Wildwood Imperium Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Milo

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Map

  List of Color Plates

  PART ONE

  ONE

  The May Queen

  TWO

  A Difficult Houseguest

  THREE

  The Forgotten Place

  FOUR

  The Spiral in the Trees; A Finger on a Windowpane

  FIVE

  Return to the Wood; A Fugitive of the Wastes

  SIX

  The Maiden Returns to the Mansion; For the Sake of a Single Feather

  SEVEN

  In the Realm of the Black Hats

  EIGHT

  The Interim Governor-Regent-Elect

  NINE

  Where the Air Comes From; The Second Thing

  TEN

  The Empty Folder; Unthank Reborn

  ELEVEN

  Into Wildwood

  PART TWO

  TWELVE

  Fifteen Summers

  THIRTEEN

  A Meeting at the Tree

  FOURTEEN

  A Natural-Born Saboteur; Two out of Three

  FIFTEEN

  The Sway of the Blighted Tree

  SIXTEEN

  The Undisputed Therapeutic Benefits of Singing

  SEVENTEEN

  Where Everybody Was

  EIGHTEEN

  The Assault of Titan Tower

  NINETEEN

  Martyrs for the Cause

  TWENTY

  The Kiss; Across the Threshold

  TWENTY-ONE

  A Revival Is Born

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-TWO

  An Owl’s Tale

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Lonely Crag

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Last of the Wildwood Bandits

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A Meal for the Marooned; Intruders on the Perimeter!

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Birth of Giants

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Deluge!

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Wildwood Irregulars, Take Wing!

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Body of a Prince; The Battle for the Tree

  THIRTY

  The Reluctant Resurrectee

  THIRTY-ONE

  Wildwood Regina

  THIRTY-TWO

  Wildwood Imperium

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  MAP

  LIST OF COLOR PLATES

  1. They were staring intently at their houseguest, who was taking up most of one side of the dining room table.

  2. “That’s what the Chapeaux Noirs are all about: a clean slate for the Industrial Wastes. Wipe out the oppressors, the wreckers, the looters. Finis.”

  3. And then, her son appeared from the curtain of shadow: a boy of fifteen summers, fourteen winters.

  4. She thrust her hands into the robe’s pocket and retrieved the three things she’d stowed there: an eagle’s feather. A pearly stone. A boy’s full set of teeth.

  5. The ship pitched in the waves that drew it closer to the rock’s only visible landing spot: a wave-racked wooden jetty.

  6. The ivy hung from the creature’s frame like a shaggy coat and draped in long tendrils from its faceless head, like an overly hairy dog.

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

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  The May Queen

  First, the explosion of life. Then came the celebration.

  Such had it been for generations and generations, as long as the eldest of the eldest could remember; as long as the record books had kept steady score. By the time the first buds were edging their green shoots from the dirt, the parade grounds had been cleared and the maypole had been pulled from its exile in the basement of the Mansion. The board had met and the Queen decided; all that was left was the wait. The wait for May.

  And when it came, it came wearing a bright white gown: the May Queen. She appeared on horseback, as was tradition, wearing a blinding white gown and her hair sprouting garlands of flowers. Her name was Zita and she was the daughter of a stenographer for the courts, a proud man who stood beaming in the stands—a person of honor—with the Interim Governor-Regent-elect and his flushed, fat wife and his three children looking bored and bemused, stuffed as they were into their little ill-fitting suits that they only wore for weddings.

  But the May Queen was radiant in her long brown braids and white, white gown, and everyone in the town flocked to see her and the procession that followed. In the center square, a brass band, having performed “The Storming of the Prison” to satisfy the powers that be, launched into a familiar set list of seasonal favorites, led by a mustachioed tenor who played up the bawdiest bits to the delight of the audience. A traditional dance was endured by the younger set among the audience, while the elders cooed their appreciation and waxed nostalgic about their own time, when they wore those selfsame striped trousers and danced the May Fair. The Queen reigned all the while, smiling down from her flower-laden dais; she must’ve been only fifteen. All the boys blushed to make eye contact with her. Even the Spokes, the hard-liners of the Bicycle Revolution, seemed to drop their ever-present steeliness in favor of an easy gait, and today there were no words of anger exchanged between them and the few in the crowd who might question their fervor. And when the Synod arrived to rasp the benediction on the day, the crowd suffered them quietly. The rite was a strange insistence, considering the fact that the May Fair’s celebration had long predated the sect’s fixation on the Blighted Tree; indeed, the May Fair had been a long-standing tradition, it was told, even when the tree’s boughs were full with green buds, before it earned its present name, before the strange parasite had rendered the tree in a kind of suspended animation. But such was the spirit that day: Even the spoilers were allowed their separate peace.

