The Poison Jungle

by Tui T. Sutherland

  “This is the antidote?” she said to Hawthorn in a hushed voice. She reached in and lifted out one of the roots, turning it between her claws. “What is it?”

  “It’s another plant I found growing in the jungle,” he said. “I call it ‘heart of salvation.’ ” Nettle snorted and he shot her a half smile. “I figure if we’re going to be all dramatic with our plant names, I might as well join in.”

  “Wow,” Cricket said reverently. “And it really works? It breaks the mind control?”

  “As far as I can tell,” he said. “It works on snakes … but who knows about dragons? I haven’t exactly had any test subjects for that, have I? Oh! Maybe you could eat one, and we’ll see if it works on you!”

  She shook her head ruefully. “I’m not susceptible to the mind control,” she said. “Queen Wasp never injected my egg, so it doesn’t work on me. Which means we wouldn’t learn anything from me eating this.” She sighed and put it back in the chest. Hawthorn watched the movements of her claw intently, as if he was trying to think of a way she could still be useful to the experiment.

  “So to test it out,” Sundew said, “we’ll have to find a HiveWing who is all zombie-brained, force them to eat it, and see what happens.”

  “I’m afraid so,” he said, wringing his claws together.

  “Well, luckily for us, there’s probably about a thousand of them heading this way right now,” Sundew said. “Pack all the weird knobbly salvation roots you have and let’s go.”

  It took a while to convince Hawthorn that, yes, they really meant it, he should come back to the village with them. That, yes, Queen Sequoia would be happy to see him, now that he’d found the antidote. That, no, nobody would yell at him, probably, and in fact nobody had any idea what he’d done except for the queen, as far as they knew.

  Then they had to deal with him being miffed about everyone completely forgetting him, and then they had to talk him out of packing every single one of his carvings.

  “There’s no time!” Sundew cried as Hawthorn scooped up an armful of little wooden Sequoias and glanced around frantically for a box. “Hawthorn, you can come back and get them later. Right now the only thing we can bring is the antidote. We need to move as quickly as we can, not cart a houseful of nonsense all over the jungle.”

  “They’re beautiful carvings,” Willow interjected soothingly. “Maybe just bring one, for now?”

  Hawthorn’s expression relaxed, and he dropped all the others, reaching for his egg-like favorite. “Yes, we can do that,” he said. “As long as I have this friend, I’ll be all right.”

  “Wonderful,” Nettle said, rolling her eyes. “You carry that; Mandrake and I will carry this.” She waved one wing over the chest full of roots.

  Sundew had misgivings about that plan. Leaving the antidote in the talons of those two … but Cricket was carrying Bumblebee, and Sundew wanted a chance to talk to Willow out of everyone’s earshot.

  It’ll be fine. They’ll be careful with it, I’m sure.

  “What about my vipers?” Hawthorn asked as they stepped out the door. Sundew cast a glance at the sky. She guessed it was late afternoon.

  “Uh … what about your vipers?” Mandrake echoed. They started across the clearing, back into the snake-spangled jungle.

  “Should I bring them?” Hawthorn said brightly. “I should bring them, shouldn’t I?”

  “Your army of poisonous snakes? To a village full of dragonets?” Willow said. “I vote … definitely no?”

  “But they might be useful,” Hawthorn argued, his face falling. “Aren’t we about to go to war? Yes, so I hear. So maybe Queen Sequoia would like a few zombie vipers on her side this time!”

  “Please don’t!” Cricket said. “We don’t want to make killing dragons easier. We don’t want to kill anyone — we’re going to free them all with the antidote and then there won’t be any war.”

  Nettle snorted extremely pointedly.

  “If it works,” Hawthorn said sadly. “And if we can figure out how to give it to all of them. Ooh, vipers might help with that!”

  “Sounds like a decent backup plan to me,” Nettle chimed in. She’d wound vines around the trunk and looped one end over her shoulder and one over Mandrake’s so it hung between them. They were both already huffing from the weight of it. “I mean, no harm done having an extra secret weapon around, right?”

  “Exactly!” Hawthorn said, beaming. He flapped his wings once and gazed through the trees, his eyes going weirdly still. “I’ll just have a few of them follow us.”

