Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

The boy heard her; he approached and offered his hand. She took it, feeling the cold grip of his metallic fingers press into her palm. He helped her to her feet, which she regained with some difficulty. Her knees wobbled; she stared at the boy intensely, marveling at the pristine whiteness of his eyes, the immaculate smoothness of his skin. But the boy didn’t tarry long with Prue; instead, his attention was returned to the spirit at the end of the long channel of ivy.

Seeing the boy, the ivy spirit let out a heartrending moan.

Alexei approached. The girl in the white dress walked beside him.

“Hello, Mother,” he said, and the Verdant Empress flinched to hear his voice.

“What have they done?” The voice issued from deep inside the towering figure; it seemed to flow from the river of ivy around her.

“They’ve brought me home,” replied Alexei.

“I brought you,” said the boy’s mother quietly. “I gave you life.”

“I know,” said the boy. “And I forgive you.”

Then the Verdant Empress’s temper was dissolved, and her long arms retracted. Her body seemed to shrink as the ivy vines that had built up her columns of legs and the intractable trunk of her torso seemed to fall away. She was no longer the imposing, enraged thing that had razed her surroundings with every step, every conjuration. Now she seemed almost human.

Alexei continued his approach; Zita the May Queen walked with him, her hand clasped in his, two kindred spirits on a promenade: she in her white dress and garland of dead flowers, he in his brocaded uniform, cloaked in the dust of a tomb. The moat of dry land ended at the stump of the Council Tree, where the ivy had flowed out from his mother’s feet. This was where Zita stopped and let go of the mechanical boy’s hand; Alexei took a first uncertain step on this hill of ivy, then another. He ascended the pedestal Alexandra had made of the ancient tree and stopped at the apex, standing mere feet away from the Verdant Empress.

Alexandra held out her arms; her son stepped into them and laid his head, softly, on his mother’s chest.

Alexandra held out her arms; her son stepped into them and laid his head, softly, on his mother’s chest.

Her ivy arms, now slim and small, closed and she wrapped her son in a long embrace, bowing her head so that her lips graced the metallic smoothness of his brow with a tender kiss.

And, at that very moment, when the kiss was laid on the boy’s head, and the mother’s arms were firmly wrapped around her child as they’d been when she’d first held him, when she’d first cradled him as a baby, when she’d held him as a child crying over some lost bauble, when she’d held him as a boy when a fever had come on strong, when she’d held him as a young man in the full throat of summer, and when the horse had thrown him and he lay motionless on the flagstones and she’d held him then—at that very moment, the ivy ceased its endless writhings and lapsed into immobility and fell quiet.

Then: the arms that had enwrapped the boy turned to what they had previously been: just a gathered and bound bunch of ivy stalks, and the form of the Verdant Empress fell away and was returned to the ground, to the ether.

For Prue, it was as if the very air had been returned to her lungs. The two walls of ivy on either side of the clear strip of grass leading to the stump of the tree settled and compressed, flattening to the ground like downy feathers after a particularly ferocious pillow fight. The plant collapsed into the canyon the Verdant Empress had created, and Prue was swamped by the torrent.

STOP! she called instinctively, and found that the ivy responded very well; it was no longer under the powerful enchantment of the Verdant Empress and so had reverted to its normal suggestible self. Truly, were you to poll any Woodian Mystic (or anyone else, for that matter, with the ability to communicate with plant life), you’d find that ivy, under normal circumstances, is the easiest thing to persuade to your control. Soon, Prue had called away the languid vines and had a small stretch of ground emptied. She heard a voice call to her, a familiar voice, a boy’s voice.

“Curtis!” she yelled, batting away the ocean of ivy. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah!” came his voice, some yards off. “What happened?”

“She’s gone!” shouted Prue. Peeling apart a curtain of the plant, she found her friend, busily cutting through the thick jungle with his saber.

“Gone?”

“Alexei came, Curtis. He got here just in time. He went to her. I don’t know what he said, or what she said, but she just disappeared. Like that!” She found she had tears in her eyes as she spoke. “The tree was right—we were right! We needed to bring him back to save everything. I just never in a million years expected it to turn out this way.”

Curtis had a giant grin on his face by the time he’d pulled himself from the vines and stood in the open ground that Prue had managed to clear. They fell into a hug, the two friends, and laughed loudly.

“Where were you, the whole time?” asked Prue between fits of relieved laughter.

“Oh, I was around,” he said, still smiling.

“Alexei!” shouted Prue, suddenly remembering. “Let’s go find him!”

They fought through the jumble of ivy, Prue clearing the way as she went. Soon they arrived at the foot of the Council Tree’s stump; they stepped clear of the vines as they climbed to the top of the mound. There, they found Alexei standing, staring at the ivy-strewn ground where the reborn form of his mother had only recently stood. By his side was the girl in the white dress. She saw Prue and Curtis approach and smiled, saying, “Are you Prue?”

Prue nodded. “I am. Who are you?”

“I’m Zita. I’m the one who made all this happen.” She seemed abashed then, and she looked quietly at her feet.

“You’re not,” said Prue. “This was all in the making, a long time ago.” She felt the solid wood of the Council Tree’s stump below her shoes. “You had as much control over these events as a leaf does in the time of its falling.” She smiled and added, “Someone really special told me that once.”