“Thanks, Dad,” she said.
He smiled warmly, looking at the whole ensemble: his daughter, the motorcycle, the sidecar, and Zita could guess what he was thinking. He was thinking about the one thing missing: her mother, his wife.
Zita chose not to let him dwell on the image for too long: the fact that her mother had often been the passenger, the helmeted head sprouting from the sidecar, while he gripped the handlebars and rode them from hamlet to hamlet. Instead, she spoke. “I’ll be back sometime tomorrow.” (She’d furnished camping gear to complete the ruse that she’d be sleeping with Kendra in the woods.) “I love you,” she said.
“I love you too,” said her father, momentarily disarmed. She could see: His eyes brimmed with tears, but none fell.
Zita curled the grip, and the engine sputtered and roared. She walked it backward, out into the sunlight, and without giving a further look at her father, she kicked it into gear, the old thing, and wheeled out into the road.
She was an old hand at riding the ancient motorcycle, its gas tank all dented and scored; her father had taught her to ride it when she was barely seven—much to the consternation of her mother. It felt good to be back in the saddle again, feeling the air beat at her cheeks and whip at her coat. She raced through the Mercantile District, her home district, down its narrow cobblestone alleyways, which she knew like the veins on the back of her hand. Whipping past an old beaver trawling a hay cart, she nearly upset a card-trick grifter’s table and caused a black-clad nanny to anxiously yank her charges (two human toddlers) out of the road and onto the sidewalk. “Sorry!” shouted Zita above the cooing roar of the motorcycle.
She swerved out onto the Long Road and into the flow of traffic: Automobiles and bicyclists, rickshaws and lumbering palanquins all vied for real estate on the cluttered roadway. She zipped around a horse-drawn cart and into the slipstream of a clattering roadster until the exhaust became too unbearable and she zipped around it, nearly running headlong into a fleet of rickshaws.
“Watch it!” cried one of the drivers.
But Zita sped on, watching as the Mercantile District, the tightly knit rows of brick houses and shops, began to fall away and the road became lined with towering trees and wide fern glades. Here the traffic let up, and she was able to really open up the motorcycle’s throttle and the scenery blew by in a fading blur. She girded herself for what was to come.
It had been one thing to climb the North Wall and sneak like a thief into the Avian Principality; it was another to have to blow the gate on a sidecar-dragging motorcycle. There was no way she’d be able to get to Wildwood on foot—it was too far—and right now there was no available transport to North Wood that would let her climb out in the middle of the wildest part of the Wood, not to mention that the next bus wouldn’t be leaving for another three days. So she’d decided she’d just make a run at the gate.
She’d heard, since her early morning escapade in search of the eagle feather, that many of the soldiers who manned the North Gate had abandoned their posts, that a kind of chaos had come over the security infrastructure of South Wood. The word was that the soldiers weren’t getting paid, there was no money left in the coffers, and it was a resilient guardsman indeed who stayed at his post when he hadn’t received a paycheck in three weeks. The Synod had been quickly forthcoming about taking their place, providing security where there was none, but she hoped that transition had yet to reach the North Gate.
The world sped by; the needle quivered on the motorcycle speedometer, and she fell behind a mail truck that was, she assumed, bound for the North Gate. She caught sight of the driver in the truck’s side-view mirror: An old, grizzled man, he wore the visored cap of a postmaster general. After a time, the wall came into view, and she eased up on the throttle, following the truck as it rolled to a slow halt.
Only one soldier, dressed in dirty khakis, appeared to be manning the gate, and he seemed to be none too pleased with the responsibility. Seeing the mail truck, he slowly stepped away from his prior position leaning against the stone wall, and sauntered toward the vehicle. He didn’t ask for papers; he merely looked in the front of the truck and made a visual ID of the subject, nodding. He then walked over to the gate and, after some wrangling, threw the giant double doors open.
That was when Zita made her move.