  “Willow,” Sundew whispered. “Should we stop him?”

  “I don’t know,” Willow whispered back. She furrowed her brow at the rustlings in the leaves. “It feels wrong, but then, I’m not even sure I know what’s right and wrong anymore. Queen Sequoia was always my moral compass. I thought she’d always do the right thing, and I wanted to be like her so much. But what she was going to do to Wasp … and the fact that she lied to us about it. I don’t know how to feel right now.”

  “Mad!” Sundew suggested. “Really mad! You’re allowed to be angry about this, Willow.” She brushed Willow’s wing lightly.

  “I don’t want to be mad,” Willow protested. “What good would that do? If I let myself be really angry, I might do something terrible like yell at Queen Sequoia.”

  “Maybe she should be yelled at,” Sundew pointed out.

  “But how would that help? Then she’d feel awful and I’d feel guilty and we’d be distracted from more important things.”

  “The point is to make sure she knows she did something wrong! So she won’t do it again … and maybe she’ll try harder to fix it.”

  “I’m sure she already knows it was wrong,” Willow said.

  “I’m not sure he does,” Sundew said, nodding toward Hawthorn. He was walking at the front of the group, chatting with Cricket. A pair of snakes was slithering along right by his talons, but he barely even glanced down at them.

  “Getting angry will only make me feel worse,” Willow said firmly. “But I am upset. And just … really, really sad.” She shook herself from head to tail. “That’s what this is. I’m sad.”

  “Well, I’m pleased for you that you’re that good at choose-your-own-emotion,” Sundew said. “I’m definitely mad and I can’t just smush that into feeling sad or something else instead. So you can go eat chocolate or whatever being sad leads to; I’m going to yell at the queen.”

  Willow shot her a troubled look. “I hope you won’t be too mean. We need her on our side for the war ahead. I mean … I want her to keep listening to us. To you. So I just hope you won’t drive her away.”

  “She still talks to Belladonna after all this time,” Sundew said. “And she’s a queen. She should be tough enough to handle it.”

  Their trip back to the village seemed faster than their trip out, partly because they were able to move much more quickly through the Den of Vipers, and partly because this time they went around the other edge of the lake, which was lined with sharp marsh reeds and cobra lilies, but nothing that actually managed to catch them.

  They reached Queen Sequoia’s tree palace shortly after nightfall. Sundew’s leafspeak kept picking up strange murmurs from the jungle around Willow’s village. Trouble … they’d whisper one moment, and then the next, All is well. She wound her mind through the roots and whispers, but she couldn’t pin down what they were feeling or worrying about.

  All is well, all is well.

  Danger is coming.

  All is well.

  She shivered and pulled her mind back. It didn’t make sense, so she’d have to ignore it for a while until it did. Trees could be ridiculously maddening sometimes.

  Hawthorn had pulled his wings in close and gone quiet as they entered the perimeter of the village. He kept looking up at the trees, perhaps sensing the LeafWings who had come out to watch them pass by. Sundew hadn’t seen any sign of more vipers beyond the two at his feet, but she wondered if they were out there somewhere, too, a
small deadly army trailing along behind their leader.

  They flew up to the throne room and found Hazel there, pacing in a circle around Tsunami, who was lying down with her eyes closed and her front talons clasped. If the SeaWing was asleep, she didn’t look very peaceful; her brow was furrowed and her tail twitched furiously as though she might be lashing it inside her dream.

  They landed as quietly as they could, and Willow signaled what in the world? to Hazel.

  “She said she could communicate with the Distant Kingdoms somehow,” Hazel whispered, hurrying over to them. “I have no idea what she’s doing! Maybe all the dragons over there are delusional.”

  “Or magic,” Cricket breathed.

  “Where’s your great-grandmother?” Sundew asked.

  “She left with Belladonna and half the village,” Hazel said. “They’re at the Snarling River by now, I’m sure.” She picked up a book from the throne, fiddled with it for a moment, then put it back. “I haven’t heard anything. Hoping for a messenger soon. What did you find?”

  “We found Hawthorn,” Willow said, indicating the old dragon. “And he does have an antidote, but we need to test it to make sure it works.”

