“Gone, gone. Forever gone. Marooned on the Crag. She won’t last out the week. I’d say your best bet is to simply let myself and Carol go. You are all, in one way or another, Outsiders who are simply out of your depth. This is much bigger than you.” The man shifted in his bindings awkwardly as he spoke. “As we speak, the Synod is expanding their control over the Wood. You will all eventually be assimilated, should you choose to stay, or simply be pushed out of the way.”
“Assimilated?” breathed Nico.
“Yes,” said the man as he, with some difficulty, righted himself back into a seated position. “Like your fellow bandits. They’re part of the Synod now.”
“What?” shouted Curtis, suddenly walking toward the man as if he were intent on setting him on fire with the torch. The man flinched to see the boy approach. “You know where the bandits are?”
“Oh yes,” said Roger, clearly amused that his words had stung. “They’re with us now.”
Curtis stumbled a little; his face slackened with shock.
“What’s the Synod, anyway?” asked Rachel, staring curiously at her brother.
“The Holy Mystics of the Blighted Tree,” said Roger. “Or some such rubbish. Doesn’t matter. Now that the Synod has imposed its rule, there’s little to stop us. The Spongiform is all-powerful.”
“I don’t really have a clear idea what you’re talking about, but I don’t particularly like it,” said Nico, staring down at the man. He looked back to Curtis. “Can I kick him again?”
“Wait,” said Curtis, shaking himself from his reverie, holding up his palm. He knelt down beside Roger and grabbed him by the scruff of his robe. “Tell me,” he said. “What happened to the bandits? What did you do to them?”
“Oh, it was all fairly innocent,” said Roger. “We’d known you were looking for the makers. We discovered where you were hiding. We assimilated your friend first. I believe his name was Seamus? The emissary, left behind after the revolution. To ‘represent’ the Wildwood bandits. Needless to say, he didn’t do a very good job. We fed him the Spongiform and then commanded him to do the same to your fellow bandits. It’s quite miraculous how that little fungus works, actually. It spread so easily—”
He was interrupted when, on Curtis’s signal, black-bereted Nico gave him another kick in the ribs. He let out a groan and toppled over again. Curtis dragged him and held his face within inches of his own. The talking rat perched on his shoulder stuck out his snout so that he, too, was staring down the captive.
“I don’t know who you are or what your master plan is here,” said Curtis. “But you’re going to take me to the bandits, and you’re going to make this right.”
“What he said,” said the rat.
The spectral figures in the trees, the ones the Unadoptables and Nico had seen surrounding them when they’d still been in pursuit of Roger and Carol, had been a particular challenge. Curtis had apparently started with one—he’d named him Jack after one of his departed fellow bandits—and slowly expanded once he’d gathered enough resources. It was hard, he said, finding the right shape tree branches and trunks. Moss could be used to mimic the scraggly beards that were a hallmark of the bandit style; the right angle of maple branches made apt arms, resolutely crossed at the chest. He’d decided, in the bandit band’s absence, that at least a show must be made. Like the extinction of some vital organism, Curtis believed that were the Wildwood bandits to disappear altogether, it would upset the delicate balance of Wildwood’s ecosystem.
This was the story he told as the group made their way, in the dark of night, toward South Wood. Their goal seemed simple, if somewhat challenging: to free the bandits, rescue Esben Clampett, and hopefully, save Prue from her harrowing sentence on the Crag. They were an interesting group: The boy with the brocaded uniform and the talking rat led the way with his two sisters, dressed in identical black turtlenecks, at his side. Directly behind him was the blind man, Carol Grod, who was being guided along the road by goggled Martha Song. Their captive walked slowly in the midst of the group, his head solemnly downcast, while Nico and the other three Unadoptables kept a wary eye on him, lest he should escape into the surrounding woods.
The traps were another matter altogether, Curtis explained to the group, and he hadn’t taken on the challenge until he’d found that he was becoming more and more handy repurposing the salvaged flora of the woods. He’d expected to catch food or intruders; he had not, in a million years, thought he’d nab his sisters.
“But why?” It had been Elsie’s nagging q
uestion, all along. “Why’d you go through with all of it?”
“I made an oath, Els,” replied her brother. “The Bandit Oath. I swore to uphold the band. I figured this was the way to do it.”
The story went like this: He’d returned to the Wood, crossing through metropolitan Portland in the dead of night. He’d left Prue to her own devices, having decided, once and for all, that his loyalty remained with the Wildwood bandits. He’d witnessed the scene at the bandit camp, that day when Darla and her fellow Kitsunes had attacked the two children and sent them spilling into the depths of the Long Gap, and was longing to get back to investigate the bandits’ disappearance.
“You walked through Portland?” interjected Rachel. “You were there?”
“Yeah,” said her brother, a little sheepishly. “I walked by the house. Everyone was gone. Figured you guys were on, like, vacation or something.”
“You walked by the house,” repeated Rachel plainly.
“Yeah.” The boy seemed to suspect what was coming.
“Well, we weren’t on vacation. Actually we were in an awful orphanage-slash-factory and Mom and Dad were in Turkey and Russia and wherever else, looking for you,” said Rachel.
“C’mon, Rach,” chided Elsie. “We’ve been through all that.”
Rachel mumbled something grumpily in response while Curtis, thankful for his younger sister’s defense, continued.
He’d then retraced his steps, back when he’d first followed Prue into the place he’d always known as the Impassable Wilderness and his life had changed so precipitously. He crossed the Railroad Bridge, thankfully avoiding any sort of run-in with another southbound locomotive, and crossed over the thick mantle of trees. He found himself, very quickly, back in Wildwood.
“It’s where we are now,” he explained, gesturing to the darkened trees around them, lit by the bare throw of the torch’s light. “It’s the frontier, the wild part of the Wood. Everything that goes on here, it’s still kind of a mystery. Even the oldest bandits would tell stories about ghosts and sprites living in the trees.”