Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

Her father looked up from the paper. His mustache twitched a little. “What do you need that for?”

“All the good flowers are farther off,” said Zita, sitting up straight. “We can’t get to them by foot. It’ll take all day.”

“It needs a tune-up. I’ve barely started the thing since . . .” He paused, clearing his throat. “And it’ll need gas.”

“I’ll fill it,” said Zita. “And you can help me with the tune-up. Would you?”

Her father looked at the grandfather clock on the wall, the clock that chimed midnight when the spirit of the Verdant Empress visited, and nodded. “Seems like a good project.”

Zita smiled. She was thrilled to see her father emerge from his quiet, stormy stupor. They cleared the table quietly, father and daughter, and washed the dishes in the sink. They went out to the garage where the old motorcycle sat, its mismatched sidecar a receptacle for whatever junk in the garage had not found a proper home. Zita and her father collected this stuff, a pile of blankets, a spare tire, and a box of spent candles, and set it on the nearby workbench. Her father undid a tethered pouch, revealing a set of worn tools, and the two of them, together, began tinkering with the engine of the machine. Soon enough, the thing had been started and was growling in a healthy way, spewing its usual vapor into the atmosphere. Zita’s father wiped his hands clean of grease, watching his daughter, now astride the bike, shrug a silver-sparkle helmet over her head and a pair of riding goggles over her eyes.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said.

He smiled warmly, looking at the whole ensemble: his daughter, the motorcycle, the sidecar, and Zita could guess what he was thinking. He was thinking about the one thing missing: her mother, his wife.

Zita chose not to let him dwell on the image for too long: the fact that her mother had often been the passenger, the helmeted head sprouting from the sidecar, while he gripped the handlebars and rode them from hamlet to hamlet. Instead, she spoke. “I’ll be back sometime tomorrow.” (She’d furnished camping gear to complete the ruse that she’d be sleeping with Kendra in the woods.) “I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” said her father, momentarily disarmed. She could see: His eyes brimmed with tears, but none fell.

Zita curled the grip, and the engine sputtered and roared. She walked it backward, out into the sunlight, and without giving a further look at her father, she kicked it into gear, the old thing, and wheeled out into the road.

She was an old hand at riding the ancient motorcycle, its gas tank all dented and scored; her father had taught her to ride it when she was barely seven—much to the consternation of her mother. It felt good to be back in the saddle again, feeling the air beat at her cheeks and whip at her coat. She raced through the Mercantile District, her home district, down its narrow cobblestone alleyways, which she knew like the veins on the back of her hand. Whipping past an old beaver trawling a hay cart, she nearly upset a card-trick grifter’s table and caused a black-clad nanny to anxiously yank her charges (two human toddlers) out of the road and onto the sidewalk. “Sorry!” shouted Zita above the cooing roar of the motorcycle.

She swerved out onto the Long Road and into the flow of traffic: Automobiles and bicyclists, rickshaws and lumbering palanquins all vied for real estate on the cluttered roadway. She zipped around a horse-drawn cart and into the slipstream of a clattering roadster until the exhaust became too unbearable and she zipped around it, nearly running headlong into a fleet of rickshaws.

“Watch it!” cried one of the drivers.

But Zita sped on, watching as the Mercantile District, the tightly knit rows of brick houses and shops, began to fall away and the road became lined with towering trees and wide fern glades. Here the traffic let up, and she was able to really open up the motorcycle’s throttle and the scenery blew by in a fading blur. She girded herself for what was to come.

It had been one thing to climb the North Wall and sneak like a thief into the Avian Principality; it was another to have to blow the gate on a sidecar-dragging motorcycle. There was no way she’d be able to get to Wildwood on foot—it was too far—and right now there was no available transport to North Wood that would let her climb out in the middle of the wildest part of the Wood, not to mention that the next bus wouldn’t be leaving for another three days. So she’d decided she’d just make a run at the gate.

