The Poison Jungle

by Tui T. Sutherland

  So killing Hawthorn … even killing Wasp … might not be enough to stop it.

  Willow blinked once, twice, three times. She slowly rolled her eyes down and to the left, at the mud between her and Hawthorn. Then she looked back at Sundew meaningfully.

  “Wait, I have more questions first,” Cricket babbled. “Why aren’t your eyes white, like the dragons who are controlled by Wasp? Or your voice; why isn’t it all double weird like when Wasp talks through another dragon?”

  Sundew shifted her gaze to Cricket, trying to look as though she was listening, when really all her attention was focused on her leafspeak. She had to weave it past the creepy shivering tangle of the breath of evil, burrowing through the earth around and below it. Her awareness slipped out of the nest of vines and across the stream, tiptoeing through the waterwheels.

  The earth between Willow and Hawthorn … what had Willow seen there? What did she think Sundew could use? The pitcher plants here were too small to swallow a dragon; they had to content themselves with insects, frogs, and occasional small monkeys, but they were still very smug about it. Do you know what I ate today? Well, do you know what I ate? Self-important, like all pitcher plants everywhere. Even if Sundew made them enormous, they couldn’t attack Hawthorn or the snake for her. They caught their prey by sitting there with their gaping mouths open.

  Sundew reached farther and found mushrooms, water lilies, and arrowroot — none of that would be helpful.

  Wait …

  There was a tiny sprout buried among the pitcher plants. Normally it wouldn’t survive another moon cycle; the self-satisfied plants around it would crowd it out of existence and steal all its prey until it wasted away.

  But Sundew could save it, and maybe it could save them in exchange. She had to be precise, though … and fast.

  Hawthorn was explaining something about cells and fungi to Cricket. Something about the hosts (or playthings) of hosts having the white eyes, but not the hosts themselves. She asked another, even more scientific question. She was stalling, whether she guessed what Sundew was doing or not.

  Hello, beautiful plant, Sundew whispered with barely a shimmer of leafspeak. She didn’t want the thing to notice what she was doing, and she wouldn’t be surprised if it could overhear leafspeak conversations.

  Oh, she realized suddenly. That’s what I was hearing in the trees. They sensed the breath of evil — they were warning one another of trouble — but Hawthorn was talking over them with his own leafspeak, telling them all was well. He was confusing them and me.

  Frllp, the little plant said in a teeny-tiny voice.

  Would you like to be bigger? Sundew asked in the plant’s own language. She sent it visions of sunshine pouring through its leaves, all the pitcher plants bowing before it, first choice of all the prey that wandered through. All the creatures it could eat.

  Ooooooooo, the plant murmured.

  I can make you strong, Sundew whispered, and big and tall, if you will eat one thing for me.

  She showed it the viper. The slithering feel of it, the flickering danger of it, its exact location in space relative to where the sprout could be.

  Oooo would love to eat that yes give please, the plant said, more or less.

  It’s yours. Take it. Take it fast … NOW! Sundew shoved all her power through the systems connecting them, flooding the little plant with strength.

  A swarm of sundew tentacles erupted from the earth near Hawthorn’s feet, bright red and green like the daylight version of the evil vines. The sundew shot up and out, all its arms growing as thick as anacondas in the space of a heartbeat, and one aimed straight and true for the viper around Willow’s neck.

  The sticky droplets caught the snake’s tail, body, head, mouth all at once, yanking it up into the air. The viper writhed furiously, snapping at the tendrils of goo, but the sundew sucked it in and rolled it up fast, like a frog catching a fly on its tongue.

  Or a grasshopper.

  “How dare you!” Hawthorn roared.

  Several of the tentacles had snared around Hawthorn as well as they shot from the ground, but Sundew could see that he was fighting them off with his own leafspeak. A few of them were withdrawing, reaching toward Willow instead as she backed away.

  No! Sundew commanded. Eat that big one. The infected one. Leave the other. I helped you; listen to me.

  Loud strong loud, whined the sundew. So loud hurts.

