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  The carriage unexpectedly stopped, sending Dax, Leon, and Tarfeather to the floor. The horses chuffed and the reigns slapped.

  “What was that? No—no! I said don’t come any closer,” Tarfeather said like a movie scene. He cleared away Briar’s layers of dress from his face.

  “I don’t know,” Briar said. She looked out the window and saw a dark figure, black mask covering its eyes, holding a sword toward the carriage driver. She gasped and silently indicated for everyone to get down on the floor.

  “Bandits,” Briar whispered.

  Then the carriage door flung open and Briar, who was cramped against it, fell to the dusty desert floor. At once she felt a cold knife at her throat. “Briar,” Dax shouted, but he could not see who it was that held Briar hostage in the darkness.

  “Stand up real slow or I’ll slice out your throat,” a resonant voice said. “The rest of you, get out.”

  Dax piled out of the cab. Leon and Tarfeather sprang out after, leaving Sherman inside. “Hands where I can see them,” the bandit said. He shoved Briar toward Dax, where Leon stood on his hind flippers, his tiny green arms raised high. The carriage driver was forced down to stand with the others.

  “Turn around,” said another tough-sounding man. He jabbed something sharp into Dax’s back. “Put your hands on the carriage.”

  The masked bandit, who seemed to be rather short in stature, called out. “Blessfang!”

  “Yeah Boss?” Blessfang called from deeper in the shadows. He had a thicker, slower sounding voice.

  “Check them for weapons. Vilesight, Thrash, check the carriage for valuables.” Two caped creatures swooped from above into the carriage, while another stomped, heavy footed, behind Briar and the others and began to frisk them roughly.

  “They’re clean,” Blessfang announced.

  “What do you want?” Leon asked.

  “I said hands on the carriage! Eyes down, everyone. Don’t look up,” the masked one said. Then he held the tip of the sword to Leon’s green skin and said, “Unless you want to be the main course at our dinner tonight.”

  “Yeah Boss,” the dull-voiced Blessfang replied. “Frog’s legs with a little butter sauce would be utterly delightful.”

  “Shut up, Leon,” Briar whispered. “You’re going to get us killed.”

  “I’m not the one who got us into this mess in the first place,” Leon snapped back.

  “Both of you, be quiet,” the masked bandit said. “I’ll ask the questions. What are you doing here?”

  “She’s Briar Blackwood!” Dax shouted. “The redeemer of the Realms. The girl from the Three Omens.”

  The masked bandit chuckled. “Really? The girl from the Omens?” He laughed some more and then Blessfang followed suit, laughing a bit too enthusiastically. “Shut up, you dope,” the masked one snapped. Blessfang went mute.

  Vilesight and Thrash came out of the carriage but were too quick for Briar or the others to see who they were. “There’s nothing in there but a sick fox,” Vilesight said.

  “Yeah, we checked everything,” Thrash confirmed.

  “Impossible!” the Boss said. “Is this not the king’s coach?”

  No one responded.

  “Answer me!”

  “Yes, it is,” Dax said. Briar elbowed him. “What?!” The king’s crest is right on the door.”

  “Then why is there no treasure?” the Boss asked.

  “Prince Valrune sendery Briar Blackwood to safety from Murbra Faire,” Tarfeather replied. “Is under attackery by Orpion and bad wolves.”

  “Boss,” Blessfang said. “That’s all part of the Omens.”

  “Oh, what do you know?” the masked bandit said. Blessfang shut his mouth again and the masked bandit—the Boss—entered the carriage.

  “Faywries and berries!” he exclaimed. “Sherman Herbclaw! It’s Herbclaw come back.” The Boss popped his smallish masked face from the door. “How do you know Herbclaw? He left this place long ago. Went with those three dillywigs, didn’t he? What were their names?”

  “Uh…uh—” Blessfang tried. He wanted to have an answer for his Boss.

  “Myrtle was one of them,” Thrash said from far away.

  “That’s right,” the masked bandit said. “And Poplar. What was the other one’s name?”

  “Ash,” Briar said.

  “Hey, she knows them, Boss!” Blessfang sounded like a happy child.

