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“I’m Zita,” said the girl. “I’m the one who did all this.”
The heron, its two passengers gripping tightly to its feathers, corkscrewed into the air, and Prue’s vision swam in her head. The wind, cool and brisk at this higher altitude, whipped at her coat and hair, and she looked down at the scene they were leaving on the ground below.
It was an awesome spectacle; it was a horrible spectacle.
The ivy had completely buried the great meadow in its tide; it had consumed the sitting Mystics and was now fully laying siege to the Council Tree, assaulting its giant, twisted trunk and climbing into its outstretched boughs, snaking over the leaves and limbs like deadly streamers.
She listened and heard the tree dying.
“No!” she moaned. “Curtis—put me down! I need to get to the tree!”
“No way!” shouted Curtis over the din of the battle. “We’ve lost a few already—we can’t afford to lose you!”
“But we’ve already lost,” was Prue’s anguished reply.
“But we’ve got Carol! Carol Grod, the blind man! He’s with Esben. They’re making the cog!”
This news buoyed Prue’s spirits considerably. She blathered a little, as overwhelmed by her present situation as she’d ever been. “But how? Where did you find him? And where have you been all this time?”
“Can we talk about this later?” It was Septimus the rat, sitting at Curtis’s shoulder. He pointed a single spindly finger at the ground below them.
There was no need for further explanation; Prue looked away from the Council Tree and saw, for the first time, the ivy giants. There were seven of them now, and they were falling into position in a circle around the tree. Their heads were each obscured by a long, tangled mop of ivy, and their gargantuan legs sent waves of vines out into the meadow with their every crashing footstep. The air was filled with a flurry of massive birds, each one carrying a mounted rider, who dive-bombed the ivy giants, harrying their movements with swift attacks to their arms and heads. The bandits who’d stayed behind to muster arms had arrived; they attacked the ivy giants with swords and muskets, their every attack receiving great, throaty cheers from the farmers, who were still armed with garden tools and farming implements. Still, those carrying scythes and shears managed to cut away large chunks of ivy that made up the giants’ bodies; with every attack the birds’ talons took away even more, dropping the dead vines to the covered meadow below.
Watching the whole thing with a cold, measured grace was the Verdant Empress herself. Prue knew her as soon as she laid eyes on her. Even though Alexandra’s body stretched yards above her height as a living human and her flesh seemed to be made of the ivy itself, there was no doubt that this was the woman who’d abducted Prue’s baby brother and attempted to sacrifice him on the Plinth, those many months before. The same woman who’d raised an army of coyotes to wreak havoc on Wildwood; who’d plotted, in her despair over the death of her son, to reduce the entire Wood to nothing.
And it appeared she was succeeding.
She stood some yards off from the action, callously watching it transpire, her attention fixed, as the Mystics’ had been, on the Council Tree itself. She was watching the brutal efficiency of her dark handiwork.
“Bring me low!” shouted Curtis to the heron, and the bird dove swiftly down from its heights to graze the neck of one of the ivy giants. As they passed, Curtis gave an impassioned yell and swung his saber, cutting away a huge lock of the giant’s ivy tresses. The creature lowed in anger and swung one of its trunklike arms in the direction of the bird, but the heron’s swiftness outmatched the lumbering movements of the giant, and they were soon flown to safe airspace.
“There’s no use!” shouted Prue, her eyes still intent on Alexandra herself. With every chunk the flying fighters took out of the ivy giants’ hides, the woman simply raised her arms and more ivy climbed from the meadow’s surface to graft itself onto the giants’ wounds. “They’re made out of the ivy! It keeps just growing back.”
“Then we go for the queen!” shouted Curtis, and the heron, marking the boy’s words, banked sharply to the left and carried them, in all swiftness, toward the Verdant Empress.
She watched them come, this tall, green, reborn form of Alexandra. Her dark, empty eyes narrowed to see them approach.
She lifted her arm, a supplicating gesture, a greeting between old friends; vines shot out of her fingers and ensnared the talons of the heron.
The bird cried loudly and they began to plummet; Prue, thinking quickly, commanded and the ivy fell away. The heron regained its bearings, and they looped around the back of the Verdant Empress in a tight, dizzying circle.
“Watch her fingers!” shouted Curtis as he leaned away from the bird’s torso, his saber extended.
The Verdant Empress whipped around to confront them, and no sooner had she done so than Curtis’s saber came bearing down and struck her in the shoulder. She let out a scream of anguish as the limb fell away, the bundled stalks of its musculature rending at the shoulder joint, and was dashed to the ground in a shower of deadfall.
They hadn’t had much time to enjoy the afterglow of their successful attack, however, when Prue tapped on Curtis’s back and pointed her finger in the direction of the angered creature. She had bent low and a new clutch of ivy vines had clambered up her legs from the meadow’s floor, binding itself at her shoulder to grow a new limb.
“Oh,” said Septimus, seeing Prue’s gesture. “Well, that’s going to be a trick, isn’t it?”
But a new enemy had been dispatched; waving her newly sprouted arm over the thick blanket of ivy in the meadow, the Verdant Empress made a conjuration and little smooth lumps began to emerge from the bracken, looking every bit like eggs made from ivy vines. Prue watched with horror as these ovoid bunches began to shake and break open, revealing distinctly birdlike shapes within. They opened their viny wings, just babies in their nests, and raised their ivy beaks to the sky. Their growth was then spurred as their little bodies gathered more of the plant, and soon they were each as big as any of the large birds that were currently thwarting the ivy giants’ advance in the meadow. They sprang into the air, scores of them, and giving a terrible cry, lit into the flying corps of bandits and farmers with flashing talons and gnashing beaks.
One such ivy bird flew for Prue and Curtis, and the heron deftly dodged a grab the thing made for her neck. Gliding sideways, she quickly outflew the fledgling creature and circled around for another attack on the Verdant Empress.
“They’re fast!” shouted the heron.
Just then, they heard a scream from below them; Sterling Fox, astride an egret, was engaged in a full airborne tussle with one of the ivy birds; the egret had reared up and was tearing at his spectral foe’s underside with his talons. Sterling was holding on to the egret’s neck desperately, swinging his pruning shears impotently at their attacker.
“Hold tight!” shouted Septimus. He looked back at Prue, gave her a quick wink, and leapt from Curtis’s shoulder.