  Even with her strength behind it, the sundew would give up soon; it was never meant to be an aggressive predator. She needed something else to fight Hawthorn with, and the vines were getting tighter and tighter around her.

  Sundew looked around frantically and saw with horror that one of the vines had crawled up Cricket’s leg and wound around her neck, squeezing. Cricket was trying to bat it away with her wings, but her breath was already coming in choked gasps.

  “Maybe I don’t need one more HiveWing,” Hawthorn growled. “Especially a deceitful, inquisitive one who won’t shut up.”

  “Let her go!” Sundew shouted. “I’m the one who’s all the trouble! Fight me, not her!”

  “I know you are,” the thing said. “But you will be useful to me. I’m going to use your leafspeak to retake my continent. Between you and Hawthorn — and I suppose this feeble worm over here,” he added, indicating Mandrake, “we can spread across all of Pantala in a matter of days.”

  “I don’t think so,” Willow said from above him.

  Hawthorn started to look up, but he was too slow to see the thorn as long as a dragon’s tail in her talons. Too slow and still too tangled in the sundew to escape or move or fight her off.

  The sharp end of the thorn slammed into the base of his neck.

  And he fell, killed instantly, as all the breath of evil vines screamed with fury.

  Willow let go of the thorn and lifted herself up, her wings beating as she pressed her talons to her face.

  “Willow!” Sundew cried. “Get to Cricket!”

  The vines were seething with rage and confusion. As far as Sundew’s leafspeak could gather, they were bewildered by the sudden loss of Hawthorn, like arms that had been cut off an octopus but still grabbed for prey. They’d lost their brain for a moment, but they were still deadly, and she was sure the brain was still out there, even with Hawthorn dead.

  Willow snatched a branch from the ground and flew to Cricket, who looked close to passing out.

  “Don’t land,” Sundew warned, “or it might get you, too.”

  Willow nodded, hovering over the mass of vines. She snapped the branch in half and stabbed the sharp, splintery end into the vine near Cricket’s neck. Sundew could hear that tendril hissing, bleating to the others that it was wounded.

  But the other vines couldn’t help. The plant’s voice was still loud, but the power to hold the dragons captive was fading. Sundew felt the bonds around her talons slacken and fall.

  Cricket gasped for breath as the one around her neck dropped away. The moment the vines were loose enough, the three dragons all threw themselves aloft, out of reach in case they moved again. Mandrake took off across the stream and into the trees, and the other three followed him high up into the branches of a giant baobab.

  Sundew threw her wings around Willow as soon as they landed. They held each other for a long moment without speaking, their necks curved around each other, their hearts beating as fast as rain in a thunderstorm.

  “Why did the vines let go?” Cricket asked in a shaky voice. “I thought there was something out there controlling Hawthorn, and the snakes, and the vines, too.”

  “Maybe it’s dead?” Mandrake said hopefully.

  Sundew let go of Willow reluctantly and shook her head. “No. Willow killed one of its heads, but it’s got more than one.”

  “It still has Wasp,” Willow agreed.

  They all fell silent, thinking of the other dragons it might have by now … the dragons near the smoke.

  Sundew pressed one of Willow’s talons between hers. “That was a p
retty important head, though. I think the thing was using Hawthorn’s leafspeak to make the vines attack us. Without his leafspeak to control them, the vines can’t move any more than ordinary plants can.”

  “What do we do now?” Cricket asked.

  “We fly to the border and try to save our tribe,” Sundew said. “And our friends.” She lashed her tail. “We fight that thing and kill it exactly the way Willow did. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to kill it A LOT.”

  “Wait,” Willow said, pulling Sundew’s talons toward her. “No. That’s exactly what we shouldn’t do.”

  “What?!” Sundew flared her wings. “We have to! We have to go now! I REALLY WANT TO DESTROY SOME THINGS.”

  “The four of us against the entire HiveWing tribe, Queen Wasp, all the best LeafWing fighters, and our friends?” Willow said. “We don’t even know what to destroy!”