  “As quickly as possible,” Sundew agreed.

  “So we need a HiveWing?” Hazel asked sharply. She climbed onto the throne and tapped the small gong hanging above it. “Then let’s get one.” Three guards came swooping in from the level above them. “Go to the Snarling River,” Hazel commanded. “Find the queen, and find out whether Wasp’s army is there yet. If so, capture a HiveWing on his or her own and bring it …” She hesitated for a moment, her eyes scanning the village out the window. “Bring it to the hemlock grove on the banks of the Gullet River. As fast as you can.”

  “I want to go, too!” Nettle demanded. She dropped the chest and flapped herself loose from the loops of vines. “I want to abduct a HiveWing! I want to be where the fighting is!”

  “You may go with them,” Hazel said. “You can explain everything to the queen.”

  The guards bowed and flew off with Nettle, their flashing scales quickly swallowed by the darkness outside.

  Hazel hopped down from the throne and untied the vines around the chest so she could look inside. “This is it?” she asked, looking up at Hawthorn. “Will this be enough?”

  “It depends on how we give it to them,” he said. “Ideally they would all eat a piece at least this big.” He held up his claws to indicate a small cube. “But it might work if we could get it into their water supply.”

  Sundew shook her head. “We need a way to give the whole army the antidote at once, before Wasp realizes what’s happening. Otherwise she’ll stop them from taking it the moment she notices.” She frowned at the pile of roots. She knew the jungle was enormous and probably contained hundreds of plants she’d never encountered, but she was still a little surprised that the heart of salvation didn’t look more familiar.

  “Oh!” Cricket said suddenly. “What if … would it work if we burn it, and they breathe in the smoke?”

  Hawthorn scrunched up his snout, thinking. “Maybe.”

  “We could set the whole army free that way, couldn’t we?” Cricket adjusted her glasses and patted Bumblebee absentmindedly. The dragonet had just woken up and was trying to clamber out of the sling, babbling to herself.

  “I would think we’d need more than this,” Hazel said. “What if we plant a few of these and get our most powerful leafspeakers to grow them as quickly as possible, so we’ll have as much as we need?”

  Hawthorn reached past her and gently closed the chest. “I’d wait to see if it works on dragons first. The heart of salvation is rather a pain to uproot once it takes hold … you wouldn’t want to overrun your village with it for nothing. Keep a few aside for planting; the rest should be enough for the army, and we can grow more for the rest of the Hives later.”

  Hazel lifted one eyebrow at the wooden egg wrapped carefully in its sling across his chest. She opened her mouth to argue with him, but just then an abrupt snort from Tsunami made them all jump.

  The blue dragon let out a hiss and then grumbled, “Arrrrgh, FINE, but I’m still Head of School. Yeah, tell him hugs to him, too, and no, the cows are not bigger and more delicious over here. BYE.” She snorted again, rolled over, and sat up, blinking and rubbing her eyes.

  “Whew,” she said. “I’ll never get used to that.”

  “What did you just do?” Cricket asked eagerly.

  “It’s … I …” Sundew noticed Tsunami slipping something into a pouch behind her front left leg. Something she clearly wasn’t comfortable telling them about. “I was … sort of … talking to a few of my friends back on the other continent.”

  “Oh my goodness, how? With Distant Kingdoms magic?” Cricket asked.

  “Yup,” Tsunami said, flicking her wings back. She looked troubled. “Hard to explain. Anyway. They didn’t have any particularly helpful ideas, but Moon seems really sure that there must be a way for you to get there.” She rubbed her forehead. “Something about a prophecy. Have I mentioned that I hate prophecies?”

  “She had a prophecy about us?” Cricket yelped. “What was it? What’s going to happen?”

  “No,” Tsunami said, pointing a stern claw at her. “Do not get excited. Prophecies are terrible and annoying. And this one sounds like a pile of wet seaweed to me, because there’s no way you can all get over there!”

  “Clearsight did it,” Willow pointed out. “She wasn’t a SeaWing, but she crossed the ocean safely, somehow.”

  They all looked back at Tsunami. “I guess that’s true,” she said doubtfully. “I have no idea how, though.”

