Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

“Hold up!” shouted Septimus, rat-galloping across the bridge. “I’m coming!”

He scurried up the fir trunk, circling it as he went so as to avoid the most rapacious vines. When he made the platform, he was surprised to see that he’d beaten the ivy there—though it was fast approaching. On a simple, five-by-five wooden ledge stood six people. The platform had been built just ten feet shy of the very top of the tree, which itself stood some two hundred and fifty feet tall above the ground. The tree was hale and hearty, boasting some half dozen centuries on the earth, but its crown was swaying under the weight of its six (now seven) occupants like a particularly tall man undergoing a fainting spell. They were five children, a rat, and a blind old man, and they stood on the platform with their backs pressed to the tree’s diminished trunk.

“Okay!” said Septimus, finding a postage-stamp-sized spot for himself. “I’m here.”

The people on the platform shared uncertain glances.

“Where’s Curtis?” asked Elsie.

“Down there, fighting ivy,” said Septimus.

“We tried to save Roger,” shouted Martha, pointing out at the nearby trees. “But we couldn’t get to him in time.” Everything was drowning in the ivy wave. The tree that held the weight of their captive’s pen, several yards off, was completely enshrouded.

Septimus gulped. “Let’s just hope it was quick and painless.”

The wind picked up and buffeted the top of the tree like a rubbery antenna; wide-shouldered Harry gave a whimper and pressed his small back closer to the tree’s trunk. The sound of the ivy, a kind of scratchy slither, was everywhere, like snakes moving through rustling leaves. They heard a shout from far below; Septimus reckoned it to be Curtis’s voice. He peered over the edge of the platform and yelled, “Hang on there, Curtis!”

“What do we do?” asked Martha, her hand firmly grasped in Carol’s.

“Get he

lp,” said Septimus. “That’s what Curtis suggested.”

“How do we do that?” This was Elsie.

Septimus chewed on his lower lip for a second before saying, “Shout?”

“That’s sort of what we’ve been doing,” said Ruthie.

Suddenly, a loud crack sounded. Some of the ivy had crept through a break in the platform’s thin, hand-milled planks and had broken away a large chunk right below Oz’s feet. He immediately lost his balance and pinwheeled out into the air.

“Oz!” shouted Ruthie. Just as he tipped off the edge, the girl managed to grasp hold of his hand. It was an impetuous move on Ruthie’s part, one driven by the fierce love and dedication the two shared, but the very real facts of gravity and motion made it so that Ruthie joined Oz in his downward plummet.

Elsie screamed; Martha planted her feet. Harry jolted forward, his hand interlocked with Elsie’s, and swung one thick arm in a quick swoop, snagging Ruthie by her black Chapeaux Noirs–issue pant leg. The momentum of the two children’s fall was stopped, briefly, as the forward motion of the energy was distributed backward through Harry’s arm to Elsie’s hand; from there it was further absorbed by Martha, whose elbow was interlocked around Elsie’s, and finally to Carol, who, instinctively, had thrown his arms around the trunk of the tree while Martha looped her fingers into his hand-spun rope belt.

Septimus, now doubly certain of the very extreme lack of hope in their present circumstances, began running in quick, panicked circles on his small portion of the rickety platform. The ivy continued its steady crawl, unabated, and it began to lap over the edge of the shingle.

They were all screaming various shouts and epithets, a bond of adrenaline running through them. Except for Oz, at the end of the chain, hanging several hundred feet above the ground, who had promptly passed out cold.

Elsie felt like she was about to be torn in two; she could feel the ivy now, licking at her shoe soles. Terrified as she was of losing her footing, she could only watch as the stuff began its steady, untrammeled assault on her ankles and her calves. Septimus valiantly ran about, trying to swat off the encroaching vines, but soon it became too much. The platform was becoming overrun. The tree teetered under the strain of the ivy and the wind and the hanging chain of humans swinging from its crown.

Elsie looked at the ground; she looked at the sky and the scattering clouds. The long horizon laid itself out before her, and a kind of peaceful resolve descended as the pressure exerted between her left elbow and her right hand grew so great as to almost dissolve. There was nowhere to go now. There was nothing that could be done. Why fight? she thought. Her whole life, she realized, had led to this very point. Every choice, every decision she’d made revealed itself to her as a long chain, not unlike the one for which she was currently a link, one that led inextricably to her present circumstances. In this light, it was as if she’d been living this moment her entire life, as everything else: Every memory, every dream, was sublimated into this single, final moment in all its pitching, wheeling chaos.

So it did not surprise her to see Oz’s pant leg finally tear—could they have really put so much faith in the seam-sewing handiwork of a bunch of subterranean-dwelling explosive experts?—and to watch the boy, his right leg comically bare, begin to fall. Some of the pressure on her arm vanished at that moment, though it couldn’t be said to matter that much: The ivy was now entirely consuming her legs.

What was surprising, however, was the dark shape that suddenly flew beneath her vision, distorting the air between Ruthie’s outstretched hand (torn pant shred firmly gripped) and Oz’s spinning, falling shape. A flurry of wind and feathers.

Had it been a bird? But there was something else—had there been someone riding on the back of the bird?

There had, hadn’t there?

However, she didn’t have much chance to consider the implication of this bizarre vision when Ruthie, screaming, slipped from her grasp and another brownish shape dove in and stopped her from her free fall. The sudden loss of Ruthie’s downward pull threw off the balance of the chain, and Elsie was nearly about to follow her fellow Unadoptables’ trajectory when she felt something sharp pinch into the flesh at her shoulders and she was suddenly pulled upward, her feet torn free of their ivy webbing.

Her head bobbled on her neck and she looked down at her legs, a few strands of ivy still clinging to her shoes, as the world grew smaller below her and she rose into the air.

Fearfully, her heartbeat wailing in her eardrums, she looked upward and saw that she was being carried in the talons of an eagle.

What’s more, as they rose above the highest treetops, the eagle fell into formation with a menagerie of avian creatures, small and large. Elsie saw, to her great surprise, that many of the bigger birds carried riders on their feathery backs.