Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

“Very well,” said the man. “Let’s get her onboard.” He looked at Prue and said, “I’m very sorry this has to be the way, miss. I’ll try to make your passage as comfortable as I can, given the circumstances. My name is Captain Shtiva. The Jolly Crescent is my ship. Long live the revolution.” He paused and glanced at the Synod members present. “And long live the spirit of the Blighted Tree.”

“Where are you taking me?” asked Prue. She still wasn’t entirely clear what was happening to her. “What have I done?”

The man, Captain Shtiva, frowned. “You are an enemy of the state. I have written authority from the Interim Governor-Regent-elect to carry you to your permanent incarceration on the Crag.” He held up a long and wide envelope, its seal freshly broken. “In the event of your not capitulating to the demands of the Synod.”

“Enemy of the state?” gasped Prue breathlessly. “I’m the hero of the state! They’re poisoning the people—they’re feeding them that stuff—on the tree! It’s changing them! I saw the Bandit King—the Wildwood Bandit King—behind one of those masks! I think there may be more bandits among them! Something very terrible is happening, Captain. I need to stop it. Please, let me go! I have orders from the Council Tree. I have to rebuild the prince. I have to find the makers to reanimate the half-dead prince!” The words now were flowing from her mouth in jerky rivulets. She could feel the spittle flying from her lips.

The captain watched her with a look of abject pity on his face. Her entreaties seemed to make no dent in his resoluteness; if anything, her every word seemed to erode whatever pity he had stored up. He seemed to look at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “Get her onboard,” he said finally. “There’s a berth for her in the lower hold. Make sure she’s locked up tight.”

The men began to hustle Prue away when the captain turned and said, “But keep her safe. I don’t want any harm done in the process. I will not have my hands bloodied further. Is that clear?”

The men murmured their understanding; Prue was led down the path to the bottom of the bank, where a worn dock spread out from the ground into the placid waters of the inlet. The sailors holding her tied hands sniffed at the air; one said, “No mist. How we gonna get to sea?”

“Let the captain manage that,” another said. “Let’s get this one belowdecks.”

Lanterns, hanging from the stout wooden pilings along the dockside, lit the way as Prue was led toward the awaiting ship. She could see the winking lights of the Industrial Wastes just beyond the shade of the trees that marked the boundary between the Wood and the Outside; she assumed the Periphery, that magic ribbon that served as the protective shield around the so-called Impassable Wilderness, was somewhere in her vision, invisible.

The ship swayed as they stepped onto the deck; a crowd of like-dressed sailors stood, mopping the boards, coiling rope, shouldering wooden crates. Prue was escorted toward an opening in the floor; arriving there, she was instructed to climb down a stepladder. A smell of stale beer and moldy cheese attacked her senses as she arrived at the rough wood floor of the belowdecks. Down a crowded passageway she was led to a door made of iron bars, which opened onto a small, closetlike hold. A cot and a tin pail were the room’s only furnishings. A porthole above the cot, its glass pane hatch-marked with iron bands, looked out onto the dark harbor.

Something cold was pressed to her wrists; her bonds fell away and her hands were freed. She rubbed at the sore, reddened welts the ropes had left. Her captors seemed unconcerned that she would attempt any kind of escape.

“Make yerself at home,” one said. “It’s a long journey.”

“Where are we going?” asked Prue. To her recollection, there wasn’t any kind of inland sea in the Wood; if her direction sense was not failing her, they would be plying the waters of the Willamette River.

“To th’ Crag,” said the other.

“What’s that?” When she sensed they were not about to tell her, she tried on her best twelve-year-old-girl pleading voice: “Don’t I have, like, a right to know?”

The two sailors looked at each other uncertainly before one said, “I’ll tell you as much, seein’ as how you’re the Bicycle Maiden. I don’t cotton to what they’re doin’ to you here, but I’m just under orders, right? You’ve been sentenced to the Crag. It’s a rock out in the ocean. It’s a hard, barren place. There ain’t no escapin’ it.” He looked saddened by this description. “I expect you’ll live out yer days there, miss.”

Prue gasped. “What?”

The man shrugged. “Orders, miss.”

“For the good of the revolution,” said the other.

The door was closed in her face, and Prue felt her knees buckle out from under her; she caught herself on the lip of the cot and sat down heavily, her head in her hands, and began to cry. Loud, heaving sobs. They seemed to bucket up from the deepest wells of her gut.

Voices could be heard through the locked door. “Shame, what they’re doing,” said one sailor to another. “A shame.”

“Well, we ain’t going anywhere till we got a mist.”

“It’ll come. Calling for it tonight.”

“Believe it when I see it. C’mon.”

Footsteps trundled up the stepladder; the hatch slammed noisily down behind them. Prue was alone in the hold of the ship. She looked over her shoulder at the dark porthole. Standing on the thin mattress, she peered out the dirty window to watch the lantern light reflected against the water of the placid inlet.

Time passed, slowly.

Far off, the stars were beginning to be blotted out by an approaching fog. Prue turned her face away from the gray window and stared at her small prison cell. She thought about what she’d done, what had transpired to this point; she thought about the great mess she’d caused. She wondered, as people often do when faced with the very real consideration that all their plans have failed miserably, how it could be possible that she could go so wrong. Why

had the tree picked her? Why had she received this communication? Certainly, there were people more qualified for the job of wrangling two missing machinists from exile to re-create a robotic boy prince in the wake of a popular revolution and an aggressive religious takeover.

The hatch on the above-decks opened, and a figure moved silently down the ladder. Prue looked over to see that it was one of the Caliphs, the silver-masked Mystics, come to hold vigil.

“Hi,” said Prue.