Letting go the clutch, she cranked the throttle and peeled out from behind the mail truck, spraying a rooster tail of gravel behind her. The soldier, shocked, fell backward and impotently raised his hand in objection. Zita flew through the gate and, quickly shifting, was soon well beyond sight of the soldier’s objecting cries.
It was shocking how easy it was. She threw a glance over her shoulder in time to see a pair of golden eagles swoop down from their perches and fall in behind her, squawking loudly.
“HALT, HUMAN!” one shouted.
Lowering her brow against the headwind, Zita twisted the handgrip, and she felt the bike leap forward at her command; soon the shouts of the pursuing eagles grew quiet and distant behind her. There was little they could do—within an hour she’d be on the other side of the Principality. She was bent on her task, the retrieval of a single pebble from some obscure creek in the middle of Wildwood.
Now that she’d cleared the gate, she had a moment to reflect on the craziness of the thing she’d just done. Where, in what remote part of her, had she managed to distill that kind of courage? She’d never been a particularly courageous kid—not any more so than her schoolmates, though perhaps a little more headstrong and curious—and yet here she was, riding her father’s motorcycle at a breakneck pace through the North Gate and toward the most inhospitable and dangerous province of the Wood. There were stories that were told around fireplaces and banquet halls, stories of wights and wyverns that lived in the depths of Wildwood; stories of the Wildwood bandits, who’d strip you clean of your possessions and leave you tied to a tree in the middle of the wilderness, an easy lunch for any number of wights or wyverns who might happen to be passing by.
All for the strange calling of this woman, this Verdant Empress.
Who was the Verdant Empress? It was one thing she’d had a lot of time to consider. The origin story she had learned (though admittedly there were many) went that she was a bereaved mother, one of the Ancients, a woman whose own child had been violently and horrifically taken from her. It was said she’d died of sadness. And so: She visited the living, children especially, in search of her departed child. If these stories were true, Zita had to think she was doing the spirit world a tremendous service by carrying out these errands.
But there was something else; something else dug at her insides as she went about these tasks, something that had very much to do with the empty sidecar that she tugged alongside the speeding motorcycle.
Zita knew what it was like to lose, to feel loss. She’d felt that incredible incision when her mother had been taken from her.
But her loss hadn’t been violent, not like the Verdant Empress’s—if anything it had been the very opposite: drawn out and slow, the woman’s passing marked by silence and fog. It’d been some kind of illness; that’s what the doctors had said. Some seven months ago, she’d taken to bed at the beginning of the week, complaining of pain in her chest, and by Friday she was gone. And it felt like the foundation that held up Zita’s life had been promptly taken apart, stone by stone, and she was left with a weird, empty space. She felt like a person without legs, like a car without wheels. Like some very integral part of her was missing and yet here she was: keeping going.
So she understood the Verdant Empress’s pain. She understood her loss. And in many ways it felt like she owed this service to a mother, a mother who very well could be much like her own, as a way of completing some kind of circle.
These were the thoughts that occupied Zita the May Queen as she sped farther into the Avian Principality.
There was no wall marking the boundary between the Avians’ province and Wildwood—the birds had no need for wall
s. Instead, a series of signs had been posted, one after another, along the side of the road:
YOU ARE LEAVING THE AVIAN PRINCIPALITY.
YOU ARE ENTERING WILDWOOD.
WILDWOOD APPROACHING; TRAVELERS BE WARY.
JUST BEYOND THIS SIGN IS WILDWOOD.
ACTUALLY, THIS SIGN.
THERE ARE BANDITS AFOOT.
YOU ARE NOW IN WILDWOOD.
A final sign, tipped over on its post, read GOOD LUCK.
Zita cranked the throttle and rode her motorcycle and sidecar across the border and left civilization behind.
