Wildwood (Wildwood Chronicles 1)

“I mean, what if one of your, your”—he struggled to find the word—“whelps was kidnapped by some person or animal or whatever. And they were going to sacrifice him? Would you stand for that?” Not receiving an answer, he proffered one himself: “NO! No, you wouldn’t. It’s not right!”

The tunnel was filled with the noise of the coyotes’ labored panting; in the half-lit distance, something vaguely arachnid scurried across the tunnel floor, disappearing into a large hole in the wall.

“What was that?” shrilled Curtis.

“Who knows what lives down here,” responded one of the coyotes.

Another took up the game. “Never been this far into the warren, myself. Heard stories, though—they say there’re things down here ain’t never seen the light o’ day. Things that are dyin’ for a lump of good meat to sink their teeth into.”

“Good human meat,” intoned another coyote.

“Feed a rat to the rats,” said one. “That’s how we deal with turncoats around here.”

“Listen, just let me go,” said Curtis. “No one has to know—I’ll just go on my way and . . .” The words froze in his mouth as the coyotes turned a sharp corner and the tunnel opened up into a large room and Curtis saw the cages.

“Oh,” he said flatly. “Oh man.”

It appeared as if the room had formed naturally: The floor was knobbed with rubble and rock and the walls sloped down from the towering ceiling in an irregular fashion—but this was by far the least remarkable thing about the room. The thing that instantly demanded Curtis’s attention was the massive twist of roots that hung from the ceiling—what a tree must be above this system of limbs!—and the ominous array of rickety wooden cages that hung from the thick tendrils. The viney maple boughs that made up the cages’ bars joined in a crown at the top; they looked like birdcages in a giant’s aviary. Thick hempen cables attached the cages to the root system above, and they issued whining creaks as they twisted around on their lines. Inside, Curtis could make out a few figures—the cages looked to be big enough to imprison several unfortunate souls apiece—while many remained empty. He didn’t have time to count them, but they looked to number in the dozens.

“Warden!” shouted one of his captors, and a bloated and graying coyote appeared from behind a jagged rock below the dangling cages. A cord around his neck carried an impressive assemblage of keys of all different sizes and shapes. As he shuffled toward them, he blandly mumbled a recitation:

“Abandon hope, ye prisoner, abandon hope. The cages’ bars, impenetrable. The cages’ locks, unbreakable. The distance to the ground, unjumpable. Abandon hope. Abandon hope.” He sniffled between sentences, barely looking up from the ground. Curtis, horrified, noted that the ground appeared to be littered with the bleached and broken bones of former captives, dropped to their deaths.

“Yes, yes, we know,” one of the coyotes holding Curtis’s arm said impatiently. “Enough with the ominous speeches. We got a traitor here. Cage ’im high.”

As the warden approached, a voice could be heard from one of the cages above. “What? Is that another biped? I thought this was a coyote-only brig.”

Curtis looked up at the source of the complaint and saw a coyote muzzle sticking out between the wooden bars of one of the cages nearer to them.

“Quiet!” hollered the warden suddenly, breaking from his monotone.

A distinctly human-sounding voice rose up from one of the cages farther up. “You jackals’ll pay for this! I swear!” Curtis couldn’t make out the speaker through the snarl of the branching roots.

“See?!” shouted the coyote prisoner. “Do you hear that? I’m a soldier and I’m thrown in here with bandit scum! I thought this was an exclusively military prison!”

“QUIET!” the warden shouted again, now louder. “Or I’ll cuff the lot of ya.”

The bandit, now enlivened, began chanting, “Free Wildwood! FREE WILDWOOD!” A few other prisoners, apparently bandits as well, stood up in their cages and took up the call, screaming and shaking the bars of their enclosures.

The warden sighed and walked over to Curtis. “Lively bunch,” he said under the din. “Sure you’ll enjoy the company.”

While Curtis was still being held, the warden walked over to the wall and fetched what looked to be the longest, ricketiest ladder Curtis had ever seen. Carefully balancin

g it upright, the warden walked the ladder over to the center of the room, weaving its topmost rungs through the tree roots. Arriving at a vacant cage, he hooked the top against the bars and steadied the bottom on a large rock on the cavern’s floor.

“Up we go,” said the warden. He climbed first; arriving at the cage, he undid the lock and climbed back down. At a nod from the warden, Curtis’s wrists were uncuffed and he was shoved rudely toward the ladder. The ladder swayed and bowed beneath his weight as he climbed. When he finally arrived at the cage, he swooned slightly at the height: He was easily sixty feet above the chamber floor, and the ground was strewn with boulders, stones, and toothy stalagmites; the fall did not look inviting. Once he had been pushed into the cage, the warden returned to the top of the ladder and fixed the door closed with a large iron padlock. Before returning to the ground, he looked directly at Curtis and said, “Don’t even think about escaping.”

“Wasn’t going to,” said Curtis.

The warden seemed temporarily caught off guard by the answer. “Oh,” he said. “Good.” And with that, he disappeared down the ladder. Curtis let out a sigh of despair as the top rung lifted away from the bars, and the wooden cage swung freely, the anchor cable above creaking and groaning under the weight of its new resident.

The gas lamps, positioned as they were on every corner, cast pallid cones of light on the cobbled intersections of the streets; shadows ruled the in-between spaces. It was within these shadows that Prue found concealment as she and the sparrow made their way through the neighborhood. Prue stayed hidden behind an obliging rain barrel or mailbox while the sparrow (whose name was Enver, Prue had come to find out) stealthily flew ahead, scouting the area from the roof eaves and weathervanes of the majestic houses that dotted the landscape. When the sparrow warbled an all-clear, Prue would leave her hiding place and rush to the next available cover. The pace was slow, but they made steady progress up the street. Their momentum was only ever stalled when the inevitable SWORD van would come wailing down the street, its flashing siren tinting the houses in garish red, and Prue and Enver would have to hold their positions until the sparrow was satisfied that their movement would not be detected.

“I think it’s a left up here,” Prue whispered loudly from behind a garbage bin. Enver was perched atop a gaslight that lit a four-way intersection. The cobblestones here were slowly being replaced by dirt and pine needles as the upscale Rue Thurmond neighborhood gave way to the smaller hovels of the forest, their mossy roofs enshrouded by the overhanging fir boughs in the near distance.

“You sure?” asked Enver, uncertainly scanning the horizon.

“No,” whispered Prue. “Kind of just guessing.”