A dais had been erected at the far side of the room; several local craftsmen had come together and designed a magnificent throne, in honor of the returned mechanical boy prince, the newly crowned Wildwood Emperor, and this was where Alexei abashedly sat while well-wishers and congregants brought flowers and benefactions to the savior of their land. He accepted their gifts with embarrassment, squirming uncomfortably under all the blushing attention. Not long into the party, he saw Zita come into the light of one of the paper lanterns and he stood up, gesturing her over.
She came up to the dais and bowed.
“Don’t bow,” said Alexei. “Please.”
“Sorry, Your Majesty,” she said.
“And don’t call me that. It’s me who should be referring to you that way, May Queen.”
Zita blushed at the mention.
“Will you sit with me?” asked the boy, patting at a small chair that had been set beside the opulent throne. “It’s awfully lonely up here.”
Zita smiled and gave a low curtsy. “If Your Majesty wishes,” she said. She ignored the glare the boy gave her as she crossed in front of the throne and took her place at his side. Together they watched the whistling, wheeling party as it played out before them, while the paper lanterns cast dancing shadows on the wooden floor and the band played merrily under a sky filled with stars.
But that is not the end of the story.
There is more.
In a leafy borough of Portland called St. Johns, there lived a man and a woman and their young child.
And though they were blessed with a family, they were heartbroken over the loss of their daughter, a girl of twelve short summers who’d disappeared earlier in the spring. They carried their grief bravely, however, because they knew that their daughter had become a great power in a distant and dangerous land and perhaps had died in the defense of this land. They’d known of her exploits from her telling; they’d met talking birds and a sentient bear with hooks for hands. They knew that whatever had happened to their daughter, she had lived a good life and had persevered bravely for a downtrodden people.
But still, this did not dispel their grief.
A shadow was cast over their lives. They struggled to regain a feeling of normalcy and poured all their love into their young son, Mac, and watched him grow happily into a toddler; they marveled over his first sentences and his first stumbling steps. They remembered their daughter when she had done the same, those years before, though sometimes this would make their loss come back afresh.
Then one day, while mowing the lawn, the father saw something growing amid the freshly cut grass. In a small circle of earth, the sprout of a tree had grown. Getting down on his hands and knees, the father pulled back the grass and made a little bed of dirt for the small green shoot. A seed must’ve taken, he decided, blown by some neighbor’s tree. He felt connected to the tiny sprout for some reason, and so he became the tree’s staunch steward.
He watered it meticulously and kept the weeds from infringing on the small circle of turf he’d carved away. He fed it compost; he built a small fence around it to keep the deer from chewing at its fledgling limbs. Perhaps it was because of his insistent caretaking, perhaps it was because of magics beyond his ken: The tree grew at an alarming rate.
Each day the father would walk out onto the back porch of his simple house and see that the tree had grown several feet during the night. His wife and his son soon joined him in his careful minding of the strange tree, and together they would replace its compost and feed its roots with water and fertilizer. The tree continued to grow quickly; soon it was the size of a juvenile sapling, and from its trunk grew many long, healthy limbs, sporting an array of waxy green leaves.
One night, as the father lay asleep in his bed with his wife by his side, he felt something tug at his blanket. He opened his eyes to see it was his young son, having woken up in the night.
“Daddy,” said the boy. “Come see!”
They both, the husband and wife, followed the child down the stairs and through the kitchen and out onto the back porch, where they saw that the tree, the tree they had so meticulously watered and cared for these many weeks, was gone.
In its place, in the small circle of dirt and compost where the tree had been, was their daughter.
“PROOOO!” shouted her brother, getting her name right for the first time.
They ran to her and threw their arms around her and bathed her in kisses; she smiled blearily at them, having undergone some incredible journey, and happily returned their embraces. They walked together, this overjoyed, reunited family, and returned to the shelter of their house’s kitchen where their daughter, once she’d recovered from her reverie, told them an incredible story about a land in upheaval, about the strange cult that gained control over it; she told them about a ship that took her to a faraway rock in the ocean, where she thought she’d die—until the great bird prince rescued her and returned her to a land overcome by a reborn spirit, made of ivy, bent on the destruction of this land, and how only the return of the spirit’s son, the heir to the kingdom, would stop the devastation. She described the heartbreaking reunion of these two, mother and child, and how the ivy was pulled away and the boy became the emperor of this strange land.
The girl’s mother listened to the story attentively; her brother barraged her with questions; and her father, shaking his head and smiling at the incredible tale, only said, “Who’s up for some hot chocolate?”
And, indeed, they all were.
The End