The Poison Jungle Read online

  Sundew pivoted to study the entire space, but she saw no sign of the breath of evil within the perimeter of the clearing. She could still hear it, though, and feel it curling around the edges of her mind.

  “Come on in,” Hawthorn called from the doorway.

  They stepped up onto a covered porch that ran along the front of the house. One end of it seemed to be a small woodworking studio, where a little half-carved dragon sat on a stump. Honeysuckle vines adorned the roof of the porch, adding a sweet smell to the air and a tranquil murmur to the chorus in Sundew’s head.

  Inside, Hawthorn’s house was breezy, warm, and full of a rose-colored light from the sun filtering through the curtains. It was all one room, but with a high ceiling and lots of space. Carved wooden dragons, snakes, trees, and orangutans perched atop the shelves on every wall. Sundew looked closely at one of the dragon heads and thought it looked a lot like Queen Sequoia.

  “Did you make all of these?” Cricket asked, gazing around the room.

  “Ah, yes,” Hawthorn answered. “Lots of time on my talons, you know. No one else to talk to, so I thought I’d make some friends for myself. This one’s my favorite.” He patted a smooth egg shape made of honey-colored wood, with a delicate filigree of leaves carved around the top. It sat on a stand on a little table by itself, next to the window. “They’re better company than you’d think. Thank goodness I have you, right?” he said to the egg.

  Poor lonely dragon, Sundew thought. But then, carving little figures to be your only friends is one thing — organizing a nest of snakes to be your bodyguards is quite another.

  “I can’t help but notice that you’re a HiveWing,” Hawthorn said, wagging one claw at Cricket. “I hope you being here means peace has finally been achieved between the tribes? So … maybe I can go home?” he added hopefully.

  Nettle snorted. “Peace! Not even close,” she said. “This one’s a bit of an ex-HiveWing, at least according to the morons who believe her.”

  “Ah, hmmm,” Hawthorn said, crouching to dig in a cabinet. “Traitor to her tribe, eh?”

  “No!” Cricket said. “The opposite! I want to save them!”

  “Oh, right,” his muffled voice responded. “I know that feeling.” He emerged again, smiling. “I must say, if I’d known so many visitors were coming, I would have carved more cups! But these are all I have.” He produced three ebony cups and a stone jar full of tea leaves; Sundew could smell the chamomile from across the room. “We’ll just have to share, won’t we? Yes, we can manage that.”

  “Oh, no, thank you,” Willow said politely. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for tea.”

  “We don’t?” Mandrake said with a wistful look. Nettle stepped on his talon and he yelped.

  “It won’t take long,” Hawthorn said. “There’s a hot spring out back where I can get the water. I even have honey!” He started toward the door.

  “Really, no,” Sundew said, putting one talon over the tea jar. “The tribe is in danger. We must get back before Queen Wasp attacks, which might be as soon as tonight.”

  “Oh,” Hawthorn said, looking startled. “That does sound serious! Really worth mentioning, I must say. Yes. I’d call that relevant news. How do you know that? Someone is quite clever, I see.” He put one talon on his wooden egg and frowned down at it thoughtfully. “Ah,” he said after a moment. He looked up at them, his brow clearing. “You know about the breath of evil.”

  “We know it’s linked to Wasp’s mind control,” Sundew said. “We were hoping —”

  “Did Queen Sequoia send you?” he interrupted eagerly. “Does she want me back at last?” He hesitated. “That is … Is Sequoia still queen?”

  “She is,” Willow answered.

  “She is!” he said, clasping his front talons together. “That’s … that’s wonderful news. After all this time. Still alive! I can hardly believe it. And she did send you? What did she say about me?”

  “That you’ve been working on a cure for Wasp’s mind control,” Sundew said. “She said you know more about it than any other dragon alive.”

  “Ha!” he said. His long green wings dipped and folded back. “That is certainly true, isn’t it? I mean, that was her intention, sending me here. Quite a long time it’s been, for me to be here studying it, all alone. I really should be an expert by now.” He laughed.