She’d heard, since her early morning escapade in search of the eagle feather, that many of the soldiers who manned the North Gate had abandoned their posts, that a kind of chaos had come over the security infrastructure of South Wood. The word was that the soldiers weren’t getting paid, there was no money left in the coffers, and it was a resilient guardsman indeed who stayed at his post when he hadn’t received a paycheck in three weeks. The Synod had been quickly forthcoming about taking their place, providing security where there was none, but she hoped that transition had yet to reach the North Gate.

The world sped by; the needle quivered on the motorcycle speedometer, and she fell behind a mail truck that was, she assumed, bound for the North Gate. She caught sight of the driver in the truck’s side-view mirror: An old, grizzled man, he wore the visored cap of a postmaster general. After a time, the wall came into view, and she eased up on the throttle, following the truck as it rolled to a slow halt.

Only one soldier, dressed in dirty khakis, appeared to be manning the gate, and he seemed to be none too pleased with the responsibility. Seeing the mail truck, he slowly stepped away from his prior position leaning against the stone wall, and sauntered toward the vehicle. He didn’t ask for papers; he merely looked in the front of the truck and made a visual ID of the subject, nodding. He then walked over to the gate and, after some wrangling, threw the giant double doors open.

That was when Zita made her move.

Letting go the clutch, she cranked the throttle and peeled out from behind the mail truck, spraying a rooster tail of gravel behind her. The soldier, shocked, fell backward and impotently raised his hand in objection. Zita flew through the gate and, quickly shifting, was soon well beyond sight of the soldier’s objecting cries.

It was shocking how easy it was. She threw a glance over her shoulder in time to see a pair of golden eagles swoop down from their perches and fall in behind her, squawking loudly.

“HALT, HUMAN!” one shouted.

Lowering her brow against the headwind, Zita twisted the handgrip, and she felt the bike leap forward at her command; soon the shouts of the pursuing eagles grew quiet and distant behind her. There was little they could do—within an hour she’d be on the other side of the Principality. She was bent on her task, the retrieval of a single pebble from some obscure creek in the middle of Wildwood.

Now that she’d cleared the gate, she had a moment to reflect on the craziness of the thing she’d just done. Where, in what remote part of her, had she managed to distill that kind of courage? She’d never been a particularly courageous kid—not any more so than her schoolmates, though perhaps a little more headstrong and curious—and yet here she was, riding her father’s motorcycle at a breakneck pace through the North Gate and toward the most inhospitable and dangerous province of the Wood. There were stories that were told around fireplaces and banquet halls, stories of wights and wyverns that lived in the depths of Wildwood; stories of the Wildwood bandits, who’d strip you clean of your possessions and leave you tied to a tree in the middle of the wilderness, an easy lunch for any number of wights or wyverns who might happen to be passing by.

All for the strange calling of this woman, this Verdant Empress.

Who was the Verdant Empress? It was one thing she’d had a lot of time to consider. The origin story she had learned (though admittedly there were many) went that she was a bereaved mother, one of the Ancients, a woman whose own child had been violently and horrifically taken from her. It was said she’d died of sadness. And so: She visited the living, children especially, in search of her departed child. If these stories were true, Zita had to think she was doing the spirit world a tremendous service by carrying out these errands.

But there was something else; something else dug at her insides as she went about these tasks, something that had very much to do with the empty sidecar that she tugged alongside the speeding motorcycle.

Zita knew what it was like to lose, to feel loss. She’d felt that incredible incision when her mother had been taken from her.

But her loss hadn’t been violent, not like the Verdant Empress’s—if anything it had been the very opposite: drawn out and slow, the woman’s passing marked by silence and fog. It’d been some kind of illness; that’s what the doctors had said. Some seven months ago, she’d taken to bed at the beginning of the week, complaining of pain in her chest, and by Friday she was gone. And it felt like the foundation that held up Zita’s life had been promptly taken apart, stone by stone, and she was left with a weird, empty space. She felt like a person without legs, like a car without wheels. Like some very integral part of her was missing and yet here she was: keeping going.