Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

Alexandra called out her son’s name. The boy stopped, just in the shade of the house. She said something then, something she couldn’t later recall, later when she replayed the entire exchange in her mind, over and over again, like a film taped in a tight loop, always stopping when the boy had reached the shelter of the building’s shade, connecting smoothly and flawlessly with the image that had preceded it, with him approaching, there in the same rhombus of dark. She said something: perhaps a word of caution. A token of motherly concern, in the hopes he might carry it with him, like a guarding charm. Or was it something unimportant? An impotent demand, a suggestion that these sorts of privileges were conditional, dependent on his good works. It never was clear. She tried, later, to conjure from that mist, that long patch of shade, a simple declaration. That she had told him that she loved him. That he was everything to her. But then he was gone, and the film replayed: the heat, the light, the block beneath her foot, the sound of his voice.

Because what came next was nothing.

It almost seems pointless to recount it.

She is in the gardening shed, peeling the gloves from her hands. She is hanging the sun hat on a hook. She is speaking to the master gardener, briefly. She is remembering the glass of water. She is walking through the back door, through the glassed-in sunroom. Across the checkerboard of the foyer; she is greeting a staff member bent at some task. She is entering the kitchen, acknowledging the kitchen staff quietly, trying to be unseen. An empty glass under the tap. And then: a shout from the courtyard, loud, through the window. Looking up to see a wild black horse, rearing. Mr. Cooper struggling to hold the bridle.

Her son, Alexei, fifteen summers, lying on the ground.

She dropped the glass in the sink, its crystalline shatter a tiny explosion, and ran for the front doors. She threw them open, her thin limbs imbued with a new strength, and tore out into the courtyard, her every heartbeat a fresh tremor in her ears. Mr. Cooper was shouting, wrangling the horse as it kicked and whinnied. No obstacle could stop Alexandra from getting to her son, and she felt the air the horse moved all around her and felt the pebbles spat by the horse’s hooves shower her.

There was blood. A lot of blood. The boy was pale and still as a stone, as still and pale as a white stone. The red blood seeped onto the courtyard and welled about his head. His hair was matted with fresh blood, and his eyes were closed.

She grabbed him by the shoulders and held him to her chest. She shouted his name. She threw her arms around his limp body and embraced it with all the energy and love she could muster. She thought, maybe, she felt the last few thrums of his heart. Little phantoms. Little wisps of smoke: gone as quickly as they’d appeared.

She felt him disappear. Fourteen winters, gone.

The horse had been spooked, they said. A flash of light from the bright summer sun against a leaded pane of glass. A thrush startled from its hiding. His little body had been thrown from the horse’s back like a doll. He’d hit the cobbles headfirst and was gone before he could utter a cry. The boy couldn’t have felt a thing, they reasoned, they reassured. But no amount of reassurance could placate the demon inside Alexandra’s breast. She stayed by the lifeless body of her son for days; she bade the funeral director teach her how to clean the body. She performed the ablutions lovingly, as she had when the boy had been alive: A sallow yellow sponge carefully ran along his abalone skin. He had put up such a fuss, hadn’t he, when she’d done the same thing when he was alive? She’d practically had to wrestle him down, in a torrent of water and bath suds, to wash his feet, his shoulders, his little fingers: him laughing ecstatically, she trying to keep her composure, the placid mother. The picture of calm. But now he lay still and raised no objection to her washings.

Maybe it was then that she decided that this was not her son. This still thing. That there was something else, something elusive, that had animated this dead vessel. They interred the boy with full honors, the same band that played for his birthday playing for his funeral. Grigor, of course, was in bed, having heaped enough blame on himself for his son’s death that he could barely rise under the weight. She became disgusted with her husband as the demon inside her breast grew larger and noisier. She stood silently as the casket was entombed and ignored the hushed words of sympathy from the surrounding mourners.