  By the time the festivities, the beribboned maypole their axis, had spiraled out into the surrounding crowd and the light had faded and the men gathered around the barrels of poppy beer and the women sipped politely at blackberry wine and the dancing had begun in earnest, the May Queen had long since been hoisted on the shoulders of a crowd of local boys and brought with much fanfare to her home, where, her now-tipsy father assumed, she was peacefully asleep, her white gown toppled in a corner, her braids a tattered mess, and her pillow strewn with flowers.

  But this was not the case.

  Zita, the May Queen, was climbing down the trellis from her second-floor room, still wearing her white gown, and her wreath of flowers still atop her braided hair. A thorn from the climbing rose made a thin incision in the taffeta as she reached the ground. She stopped and studied her surroundings. She could hear the muffled, distant sounds of the celebrations in the town square; a few straggling partygoers, homeward bound, laughed over some joke on the street. She whistled, twice.

  Nothing.

  Again, she pursed her lips and gave two shrill whistles. A rustle sounded in the nearby junipers. Zita froze.

  “Alice?” she asked to the dark. “Is that you?”

  Suddenly, the bushes parted to reveal a girl, dressed in a dark overcoat. Remnant pieces of juniper stuck obstinately to her short blond hair. Zita frowned.

  “You didn’t have to come that way,” said Zita.

  Alice looked back at her improvised path: a hole in the bushes. “You said to come secret.”

  Another noise. This time, from the street side. It was Kendra, a girl with wiry, close-cropped hair. She was carrying something in her hands.

  “Good,” said Zita, seeing
her. “You brought the censer.”

  Kendra nodded, proffering the thing in her hands. It was made of worn brass, discolored from decades of use. Tear-shaped holes dotted the vessel; strands of gold chain clung to its side, like hair. “I need to get this back tonight,” she said. “It’s serious. If my dad knew this was missing. He’s got some weird thing he has to do tomorrow.” Kendra’s dad was a recent recruit to the rising Synod, an apostle to the Blighted Tree. She clearly wasn’t very happy about his newfound religiosity.

  Zita nodded. She turned to Alice, who was still brushing needles from her coat. “You have the sage?”

  Alice nodded gravely and pulled a handful of green leaves, bundled by twine, from a bag slung over her back. The earthy smell of the herbs perfumed the air.

  “Good,” said Zita.

  “Is that all we need?” asked Alice, stuffing the herb bouquet back in her bag.

  Zita shook her head and produced a small blue bottle. The two other girls squinted and tried, in the half-light, to make out what was inside.

  “What is it?” asked Kendra.

  “I don’t know,” said Zita. “But we need it.”

  “And isn’t there something about a mirror?” Again, this was Kendra.

  Zita had it: a picture mirror, the size of a tall book. The glass sat in an ornate gold frame.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” This was Alice, fidgeting uncomfortably in her too-large coat.

  Zita flashed her a smile. “No,” she said. “But that’s half the fun, right?” She shoved the bottle back in her pocket, the mirror in a knapsack at her feet. “C’mon,” she said. “We don’t have a ton of time.”

  The threesome marched quietly through the alleyways of the town, carefully avoiding the crowds of festivalgoers on their weaving ways homeward. The red brick of the buildings and houses gave way to the low, wooden hovels of the outer ring, and they climbed a forested hill, listening to the last of the brass bands echo away in the distance. A trail snaked through the trees here; Zita stopped by a fallen cedar and looked behind them. The lit windows of the Mansion could be seen winking some ways off, little starfalls in the narrow gaps between the crowding trees. She was carrying a red kerosene lantern, and she lit it with a match; they were about to continue when a noise startled them: more footsteps in the underbrush.

  “Who’s there?” demanded Zita, swinging the lantern toward the sound.

  A young girl appeared, an overcoat hastily thrown over flannel pajamas.

  “Becca!” shouted Alice. “So help me gods, I’m going to kill you.”

  The girl look appropriately shamed; her cheeks flared red and her eyes were downcast. “Sorry,” she muttered.

  Zita looked directly at Alice. “What is she doing here?”

  “I’d ask her the same thing,” said Alice, her eyes not leaving the young girl.

  “I know what you’re doing,” said the young girl.

  “Oh yeah?” asked Zita.

  “Becca, go home,” said Alice. “Do Mom and Dad know you’re gone?”

  The young girl ignored her sister’s question. “You’re calling the Empress.”

  Zita’s eyes flashed to Alice’s. “What did you tell her?”

  “N-nothing,” stammered Alice. She glanced around at the gathered girls, hoping for some rescue. Finally, she frowned and said, “She heard us talking. Last night. She said she’d tell Mom and Dad if I didn’t let her in on it.”

  “I wanna come,” said Becca, still staring at Zita. “I want to see you do it. I want to see what happens.”

  “You’re too young,” said Zita.

  “Who says?” said Becca.

  “I do,” said Zita. “And I’m the May Queen.”

  This seemed to silence the little girl.

  “Go home, Becca,” said Alice. “And I won’t make you rue the day you were born.”

  Becca rounded on her sister. “I’ll tell Mom and Dad. I swear to the trees. I’ll tell ’em. And then you won’t be able to go out for a week. You’ll have to miss the school Spring Pageant.”