  “She’s right,” Cricket said. “I’m all for killing Queen Wasp, but if that thing can be in any dragon, what are we supposed to do — kill everyone? We’re not doing that and you know it, Sundew.”

  She did know it. Even if there was a way to kill all the HiveWings, she didn’t think she could, after all. Not now that she knew HiveWings she cared about, or now that she’d learned the truth behind all of this and what the LeafWings had done to them. And especially not now that she’d heard the voice of their true enemy.

  And of course, she could never hurt Blue, or Queen Sequoia, or Swordtail, or even Belladonna, who usually made her madder than anyone. If they were all lost to the thing … and she felt grimly certain they were … there would just have to be another way to save them.

  “Fine, yes, but we still have to go see what’s happening! We have to fight!” she argued.

  “We will fight,” Willow said. “We’ll use this rage, I promise. We have to start by using it to save everyone else.”

  “I want to go to Blue more than anyone,” Cricket said. “But I also need to make sure this doesn’t happen to Bumblebee.”

  “Or Hazel,” Willow agreed. “We need to protect the dragons who are left so we have someone to fight with us.”

  Sundew dug her claws into the branch and felt the tree wince. Sorry, she flickered through her leafspeak, sending a filament of comfort out to smooth over the scratched bark.

  “All right. All RIGHT,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  They sped through the trees as fast as they could move, keeping to the higher branches where there was more room to fly, at least sometimes.

  Sundew’s village was first, closer to the Snarling River; Sundew reached out to the dome as they arrived and moved the plants to make a hole near the top. They hurtled through, startling all the dragons below them. It took several moments of confusion, hissing, yelling, and threats before the villagers realized that their savior Sundew was one of the “attacking” dragons, that Cricket was their erstwhile HiveWing prisoner, and that they weren’t an advance party of invaders from Queen Wasp.

  “But they are coming,” Sundew said. “We have to fall back to the other — to the SapWing village and regroup with the dragons there.”

  “Fall back?” Cobra Lily objected. “Are you saying … we lost? Already?”

  “Is Belladonna dead?” several voices asked in alarm.

  “Not exactly, but she’s lost to us right now,” Sundew said. “I can explain everything, but I’d rather do it once, to everyone, and I’d rather do it after we get all our dragonets out of here.”

  “LeafWings don’t run away!” someone shouted. “We stand and fight! We bare our fangs and raise our claws and —”

  “And end up as mind-controlled zombies just like the HiveWings,” Sundew snapped. “Don’t be idiots! This isn’t a normal threat! We have to find an un-normal way to fight it, and we need all the dragons we can gather! So we get to safety first, then make a plan.”

  “I’ll round up the dragonets,” Cobra Lily said unexpectedly. She loped gracefully off to the nursery area, and several other dragons followed her. Several more stayed to keep arguing with Sundew, but she ignored them and flew to the outer wall of the dome — the same spot where she used to sneak out to meet Willow. She rested one talon on the woven branches and nudged them apart, hoping they felt her love for them as she did. She loved all the plants that made up this dome, which she’d built to protect her tribe. She hated to leave it; she hated to imagine the breath of evil slithering over it, stealing its light and smothering it.

  Dragons began climbing out through the hole; she tried to count them all but lost track around fifty. She guessed about a third of the village was here, most of them probably planning to be called up as the next wave of soldiers. A lot of them were carrying weapons of some sort. Many of them had pouches like hers slung around them, hopefully full of useful deadly things.

  She wished she had time to refill her own pouches, but she’d have to do that later, when all the dragons were somewhere safer.

  They moved a bit slower now, hampered by their numbers and the slowest among them, including two dragonets who couldn’t fly yet, one elder who hadn’t left the village in years, and three limping dragons who’d been recently wounded by various jungle dangers.

  “Do you think Wasp and the army are right behind us?” Mandrake worried, pacing beside Sundew. “How soon could they get here?”

  “I’m surprised we haven’t seen anyone yet,” Willow admitted in a low voice. “I would have thought the … the othermind … would have sent something to chase us down as soon as Hawthorn died.”

