Isle of Wysteria: Make Like a Tree and Leaf

by Aaron Yeager

  Athel felt a rising sense of excitement as she watched the approaching cliffs of Thesda, snaggleteeth of rock rising up out of the sea, illuminated from behind by a crescent moon in the night sky.

  They had left the Dreadnaught hidden beneath the sands of Whilinham for the time being, along with a very relieved Odger and Pops, while the rest of the crew made the final leg of the journey in the longboat and Privet’s sloop.

  Looking up, Athel could see why. She counted at least a dozen Navy ships just on this end of the island, their hazy shapes obscuring the stars beyond as they circled carefully in their formations. They were surprisingly active for this time of night, but since her Naval experience primarily centered around the Dreadnaught, which was severely atypical, she didn’t think it strange enough to speak up. So far they had only been stopped by one patrol boat, but had easily passed by using Privet’s royal mandate papers and a generous donation to the patrol boat’s personal coffers.

  “I want to thank you again for coming this far with me,” Athel praised to those around her. “I have already caused you all so much trouble as it is and I feel bad asking so much more of you this night.”

  “Don’t be thanking us just yet, missy,” Evere said, his black eyes twinkling in the dark. “Don’t forget that we’re about to rescue the heir to the Stretian kingdom, the second wealthiest nation in the league. I’m guessing she’ll have plenty of ways to thank us once this is over.”

  “I swear, you are all such mercenaries,” Athel kidded.

  “Sweetie, if we were mercenaries, we would have turned you in the minute the Navy asked us to,” Mina purred.

  “Aye, or any of a dozen other offers just as generous,” her husband added.

  “I had no idea I would be so popular,” Athel commented, looking out over the side toward Privet’s sloop. She noticed that he was looking back at her, and their eyes met for an uncomfortable moment before he looked away. She, however, kept her eyes fixed on him.

  He seemed so different to her now. He had always been this indomitable will, this undefeatable warrior to her eyes. Afraid of nothing and strong as the redwoods. Yes, it was definitely his strength that she found so attractive. His broad shoulders, his solid arms, his focused gaze. Of course she admired his skills and desired to learn from them, but it was his strength that she had always wanted to be near. Now, he seemed diminished, smaller somehow. There was a part of her that wanted to feel compassion for him, even pity him, but the hurt of his rejection was still too near for her, and so she could only look on as he looked away from her, wondering where his strength had gone.

  “Why are my fingernails still brown?” Alder asked aloud as he looked at his hands.

  “Your fingernails are brown?” Mina asked, snatching a hand and looking at it.

  “Yes, I thought they’d change back but they haven’t. They’ve been like this ever since I drank that potion.”

  “Oh, well, that might be permanent,” Dr. Griffin admitted. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “When we get back to the ship I have some nail coloring we can use to fix it,” Mina offered.

  “If we get back to the ship,” Ryin grumbled.

  “Nail coloring will just cover up the problem,” Athel interrupted, surprised at herself for being drawn in on the conversation. “I can grow some herbs that will work better, and we can make them into a tea.”

  “Well, I appreciate the offer,” Alder explained, “but the last time I ate your food I got really sick.”

  Everyone grew silent, in anticipation of an explosion of temper, but when Athel started laughing, everyone relaxed and laughed along with her.

  “That was a good one,” she said approvingly, slapping him on the back. “I like it when you stick up for yourself.”

  “And I hate it when you quote those stale adventures novels of yours,” he continued, emboldened.

  “Don’t press your luck, Bursage,” she warned humorlessly.

  “My apologies, my Lady,” he said quickly, with a bow.

  The winds shifted slightly, rocking the boat and straining its small sail and everyone looked to Margaret sitting in the back of the longboat.

  “Why are you blaming me?” Margaret defended, adjusting her glasses. “I’m not responsible for every gust of wind out there, you know.”

  “Okay,” Athel said, returning to task and pulling out her master plan sheet. “The Dreadnaught is coming to pick us up in 25 hours, so everything has to be done by then or we’ll be stranded.”

  “How come you’re still using that hand-drawn map of yours?” Ryin asked. “We have real maps in the forecastle.”

  “Because this map has my notes on it,” she retorted. “Now, we’ll be in different districts, so we’ll need a way to communicate. If your mission is complete, start one fire. If it has failed, light two.”

  “I don’t think that is going to work, lass,” Evere warned.

  “Of course it will work. I thought lighting fires was your most favorite and most sacred thing.”

  “Is that another thing on your list?” Mina asked, insulted.

  “No,” Evere said, pointing ahead, “because the eastern market district is already on fire.”

  Athel turned around and saw the orange flickers as gouts of flame rose high into the night sky. Already she could hear the distant snap of cannon and rifle fire, and the moan of wood and brick splintering from impacts.

  “Is...that Spirea?” Athel gasped.

  * * *

  Inside the Thesdan Naval offices, Ms. Recaldier was doing the best she could to maintain her world of strict discipline, but everything was falling apart around her.

  “Have fire-control teams dispatched from the western port,” she commanded as one of her attendants ran off, trying to keep his footing as the ground shook beneath their feet.