She’d had an idea. Something that occurred to her one night, as she lay beside the sleeping body of her idle, bedridden husband. The film unspooled in her head, the loop of film that ran from Alexei’s arrival

to his departure in that same piece of shade by the Mansion wall. It was as if, suddenly, after reviewing the same piece of film for the hundredth time, without an inkling that anything new would reveal itself, she’d caught a glimpse of something. Something only she could see.

She had a plan.

Grigor died, the fool. Shortly after the funeral. She woke up one day to find him dead, and that was that. Poor Grigor. His heart simply became too heavy, there in the cavity of his chest. She loathed him for his cowardice. The funeral players had barely been disbanded when they were called again for the Governor-Regent’s burial, to be laid in state in a tomb not far from his departed son. The government was thrown into confusion; no sooner had the man been put in the ground than his silent, seething wife was crowned the Dowager Governess, to reign over South Wood in her husband’s stead; but this new ruler had different concerns on her mind.

She consulted ancient texts, sought the teachings of market conjurers, reviled necromancers. She invited them into the Mansion, braving the scorning eyes of her staff. Soon, the air in the stuffy place breathed with the smell of sandalwood and sage. She started with simple conjures: a piece of red tissue, flourished correctly, could become a songbird; a table could be set to dance on its legs. They taught her the magic sigils to ease rain from a threatening cloud, they showed her which mushrooms provoked the greatest visions—they even taught her the steps required to gain command over the ivy. But she always pressed her teachers for the ultimate incantation: to call a soul back from the land of the dead.

An itinerant herbalist who claimed Wildwood as his home province was sought and retained. He was thought to be the greatest sorcerer in the whole of the Wood, more powerful than the Mystics of the North, all of whom had spurned her when she sought their counsel.

Savages, she thought. Witch doctors and savages. They would soon know true power.

The herbalist sat quietly in the Dowager’s study, glancing about the room with a disinterested air. He wore little more than rags, and a conical felt hat was perched on the crown of his head. A tremendous beard grew down to his knees, a white and stringy thing in which it seemed all manner of living things had taken up residence.

“No,” he’d said finally, once he’d had his fill of the Mansion’s poppy beer and cleaned his plate of the stew he’d been served. “This thing can’t be done. To return a soul to a body long dead idn’t possible. P’raps if I’d a-gotten to him right after ’is time of passin’. Maybes then. Now, no. Y’need a vessel to contain th’ soul. Not no rotted carcass.”

“What kind of vessel?” she asked, leaning in from her chair, smarting at this ugly man’s description of her son as a rotten thing. She couldn’t stand the image it summoned.

“A seed,” said the man slowly: a mentor doling out his wisdom. “Can be taken from th’ fruit and when its flesh is gone, be trick’d into life when placed in a simple glass o’ water.”

“You’re saying my son’s soul can be brought back in a glass of water?” asked the Governess in disbelief.

The man grumbled. “No,” he said. “I mean to say that th’ spark o’ life remains in the tiny bits o’ the body and can be tricked, with th’ right conjuries, into comin’ afresh if the right sort o’ en-vir-onment is provided.”

“But how? What do you mean, environment?”

“Y’ must build a new body for the boy. One that matches all th’ intricacies of the flesh-and-blood machine. Plant the seed there. Only then can the living thing grow again.”

She’d known toy makers who could build things of staggering complexity: little automaton dolls she’d been given on her own birthdays as a child. Surely such a thing could be built. “But what is the seed?” she asked.

The old man smiled, revealing an astonishingly ugly row of brownish-yellow nubs. “The teeth,” he said. “Y’ must retrieve th’ teeth.”

And so she did; the body was exhumed secretly—present were only herself and a short, muscular grave digger named Ned. She watched him break the seal and pull back the door of the mausoleum; she held the lantern for him to see. At long last, the body was recovered. Alexandra, by this point, was indifferent to the condition of the body, of her deceased son. She knew that it was simply his disused husk, a banana peel thrown on the compost heap. She removed his teeth one after another, methodically, as if she were plucking feathers from a chicken bound for the oven.

The grave digger, Ned, was exiled promptly the next day.