Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

The bear returned to his position, gamely stirring the fire with his hooks, and his mind drifted, his belly somewhat sated by the rations Prue had brought him. After a time, he lay back with his head against a log and watched the wheeling stars above his head, trying to pick out Ursa Major, the Big Bear—it was his favorite constellation. Finding it, he followed the tail toward the bright point just above it—it was the belt buckle of the Toy Soldier, a constellation his father had shown him as a cub. His father said it was a guiding light for the makers of things, for the tinkerers and the riveters. The bear felt himself drift off as he began to imagine the task before him: the re-creation of his greatest achievement, the mechanical boy prince. It would be hard, granted, but he was up for the task. He only needed hands, gifted hands, and he guessed that the girl Prue was bound to find them for him. Sleep stole over him as he recalled his old compatriot Carol Grod, the Outsider machinist; their hours of toiling in the Mansion garret. He recalled the old man’s complexion, the cadence of his voice; a kindred spirit.

The bear had only been asleep a few hours when he heard the whistle. It was shrill, practiced. Impressive, he thought. A little woodshedding goes a long way. By the time he’d gained enough consciousness to realize how faulty this logic seemed, it was too late.

They kept to the road; that was the strategy. Staying out in the open. Still: The wrought-iron gaslights that began appearing along the side of the road did little to dispel the gloom that seemed to hover just beyond the trees. Prue found herself darting quick glances out into the dark, imagining an army of shape-shifting life science teachers emerging, claws bared, shifting interminably between human and fox.

Reflexively, she focused her mind and listened.

The plants and trees, the bushes and the shrubs, all spoke in a collective ratt

le. It’d been something she’d been able to do for a while now: Prue could hear the voices of the living vegetation around her. Only once had the voices codified into any kind of language she could understand, and that happened at a moment of extreme duress. On the other hand, it seemed that they were able to understand her, which was something, anyway. But she’d heard a word—a clear, concise holler of GO!—when Darla, the assassin, had been in hiding, preparing her attack. Prue had been waiting, these many months since that occurrence, to hear another word, another English word, spoken. But nothing had come—just more humming and whispering. It had something to do with the intensity of the situation, she assumed. Something in her had clicked; she guessed she didn’t quite have the discipline to make it happen again. And now: Could the rattling of the surrounding forest be a kind of warning in its own right? Was another assassin, bound to her task, waiting for the precise moment to attack?

No answer was forthcoming.

The fox-women of her imagination continued their advance.

She blinked the image away and faced forward in the seat of the rickshaw, watching Neil the badger’s bobbing head as he skillfully piloted the little vehicle over the cobblestones of the Long Road. Charlie gamely trotted alongside, keeping a guarded watch on their surroundings as they traveled.

“How’s it going up there?” she asked Neil, trying to drive the fear from her mind.

“Oh, fine,” said the badger between labored breaths.

“Are you sure you want to drive me? I could easily walk.”

“No, no, no.” The badger shook his head vehemently. “The road is rough, Maiden. You might throw your ankle. And then where would we be?”

“I’ve actually done that before and—”

“Besides,” Neil continued, “no one knows these roads like me. I can get you there in half the time.”

“Okay,” said Prue. She knew better than to argue with the badger. In any case, riding in a rickshaw did give her a kind of aura of importance—they seemed to collect hangers-on wherever they went. Riding from the Mansion, after the debacle in the Archives, had been like wading naked through a cloud of mosquitoes: No sooner had the mob been dispersed by the Synod when a new congregation of admirers appeared, previously hard-liner Spokes who now adopted the slogans: “REANIMATE THE PRINCE ALEXEI!” and “BRING THE ROBOT BACK!” The boy’s last name, Svik, was conspicuously absent from these shouted mantras; Prue suspected there was a kind of cognitive dissonance going on—a phrase her dad had once defined for her as being the ability to believe in two radically conflicting beliefs at the same time, despite the illogic of it all. She could see how these political movements got their steam.

And now: She’d barely finished flipping through these series of thoughts and recollections when she found that the rickshaw was once again surrounded by a small crowd of Spokes and admirers, citizens roused from their beds when Prue’s arrival had been announced by some overexcited witness. They came teeming about the rickshaw, some still wearing their pajamas, climbing on top of its canopy and dragging along the back. Initially, Charlie made an effort to keep the carriage free of hangers-on, but soon the collective momentum of the crowd was so great that Neil didn’t even have to pull the cart—it was carried along like a paper boat in a swiftly flowing stream. Needless to say, the specter of Kitsunes creeping in the bushes seemed a concern of the past.

“We’re with you, Maiden!” shouted some from the crowd. “It’s time to bring back the mechanical boy prince!”

“Peace! Peace in our time!”

The crowd carved their way into the populated districts of South Wood, past the storefronts and the houses, around the wide path that bowed away from the glow of the Mansion’s lit windows. Here, the forest grew darker. The canopy of the trees seemed to hang lower over the road, and the gas lamps were fewer and fewer. Many of the crowd that followed the rickshaw seemed to stray, and the throng grew thinner.

“Where are you going, Maiden?” one follower, a teenaged bear in a bicycle cap, inquired.

“To the Blighted Tree. I’m supposed to meet someone there.”

“Who would want to meet you there?”

“Gonna find out, I guess,” said Prue.

“Ooh,” said someone at Prue’s left. She turned to see it was a middle-aged woman, dressed in a kind of flowery-patterned dress. “They speak to the trees, you know. They can hear the plants talk.”

Prue smiled, though the idea made her all the more confused: Were these Synod members simply the South Wood’s answer to the Mystics of the North? She thought of Iphigenia, the dear departed Elder Mystic, and wished she could be here now to guide her. She didn’t know who to trust, what to believe. She listened for the trees, again, and noticed a marked change in their tone: The noises were lower and almost throatier. What’s more, she could now discern a kind of hum occurring just on the fringes of her hearing. Something big, like the lowing of somebody’s car stereo, just down the street and out of view.

“Here we are,” said Neil, drawing up at the top of a little rise in the road where two gnarled and ancient hemlocks made a kind of gateway. “The Blighted Tree’s just beyond there.”

“Will you come with?” asked Prue.

“Only those who are called can cross the threshold to the Blighted Glade,” said Charlie. He nodded his head, gesturing to the road ahead, and Prue saw two figures appear from behind the hemlocks. They wore identical gray hooded robes that covered their bodies entirely. As they came closer, a bright spark of light, a reflection from a nearby gas lamp, revealed that their faces were covered in silvery mirrored masks. The look was alarming, and Prue stared in disbelief at the two approaching figures.

The few stragglers of the crowd around the rickshaw fell away, bowing reverentially to these strange newcomers. Prue stepped down to the road and greeted the figures, saying, “Hi.” When there came no response, she said, “I’m Prue. I’m supposed to meet someone? At the tree?”