  “What is going on?” another attendant asked as she approached, buttoning up her uniform.

  “We’re not sure yet,” Ms. Recaldier said, losing her footing as the ground shook beneath her and some soft clay dislodged itself from the ceiling above. “It seems a 600 foot tree just appeared in the market district above us and began smashing everything.”

  The attendant leapt back as a bookshelf fell over, crashing to the ground between them.

  “What should I do?” she asked in a panic.

  “How should I know?” Recaldier screamed, stands of loose hair falling into her face. “Just tell everyone to get out of the offices before the place collapses around us.”

  As the frightened attendant ran off, Recaldier could think of nothing else to do, so she retreated into minutia. With an eerie detachment she removed her high-heeled shoes and set them down in the doorway where they belonged, brushing aside enough of the fallen rubble to make room for them. With a crash and a rush of dusty air, the southern entrance to the offices collapsed. But she ignored it. She futilely tried to straighten a stack of vacation requests, and began looking around the rubble-strewn floor for her rubber stamp to approve them.

  The ground shook even more violently, knocking Ms. Recaldier to the floor, as the northern entrance collapsed as well, filling the now sealed off rooms with dust and debris.

  Suppressing a cough, Ms. Recaldier straightened her hair as best she could, and started picking up some of the smashed pictures from the floor and hanging them back on the wall.

  “A place for everything and everything in its place,” she mumbled aloud.

  The crystal lamps flickered as another tremor ran through the room, then the sealed room was bathed in darkness. Ms. Recaldier forced her breathing to stay steady and ordered as she groped around in the dark, looking for something to straighten. She felt her lungs burning from a lack of oxygen, and she began gasping fruitlessly as another tremor, much stronger than the others, tore through the ground.

  She felt herself being tossed to the floor, then up in the air again, then back down, this time facedown. Instead of subsiding like the others, this tremor intensified further, and the
floor beneath her exploded upward. New light broke into the room, and when she righted herself, she could make out a crater that had been punched up through the floor from a tunnel below. A white-furred Mesdan wearing a Navy uniform poked her head up and looked around, her long ears twisting this way and that, holding a crystal torch that bathed the room in a calming blue light.

  “I found her,” Mina Duvare called out triumphantly as she pulled herself up and walked over to where Recaldier had landed.

  “M-Mina Evere?” Recaldier asked out loud as her eyes adjusted to the light.

  “Close enough,” Mina agreed, grabbing the short, filthy woman and helping her up.

  “I must assume you have either come here to report that you have handed the Wysterian over to the NP’s or to turn yourselves in to them.”

  “After all these years,” Captain Evere joked as he climbed up into the room, “I think my favorite part about you is that wonderful sense of humor.”

  “It’s certainly the largest part of her,” Mina chuckled, making a point to stand up as straight as she could in front of her diminutive superior.

  “Then you are traitors,” Ms. Recaldier said boldly, trying to straighten her torn uniform. “You are the ones attacking us with that enormous tree.”

  “Why does everyone always assume that it’s our fault?” Dr. Griffin complained as he climbed up behind them. “Have you never considered the possibility that it’s just a coincidence?”

  “Then why are you here?” she asked suspiciously, folding her arms.

  “You are going to issue orders to the fleet around Thesda to go south for a while,” Evere said with a grin. “You see, we came here to rescue someone you took from us, and we’re afraid all those warships will be ‘impolite’ to our little patrol boat when it comes back to pick us up.”

  “And you mean to force me to do that?” she chuckled. “Then I’m afraid the joke is on you. I don’t even have authority to do that.”

  “You don’t have to have it,” Mina explained. “All you have to do is say you are relaying the orders from Central and by the time the mistake is discovered, we’ll be long gone.”

  Ms. Recaldier stood looking at the three of them for several moments in silence as they towered over her. “You don’t frighten me,” she said unconvincingly.

  “We have no intention of scaring you,” Dr. Griffin said, removing a vial of swirling fluorescent liquid. “All we need to do is give the puppet strings.”

  * * *

  Captain Sykes was a pillar of courage as the St. Downing fired a full volley at the target before them. At the center of the eastern market district, the enormous tree writhed back and forth, crushing buildings with its branches. The cannon fire tore into the target, and the tree shrieked and wailed in pain, as pieces of bark shredded and fell down toward the ground below.

  Despite the combined cannon fire from more than a dozen ships, they were not inflicting any critical damage to the tree. Sykes hated seeing his beloved cannons inflict so little damage. He wanted so badly to order full ramming speed and hit the tree dead center. He thought the destruction of such an order would be glorious to behold, but decorum had to be maintained and his men needed to see him make good decisions in the heat of battle, no matter how much it pained him to do so.

  “Hard to port and reload the starboard guns for another volley as we pass,” he ordered. His leftenant relayed the commands to the gunnery crews as they pulled their guns back to give them access to the muzzle.

  The guns were run out to firing position once again, and with the order to fire came the satisfying wash of acrid smoke over the deck. Captain Sykes breathed it in deeply, waiting for it to pass and clear his view of their target as they passed it.

