He couldn’t, however, have anticipated the horrors that the ivy could create: He rounded the felled stump of a large tree and had to leap back, his heart racing, when one of those ivy-built behemoths came charging down the hillside toward him. He waved his hand to Rachel and Nico, and they dove into cover behind him.
The thing was even more awesome from this perspective, here on the ground. Seeing it from the air had given it a toylike appearance; but from here, from below, the thing looked positively menacing. Thick curtains of ivy poured down from the crown of its head and all but covered its humanlike limbs, which, when they revealed themselves from within a thick screen of ivy, were seen to be rippling with viny sinews. The thing hadn’t seen them, there concealed by the leveled stu
mp, and the three of them watched slack-jawed while it slowly crashed its way through the forest; soon, two more appeared in its wake. One of them stopped and, letting its foot fall with a loud, crashing stomp, sent a tidal wave of ivy up an ancient hemlock, crowning it in vines until it was a sad, drooping thing, a Christmas tree over-decked with tinsel.
“Curtis,” came a hissed voice. It was Septimus, just above them, hidden in the boughs of a tree. “They’re moving toward Deerskull Dragonfighter.”
Just as the rat said this, another crash sounded as one of the giants swung its heavy arm against a tree that had stood in its way; the tree’s massive roots tipped up from the ground, sending a spray of dirt skyward, and it toppled to the forest floor.
Curtis thought quickly; diving out from behind the tree, he dashed toward the ivy giant, waving his saber wildly around his head.
He yelled something then, though he wouldn’t later be able to remember what it was. Even Rachel and Nico, who were still cowering behind the tree trunk, couldn’t be called upon to describe it later, so shocked were they to see this twelve-year-old boy go darting out into the path of possibly the most horrifying and grotesque spectacle they’d ever seen in their lives. All any of them really knew, at that moment, was that the ivy giants, all three of them, stopped what they were doing (which was stomping around, sending up rafts of ivy and knocking trees down) to stare at the small human with a look of seeming disbelief—though it couldn’t be said that the giants had eyes—or even faces; their undulating green heads were totally featureless, covered as they were in deep, shaggy tresses of vines.
Curtis made a few more prancing leaps, shouted something else, turned around, and started running.
One of the three giants lifted its bulky leg and let it fall, stomping out a flurry of ivy vines that shot toward the running boy; they hit the wall of trees Curtis had dived beyond and exploded upward into the branches. Rachel, seeing this, let out a little yelp. One of the giants, having evidently heard her exclamation, swiveled its weird head in her direction and began walking toward her and Nico.
“C’mon!” shouted Nico. He leapt from cover and, following Curtis’s lead, did a little attention-grabbing dance before running toward the distant tree line. Rachel came swiftly behind, running as fast as she could through the thick stratum of ivy that covered everything. Soon, she’d made it beyond the trees and could see the golden fringe of Curtis’s epaulets glinting in the breaking sun.
The giants’ crashing steps sounded loudly behind them as the creatures gave pursuit.
“This way!” shouted Curtis, seeing that Nico and Rachel had followed him. They skittered across the forest floor while a wave of ivy followed them, a flurry of tendrils being sent out with every one of the giants’ footfalls. Finally, Rachel saw Curtis reach a small glade and turn sharply to the left, diving behind a stand of sword ferns. She and Nico followed quickly after, rolling to a stop next to him.
“Heads down!” hissed Curtis, his own cheek kissing the cold scrub of the fern fronds. Rachel did as she was instructed; Nico watched the scene in the meadow play out.
The first giant came clambering past the line of trees and stopped, scanning the landscape for sign of its prey. The clutch of ivy at its large, clubbed feet seemed to pause as well, its waxy leaves swaying about like a many-headed hydra. It seemed momentarily baffled by the humans’ disappearance, standing just on the outskirts of the clearing.
“C’mon,” hissed Curtis. “Just . . . go!”
Rachel shot a curious look at her brother; his attention was fixed on the strange creature.
The giant, then, evidently seemed to make a guess as to which way they’d gone and it began to walk again, taking another lumbering step into the center of the glade. A loud, woody click sounded, and the giant flinched at the noise. No sooner had it done this than the greenery surrounding it seemed to peel back and a vast handwoven net, anchored by an unseen pulley in the trees, whipped up and neatly captured the creature’s legs in its web. The behemoth toppled to the ground with a moan of surprise and anger; the ground tremored at its landfall. The trap gave a noisy complaint, as it was unable to lift the weight of its captive, but the giant seemed fairly ensnared regardless.
Curtis let out a little whoop and pumped his fist against his side, seeing the success of his well-laid trap. He looked at Rachel and Nico, saying, “Not bad, eh?”
The giant writhed in its bonds, letting out angered, rattling groans from its mouthless face. Nico and Rachel looked on with horror. Two more of the giants entered the clearing and, seeing their compatriot caught in the trap, began whipping about angrily, sending vines of ivy from the tips of their long, twiggy fingers.
And that was when Curtis saw her.
The ivy had rustled a little, the dormant ivy that sat in patches about the clearing and issued from the fists of the angry giants, before undulating alive, and the center of the clearing became awash in a kind of turbulent cyclone of writhing greenery, and then the center erupted and out of it grew a pillar of winding vines that, bizarrely, began to take the form of a very human-looking creature. A very human-looking woman.
Even though she was like a sculptor’s replica of an original, the death mask produced by a handy plasterer, Curtis immediately recognized her. It was the same woman who’d taken him in and shown him the Wood in all its glory, when he’d first set foot in this strange place. The woman who’d first put a saber in his hand and given him his own uniform. The first person he’d ever truly known to be evil, and not in the way he’d been accustomed to, growing up in the Outside. She was not some idle felon, not some immoral crook; she was a woman who he’d seen become completely derailed by her own passions. He’d recognized it when he’d come across Prue’s babbling baby brother in a crib surrounded by crows, with her there, complicit in the deed. He remembered her that way, standing amid those black, squawking things, and how her heart outshone even the dark birds in its opaque, bruised blackness.
But what he saw now was green.
Like the giants, her arms were ivy and her legs, splaying out from the ground, were ivy and her lithe torso was ivy. Her face was ivy, but the vines here began cinching closer together until features were constructed and two twin tufts of ivy vines grew from her head and draped down her neck, insinuating themselves together until they became the two braids that the woman had worn in life, so many months ago.
Curtis looked on and saw the writhing body of Alexandra, the Dowager Governess, re-formed from molten ivy.
He felt his sister’s breath at his neck; he felt Nico’s nervous, clutching hand at his shoulder. He wondered, then, if their horror at seeing this specter seemingly rise from the ether was as horrific to them as it was to him; they did not know the heart of this thing. Curtis had reckoned it immediately.
“No,” he breathed quietly. “It can’t be.”
“What?” asked Rachel. “What is it?”
“Looks like a she,” said Nico.
“We have to get out of here,” replied Curtis in a whisper. In the clearing, this new, plantlike Alexandra had completed her transformation and was now standing and inspecting the damage wrought by Curtis’s trap. She casually circled the collapsed net while the giant within had ceased his protestations and was lying dormant. The ivy-woman, some ten feet tall, did not so much walk as re-transform herself at every step, the ivy that made up her flesh and bones reconfiguring and re-entwining to give the illusion of walking.