  The masked bandit hopped from the carriage and pressed the sword into the base of Briar’s skull. “You’d best explain how you know them dillywigs.” One of the bandits plucked some dried weeds, struck flints together, and lit them to get a better look at Briar.

  Briar began to tremble. She felt in danger and now they were near an open flame. Her palms tingled and her guts tossed. “My friend told you already. My name is Briar of the Black Woods. I came in search of my friend here.” She gestured to Leon. “I was sent by Myrtle, Poplar, and Ash. Sherman came as my teacher. But now he’s hurt—badly.”

  “A likely story,” the Boss said. “What do you think, boys? Shall we skin ’em and sell their bones to the ogres?”

  With that, Briar’s hands became fully engulfed with power. She tried to hide the flames, but it was no use. Out in the utter darkness of Waste, there was nowhere to hide such an obvious source of light.

  Blessfang gasped. Then he recited aloud like an elementary school kid:

  “The Dark One ever chases

  What the winged three did tickery-take

  To hish-hush secret places,

  Dragon powers in her wicketty-wake…”

  The others stopped talking—stopped moving altogether. Briar felt the sword fall from her neck and the blade landed in the soil with a little shushed dig. She turned around to face her attackers, glowing palms face out. And from their shifting gas-blue light, she could finally see the bandits’ faces.

  One was a deer, who stood on its hind legs, front hoofs to its mouth in a breath of horrified recognition. Two others were tiny dark-caped bluebirds that sat perched on the deer’s antlers. Their shining black eyes and beaks were wide with amazement. Briar could finally see that the Boss was a white rabbit that stood perhaps as high as Briar’s calves. Had he not just attempted to cut her throat out, she might have found him darling and tried to cuddle him a little.

  “Boss, it’s her,” said Blessfang, the deer. “Just like it says in the Lores of the Bramble. It’s the Black Woods girl, come with her Dragon Powers.”

  “Can it be?” the Boss asked. “The Black Woods girl, here?” He paused, as if to consider the question he posed. Then to the others he shouted, “Blessfang, bring Sherman out. Vilesight, Thrash, fly quickly and bring back the Dire Liquid.”

  The flames in Briar’s hands died down and she could only assume it was because whatever danger they were in had passed.

  The bluebirds shot away and Blessfang, large and ungainly as he was, still managed to carry Sherman respectfully out of the carriage. He lay the fox on the ground and his head slackened to one side like one who had already died—or was about to die. The Boss hopped to Sherman and cradled his head with his paws. His tall ears flopped forward as he opened the bandage Briar had made from her gown and examined the puncture holes.

  “Black dragon,” he said aloud. “One of Orpion’s creatures.” He spat upon the ground, a magical custom against abominations. Blessfang tried to imitate his Boss, but instead he just dribbled down the front of his pelt and giggled with embarrassment.

  Vilesight and Thrash arrived back with a bounce in their flight, carrying a small knapsack. They alighted in Blessfang’s antlers. “There ain’t much left, Boss,” Vilesight said.

  Briar and Dax stood by watching in the darkness as the Boss opened the small knapsack and removed a silver container. He uncorked it and held it close to Sherman’s wounds. He was careful to put no more than a single drip on each lesion. They sizzled, the smell was something foul—like garbage or rotting meat.

  He covered the wound again with
the bandage and looked up at Briar with his dewy bunny eyes. “Where were you headed so conspicuously?”

  “Conspicuously?!” Dax asked. “It’s the middle of the night in the Black Waste where you can’t see anything unless it’s pressed up against your face.”

  “The Black Waste is journeyed by Orpion’s troops. It is the only route to Scarlocke that they can travel in concealment,” the Boss replied.

  “We are on our way to the Towery Flowery Hill,” Briar said. “We have less than two days to get there. Can you help us?”

  “Sherman is in very bad condition. He will be lucky if he can heal. The wounds are very deep and he has lost much of his gray mist. He can’t go further,” he said.

  Then his ears stuck up and turned left and right like antennas picking up sounds unheard by others. “The road is not safe, Black Woods girl,” he said. “You’d best come with us for the night. Call me Boss, and these two tough birds here are Vilesight and Thrash.” He pointed then to the deer who was busy entertaining himself with the clip-clop noise he could make with his hooves. “And that there’s Blessfang. You’ll be safe with us for the night. But a night is all we can offer.”