  When the smoke cleared, he could see fresh pockmarks where cannonballs had embedded themselves in the gnarled, twisted wood, but it was still only surface damage.

  “Could this be a preemptive attack by the tree-witches?” his leftenant wondered aloud.

  “Perhaps,” Sykes answered smoothly.

  “If it is, it wouldn’t make any sense. Wysteria can’t fight off the whole league at once. They need allies in the coming war, and attacking another kingdom will only achieve further alienation.”

  “Perhaps...” the Captain said quietly, “...we should do our duty and allow others to do theirs.” He looked frigidly at his leftenant and allowed the lesson to sink in. The military functioned with everyone doing their part. It was not their place to speculate on long term strategy or political implications. That was the duty of central command and the chiefs of staff. Their duty was to follow orders to the best of their ability.

  “Aye sir,” the leftenant said, acknowledging his mistake. Sykes looked at him coldly for several more seconds. Only when he was satisfied did he turn his gaze away.

  As he looked upon the enormous tree his eyes widened in astonishment. It shrieked and reached out toward them, its branches growing hundreds of feet in an effort to ensnare them.

  Captain Sykes yelled out, “Brace for...” but the rest was lost as the branches hit the deck, shattering wood and tossing cannons into the air like pebbles.

  The men who had kept their footing drew sabers and hacked at the thick wood, but as they struck home, the wood pinched and grew around the metal, sealing their blades fast inside the branches.

  The ship lurched sharply starboard as it was pulled in toward the massive creature of wood and leaf.

  Captain Sykes checked the belt on his uniform, making sure that the float-stones installed there were still fully charged. “Abandon ship!” he ordered as the hull began to break. His men threw themselves over the side, their belts slowing their descent to tolerable speeds as another branch wrapped itself around the hull.

  * * *

  On the bridge of the Indomitable, Admiral Miguel Roapes watched in fascination at what he saw, and for once it was not the women handpicked to his staff for their exceptional beauty. As his ironclad warship slowly turned around for another pass, he could see the massive gnarled tree silhouetted among the flames as it wrapped its branches around an interceptor that had ventured in too close and crushed the hull like an eggshell.

  “Hyperio squadron reports another ship entangled in that big tree-thingy,” Rachael reported, trying to move the small models on the tactical board without mussing up her freshly painted nails.

  “Have Echelon and Brendegar withdrawal while we prepare a fresh mortar barrage,” the Admiral commanded as a beautiful officer with blonde hair rubbed his shoulders.

  “With all due respect, sir,” his attaché Nicole spoke up as she cooled him indignantly with a large feather fan, “the last barrage only set the surrounding market district on fire. A second barrage will just make the fires worse. Plus, now we have fire-suppression crews moving into the area, so we would also risk friendly casualties.”

  “I appreciate your input, Nikki,” he said as a chocolate was placed in his mouth, “but it is times like these when we in the Navy must be examples of maturity and self-restraint in the face of danger.”

  “How is firing mortars mature or restrained?” she grumbled under her breath.

  There was a warning klaxon and Nicole threw down her feather fan and ran over as best she could in the ridiculously high heels the admiral made her wear to read the hovering letters above the crystal relays.

  “It’s a priority redirect from central,” she reported. “The patrol boat Dreadnaught has been spotted south of here over Hazari waters, and our flotilla is ordered to make best speed and pursue. The local authorities will bring down the tree with construction golems.”

  “Splendid,” Roapes commented, stroking his gray goatee. “Signal all remaining ships to set heading 118. Have the local Naval office make room for the stranded crews until they are reassigned.”

  “How is that splendid?” Nicole asked. “What if the golems cannot stop this tree? Are we just going to leave it to destroy the whole island?”

  “It is splendid,” Roapes
continued, “because Hazari is beautiful this time of year.”

  “Sir?” Nicole asked, picking up the fan again.

  “Once we apprehend the defector, we can have some R&R on the beaches.”

  Rachael squealed in delight and sat down on Roapes’ lap. “Oh, thank you, Miguelito,” she gushed, kissing him enthusiastically on the cheek. “I have a great new swimming suit I have been dying to try out.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he cooed. “In fact, I think we should allocate some of the discretionary funds and get new swimsuits for the entire staff.”

  The women on the bridge nodded in excitement and a couple of them cheered. Nicole, however, was not amused.

  “Admiral Roapes,” she said in her strictest, most professional tone, “I do not think that that would be an appropriate use of military resources.”

  “Nonsense, they will be matching bathing suits to befit your special status as my staff,” he explained. “Think of them as special issue hot-weather uniforms.”

  “And what if I do not wish to spend my R&R time on the beach?”

  “Oh, this will be mandatory R&R, Nikki.”

  “Aye, sir,” she growled through clenched teeth. In her mind all she could hear was the sound of her career flushing down the pipes. “And please try to remember, my name is Nicole.”

  * * *

  Athel and Privet made their way down the market street, keeping to one side as the thatch rooftops on the opposite side burned brightly. Behind them, Alder and Ryin ducked behind some water barrels as a freed cannon barrel crashed to the ground, impaling itself like a massive dart in the soft soil.