Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

Zita lifted the mask from her face, letting it rest on the crown of her head. She didn’t expect she’d see any Caliphs here, at the cemetery, where few people would think to go after eleven. But she kept the mask poised, just in case, so she could bat it down over her face at a moment’s notice. She gave the gate a push; it creaked a little, and she squeezed herself through the opening.

She made her way by the rows of headstones, along the avenues of memorial plaques, all littered with drying flowers, toward a shape she could just make out through the thickening mist: a gabled roof, on a little rise in the earth, with a fluted portico. She’d seen it often—it was impossible to miss. Every Sunday, when she and her father made their way drearily to this cemetery, their arms filled with fresh-cut flowers, she would look at that strange, noble mausoleum and wonder: what an incredible testament, what a gift, to be housed in such a glorious tomb. She wondered at the person resting within—her father had explained to her that it housed the remains of Alexei Svik, the son of the old Governess. Her mind boggled at the importance of the child, the heir to the Mansion. How his greatness required such an elaborate monument be made over his deceased form.

But then she changed her mind; with every visit to her mother’s gravesite, some yards below where the prince’s mausoleum stood, she grew disgusted with the building. No one ever visited it, not that she could tell, and no flowers were scattered across its granite veranda. What an ostentatious display of reverence, she thought, for just another person dead. What made his death more important than any other’s, that he required such a monument? Her heart was broken, her father’s life was a shambles, and every Sunday they came to remove the old flowers and replace them with the new ones at the simple grave of her mother, a woman who had meant more to them than any deceased royal or gentleman-in-waiting, while the prince’s cold tomb remained unvisited, unloved. She wanted to tear it down, piece by piece, and use the salvaged remnants to build a shrine to her grief for the loss of her mother, one that she and her father could visit every day and cry over. Something big that towered over everything around it; something so big that it blocked the sun.

So she did not feel an iota of remorse about what was asked of her—to violate the tomb and desecrate its lifeless occupant. To push back the lid of the sarcophagus and remove the body’s teeth.

Strangely, she found she was numb to the macabre nature of the act; she was now too determined to be thrown by anything. The Verdant Empress had asked this much of her. She would show the spirit that she was not cowed.

Zita did not stop at her mother’s grave. Not tonight. Her eyes remained locked on the prince’s tomb and she walked steadily toward it, weaving between the tidy, moss-grown plots along the way.

The door to the tomb was made of iron and hung on ancient metal hinges. Zita gave a quick look around her before she pried the door open and slipped into the mausoleum. Inside, all was dark. She shone her flashlight around the small entry chamber and watched as the light fell on various items that had been laid there: a child’s doll, a toy castle, a riding crop. Evidently the things the family of the deceased boy had thought should be interred with his body. The room let onto another, larger room, and in the center of this chamber she saw the sarcophagus.

It wasn’t too long or wide; it was the size you would expect to hold the body of a teenaged boy. It was made of polished stone, and some coffin maker had gone to the extra trouble to carve a frieze around the beveled edge of the lid: a woodland scene with a group of elk being chased by a boy on a horse through a grove of flowering trees. Zita ran her fingers along the decoration as she looked for the seam between it and the container itself. Finding a spot, she gritted her teeth and pushed; the lid groaned and slid slightly to one side.

It had taken, really, all the strength she could conjure to push it a scant few inches. She peeked into the crack she’d made between the lid and the coffin; the light from her flashlight caught the fringe edge of an epaulet. She pushed again, setting the flashlight down on the ground next to her. Again, it moved a few inches before she had to stop and take a deep breath. She glanced heavenward, wish-thinking to the spirits of the air that maybe the Verdant Empress could just come now and help her. But no: She had a rite to complete.

She knitted her brow, braced herself against the cold stone of the floor, curled her finger around the edge of the coffin lid and again, with all her strength, pushed. The lid gave and an opening spread out; the body was revealed. The far edge of the coffin lid suddenly tipped, and the weight of the lid came toppling down on the other side of the container, cracking into pieces with a loud crash. Zita screamed and leapt back—she hadn’t intended that.

Her hand to her face, she walked slowly toward the open coffin and looked inside.

There, lying peacefully, was a boy.

A boy her age, she judged. Untouched by the weathers of time. His skin was perfectly pale and placid. His eyes were closed and his face was set in a look of almost resigned quiet. He was beautiful, this boy. Suddenly, Zita felt a shock of remorse for her loathing of the mausoleum, of the monument to the boy. It wasn’t as if he’d had a say in how he was memorialized; he had no more choice in his death than in his birth. The garish display of his mausoleum had been t

he work of a state intent on creating a symbol of this boy and of the enduring legacy of his family name, no more.

