in all, the passage bore very little similarity to her first time making the trip, when she’d been a passenger of the charitable postmaster general, Richard, and the fantastic world had opened up to her like an unbelievably beautiful flower, strange and alien.

“The Maiden returns to the Mansion!” yelled a man at her side. “There’s a song in that!”

Prue had long since lost her ability to process everything that was happening; everything was coming too quickly for true inspection. The roar of the crowd was like a symphony of cymbals in her ears, and she truly felt like she was being carried along on a wave of unbridled enthusiasm. It was intoxicating.

That is, until they’d rounded the corner and come across a great contraption that loomed over the central square before the Mansion’s front doors. The crowd paid it no mind, fixed as they were on conveying the triumphantly returning Bicycle Maiden through the doors to confront the Mansion’s leadership, there to do whatever it was she’d come to do (expectations were raised very high). But Prue froze as she stepped down from the rickshaw, just as her right foot touched the fabric of some chivalrous young man’s proffered coat, and studied the apparatus.

It was, undoubtedly, a guillotine.

The silhouette of the gruesome thing stuck in her mind, like the blot left behind in the dark of one’s closed eyelids after looking at a lightbulb or the sun, and stayed there as she was transported by the rush of the mob into the foyer of the Mansion.

Zita had never been this far into the forest; she’d never left the safe confines of the North Wall, that wide stone edifice that stretched east to west through the vast woods and separated, as her father had described it, the civilized world and the world of the birds.

She’d known a few birds; she’d been a small child when the partition had been agreed on, and she still remembered when South Wood had been filled with birds, before their diaspora to the newly founded Avian Principality. They’d been kind, the birds she’d met, but she knew there’d been strife. When the partition had been decided and the lines drawn, it seemed to release some of the built-up pressure. Naturally, some Avians decided to stay on in South Wood and they were welcome by most quarters. It wasn’t until the Night of Broken Doors, the night that the SWORD began rounding up and imprisoning the remaining birds, that it became clear that there were still differences that could not be erased. Tensions had eased since the Revolution, but most of the birds of the Wood tended to keep to themselves and more than a few had left for the Principality, in search of a kinder community. Notably, all the eagles had left South Wood; none remained. This surprising exodus went unnoted by most people, out of fear of insulting the legacy of the Bicycle Coup—after all, there was a new dawn breaking in relations between ground dwellers and tree nesters—but the Avians, shortly after the Storming of the Prison, could be seen beefing up the security on their border with South Wood. In answer to this, a larger detachment of South Wood soldiers was assigned to the guarding of the North Gate. It was a quiet escalation, all done in the name of the old maxim “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Which was why Zita was forced to blaze a trail through the tangled vegetation of the forest, rather than tramp openly on the cobbled Long Road. She knew if she was caught, out this late and so close to the border, questions would be asked. And how would she possibly answer? She ran the conversation in her mind: “What are you doing here, miss?” comes the authoritarian voice. “Oh, just sneaking into the Avian Principality,” she would answer. “And why?” “To steal a feather from an eagle.” “And why would you need to do that?” “To satisfy the Verdant Empress, who’s leaving me notes in writing on the mirror in my bedroom.” She had to stifle a laugh; it was perfectly ludicrous, the whole situation, and she was undoubtedly going completely insane. But there was something about it—something about following the will of the spectral Empress—that seemed to save her from going completely, willy-nilly, over the cliff of sanity. Being a gofer for a ghost—it had a kind of purpose to it.

There was another reason, a deeper reason, for her giving in to the spirit’s whims, but she hadn’t allowed herself to consider it too closely. Every time it surfaced in her mind, she pushed it away. Best to focus on the task at hand, she reasoned.

A task that was now bringing her close to the wall—the darkness seemed to lighten as the flickers of gas lamps illuminated the tree boughs. Through a break in the bushes, she could see a small gathering of soldiers on the road: talking among themselves, calmly pulling on cigarettes. Four had settled down around a battered tree stump for a game of cards. Just beyond them, Zita could see the wide gate in the wall itself: the North Gate, the only passage between South Wood and the Avian Principality.

She counted the soldiers: ten in all. They swarmed like khaki-clad mice around the gate; there would be no getting through this exit. She watched as one of the soldiers, his bayonet-topped rifle slung over his shoulder, began walking idly toward her hiding place. Before he got too close, she ducked back into the bushes and began moving her way eastward, away from the road and the gate.

The light dwindled here, away from the gas lamps, and she waited until she was a safe distance from the road before she struck a match and held it to the wick of the lantern she carried. Holding it aloft with her left hand, she walked along the base of the wall, her right hand feeling the rough, weathered stone and the mossy chinks in the rock. The wall itself was easily twice her height, but the stone was uneven and she soon found a spot, some fifty or sixty feet from the road, that she thought she could scale without too much difficulty. She tied the lantern to the bottom of her knapsack and tested the first jutting stone; the soles of her moccasins held fast and she began to climb.

No sooner had she arrived at the top when she heard a crunching in the vegetation below her; a soldier had stepped away from his cohorts and had begun a solitary walk up the perimeter of the wall. She pressed her body flat to the stones and slowly, achingly dragged the lit lantern toward her face, so she might extinguish the flame. The thing glanced against the rock, and a metallic ting echoed out i