She rode for the better part of the day. The rattle of the front forks and the roar of the engine began to turn her arms into rubber, and she finally stopped at what appeared to be an old way station. There was little there: just a stone front stoop and a gnarled tree guarding what would have been the entrance, but the ground was flat and relatively free of brambles; she laid out her sleeping bag in the crook of a large hemlock, shielding herself and the motorcycle from the road. The dark came on quickly, casting the deep-green surroundings in a gray haze. Zita ate her dinner: a peanut-butter-banana sandwich and a box of raisins, washed down with stale-tasting water. She curled up in the nook of the tree’s roots and looked up at the sky, the pinpricks of stars appearing between the arrowlike treetops. An owl hooted; the wind rustled the leaves of the surrounding bushes. She fell into a deep, powerful sleep.
She started early, struggling against the aching of her limbs. The motorcycle was old but reliable, and the engine ignited without much trouble. Straddling the bike, she studied the map she’d brought, a pencil sketch she’d traced over the map in her father’s atlas. Rocking Chair Creek was not far off, she guessed: another day’s ride. Judging from how far she’d gone in the first day, she supposed she could be there by nightfall. The squiggly line of the creek bed wound its way, three tines of a fork, through a section the map had called the Ancients’ Grove.
The sky grew cloudy and the forest took on an ominous aspect as she stepped the motorcycle into gear and made her way down the rough gravel of the Long Road. She kept a keen eye on the roadside, wary of bandits or other dangerous characters. She’d never seen a bandit herself; she’d only heard about them. Apparently, they’d come to South Wood during the Bicycle Coup—the Bicycle Maiden had managed to tame their wildness and win them to her side. But once they’d left, many citizens of South Wood breathed a sigh of relief. They were known to be a vicious lot, and Zita, for one, was dearly afraid of them.
Before long, in fact right around lunchtime, she arrived at the first of the three bridges that, according to her map, crossed the three forks of Rocking Chair Creek. The water here cut a deep gulf into the hillside, and Zita stopped the motorcycle at the edge of the bridge to look down into the gorge. The snowmelt had turned the creek into a raging torrent, and while she assumed that there’d be many pebbles to be had in that particular creek bed, the chance that she’d break her neck in the trying was a little too off-putting. Looking back at her map, she decided she’d check out the middle fork of the creek, to see if there wasn’t a place where a pebble could be easier got.
She was there within the hour; a rough wooden bridge, layered in moss, allowed precarious travel over the rushing creek bed below. Again, the seasonal rains and melted snow had turned what she assumed would be a placid trickle of a creek into a small river, and the idea of climbing down the bracken-covered bank to retrieve a pebble seemed awfully dangerous. Looking farther eastward, up the hillside, she saw that the ravine grew shallower; she decided she would try her luck off the road. Letting the motorcycle laze on its kickstand, she stepped off the path and into the trees.
The going was hard, the terrain unkind. As she climbed higher, she found herself crawling into a bank of clouds that obscured her vision ahead. The trees took on strange shapes, like giants with spindly heads, and she thought she saw movements in the trees, spectral movements, and she wondered if the stories were true: that spirits and sprites haunted these woods. Suddenly, a shape came into view, through the shroud of mist: It was a toppled white column, its fluted shape covered in a web of ivy. Zita’s jaw dropped to see it; she hadn’t expected to see any sign of civilization in these woods, let alone a shape that suggested a former, carefully wrought structure. As she walked, more of these objects presented themselves until she saw that she was standing in the middle of a wide courtyard, surrounded by these white columns, all in various states of decay.
She could hear the rushing of Rocking Chair Creek, and she followed the sound up a worn stone stairway that let onto a man-made pool, where the creek spilled down a white stone sluice to feed a bubbling cistern. Looking inside the bowl of the object, she saw a single, opaline stone.
“There you are, pebble,” said Zita, aloud, like some crazy person.
She reached in and grabbed it; it was smooth to the touch. The water was frigid, and it sent a violent shiver through her body. Shoving the pebble in her pocket, she turned to head back to the motorcycle when the world around her seemed to shift.