He wore a tidy and pressed uniform, with gold-fringed epaulets at the shoulders, and tarnished brass buttons ran in a clean line down his chest. Looking closer, Zita noted that there were little rivets along the side of his chin and a hinge—yes, it was a hinge!—had been soldered at his jaw. She shone the flashlight closer and saw that his face was not, in fact, made of flesh but instead a kind of pearly-white metallic material. She reached into the coffin and, experimenting, tapped a finger against the boy’s cheek; the sound came back hollow, tinny.

“Huh,” said Zita aloud.

This much she’d known, that the Governess had re-created the boy as a mechanical facsimile of her deceased child. What she hadn’t realized or reckoned was the incredible care that had gone into the making of this automaton. It was uncanny, really, the resemblance it bore to the organic thing it was modeling. The craftsmanship involved was dizzying.

Recalling herself to her task, she balanced the flashlight on the edge of the coffin and set about managing her first-ever postmortem dental extraction.

Using both hands, she pulled the jaw of the boy open and found that the lips separated with the ease of a well-oiled pair of garden clippers. Holding the jaw carefully prized apart with two fingers, she grabbed the flashlight with her other hand and shone it into the cavity of the boy’s mouth. There, set into the metal, were a set of handsome—and very human—teeth.

Somehow, the synthetic nature of the rest of the boy’s head and face tempered the wave of nausea that had begun creeping up through Zita’s chest as she began the careful extraction. She’d laid the flashlight by the boy’s ear in order to get the scant light right, and, with two fingers keeping the metallic jaws pried apart, she gripped the top row of teeth and pulled. To her surprise, the entire row released from the jaw with very little resistance—a kind rubbery pop sounded as she did so—and she held the thing in her hands up to the flashlight’s beam: Some sort of pinkish material held the teeth in formation; little copper rivets seemed to hold them to the mold. Sticking the thing in her pocket, she pulled the bottom row of teeth out in a similar fashion. The jaw, apparently set on springs, clicked back into place.

Something stirred somewhere, something almost imperceptible. A slight change in temperature, a shift in the timbre of the ambient noise in the mausoleum. Zita glanced around the room, at the cold, fluted pillars that supported the four corners of the slanted roof. She backed away from the opened sarcophagus and edged toward the entrance. A sudden breeze erupted out of nowhere, strong enough to make the heavy iron door at the entrance moan slightly on its hinges.

She shoved the second set of teeth into the pocket of her robe. They were now joined with the eagle feather and the white pebble. She turned and began to run for the entrance of the tomb, suddenly overcome with anxiety. The green mask fell over her face, startling her. She dashed out of the door and into the cemetery.

A wind had picked up, and it shook the ancient trees of the graveyard; the beam of the flashlight danced before her as Zita ran down the little paved walkways between the graves. She squeezed back through the wrought-iron gate and onto the road. A gang of robed guards, the Watch, appeared from around the bend in the road. Taking a deep breath, she calmed herself and slowed her walk. She noticed they seemed to be agitated; they were all looking up at the waving branches of the trees. They seemed alarmed by the sudden and strange shift in the weather.

They saw her and hollered something; it was lost in the wind, which was now blowing powerfully enough to bend the thickest boughs on the oldest tree. Something cracked; a limb fell noisily to the cobbled street below. It fell into the midst of the gathered figures, scattering them, and Zita ran in the other direction.

The wind barked and the trees shook all around her; it was as if the forest itself was trying to stop her from finishing her rite. Leaving the road and breaking through a thicket of briars, she felt the thorns tear at her robe as if they were fingers holding her back. The branches lashed at her face; the green mask protected her, but she felt battered nonetheless.

Finally, she arrived at her destination. The glow of the flashlight lit up the mossy green walls of the old stone house; the village clock, somewhere, chimed midnight. The wind howled through the empty cavities of the house’s windows and whipped down through its open roof.

She stumbled through the broken door and fell to her knees in the thick carpet of ivy that was the house’s floor. The wind was practically roaring now and a heavy rain had started, thrashing sideways across Zita’s face once she’d thrown her mask to the ground. She dropped her father’s Synodal robe from her body, revealing the white dress beneath, and adjusted the flower crown on her head. Her brown hair was soaked through almost instantaneously. The water was pouring down her face as she thrust her hands into the robe’s pocket and retrieved the three things she’d stowed there: an eagle’s feather. A pearly stone. A boy’s full set of teeth.

She thrust her hands into the robe’s pocket and retrieved the three things she’d stowed there: an eagle’s feather. A pearly stone. A boy’s full set of teeth.

From the other pocket, she pulled the little bowl, the bowl that had been her mother’s, the one she’d kept on her dresser. She set it carefully down in the bed of ivy (which was now writhing in the wind) and, one after another, she placed the three items in the bowl.

First, the feather.