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“Null?” said Prue, suddenly panicked. “What do you mean, null?” She found a reserve of strength and pushed herself away from Angus’s arm.
The owl turned to her and frowned. “Yes. Alexandra—the Verdant Empress—will move beyond the Periphery. Once she’s done wreaking havoc on the Wood, she will consume the Outside as well.”
While none of the individuals present, besides Prue, could truly envision what this statement suggested—none of them having ever set foot in the so-called Outside—it immediately conjured a very stark and terrifying picture for Prue. She found, while in the Wood, that she cared very little for the Outside; for its mundane realities and trivial concerns—but there was something in this, this suggestion that the boundary between the two worlds would be overrun, that made her almost protective of her home-world.
“Over here!” came a voice; they all looked to see one of the bandits standing some yards off, on the edge of the clearing. “Prue! You’re needed!”
Rushing to where the bandit stood, they immediately saw the cause for concern: A small hut was in the process of being crushed under the weight of its thick mantle of ivy. Inside, a voice could be heard, crying for help.
“Esben!” shouted Prue, suddenly recognizing the growly timbre of the voice.
She threw her hands up to the surface of the structure and began coaxing away the ivy vines; the bandits fell in around her and started stripping the plant away once it had been controlled. The door was soon located; they were dismayed to find its latch was affixed with a heavy iron padlock.
“Hold tight there!” shouted Brendan as he turned to his fellow robed bandits, waving his hand. “One of you’s got to have the key. Search your pockets, lads!”
The hut’s strained framework wheezed as the ivy continued to constrict, bending the structure into a weird, oblong shape. Inside, something cracked. Esben let out a yell of surprise.
“We’re going to get you out of there!” shouted Prue, her hands held to the living surface of the hut, willing the ivy to let up its pressure. The mass seemed too great; she was having a hard time communing with it all.
The bandits, almost comically, were it not for the gravity of the situation, were simultaneously patting the sides of their identical gray robes, searching for the key, before Brendan spoke up. “Look at that,” he said, producing a brassy skeleton key from his pocket. “Had it all along.” The lock undone, they threw open the door.
Inside, pressed up against the far wall, was a bear with two golden hooks for hands. He smiled sheepishly to see his rescuers. “Hi, there,” he said. “Mind the ivy.”
Indeed, the plant had made its way through the chinks in the hut’s log walls and was busily crawling across the floor toward the bear. Prue leapt forward and, issuing a word of warning to the creeping plant in her mind, grabbed Esben by the hook. She rushed the bear through the door frame, squeezed as it was into a vexed rhombus, while the hut groaned and shivered around them.
Once they’d made the safety of the outside, Prue threw herself on the bear, wrapping her arms around his massive midsection and only managing to cover half the distance. The bandits looked on, marveling at the sagging structure of the bear’s former prison cell.
“And I thought it’d cave in just as we got him out,” said Seamus.
“Only works that way in stories,” said another bandit nearby, Gram.
Seamus gave one of the doorjamb posts a kick, and the entire structure blew to the ground in an eruption of noise, dust, and ivy. “There we go,” said the bandit, satisfied.
Prue, momentarily jolted by the hut’s collapse, turned back to Esben; she began busily pulling the last bits of clinging ivy from the bear’s fur, motherlike, while she spoke. “I’m so sorry, Esben. I had no idea what was happening.”
“They must’ve followed the badger,” said Esben, still regaining his bearings. “They came at me quickly; I couldn’t have escaped. Hooded things.” He shivered then. “And then the ivy; it came on so fast. And the terrible crashing noises. I’ve been trapped in that cabin for who knows how long!”
“You’re safe now,” said Prue.
“Am I?” asked the bear, taking in the surroundings. Indeed, his environment had changed so drastically since he’d been taken prisoner that there was barely a resemblance remaining to that diverse forest he’d left when they had first locked him up.
“She’s back, the Dowager Governess. Just in . . . some other form,” said Prue. “She’s taken control of the ivy.”
“What does she plan on doing with it?” asked the bear, confused.
“She means to rend the very fabric of the Periphery Bind,” answered Owl Rex. “She means to tear down the Trees of the Wood.” The bird’s head feathers were ruffled by a flurry of the wind and he looked southward, to the lowering banks of clouds on the horizon. “If it is her wish,” he said, “she now rides for the Ossuary Tree, the second tree, to break it to its roots. Then, only a third tree will stand in her way.”
“The Council Tree,” breathed Prue. Her mind flashed on the peaceable folk of North Wood, on the chain of quiet Mystics, practicing their meditations around the gargantuan trunk of the great tree. “We have to go. We have to stop her.”
“We can perhaps hold her back,” said the owl gravely.
?
?But what of the girl’s power?” put in Brendan. “She can control the ivy. Could she hold the tide at bay?”
The owl looked to Prue, frowning. “Even with your estimable powers, the Verdant Empress would overrun you.”
“But the Mystics—if we rallied them, they could help. We could work together,” said Prue.
