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YES, came a voice—or was it the wind?
Then the stone.
YESSS, repeated the voice. Couldn’t be the wind.
And finally, the teeth.
NOW, said the voice.
Zita looked up at the sky, laden with clouds and shaking tree branches, and calmly intoned the following incantation:
“I CALL YOU,
VERDANT EMPRESS.”
The sky ceased its bucketing rain. The clouds froze in place. The trees quivered and gasped.
The ivy came alive under Zita’s knees. It was as if the ivy was a body of water and someone, from a very great height, had dropped a rock into it. The point of contact was the bowl of offerings, and the wave rippled out in concentric circles from the center. Now the circle came again, this time as if the thing that had been dropped was the size of a basketball, and Zita, to her shock, was carried along in the crest; she fell backward on her elbows. Then it happened again, again larger, and Zita was thrown to one side of the house, where she braced herself for another wave.
Quiet. Silent stillness.
Then: an eruption from the center of the ivy bed, from the spot where the bowl had been laid. A single column of ivy blew from the earth and rocketed upward, a writhing, pitching obelisk of the plant; the green vines twisted and braided themselves, controlled by an unseen power, and began to take shape into something other. Suddenly, from the cocoonlike tangle of ivy, Zita saw an arm outstretch.
She was watching a human, slowly being created out of ivy.
Zita watched as the ivy, suspended in midair above the floor of the stone house, formed twin limbs—human limbs—that licked out into long, thin fingers; fingers that unfurled and straightened as life channeled through them. The ivy, at the center point, curled in on itself, making the trunk, and two breasts extruded from the leaves, and Zita realized she was watching the creation of a woman and, in her wildness of thought, suddenly knew it to be the Verdant Empress herself.
The vines atop the columns busily coiled in on themselves, and soon a head and a face became clear, and a clutch of the plant grew down from the crown of the head to form two braids of hair. A wide brow, an elegant cheekbone—all framing two closed eyes that hung over a nose and a pair of sweet green lips. Zita watched it all take place, absolutely transfixed by the miracle that was happening, that she had called into being. What power! What incredible magic!
And then the eyes opened.
They flared like fire, a fire that overtook the figure’s placid expression and tw
isted it into a look of absolute spite.
Seeing this, Zita screamed, and the figure looked down at her pitilessly.
The ivy-woman’s mouth yawned open, and a terrifying and heartrending moan issued from its lips, and Zita realized that what she had done was a very bad idea. A very bad idea, indeed.
The three sets of ripples that had started from that center point on the floor of the old stone house on Macleay Road continued, as all waves must, on past the walls of the house and pulsed out into the neighboring woods. With each spasm of energy that was created, the wave in the ivy poured out, concentrically, and the wave grew as it moved, pushed forward by its own momentum. It rolled through the vegetation that surrounded the cemetery and out into the villages of South Wood; it contorted the roads and shattered the windows of the sleeping houses. It woke children and adults alike from their sleep; sent fathers and mothers running for their windows to see what the disturbance had been. It swept outward, farther still, and rent the hard stone of the North Wall and quaked the massive cedars of the Avian Principality, sending birds scurrying to flight while their nests, brittle in the wave, broke to pieces and scattered into the wind. The wave roared through Wildwood, awaking every tendril of ivy as it went, pulling every vine into its movement and through the Ancients’ Grove. It broke under the feet of a mob of young children who had just crossed into the woods, only momentarily slowing them in their pursuit of the two men who were making their way, farther and farther, into this strange and unknowable wilderness. It rode across these deep, uninhabited forests and wrecked the cobbles of the Long Road and crested, unstoppable, over the passes and the peaks of the Cathedral Mountains; it rolled into North Wood and pulverized the freshly plowed furrows of the farmers’ lands and shook the roots of the Council Tree, sending a flurry of dead and dying leaves into the cold, gray air.
It went out, farther still. It became a loping wave on the churning Columbia River and sent bucking breakers to smash into the hull of a four-masted ocean-bound ship. The vessel rocked violently and sent a flurry of seamen scrambling about the decks, trying to right the ship. Down in the belowdecks, a black-haired girl, held captive in a locked cell, awoke from a fitful sleep and gasped.
She stood up quickly, feeling something—not just the feel of the ship quaking in the sudden wave—but something else entirely, as if the physical force of the wave had been accompanied by a cry for help from every leaf and branch and stem and petal of the forest.
She stared out of her barred porthole, her eyes agape.
“She’s come back,” said the girl.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 22
An Owl’s Tale
In the woods, there lived an owl.
He was a quiet owl, one who liked to keep to himself. He considered himself lucky to be living in a fairly untrammeled patch of the forest, and he rarely had much fuss with his neighbors. He slept through the days, typically, in a cozy nest he’d built in the hollow of a very old tree, which had snapped in half during a storm some twelve years prior. The hollow made a very nice home for an owl who was getting on in years.
