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But to make the boy again, a machine replica of the living, breathing thing, special expertise would need to be engaged. This was no simple automaton, no blinking ceramic doll that wet itself when its left arm was raised. The task before her was to imitate the workings of the Maker, the Divine Being. For this, she consulted blacksmiths and machinists, toy makers and engineers. A bear, living in seclusion in the farthest reaches of South Wood, was known for his intricate metalwork. His family had repaired the Mansion’s clocks for generations; the bear himself was known for the construction of little trinkets: mechanical waxwings that aped the behaviors of their flesh-and-blood models and bellowed about in thick flocks, clouding the air of the market where he sold the things to ecstatic children. But he alone could not re-create a human child. To do so, he needed the aid of an Outsider machinist, a man who existed in legend only among the toy makers and tinkerers of the Wood. He explained this to the Governess in quaking tones while she stared at him from behind her desk in the Mansion’s office.
“His name is Carol Grod,” said the bear. “I believe together we could make such a thing.”
A pair of eagles was dispatched to fetch this machinist from some lonely hovel in the Outside. How easy it seemed, the Governess reckoned, to simply have a thing, a person, carried to oneself at one’s bidding. The man’s story was uninteresting to her, the demon having bloomed fully in her breast: how his creations had astonished and wowed Outsider children and adults alike for decades, little contraptions made of brass and copper with intricate inner workings that clicked and whirred. But his abilities became overshadowed by the wondrous worlds available by screen, by computer, and his inventions were forgotten and ignored and he disappeared into anonymity.
He had use here, though, here in the world his kind called the Impassable Wilderness. And so the two of them, the old man and the bear, working in seclusion, began to create the body that would house the soul of Alexei. The soul of her son.
CHAPTER 13
A Meeting at the Tree
Esben the bear stirred at the fire with the hooks of his hands and breathed in the dark around him. The night had come on quickly, here in the woods, where the tall shroud of trees acted as a kind of curtain to the sun. An owl hooted, somewhere, far off. He shivered, a reflexive shiver, as a slight uneasiness came over him. It’d been many hours since he and the girl parted ways; he’d expected her back before sundown. What’s more, he was getting a little peckish. He’d eaten through what food they’d had in her bag fairly quickly; his appetite did tend to get the best of him from time to time. Prue had promised to bring more food—she’d said that, hadn’t she?
He knocked over one of the burning branches in the fire, sending sparks in the air, and stabbed his hooks into a fresh log just to the side of the pit. It was one thing, he reflected, he was particularly good at now—fire tending. The hooks were kind of a godsend in that way: If he ever had to tend fires for the rest of his life, it’d be something he’d do well at. It’d been—what—thirteen years now, right? Since he’d had his paws roughly removed—a surgeon’s scalpel had done the job in a scant few minutes. He grimaced a little now, here at the fire, remembering the pain. The searing pain.
A noise startled him: a scratching somewhere beyond the throw of the firelight. “Who’s there?” he shouted. No response came. The scratching stopped. Esben adjusted the rake of his knitted cap and grumbled a little, there, angry at the invisible thing for disturbing his peace. “Fine,” he said to the darkness. “Don’t show yourself.”
Pr
obably a squirrel, he reasoned. He hoped it wasn’t some spy for the Mansion—some holdout from the old days who might catch him, accuse him of breaking his parole. He was supposed to be dead, exiled away to the deepest reaches of the Underwood. Even though Prue seemed convinced that he’d be safe—that the people responsible for his mutilation and exile were long gone, washed away in the flood of revolution—he still couldn’t fight the residual fear that he’d be thrown back into that dark world. Or worse. Surely, seeing he’d survived the most horrific disfigurement and exile they could devise, they’d want to try something more severe. He shivered, again, at the thought.
Another sound came from the surrounding woods, this time louder: It was indescribable to the poor bear; it was both airy and watery, if such a thing could be said to exist. It called to mind the angered battle cry of some terrible creature, something that perhaps had the body of a squid, all slippery tentacles and ooze, and the head of an owl. The noise came again: a kind of bubbling WHOOOO. A drowned ghost, perhaps, called to Esben’s position by the promise of a warming fire, where the wandering spirit might dry his soggy, moss-covered clothes.
“Who’s th-there?” managed Esben, staring off into the dark, his hooks held in a defensive position.
There came a pause, then the words: “Oh, forget it.” It was, unmistakably, Prue’s voice.
The bear let out a breath of relief when he saw the girl’s figure appear from out of the forest’s dark. She set her hands on her hips in a show of frustration and said, “I can’t whistle. I forgot.”
That was, after all, to be their signal that a friend was approaching.
The bear smiled. “No matter,” he said. “Takes some practice.”
Two other figures appeared behind the girl, a short-statured badger and a lumbering hulk of a man sporting a nappy brown beard.
“This is Neil, who you met earlier,” said Prue, gesturing to the badger. “And this is Charlie. They’re going to help us.”
“How do you do?” said Esben.
“Very well, thanks,” said Charlie. “Nice fire you got there.”
“We have a moment, anyway,” said Prue. “If you want to take a load off. It’s been a long day.”
“What happened?” asked the bear.
The man, Charlie, put in enthusiastically before Prue could answer, “Oh, you wouldn’t have believed it, if you’d ’a been there. A glorious return, it was. The Bicycle Maiden, come back to the Mansion. I’ll be tellin’ my grandkids about that.”
“Oh, please,” demurred Prue, her cheeks showing their blush by the light of the campfire.
“It’s true!” continued Charlie. “Quite a show. Even those Caliphs were quakin’ in their boots to see her show up.”
“Charlie’s a fan,” said Prue, by way of explanation. Remembering herself, she shrugged her bag from her shoulder and let it fall with a thump to the ground. “I got you some more food. A little dried fruit and some bread. Some jerky and potted meat, too. It was all I could grab.”
“That’ll do very nicely, thanks,” said Esben. He easily unpeeled the top of one of the cans of meat and began dishing the pink stuff into his mouth. “How’d it go?” he asked between bites.
“As well as you could expect, I guess.”
“And it was a big deal, you coming back?”