The mist had grown closer, like a blanket smothering a fire, and even the closest trees and columns grew hazy. She thought she saw lights flicker through the fog: firefly-like flickers, like starfalls. A howl erupted, not far off, followed by a series of whiny yips. She recognized that call: coyotes.
She’d heard that the coyotes that had fought in the Battle for the Plinth, now returned to their natural state, were a lawless and savage kind. She chose not to wait and find out if this was true. She bolted back down the hill, following a winding stone path that led away from the cistern.
She’d lost track of which direction the road was in; the mist consumed everything. It seemed to fall on her, to enshroud her. She leapt over trickling brooks and under fallen marble columns. She threw herself through a clutch of thistles, the thorns tearing at her coat. The sounds of the coyotes’ braying grew louder; the lights flickered on all sides. A noise like a whisper suddenly shushed at her ear and she screamed, once, loudly. She fell into a wide glade, like a sea of ivy, and there she saw the Plinth.
A feeling of horror overtook her to see this thing, this stone thing that she’d only heard about. It was here that all those good folk died, the Wildwood Irregulars, when they fought the Dowager Governess’s coyote army. It was here, the stories told, that the Governess nearly conducted her horrible conjuration. Zita stood, transfixed, and very suddenly she was stripped of her fear—even though the fairy lights continued to flash around her and the braying of the coyotes sounded as if they were growing closer and closer—she suddenly felt an incredibly placid wave come over her.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the pebble she’d stored there. The size of a walnut, it had a surface as smooth as glass and as white as an ivory tusk.
The ivy rustled at her feet, as if it were alive.
PART TWO
CHAPTER 12
Fifteen Summers
She hadn’t known what it was, at first, when she stepped on it. Some discarded thing that the gardener had dropped. Some trinket or tool. Her ankle twisted when she stepped on it, and she momentarily lost her balance. She cursed, once, quietly.
It was one of those summer days that seemed to stretch on into eternity, and the heat was such that you couldn’t believe that the grass, yellow in patches where the gardener’s watering can had been remiss, didn’t just erupt into flames. She’d been standing in the garden, the chinks in her sun hat dappling her skin with bright, light freckles, weeding the wildflower beds. Or she thought she had. Instead, she’d been taken by her thoughts and her mind had become clouded over by the heat and the light and she’d dropped her spade and swooned. Deciding she needed a glass of water, she’d carefully walked back toward the Mansion, excusing herself to the staff who had stood up from their labors, concerned about their mistress’s health.
“I’m okay,” she’d said. “Just the heat.”
And then she stepped on the thing and cursed and lifted her foot t
o see what it was: It was not some mislaid tool. It was a toy block.
A wooden thing—perhaps the missing crenellation of some battlement or the capstone of a pyramid—it suddenly and shockingly made her realize how quickly time had passed; that this little block, once a beloved and necessary thing to her child, was no more missed now than a piece of clothing that had long outlived the time of its fashion. She picked it up and studied it, turning it over in the light of the bright sun.
Just then, she heard his voice. “Mama!” called her son, the boy who’d, at some point in the distant past, mislaid this crucial block. His voice was deepened now, showing the first sign of his father’s husky baritone, but she found it was still inflected with the tone of a child, a boy. She waited to answer; she wanted to hear it again.
“Mama! Where are you?” A little louder now. It was coming from the other side of the Mansion, where the shade fell and covered the crocuses and the yellowed blossoms of the sunburnt rhododendrons.
“Alexei!” she yelled in response, her gloved hands at her mouth. “Just here!”
And then, her son appeared from the curtain of shadow: a boy of fifteen summers, fourteen winters. He wore a smart suit, newly tailored, which clung to his thin, handsome frame. His hair was a color that only came on in the summer, a kind of reddish brown, which would return to brown once the season had ebbed. She knew him well enough; she’d known him through every season of his life.