  “Are you using it on the snakes?” Cricket burst out. “Is that why they listen to you?”

  “Well, of course,” he said. “Rather hard to study something without doing a few experiments.”

  “So they obey you?” Nettle said curiously. “You can just order them around?”

  “Are you in their heads, like Wasp when she controls her subjects?” Cricket asked.

  “So many questions! I really don’t know if I can do this without tea!” Hawthorn said, grabbing a teapot and bustling out the back door. Willow and Sundew exchanged glances while he was gone, but for once, Sundew couldn’t guess what she was thinking. Sundew wasn’t even sure what she thought of the eccentric old dragon.

  Hawthorn scooted back inside, steam rising from the water in the teapot. He shook out a pile of tea leaves into each cup and poured the water over top of them.

  “See? All ready,” he said. “Please do have some; I’m quite proud of this tea.” He set a jar of honey on the table as well, with a pleased expression. “No visitors in decades. This is so splendid.”

  “Hawthorn,” Willow said gently. “We really are short on time.”

  “Of course,” he said, his expression clouding. “I am surprised it took Sequoia so long to send you. I was beginning to think none of my messages got through.”

  “Messages?” Mandrake asked.

  “Well,” Hawthorn said. He took a sip of his tea. “I was forbidden to return to the village myself, wasn’t I?”

  Sundew gave Willow a puzzled look. “You were?”

  “So I sent messages however I could,” he said. “In coconuts down the river. Tied to the legs of monkeys and birds. I even sent a few of my vipers, but they were killed before they could reach the village. Such a shame; they were smart little snakes, just doing what I’d asked.”

  “I … don’t think she got any of those messages,” Willow confessed.

  “What did they say?” Sundew asked, leaning forward. “Did you find an antidote?”

  “I did,” he said. His eyes suddenly glistened with unshed tears. “That is, I believe so.”

  “But that’s amazing!” Cricket said. “Why are you sad?”

  Hawthorn rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “Oh, it’s only … you know, the time I’ve lost … all these years I could have spent with Sequoia.”

  Cricket sat down beside him and put one talon over his where it rested on the table. He twitched slightly, as though his instinct was to pull away from a HiveWing, but he left his talon in hers.

  “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through,” she said. “I can’t imagine what it was like to be alone for so long. But what you were doing is so important. You’re going to save so many dragons, Hawthorn. When all the HiveWings are freed, you’re going to be a hero. The LeafWing who devoted his life to freeing them! Your antidote will save my sis — my mother. It means everything to me. Not to mention it’ll stop another war.”

  He sniffed and pulled his talon away to swipe at his eyes again. “That is something,” he said. “If it works … I’m glad to know this wasn’t all for nothing. And don’t get me wrong. I know I deserved this. I told the queen I understood, and I meant it. This was the right punishment for me, the only punishment.”

  “What?” Cricket said, glancing at the other LeafWings as though they might have the answers.

  Willow spread her wings, equally puzzled. “What do you mean?” she said to Hawthorn. “I thought you volunteered for this — how could you deserve it?”

  “What were you being punished for?” Sundew asked.

  He blinked at them, surprise written in every crease of his face. “Didn’t she tell
you why I’m here?” he asked.

  Sundew shook her head. She didn’t know why she suddenly felt so full of dread, as though the earth was about to collapse underneath her.

  “Because I’m the one who found the breath of evil, after everyone thought it had been wiped out centuries ago,” he said. “And I’m the one who gave it to Queen Wasp.”

  “What?” Willow cried. She staggered back a step, and Sundew reached to catch her, their wings sliding together like falling petals.

  Hawthorn’s words didn’t seem to fit inside Sundew’s brain. She couldn’t link them properly to reality. They just didn’t make sense.

  “You gave it to her?” Cricket said. “The breath of evil? What do you mean? When? You didn’t really … why would you do that? Why would you make her more powerful? Why would you give anyone the power to control other dragons like that?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Willow.

  “Me neither,” echoed Mandrake.

  “I understand that someone’s been lying to us! And keeping things from us!” Nettle snarled. “I may not understand what those exact things are, but I know that I’m angry about it!”

