Wildwood (Wildwood Chronicles 1)

“Where is she, owl?” shouted one of the voices. Prue sucked her breath into her chest, her heart a caged hummingbird within her ribs.

“I’m afraid I have no idea to whom you are referring,” responded Owl Rex civilly.

The man laughed. “Just like you birds, playing stupid.”

A sparrow interjected: “This is an outrage! No one speaks to the Crown Prince this way!”

Owl Rex waved away the sparrow’s objection. “If you’re referring to the Outsider girl, Prue, she was here earlier, yes, but left some time ago. I haven’t the slightest idea where she’s gone.”

There was a short silence before the man spoke again. “Is that so?” Prue could discern the sound of the SWORD officers milling about the room. A few footsteps approached the hamper before stopping, and Prue could hear the sound of a book being opened, pages flipped.

When the owl gave no answer, the man at the bookcase cleared his throat and said in a loud, authoritative tone, “Owl Rex, Crown Prince of the Avian Principality, we are putting you under arrest for the violation of the Wildwood Protocols, Section Three, the harboring of an illegal, and for conspiring to overthrow the government of South Wood. Are the charges clear to you?”

Prue choked a gasp in her throat, her eyes wide. The silence that followed prompted her to push the lid of the hamper open a crack to get a view of the room. Owl Rex was standing in front of a small group of men who were dressed in identical black rain slickers and policemen’s caps. Two of them, while Prue looked on, drew small pistols from their coats and pointed them at the owl.

“Your law is a sham,” said the owl defiantly, “and a gross distortion of the founding principles of South Wood.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, owl,” came the voice of the man standing at the bookcase by the hamper. He threw something heavy—Prue guessed it to be a book—onto the top of the hamper, forcing the lid to slam closed. She stifled a shriek of surprise, a squeal that was thankfully masked by the quick creak of the closing lid. “But go ahead: Spit your invectives. Proclaim injustice! Shout it to the rooftops! You’re only going to make things worse for yourself. Now: You can come easy or you come fighting.”

A hush fell over the room. “Very well, I submit,” came the owl’s voice. Pushing the hamper lid slightly open again, Prue saw Owl Rex extend his wings to his would-be captors, as if in pious supplication.

“Lock him up, boys,” said the man, and one of the other officers stepped over and fastened a pair of large iron manacles around the owl’s wing tips. Another pair locked his two talons together by a short link of chain. Owl Rex’s head sank against his chest.

“What about the girl?” asked one of the officers.

“Search the building,” said the man. “She can’t have gotten far.”

Prue breathlessly retreated back to the bottom of the hamper and listened to the sound of Owl Rex being dragged from the room, the chain of his shackles scraping along the wooden floor.

Curtis watched his fellow soldiers dive headlong into their celebrations. His prior experience with the Governess’s blackberry concoction was still branded on his brain, and rather than actually imbibe the stuff, he went to great effort to merely mime drinking. The rest of the troop was evidently eschewing this strategy. A barrel of wine rolled into the hall would scarcely have been tapped before another appeared through one of the tunnels that led into the main room of the warren. Several soldiers, their uniforms unbuttoned to the waist, exposing the gray matted fur of their spindly rib-carved chests, lolled in mangled lumps below the barrel spigots, greedily lapping up every drop that fell. Curtis did his best to remain an active participant in the celebrations. His feet grew tired from treading around the room to every group that beckoned to him, asking him to retell the story of the battle—the firing of the cannon, the loosing of the tree trunk on the bandits’ howitzer. He found himself, after the seventh or eighth telling, allowing the other coyotes to finish his sentences and punch up the climaxes of the stories. Eventually, his voice grown hoarse, he found an upended keg in the corner of the room and sat, smiling politely at every soldier who stumbled over to him, each bearing a new, full mug of wine, until his feet were surrounded by a small army of untouched drinks.

A lieutenant, his uniform’s sash tied raffishly around his forehead, had climbed to the top of a short tower of emptied wine crates and was waving his saber as if it were a conductor’s baton. He cleared his throat and began singing a melody, which the rest of the room took up with a swaggering, throaty familiarity:

I was born a hangman’s cub

Whelped and weaned on maggoty grub

Torn right from my dead pa’s whiskers

So listen close, my brothers and sisters.

Hey! Hey! Catch that rat!

Tie him up and boil ’im in his fat.

Loose one finger if he is feckless

Wear it as a noose or wear it as a necklace.

Way down yonder in the brambly bog

I saw my girly with another dog.

Took ’er by the ear to the old town well

And that’s where my girl-y does dwell.

Hey! Hey! Catch that rat!