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“What does that even mean?” asked Prue.
“No time,” said the owl. “Suffice it to say, you’re needed in South Wood. Immediately.” He moved away from Prue, and, spreading his wings wide, he proffered his back to the two humans. “Get onboard. We have a long way to go.”
The two gingerly climbed on the owl’s back, Prue at the bird’s neck and Seamus just behind her. The owl, surprisingly, seemed little encumbered by their weight. He crouched low on the pinnacle of the broken stairs and shook his wings out to their full span; Prue could feel Seamus’s grip around her belly go suddenly taut. “Oof,” she said.
“Can I tell you something?” asked the bandit as the owl cocked his head, as if waiting for the wind to shift.
“What?”
“Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“Sure.”
“I’m afraid of heights.”
Prue stifled a laugh. “Better close your eyes, then,” she said. And just at that moment, the giant bird gave a heaving push and took flight from the ruin on the Crag, sending chunks of rock spiraling to the ocean water below, his two riders working desperately to stay astride. Prue heard the bandit behind her gasp loudly; she felt the sea wind rushing through her hair, and the sky opened up above her as the lonely rock where she’d been sentenced to live out her days grew smaller and smaller below her.
Though she’d done it now twice in her life, Prue could not escape the feeling of wonder while riding on the back of an airborne bird. Even Seamus had loosened up into the ride and had let go his grip on her midsection. The owl’s long wings beat against the rising air currents, and he deftly steered them through the whipping air. A low bank of clouds had settled over the ground below them, like a thin layer of cotton batting, and they flew unseen in the lofty springlike sky.
They were to travel all night, the owl said. They would follow an ancient migration pattern that connected the ocean to the Wood. It had been used since the time of the Ancients, when spots of Woods Magic appeared everywhere, before the need to shore up their defenses against the encroaching tide of Outsiders. As if underscoring this claim, a group of squawking cormorants came buzzing up from beneath them, briefly flurried around their airspace before disappearing down below the bank of clouds.
The night overtook the day, and little stars revealed themselves in the dome of sky. Prue nuzzled up against the owl’s feathery nape and drifted into sleep. Dawn was glimmering in the east by the time she was awoken by the owl’s booming voice. “Not far now!” he shouted.
Prue’s eyes blinked open and she scanned the ground below. How he could know where they were, Prue wasn’t sure. The world beneath them looked like a tufted white blanket.
The owl shifted the angle of his right wing and the trio pitched sharply down and to the right; Prue heard the bandit behind her let out a little hoot. Within moments, they were skirting the layer of clouds, and Prue looked down to see her foot, hanging just below the owl’s underbelly, disappear into fog. The world whited out for a moment, and then they reemerged on the underside of the clouds and saw the wide stretch of the Wood splayed out below them.
A Wood that, from this height, looked remarkably changed.
“What’s happened?” shouted Prue.
The owl made no reply but instead swooped lower, and Prue saw the change that was occurring.
The ivy was laying claim to the forest.
Like a thick covering of moss besieging a mottled rock, so the ivy was consuming the woods. The plant seemed to expand from some central point, draping the surrounding forest in a heavy shroud of viny brown and green. There was nowhere on this patch of earth that Prue couldn’t see the effects of the plant’s ravaging. As they flew closer, she could actually see the stuff moving, stretching out and staking new territory in its march northward, topping the tall fir trees and spiderwebbing from treetop to treetop. What’s more, Prue began to hear a sort of virulent hissing rising up from the vines.
“The ivy!” she shouted into Owl’s ear. “It’s happening!”
From where they were positioned, they could see the boundary demarcating the border between the lands of the Outsiders and the Woodians. Prue recognized the distant skyline of Portland’s downtown; she saw the puffing smokestacks of the Industrial Wastes. She saw to her horror that the ivy seemed to have lapped up against the invisible line separating these two worlds, like plants in a terrarium pressing against the glass of their enclosure. It was clear that the Periphery Bind was the only thing holding the ivy back from claiming more than just the territory it had conquered in the Wood.
The owl circled a few times before angling in on a wide meadow overtaken by the plant. Within moments, his talons
had touched the ground and his riders leapt from his back, taking in the scene.
“It’s worse than I feared,” said the owl, adjusting his footing on the strange surface.
“Where are we?” asked Prue. The landscape was, indeed, changed beyond recognition. The trees that marked the boundary of this clearing stood like shrouded ghosts, like covered furniture in some unused wing of a castle, rendered unidentifiable by the organism that smothered them. The ground below their feet heaved and shuddered under their weight; it seemed that they were not actually touching the ground, so thick was the layer of vines. A few lumps presented themselves here and there throughout the clearing, and some kind of mountainous pile of the stuff held the center: a towering hill of writhing ivy.
“South Wood,” replied the owl. He lifted his wing and pointed at the gigantic lump of greenery that stood some yards from them. “Behold, the Mansion.”
Prue gaped to see it, but she soon confirmed the owl’s declaration: She could just make out the shapes of the building’s two towers. The hissing was nearly deafening by now, and it took all her mental efforts to keep it at bay. Seamus, taking a few trial steps out into the new, living surface of the Mansion’s estate, said, “Why isn’t it covering us?”
“I expect it’s being controlled from somewhere farther afield,” said the owl. “It appears to be slightly dormant here, in the trough of the wave.” He looked about him, at the strange, apocalyptic scene playing out before them. “Here, the damage has been done. The Verdant Empress marches northward.”
“The Verdant Empress?” asked Prue. “What’s that?”
“The reborn form of Alexandra. Born of ivy, she has taken the form of the plant itself.”