  Blessfang charged up to the carriage and hopped inside like a puppy being taken for a car ride. He bounced up and down on the leather benches, slobbering and clapping his hooves. “Let’s go in the pretty buggy,” he said.

  Briar and Dax picked up Sherman and carried him aboard. The others filed into the carriage after them, except for the Boss, who climbed up and seated himself beside the coachman. Then with a whip crack, they galloped away.

  Chapter 23

  The Boss’ den consisted of little more than a short, weathered door stuck into the side of a hidden rise in the terrain. Briar noticed some puffs of smoke wafting from a hole at the top of the ridge. Two nearby boulders obscured anything from view until they were all well on top of it.

  There was some worried chatter about the carriage giving away their location, so they camouflaged it with some of the giant black tumbleweeds that rolled across the plains.

  Once they were all safely inside and the door shut, the Boss showed them around, though his den proved to be uncomfortably snug for them all. The ceilings hung quite low, so that Briar and Dax had to bend in half to fit. The coachman decided it was better to spend the night in the relative roominess of the carriage than to sleep with his limbs cramped. This left additional space for everyone else, for which Briar was grateful.

  The den was a crudely hewn dugout. Dead black roots, left by whatever grew there before, decorated the unevenly formed walls. An ornately carved table with filigree touches and matching chairs, a few masterful works of art hanging on the crude walls, and a glittering gold candelabra, all the glorious remnants of previous heists, sat at one end of the room. The Boss and his posse seated themselves around the table, allowing Briar and the others to cozy up to the smallest fireplace Briar had ever seen, which had a miniature fire burning bundles of black offcuts and loose root fragments. On the floor before the fire was an embellished rug, plush, with fancy images woven into it, upon which they laid Sherman.

  The Boss offered Briar and the others some flat brown bread that looked to Briar and Dax like pressed dirt. But they hadn’t eaten since they left Myrtle, Poplar, and Ash at the birdhouse and they were starving. Leon unfortunately had, on instinct, snapped up another insect that looked like a small black pellet that the Boss called a scatter bug. So now he was full—and nauseous all at once. Tarfeather was happy to scratch out a few choice stones from the walls and crunch on them.

  They all sat in the dim flicker of the fire for a long time before the Boss spoke. “We didn’t always live like this.” Briar had been looking down at Sherman, who shivered and twitched, and she was surprised when the Boss spoke. She did not respond, except to look up at him.

  “No tellery this to Briar Blackwood,” Tarfeather said. He sounded cross. “Now why would you go and say such a terrible thing?” he asked in the voice of a black-and-white film ingénue.

  The Boss then pulled one of several brown bottles from the roughly made shelves set in the wall just above the table. He uncorked it with his prominent buckteeth and spat it out onto the floor. “You gotta be kiddin’ me. She doesn’t already know?” he asked.

  He took a big swig. He passed the bottle to Blessfang, who tried his best to imitate the Boss’ manly swagger but couldn’t hold on to the bottle with his hooves. Most of the distilled drink ended up soaking and staining his matted pelt.

  “What don’t I know?” Briar asked. The faces of the animal gang were somber and their eyes, full of old wounds.

  “We once lived in a great wood that went from the Ice Cap Mountains to the Ink Sea. It was the greatest forest of the Realms,” the Boss said. He grabbed for the bottle and drank again. Dax looked at Leon who sat on the rug nearby Briar and he shrugged.

  “Then why are you here in the Black Waste?” Briar asked.

  “The woods were burned to the ground,” he said. He directed the statement to Tarfeather and squinted his pink rabbit eyes. “Only ashes and memories remain.” The room fell silent, save the spark and sputter of the burning roots. Transfixed by the thought, he gazed into the fireplace for some time before continuing. “Orpion, of course.”

  “That’s…terrible,” Briar said.

  “It was terrible,” the Boss shot back. It almost seemed like an accusation. But Briar couldn’t understand it. He reached for a charred child’s toy made of wood and metal that he kept near the bottles. “Everyone gone.” He wiped a tear away. “That is except for these mooks here.” He laughed bitterly and took another swig from the bottle.