  Hawthorn held up his front talons, palms out. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew! I thought Queen Sequoia would have told you. Wouldn’t you think she would share the whole story before sending someone on a quest this dangerous?”

  “I WOULD think that!” Nettle snapped. “She SHOULD have!”

  “Maybe she thought Hawthorn was dead, and if he was, then no one would ever have to know the whole truth,” Mandrake suggested.

  “That is not better!” Nettle cried. “That is worse! Talk about cowardly!”

  Sundew was angry, too, but she mostly felt as if she’d been walking along a strong branch and it had suddenly snapped off and sent her plummeting to the ground and the ground was extraordinarily far away and her wings weren’t working, and it was difficult to focus on being mad and trying not to plummet at the same time.

  “I think you need to tell us the whole story,” Sundew said to Hawthorn. I must have misunderstood something. He didn’t mean he went looking for the breath of evil. He can’t possibly mean that we did this to the HiveWings.

  Hawthorn looked down at his tea and fiddled with the handle on his cup. “All right,” he said. “But can I please start by saying I know you’ll hate me at the end of it. That’s all right. If you could hold back a little bit, though, I’d appreciate it. Fifty years of carrying this guilt has really been a lot. If you can imagine.”

  “More explaining, less self-pity,” Nettle hissed.

  He nodded again. “Yes. Well. Let’s see. Queen Wasp was dangerous from the moment she inherited her crown. Her mother, Queen Cochineal, was deceitful and power-hungry, but at least she respected the separate tribe monarchies. Wasp, though … she looked at SilkWings and LeafWings and only saw more dragons to crush under her talons. She wanted everyone to bow to her. That became clear very early on.

  “But that wasn’t the worst of it. She thought our power came from the trees, and she thought that if she cut them down, we’d become weak. She did it stealthily at first. Stretches of forest cleared in faraway corners where we might not notice. ‘Accidental’ forest fires that wiped out hundreds of trees. Another hundred cut down to build her first Hive, and a dramatic performance art piece when we tried to object: ‘Oh, are LeafWings the only ones allowed to use Pantalan resources now? Why shouldn’t I build my tribe a city to live in?’ And so on.”

  He paused to sip his tea again, then nudged one of the other cups toward Nettle and Mandrake with a hopeful expression. Nettle scowled at him, and he sighed and returned to his story.

  “By the time we figured out what she was doing, it was too late for countless trees. We tried to stop her in all the diplomatic ways, but she would lie to our faces, promise to stop, and then turn around and keep doing it. Or she’d have her guards throw us out — the queen of the LeafWings, tossed out of Wasp Hive like a spider that crawled in the wrong window! Can you imagine?!”

  “I can imagine tossing you out a window,” Nettle offered.

  “And then she became even worse,” he continued hurriedly. “She announced that according to the Book of Clearsight, the time had come for us to consolidate the three tribes under one queen: her. She sent Queen Monarch and Queen Sequoia instructions for formally stepping down and handing their subjects over to her control.”

  “We know this part,” Sundew said. “Queen Monarch said yes, Queen Sequoia said no, and the Tree Wars began.”

  “Not immediately,” said Hawthorn. “First we tried to talk her down. And second … we tried something else.” He cupped his claws around the teacup and closed his eyes. “I thought we could stop her. I thought we could save everyone.”

  “By giving Wasp the most powerful weapon in the world?” Cricket asked.

  “Yes, please do explain the logic there,” Sundew said.

  “It wasn’t supposed to make her powerful.” Hawthorn looked down at his talons. “I thought, if I found the plant and we used it on her … that we’d be able to control her.”

  Willow turned her face in toward Sundew’s shoulder, hiding it for a moment as she breathed in a small, hiccuping way. Sundew wound her tail around Willow’s and tried to think straight.

  We were trying to turn the HiveWing queen into our mind-controlled zombie.

  We would have done that to her — the same terrible thing she’s done to her subjects.

  Instead we made her stronger than any other dragon. We gave her a way to keep her claws on her tribe’s necks, and the power to use them against us.