  “Maybe the smoke didn’t reach all the LeafWings, and they were giving it a fight,” Sundew guessed, feeling proud of them and horribly worried for them at the same time.

  “Also, it doesn’t know where to go,” Cricket said.

  “What?” Willow tilted her head.

  “When Wasp takes over a dragon, she doesn’t get his memories and thoughts and knowledge,” Cricket said. “The othermind might have stolen our friends, but it doesn’t know everything they know. It wouldn’t know the way to Sundew’s village.”

  “But it will know the way to mine,” Willow said, “because it was there, inside Hawthorn.”

  “That’s true,” Cricket said, “although it might have trouble remembering the way, since it didn’t come from the border before. And without Hawthorn’s leafspeak, it won’t be able to clear sundews and dragon-traps out of its way, like Sundew is doing for us right now.”

  Sundew was surprised that she’d noticed; she was doing it almost automatically, sending her leafspeak out ahead of the group to check for dangers.

  “So, when we met Hawthorn in the Den of Vipers,” Mandrake said slowly, “were we talking to the real Hawthorn? Or the thing inside him? It seemed like it had all of Hawthorn’s memories.”

  “I think it was the real Hawthorn,” Cricket said, “but he’s spent the last fifty years being manipulated by that voice in his head. He might not have known what it was going to do — maybe he didn’t even know the antidote wasn’t real. But he was doing what it wanted him to do, even when it wasn’t controlling him.”

  Sundew shuddered. Imagine spending fifty years alone, with no one but an evil voice to talk to. Perhaps Hawthorn had been more than adequately punished, after all.

  “Do we need to talk about what … it is?” Mandrake asked. “What’s using the plant to control everyone?”

  “And is it the same dragon who used it all those thousands of years ago, in the Legend of the Hive?” Cricket asked. “If so, where is he, and why hasn’t he come out in all these years? Or is it a group of dragons, and are they hiding somewhere?”

  Sundew looked over at Willow, and she saw from Willow’s face that she had come to the same conclusion as Sundew.

  “I think it’s not a dragon,” Sundew said slowly. “I think … it’s the plant itself.” Willow nodded.

  Cricket blinked at her. “The plant? But how? That’s … plants don’t have a consciousness, or a voice, or make sinister evil plans!”

 
; “Some of them do, actually,” Sundew said. “I can vouch for that. They don’t usually have voices like ours, and I’m guessing this one didn’t until dragons came along and it adapted to use us.”

  “Yeeeeeeesh,” Mandrake said, stepping carefully over a fallen branch and eyeing it as though it might suddenly leap up to attack him.

  “It’s just a guess,” Willow added. “We need to find out more so we can stop it.”

  It was late morning when they reached the other LeafWing camp. Sundew had seen the guards patrolling in the trees, watching them arrive, but nobody came out to stop them. We’ll have to warn them that not all LeafWings can be trusted anymore, she thought with a shiver. Now that anyone could have the enemy lurking inside them. They left the dragons from Sundew’s village gathered in a huddle in the biggest clearing, glaring up at the curious dragons around them.

  Bumblebee came galloping across the throne room when Cricket and Sundew landed, her wings flopping to either side of her. To Sundew’s surprise, she beelined straight for Sundew and bonked into her feet, bouncing and reaching to be picked up.

  “Hey, little bug,” Sundew said, lifting her. The dragonet’s yellow and black stripes seemed cuter than they had the day before, and her snout was warm as she snuggled into Sundew’s neck.

  Sundew found herself feeling weirdly glad that they’d come back instead of going to fight. Saving Bumblebee from the othermind … that would be worth it.

  What has happened to me?

  Tsunami and Turtle were the only other ones there, both of them still leaning over the Book of Clearsight.

  “Any luck?” Willow asked them.

  Tsunami shook her head. “Not yet. I must admit I like this Clearsight a bit better than I did before, though.”

  “Why did you ever not like her?” Cricket asked, obviously shocked.