  “I’m so sorry,” Briar said. It was unfathomable, senseless really, that Orpion would burn her own world.

  “Yeah, me too,” the Boss said. He looked down with his ears drooping.

  Briar felt a surge of anger at the injustice. “Why would Orpion do such a thing?”

  “That’s the funny thing,” he said.

  Tarfeather sprang up and landed in one bound on the table. “I say enoughery! No tellery more!”

  Briar spoke to Tarfeather calmly. “I want to know.”

  The dwaref hopped down from the table and lighted across the floor. Once he faced Briar, his eyeholes began to shed tears. Then he spoke in one of his television voices. “There’s no one to blame, darling. There’s just no one good to blame.”

  “Go on,” Briar said to the Boss.

  “Orpion came to burn down Blackwood Hall, which was hidden by charms in the deepest recesses of the forest,” he said. An uncomfortable silence filled the room. “But the story is that she couldn’t find what she came lookin’ for. So instead, she decided to scorch everything else.”

  “You mean the Black Waste is what’s left of the Black Woods?” Briar asked. She was hardly able to speak.

  “My home,” the Boss said. “And theirs, too.” The bluebirds and the deer all looked down at the table; one of the birds spat upon the floor, hoping to avert further evil.

  “She wants the twin kingdoms to herself. The Lady Orpion— the selfish old cod,” Vilesight said. He held up one of his small talons. “I’d like a turn at her eyes.”

  “That will be a pretty day,” Thrash replied.

  “What two kingdoms? I thought Murbra Faire was the only kingdom of the Realms,” Briar said.

  “Scarlocke, the Lady’s palace, is its twin,” the Boss said. “Once, the two lived in peace. But a wickett who saw no use for the Grand Design, rose to power. Her magic was so great—her force was so dark that none could stop it, neither by magic nor by might. That was when once good Realmsmen abandoned their homes, as if under a spell, and went to serve the Dark Lady.”

  “Wicketts?” Briar asked.

  “They’re bad. Real bad,” Blessfang said.

  “And the Black Woods?” Briar asked. “Why would she destroy them if all she wanted was one hidden thing?”

  “It is almost sixteen years to the day that she
went looking for the hiding place of three dillywigs and a baby—the girl-child whom the Omens foretold would end her reign and destroy her.”

  Briar couldn’t swallow or breathe for a moment. It was she who had brought pain, horror and death to the Realms, not only for Thrash, Vilesight, and Blessfang, but for countless others whom she would never know.

  “That’s horrible. I…I don’t know what to say,” Briar mumbled.

  The Boss took several more swallows and then slammed the finished bottle on the table. He stared into its emptiness for a moment, looking for something that might make things right. “There’s only one thing left for us to do,” he said. “Blessfang, bolt the door.”

  The deer stood up with an angry scowl, knocking over his chair. He muscled his way past Briar and the others and put a wooden bar across the door. As he stomped past, Briar backed away and huddled with Dax and Tarfeather.

  Leon hopped forward, forgetting his size. “Now wait a minute,” he said to the Boss. Trying his best to assert the tough-guy demeanor that worked so well for him on the school campus wasn’t working out so well in his present condition. “This is Briar, you guys. The girl from the Omens. You said so yourselves.”

  The Boss sat in his chair and fixed his gaze upon the group of travelers. Briar couldn’t read his rabbit face to understand what he might have planned. Then the Boss spoke. “That’s why we’re locking you in for your safety.”

  “Huh?” Dax blurted out.

  “Get a good night’s sleep. And in the morning,” the Boss continued, “we will do whatever we can to help you.”

  Briar let go of the breath she found herself holding. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Nothing would please me more than to see the Lady Orpion’s head stuck to the end of a sword,” said the Boss.

  Chapter 24

  Freezing winds howled across the great lonely plains all night, kicking up ashes, blowing them through all the crevices. The tiny fire had long since blown out. Briar huddled for warmth next to Sherman, who shuddered under the effects of the Dire Liquid. At times he shook with such violence that Briar wondered if maybe, by accident, Thrash and Vilesight had brought something poisonous to drip into his wounds.