  She glanced over at Cricket, who was staring at Hawthorn in horror.

  I thought we were the good tribe. How could we do something like this?

  “When did this happen?” Cricket asked, questions suddenly exploding out of her like flamesilk erupting from Blue’s wrists. “And how did you give it to her? How did she get her talons on more of the plant? How did she figure out what to do with it?” She stopped, pressing her talons to her temples. “Why would you do this?”

  “She threatened our trees, HiveWing,” Hawthorn said, with a hard note in his voice that told Sundew he still thought his actions were justified. “The trees we loved, our homes and souls. We saw the war that was coming. We knew how dangerous she was, and we knew we couldn’t give her the LeafWings.

  “So we held a peace summit and I … I put it in her food that night.”

  Willow took one of Sundew’s clenched talons, smoothed it flat, and looked up at Hawthorn again. “Did the queen know what you were doing?”

  He made an inscrutable face. “I told her what I wanted to do. She didn’t stop me. But I can’t say she exactly told me to do it. She could have stopped me, though. I was so loyal. I always listened to her. If she had told me not to do it, I wouldn’t have. She never said no! This is really —”

  Hawthorn stopped himself, lashing his tail for a moment. “I mean,” he continued in a calmer voice. “Of course it was my fault. I found the plant; I slipped it into Wasp’s food. That was me. Even if I did it with the noblest of intentions.”

  He really does still think he did the right thing, Sundew thought. And that it just … went wrong.

  “At first, it seemed like nothing happened. It clearly didn’t work,” Hawthorn said. He put one talon on the wooden egg again, tracing the leaves with one claw. “Wasp behaved exactly the same, both that night at dinner and the following morning during negotiations. We tried to steer her onto a peaceful path. We tried subtle suggestions, and when those didn’t work, we tried to order her to back down. She hissed at us and promised war, just as she always did. So we thought we had failed. No harm done … a long shot attempt at salvation that didn’t work.

  “It wasn’t until later, when I saw her mind control, that I realized we must have caused it. I don’t know how she figured out what to do, or where she got the plant.” He tapped his claws on the top of the egg.

  “That�
��s what you get for sneaking and half measures!” Nettle growled. “It should have been poison in her food instead. That would have saved hundreds of dragons.”

  Nobody argued with her, but Sundew could see the consternation written all over Willow’s and Cricket’s faces. She’s right, but she’s also wrong, Sundew thought. Even I don’t think anyone should poison dragons at a peace summit.

  “The good news,” Hawthorn broke in, slicing through the tension, “is that now I know what we did wrong. We needed to ingest the plant ourselves. Otherwise there was no connection between our minds and hers.”

  “But if you both ate it,” Cricket asked doubtfully, “who would control who? Why wouldn’t she be the one controlling you instead?”

  “Ah!” said Hawthorn, his expression lightening. “Those are mysteries I solved with science! Experimentation! Research! Investigation! All the careful procedures I wish I’d had time for back then. It’s amazing what you can discover when you’re alone for fifty years with nothing else to do. Yes, I know, not completely alone.”

  Sundew tilted her head at him. “Not completely alone?” she echoed. “Do you mean the snakes?”

  “The snakes, the foliage, my wooden friends,” he answered, waving his claws around the little house. “I have extremely strong leafspeak, so I can always chat with the jungle if I get lonely.”

  “So you’ve been experimenting on the snakes,” Cricket said, “and you’ve figured out how to mind-control them? Is that also how you found the antidote?”

  “Yes, exactly!” Hawthorn said. “I tried everything, and I finally found this!” He darted across the room to a wooden chest, ornately carved with hundreds of tiny leaves. Sundew couldn’t even imagine how long it had taken him to carve it. He lifted off the lid, grunting slightly at the weight of it, and laid it on the floor beside him, then beckoned Cricket to look inside.

  Sundew edged closer so she could see as well. The chest seemed to be full of tiny gnarled bits of roots — they looked like ginger root but smelled more like old oranges. From the look on Cricket’s face, though, they might have been made of gold.