Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

They both looked up at the mechanical boy, who stood silent at the top of the mound. Prue gave Zita a quick nod before walking the few steps to stand at Alexei’s side.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Prue.”

“I know,” said Alexei. His voice, brittle and metallic, was tinged with sorrow.

“Thank you. Thanks for coming back.”

“I didn’t make the choice.”

“Sometimes we don’t make the choice,” said Prue quietly. “Sometimes, I guess, the choice is made for us.”

The mechanical boy prince took a long, rattling breath and exhaled out into the clear air around him. “It’s bracing,” he said finally. “Breathing. I’d forgotten.”

“I can imagine,” said Prue.

They stood there for a time, quietly, before Alexei spoke again. “I suppose we’ll have to do something about this ivy,” he said.

Prue looked out at the horizon; as far as she could see, the ivy was everywhere, settling into silent, dormant pools. Nothing had been spared.

“I can do it,” said Prue. “I need to know something, though.”

“What’s that?” asked Alexei.

“Will you stay? They need someone. The people of the Wood. Everything will need to b

e rebuilt. They’ll need someone to lead them in that. To show the way. I was that person for a bit, I guess. But I think my time is done.”

The mechanical boy stared out into the middle distance. His fingers opened and closed at his side as he thought. Zita had climbed the tree to stand beside them; she, too, awaited the boy’s response.

“I don’t know,” said Alexei. “I didn’t ask for this fate. I was gone from here. And now I’m back.” He looked at Zita, then, and spoke. “I asked her to take the cog out, once I’d done what had been asked of me. But now I’m not sure. I’m not sure.”

“Take some time,” suggested Zita, grasping the boy by his hand and holding it like a longtime friend. “Think about it. Breathe the air. Then make a decision. I’ll do the thing, the thing you asked. But Prue’s right. We need you.”

Prue gave a low bow to the heir apparent, Alexei, and stepped away, leaving Zita and the boy alone at the top of the mound. Curtis was waiting at the bottom of the slope; Septimus had crawled himself free of the ivy and had found his spot back on the boy’s shoulder.

“What now?” asked Curtis.

“I’ve got work to do,” was Prue’s reply. She smiled warmly at her old friend before saying, “And then . . .”

“And then what?” Curtis looked at her with a deeply puzzled expression.

“I don’t know. Something the tree wanted me to do. I guess it’s been a part of this whole thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see, Curtis,” said Prue. “You’ll see.”

She laid her hand briefly on the boy’s shoulder, before turning and hiking to the top of the ivy-laden stump of the Council Tree.

She stood on the fallen husk of the tree and threw her hands out to the ivy, taking the position of a hardy fisherman in the midst of a cascading spray, miles out to sea, pulling in the trolling nets. She grabbed fistfuls of ivy and with her arms and her mind began pulling it back like a blanket from a bed, like a magician pulling the shroud from a glass box and revealing the disappeared woman.

It pulled back from its farthest remove first, where it had just touched the trees and grasses of the far farmlands on the outskirts of the city of Portland. It moved quickly, sweeping back from the territory it had amassed in its initial wave of devastation. It pulled back from the streets and alleyways; it uncovered the cars on the interstates and receded from the heights of the tallest skyscrapers and unwound from the lowly parking garages. It revealed the figures of businessmen, eating their lunches on park benches. It unveiled sweethearts, walking hand in hand on busy sidewalks; it released the coffee drinkers and the book browsers and the line cooks and the bicyclists and the bag boys and the counter girls—it released them all from their sleep and they woke with a start, wondering at the strange and deep reverie that had just overcome them.

All the while, from her spot on the trunk of the giant dead tree, Prue pulled.

The plant withdrew from the locks and wharves on the Willamette River; it forded the water and quickly retraced the steps of its rampaging invasion across the Industrial Wastes. It shored up against the wild woodland of the Impassable Wilderness and retreated into the dark of the trees there. It was pulled down from the tall trees, though many had already succumbed to its crushing force. It ebbed, like a tide going out to sea, across the lush green landscape it had covered, unveiling a thriving world of tree saplings and the green shoots of newborn plants. It fell away from the unsuspecting denizens of South Wood, and they shook themselves free of their dreamy slumber. It freed the nests of birds in the Avian Principality; it swept across the wilds of the central province of this land and scaled the high peaks of the Cathedral Mountains. Finally, the receding tide of ivy rolled across the farm plots and village squares of North Wood and arrived at the edge of the great meadow itself.

Prue, from the center of the clearing, continued to draw it in. As the surplus piled at her feet, she willed it to be swallowed into the ground.