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“Where’s the Elder Mystic?” asked Prue desperately. The idea that this ancient and wizened thing would be somehow expiring filled her heart with dread. “I have to speak to him.” She remembered the odd young boy, the one who had conveyed the tree’s wishes to her. He’d been Iphigenia’s successor, by decree of the tree itself.
Sterling shook his head. “As far as I can tell, there ain’t no head Mystic. One that came before, the young one, he disappeared not long ago.”
“Disappeared?”
“Vanished. In Wildwood. He’d been to the Ossuary Tree, payin’ respects. Never seen again.”
“Strange.” This came from Owl Rex, who’d just made a graceful landing on the meadow’s surface. “Sterling. Samuel,” he said, in greeting, and the two animals bowed to the Avian prince. The owl continued, “The Mystics must be warned. The Verdant Empress—Alexandra Svik reborn—makes her way as we speak to break the tree to its very roots. She means to undo the Periphery Bind.”
“Constabulary rules—not supposed to disturb the Mystics from their meditations,” explained Sterling. “No matter the circumstances.”
But Prue was already walking, briskly, toward the seated Mystics surrounding the tree. She’d reached out, inwardly, to the massive oak, insinuating her thoughts inside the cloudy noise she felt emanating from its gnarled and woody trunk. The tree, it was said, was unlike any other vegetal matter in the Wood; its ability to communicate with all of its fellow organisms predated organized language, and so it spoke in symbols and sounds. These enigmatic voicings could only be unpacked by the Elder Mystic, someone who had spent enough time prostrate in meditation to the tree that a kind of sense could be made of the weird language.
To Prue, though, who received the tree’s channeled images loud and clear as she walked toward it, the language was an obtuse and unknowable thing. It wasn’t like the other plant life, not remotely, for whom cogent sentences could be constructed from their strange noises. Hearing the language of the Council Tree, she felt as if she’d opened some lofty tome about particle physics written in pidgin Mandarin. Something was being conveyed, that much was clear, but what, she couldn’t know.
She arrived at the circle of Mystics. Looking down, she saw that each of them, all dressed in identical hemp robes, had their eyes open, their placid gazes fixed on the tree. Another rush of wind, just then, sent a flurry of ochre leaves down to the grass. Prue knew that the Mystics’ meditation, as long as it was kept up, would be unbreakable. She walked on, toward the tree.
The trunk of the tree flowed down from its canopy like a torrent of thick syrup that had been frozen to the side of the bottle; it branched out from its base, and its roots bent and burrowed into the grassy soil of the meadow. A person could spend hours marveling over the patterns in play on one small section of the tree’s wrinkled and aged trunk, over the many knots and divots that had etched themselves into the mighty oak’s puckered bark. It was a giant among giants. And it was speaking to Prue. Or at least trying to.
As she walked closer, it became clearer and clearer that the tree was doing this: reaching out to her, drawing her in. She responded in kind; still the flurry of images and sounds in her head would not codify into anything resembling an understandable idea.
What? she thought.
There had been a pause, there, when she’d said the word, and it made the exchange at least somewhat resemble the brief quiet in conversation between two people as one speaker waits for the other. But the barrage of sounds that followed still did not make sense to Prue.
More leaves fell, and Prue felt a small cascade of the papery things alight on her shoulders. She took a deep breath and began to address the tree afresh.
Okay, she thought. I don’t understand you or what you’re trying to say. But I’m doing my best. I’ve been following your directions all along. I’ve been going on faith. I’ve trusted the people around me, as best I can. But now this: You’re dying?
Noises; chattering; shapes.
Did you know this? I mean, this must’ve been happening all along! I can’t help but feel like I’ve been let down. Like I’ve been misled. Is this part of the plan? Or have I not worked fast enough? Tell me!
Still: shushing; a rush of wind. Then, a quieting, like the stillness between gusts in a thunderstorm. And then: Prue saw.
What she saw was complex, disorderly. But, like making out the picture in between the lines of static on an old black-and-white television set, something emerged. She saw herself. But not the present version of herself: black bob, peacoat, Keds. Instead, she saw herself as an old woman, grayed hair and wrinkled brow, bent over some menial craft. Looking closer, she saw that she was knitting something. As the static cleared in the picture in her head, she was able to see closely that the thing was a cabled scarf and it seemed to stretch out from her clacking needles like a long, green path.
The image inverted, then, and had spun her around; she was now following this knitted path as it cut its way through a dense forest. She had the distinct sense that this path would lead on forever. However, the green scarf suddenly cut to her left and began a circuitous path that she soon realized was folding in upon itself. After having followed the curve of the scarf for a time, with each revolution growing shorter, she saw that the path let in on the center of a labyrinth; there, in the end point, was a single, glowing bud, nestled into the forest’s loam like an egg in a nest. As she watched, the bud unfurled, revealing the tiniest sapling of a tree. Like a time-lapse film, she saw it grow three distinct limbs; at the end of each limb bloomed a single, green leaf.
That was when she was shaken out of the vision.
“Prue!” It was the voice of Sterling Fox. “Can you hear me?”
She blinked her eyes rapidly and turned to face the animal. “I saw something. The tree. It showed me.”
“No time!” shouted the fox, his face lined with desperation. “The ivy! It’s here!”
“Maybe it needed another few hits with the hammer,” suggested Seamus.
The bear only stood, massaging his jaw with the back of his prosthetic hook.
The bandit cocked his head sideways and squinted his left eye, as if that would provide him a newer
perspective. “I guess we coulda fired it a little longer. Just a little more fuel on the fire.”
Still, the bear said nothing.
“Some gemstones? Maybe it needs something shiny. Something to dress it up a bit. You know, a little sparkle.”
