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“As well as can be expected for an old man. How’s the eyes on you?”
Esben blinked, rapidly, as if trying them out. “Pretty good shape, I’d say.” He then reached down and grabbed one of their former attempts, the wiry insect-looking thing. “This is as close as we’ve come.”
Taking the object in his hands, Carol rotated it a few times in his fingers before saying, “What’s this, a phone-box widget? Some kind of dog’s chew toy?”
Esben looked at Martha for explanation, startled by the old man’s sardonic tone. The girl shrugged. “Well, no, but . . . ,” stammered the bear, embarrassed.
“Oh, Esben. Oh, my boy. How the mighty have fallen.” A grin was plastered on the old man’s face. He felt at the object in his hands a little longer before saying, “Though if installed correctly, in a standard-issue clothes dryer . . .”
“Yes?” prompted Martha.
“Well, that’s not going to help us any here,” said Carol abruptly, before handing the thing back to Esben. “Back into the crucible with it.”
And so it went, and the two machinists’ labors began in earnest.
They barely had time to brace themselves when the ivy wave came. It preceded the giants by several miles, having gained considerable steam over its long journey from the southern part of the Wood. It pou
red over the small huts and hovels and seeped into the furrows of the farmlands, covering everything in sight. The handcarts and flatbed trucks, hastily loaded with furniture, toppled in the wave while their owners were swallowed whole and put into a deep, seamless slumber. It crowned the tall trees and broke them in two; it dashed the constabulary and the Great Hall, splintering the ceiling beams and crushing the buildings to the ground as if they were made of tissue.
Prue stood just beyond the ring of immobile Mystics, all of them still fathoms deep in meditation, and steeled herself. She could see the rumbling ivy topping the trees from hundreds of yards off; it was only a matter of time until it reached the tree.
“We must stop it,” she said, “at all costs.”
Sterling had tried to rouse the Mystics, despite his instructions, but to no avail. While the robed figures’ eyes remained wide open, fixed on the dying Council Tree, their faces belied no outward consciousness. Several bandits ran to Prue’s side, brandishing what looked to be gardening implements.
“It’s the best we could do,” said one of the bandits, Ned. He was holding a pitchfork, about as menacingly as expected, considering the circumstances.
“Line up!” shouted Sterling as the crowd of Wildwood bandits and South Wood volunteers came into formation. They were joined by the few farmers and ranch hands who managed to escape the earlier waves of ivy and had run for the shelter of the tree. Together they made a line of about thirty humans and animals, bearing what looked like the cast-off pile of a tentative lynch mob.
“Once again,” the fox side-mouthed to Prue, who was standing next to him, “not the finest fighting force the world has ever known.”
But Prue’s mind was being assaulted. The fox’s voice sounded like a blur in her ears. She could hear the ivy coming on—it hissed in her mind like a fire hose on full blast—but she could also sense the approach of her.
Alexandra was part of the plant world now, and as such her presence outstripped her simple, corporeal frame. She was as much spirit as she was living organism, and her every thought rippled through the forest. The presence was becoming overpowering, and Prue found she had to concentrate very hard in order to keep it from bowling her over. She felt a nudge at her hip; she turned to see it was Samuel.
“You okay, Prue?” asked the hare.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s just . . . a lot.”
“It’s coming!” shouted a voice from the sky; it was Owl Rex, soaring high above the assembled defenders.
White noise assaulted Prue as the ivy exploded through the ring of trees that surrounded the meadow. It paused in its forward momentum to gobble up these ancient arbors, crowning them in a matter of seconds and engulfing their leafy boughs in a thick, swarmy beard of vines. Then, satiated, it moved on to the individuals standing steadfast in the center of the meadow.
“What do we do?” asked a confused farmer, wielding a garden hoe.
“Just try to keep it back,” instructed Sterling.
The ivy began its advance.
It flowed over the meadow’s grass like water lapping up a smooth beach; it rippled and eddied against the little tufts of wood sorrel as it went, overcoming the grass like so much hair being dunked in a deep bath. It gathered speed, an advancing tide, and set itself to break on the hapless defenders that stood in its way. Prue, overcome, fell to her knees, her hands sinking into the earth. Sterling tried to help her to her feet, all the while keeping an eye on the coming wave, but it was no use. She was immobile.
The fox braced himself for the crash, the shock and concussion of this million-strong rush of angry, growing plant life splashing against their impotent weapons.
But it did not come.
Instead, the wave flattened itself against some invisible barrier, its brown underside revealed to the shocked figures who stood in the lee of the barrier’s protection.
Prue lifted her head; she commanded the ivy. She found the strength, now, to deflect the ivy’s angry hissing, and she pushed back with all her thoughts. A great wall had been constructed, seemingly from the air, and the ivy struck against it with the force of a tsunami. It erupted upward with all the force of its momentum as it tried to find the topmost edge of this invisible barrier.
