They watched him fall headlong into the ivy bird, his quick fingers grasping hold deep into the viny innards of the thing. Then, with the tenacity only a rat could muster, he began laying into the creature with his teeth. It let out a hollow, woody cry and fell away from Sterling’s egret, but not before Septimus had jumped from its rapidly decomposing body and onto the fox’s shoulder.
Curtis let out a heroic whoop at the rat’s clever action before turning his attention back to the Verdant Empress, raging at the edge of the circle of giants.
“See if you can’t get us closer to the woman!” shouted Curtis to the heron.
Suddenly, Prue felt two sharp pincers stab into her shoulders; she jerked her head upward to see that one of the ivy birds had dropped down on them from above and had clamped its talons on her back. She screamed and tried to evaporate the specter, like she had the tendrils the Verdant Empress had shot from her fingers, but her mind grew confused. The heron had banked sharply in an effort to lose the attacker, having heard her rider’s call, and it sent Prue’s mind spinning in vertigo; she couldn’t muster the focus to dissipate the animated ivy. She felt her body lift from the back of the heron; the ivy bird was intent on carrying her away!
“Hold up there, lass!” came a voice. Suddenly, the talons were torn from her shoulders, taking a good portion of her peacoat with them, and she dropped heavily back onto the heron. Looking up, she saw that her attacker was being carried, its claws grasping at thin air, by a very large eagle. On the eagle’s back rode Brendan the Bandit King; a young girl who looked very much like Curtis’s younger sister Elsie was clutching his midsection with one arm and wielding a small saber with the other.
“Mind your flanks there, lass,” he called again. “A good bandit always does!” And then he had veered off, his eagle pitching sharply away to do another flyby at one of the giants. Prue thought to ask Curtis if that had been, in fact, his sister, but the chaos of
the moment did not allow such trivial questions.
The incredible aerial battle waged on. The ivy birds crashed headlong into the avian defenders—the reborn Wildwood Irregulars—who held their ground with courage and resolve. The sky was alive with their zipping and plunging; the birds and their riders quickly learned that an eagle’s talons, properly applied, could tear these ivy creations to shreds, and the vines were soon decorating the air like so much confetti at the New Year’s stroke of midnight. It wasn’t long, however, before the Verdant Empress, seemingly unassailable, would raise her hands and more such hatchlings would birth from the very ground.
But Prue’s attention remained on the Council Tree. She saw that the Irregulars, for all their smarts and bravery on the aerial battlefield, could not hold back the ivy from consuming the ancient tree. It was now completely enveloped, as more waves, one after another, piled onto the last. The shape of the tree—the huge trunk, the wide canopy—was now totally lost. The thing had become unrecognizable, just another lump of teeming ivy in a world covered in the virulent plant.
With another wave, another push, the ivy began to tear the tree down.
A massive crack rent the air and Prue felt it in her chest, like a piercing needle. Through bleary, bloodshot eyes, she saw this massive, Paleolithic thing, this king among flora, this towering giant among the oldest, wisest trees: She saw it cracked mightily in two. The noise was explosive; it demanded the attention of every warring bird and rider in the vale. They all saw it, they all heard it—but only Prue truly heard the tree fall and die.
She heard the tree give a relinquishing sigh. She felt it lapse, then, into silence.
She also felt something snap, though she couldn’t know what. Her understanding of the thing that broke when the Council Tree cracked in two and fell was nil; even the oldest of the Woodians were ignorant of the inner workings of the spell that was woven into the trees, the thing that created a boundary between the Wood and the Outside. But at the moment when the ivy pulled the Council Tree down to the ground, the last anchor of the Periphery Bind was broken.
The ivy was loosed upon the open world.
CHAPTER 30
The Reluctant Resurrectee
She’d kept the teeth; she’d kept each of the items the Verdant Empress had asked her to retrieve. She’d rescued them from the floor of the ruined house after the spirit had been awakened, and she’d carried them with her when she sprinted for the safety of the boy’s mausoleum, the only place she knew would be spared the ravages of the ivy. The items were there in her pocket, in the pocket of her gray robe, and she held them out to show everyone gathered in the ivy-strewn meadow. An eagle feather, a white pebble, and yes: a full set of teeth. As Zita told the story, they all listened slack-jawed. Seamus, having recovered from his earlier fright, briefly raged at the girl for what she’d done, showering her with recriminations as if she was a misbehaving schoolchild, which she was, to a certain degree. As for Carol and Esben, they remained strangely silent during the retelling, understanding that Zita’s actions were just one part of an intricate web that was being woven before them. The girl wept a little in the telling and Martha gravitated to her side, resting a consoling hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” said Martha. “What’s done is done.”
“I just . . . ,” simpered Zita. “I just wanted to make things right. For someone.” She looked through her tear-blurred eyes at each of the individuals in the meadow: the old blind man, the bear, the bandit, and the little girl with the goggles. “It’s like, so much had gone wrong, you know? I mean, with me. It’s like—can’t I just fix things for someone, anyway? Like, relieve someone’s pain. That’s all I wanted to do, I swear.”
When she was done, the crowd remained in silence. Finally, Carol motioned to Martha, who walked to his side. Setting his hand on the back of the girl’s neck, he walked forward to Zita and said, “I understand your pain, child. We all have experienced loss. All of us. You’ve done what you could. And now, you truly do have an opportunity to set things to rights.” He held out his knobby, weathered hand, its palm open. “Let’s have those teeth, then.”
She set them, the boy’s teeth, in his hand, and the old man closed his fingers around them. He then had Martha walk him back to the fire, where he reached into a small groove in a rock and produced something shiny and spinning. He turned to Martha and smiled.
“Hold out your hand,” he said.
She did as he instructed, and the old man set the completed Möbius Cog in her palm.
It was a beautiful thing; all shining brass, its three concentric rings, wrapped one into the other, spun fluidly around a kind of glowing core. How two beings had managed to construct such an incredible thing was well beyond Martha’s ken, but she knew it was a thing of beauty.
“It’s . . . ,” she managed. “It’s wonderful.”
“Ain’t it?”
Esben appeared in their huddle around the cog, and he smiled at his creation. “An improvement over the first, I’d say,” he put in. “We made some extra embellishments.”
“And now, the final test,” said Carol.
The boy’s chassis, all shining brass and metal, lay naked by the fire, stripped of its regal uniform. They’d built an operating table for him, made of the salvaged boards from the collapsed hut at the edge of the meadow, and this was where he was laid, like a statue on top of an ornamental sarcophagus. Martha guided Carol to the boy’s side; Esben stood opposite him. Seamus and Zita stood quietly at the boy’s feet, watching the transpiring surgery in a hushed trance.
“Screwdriver,” said Carol.