  “Maybe there’s a clue in the Book,” Willow said, whirling toward Sundew. “Can we look at it? Maybe there’s something in there that will tell us how she got here.”

  “I read the whole thing and didn’t notice anything like that,” Sundew said, but she pulled it out of its pouch and unwrapped it anyway. The faded blue cover and thin pages looked even more ancient in the glow from the firefly lamps. “You can check for yourself, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t find anything. The LeafWings aren’t going anywhere. I’m staying right here and fighting for our place on this continent, no matter what Wasp does!”

  “And the antidote will work,” Cricket chimed in. “So we won’t have to run away. Although, I mean, I’d love to see the Distant Kingdoms someday, if there is a way to get across the ocean.”

  Hazel glanced out the window; the sky was fully dark by now, and the jungle was alive with the sounds of busy insects, grumbling frogs, and night predators.

  “Let’s get to the Gullet River and hope the guards return soon,” she said. “Tsunami, you study the Book in the meanwhile. Sundew, Cricket, Hawthorn, and Willow, come with me.” She opened the chest and picked out two pieces of the heart of salvation root.

  “Not me?” Mandrake started. “I’ll just … wait here, then.”

  “We’ll be back soon,” Sundew said.

  There was no one at the hemlock grove when they arrived. Hawthorn lay down on the grass, cradling his wooden egg between his front talons, and one of his snakes slithered up to coil around his neck.

  Cricket watched Hazel pace between the trees for a moment, and then she turned to Hawthorn. “Hey, I was wondering something,” she said.

  “You?” Sundew teased. “Really?”

  Cricket ignored her. “According to the Legend of the Hive,” she said, “the plant originally worked on everything, right? Bees, ants, lions, birds, snakes, anything. But it seems like Queen Wasp can only use it on HiveWings. I mean, she must have tried injecting the SilkWings, too, don’t you think? Maybe even a LeafWing at some point? So why doesn’t the mind control work on other tribes?”

  “That is an excellent question,” Hawthorn said approvingly.

  “Thank you,” Cricket said with delight, fluttering her wings.

  “When I found the plant, it was barely hanging on,” he said. “There was so littl
e left, cut off from sunlight and slowly wasting away. I brought it into the sun. I nursed it back to health. And while I did, I used my leafspeak on it. I trained it, essentially. I altered it so that it would only work on HiveWings … those would be the minds it was drawn to. I wasn’t sure how well I’d succeeded, but it seems I did well enough.”

  He looked horribly proud of himself. Sundew wanted to scratch his face off. How could he still be pleased about what he did, after all this time and all the damage he’d caused?

  “Oh,” Cricket said. Her wings sank to the ground. “I … guess that’s very impressive.”

  “It is,” he assured her. “Not many dragons could do it.”

  It occurred to Sundew that they should tell Hazel the whole story; the future queen had no idea what her great-grandmother and Hawthorn had done. But this wasn’t the time. She could hear muffled yells getting closer and closer.

  The LeafWing guards appeared in the treetops, carrying a HiveWing prisoner who was blindfolded and tied up with strangler vines like an insect in a cocoon. They flew him down to the damp earth by the riverside and Nettle threw him at Hazel’s feet, grinning.

  “That was GREAT!” she said. Sundew wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Nettle so happy. It was, quite frankly, very unsettling. “I want more missions like that!”

  But Hazel wasn’t smiling. She took a step back and gazed down at the HiveWing, then up at Nettle. “I guess this means Wasp and the HiveWings are at the river already.”

  “Oh, yes we are,” the HiveWing suddenly snapped. His fangs glistened in the moonlight. Even without seeing his pale white eyes, Sundew recognized the creepy extra layer to his voice: Wasp was inside his mind, using his mouth to speak to them.

  “We’re here, LeafWing, and this time we’ll make sure to finish what we started. You’re all dead!” The HiveWing twisted and writhed, trying to drag the blindfold off his eyes.

  Nettle put her front talons on his ears and pinned him to the ground, ignoring his flailing. “There were thousands of HiveWings on the other side of the river,” she said in a low voice. “And we could see more flying in. They’re just … standing there, row after row of them, staring at the jungle with creepy white eyes. It looks like they’re waiting for something.”