  Alice gave Zita a pleading, desperate look that seemed to say, Little sisters: What can you do? The May Queen gave in, saying to Becca, “How much do you know?”

  The young girl gave a deep, relieved breath and said, “I heard about it before, but I didn’t know anyone who’d done it. At the old stone house. Off Macleay Road. They say she died there.” She looked from girl to girl, judging by their silence that there was truth in her telling. “You say something? A chant? In the center of the house. And turn around three times. To wake her. Her ghost.”

  Zita listened to the girl in silence. When she’d finished, Zita nodded. “Okay,” she said. “You can come. But you’ve got to swear you’ll not tell a soul what you see. You swear?”

  “I swear.”

  “Follow me,” said Zita, and she continued walking. Alice, cuffing her sister on her head, took up the rear of the procession.

  A clock struck the half hour, somewhere in the distance, and Zita quickened her pace. “Not long now,” she said.

  “Why the rush?” asked Kendra.

  “After midnight, it won’t work. It’s got to start before the hour. The first of May, too loo too ray.”

  Kendra looked to Alice for some sort of explanation, but Alice only shrugged. Zita had long been a mysterious force in their lives: Since they were little, she’d always had a kind of peculiar magnetism. An imaginative girl, she’d captivated her friends with strange drawings and poetry, with her long-standing fascination with the occult.

  The forest grew wilder as they moved away from the populous part of South Wood and into the mangy scrub that bordered the Avian Principality. A path led through the undergrowth; before long, the girls arrived at the house, or what was left of it.

  It was a ruin, its stone walls worn down by the elements and nearly consumed by a thick blanket of winding ivy. Branches invaded the house where the roof had been, and thick swatches of moss lay in the chinks of the stone. The four girls walked cautiously into the center of the house, its floor long overtaken by the forest’s greenery: a carpet of ivy fighting for dominion of the small enclosure. Whoever had lived here before had made do with very little: The house amounted to a single, small room. Two breaks in the rock walls suggested windows; a door, its keystone long collapsed, led out into a dark, empty expanse. Which is not to say that the house had remained entirely uninhabited all these years: Empty tins of food, their labels sun-bleached indecipherable, littered the corners of the house, and the names and exploits of past explorers made a kind of diary on the inner walls: BIG RED SLEPT HERE SOME. TRAVIS LOVES ISABEL. NOT REALLY NOW NOT ANYMORE. LONG LIVE THE EMPRESS! were all scrawled in chalk and paint or chiseled into the stone.

  Zita looked at her watch. She nodded to the other girls. “Let’s do this,” she said.

  As she’d been told, as she’d heard from the older girls in her class (who whispered around her in the back of the small schoolhouse classroom, who smoked illicit cigarettes in the schoolyard and who sneered when she approached), as she’d finally learned when she’d got older: The Verdant Empress was a ghost who inhabited the house, who’d lived in the house, centuries before, when the Wood was an empire. She’d run afoul of the old government and they had sent knives to exact their final revenge. But rather than take her life, the assassins went after something more precious to her: her son. They stole into her garden one afternoon and cut the child down in front of his mother. To greaten her suffering, they let the woman live. The Empress, it was said, lost her mind over her murdered child and spent the rest of her many years wandering the Wood asking after his whereabouts, her addled mind having ceased to believe that he was dead. It was said she died of a broken heart, a forgotten and embittered old woman. Her gray hair became so filled with leaves and twigs in her wanderings that the locals coined a new name for her: the Verdant Empress. It was almost as if she was becoming a part of the forest itself. It was said her body was never found, that
her corpse had simply decayed into the earthen ground of the house. And it was common knowledge, at least among the village teenagers, that when someone does not receive a proper burial, her soul is cursed to wander the world of the living for eternity.

  Learning the story was like a coming-of-age benchmark for teenagers in South Wood; everyone knew it. However, very few acted on the promise of the story, the dark epilogue: With the right incantation, at the right time of the month, when the moon was full and the sky bright with stars, the Empress’s soul could be called from her hellish purgatory to be witnessed by the living. Once she’d been called, though, there was very little information about what she would do: Some said she would do your bidding for seven days. Others swore she would administer revenge on whomever you named. Still others claimed only her shade appeared and wept for her murdered son, keening like a banshee. In any case, it was enough to drive the macabre fantasies of Zita and make her determined to bring the woman’s ghost from the ether.

  At Zita’s instruction, the three other girls gathered around her in a tight circle in the center of the structure. She set the mirror at her feet. Taking the censer from Kendra, she opened it and filled the chamber with the sage leaves Alice had brought. The girls were silent as they followed Zita’s instructions, staring at their friend with the quiet expressions of parishioners before a solemn clergyman. Finally, she produced the blue bottle from her pocket and proceeded to pour its contents into the censer: By the light of the lantern, held by Kendra, the stuff appeared to be a grainy, gray powder.