The Poisons of Caux: The Hollow Bettle (Book I) (14 page)

orrel Flux knew that to survive in the castle through his next meal, he needed to draw upon all of his inner resources. It had been many years since he’d performed as a taster in any real way and then only for the least demanding of clients in the halls of the Guild—visiting dignitaries and guests of the Director. Anyone of these sorts was usually an accomplished taster in his own right or used a taster provided by the host—this behavior, for obvious reasons, was only among the closest of friends and associates and only in the most exclusive halls of the rich and powerful. There was a casualness that Sorrel noted among the very elite, one that Verjouce at times had him use to his advantage.

Verjouce had encouraged Flux to pursue other talents, illicit activities that made the dark Director more powerful and feared. He was just the man to perform the secret midnight
deliveries, or worse: the occasional dispatching of enemies of the Guild with a few drops of something deadly. In a strange twist of fate, Flux turned out to be much more adept at hiding poison in a dish than detecting its presence.

Now here he was, in Templar, tasting for the queen. He was very rusty. And this would never do.

Before his departure, Verjouce had assured him that he was needed here, that his presence would distract the royal family while Verjouce succeeded where Flux had failed—in capturing the unpleasant child. But Sorrel Flux was not entirely convinced—an alarm inside his conniving head was ringing. He couldn’t escape the feeling that he was being punished for his apparent missteps at the Hollow Bettle.

He needed to keep his head down. He quickly realized that if he was to survive, he needed to create a distraction, whatever necessary, so that the queen had no time to turn her attention to him. Sorrel was, after all, capable of creating much mischief. He decided to quickly befriend the servant whose job it was to oversee the king’s kitchen. And since Boskoop was feeling poorly, it was a golden opportunity.

“Prisoner eleven thousand eight hundred and two, Your Highness,” said the sentry standing at attention in the enormous double doors.

Prisoner eleven thousand eight hundred and two was very delighted to be free from confinement, even for the moment,
and bowed deeply to the assembled royal family. He was encumbered even in this small act of movement by a simply enormous knot of rope confining his hands before him, ostensibly to keep the apotheopath from any surprise medicinal tricks. Should the rope fail in this preventive measure, an excessive grouping of guards was there to protect the royal family from the dangerous quack with their pointy staffs.

Sorrel Flux, standing in position against the wall behind the queen, had met Cecil only once and was hard-pressed to recognize this man as one and the same. He was dirty and pale; his clothes were in tatters. But there was an appalling quiet dignity with which the apotheopath presented himself, and it was that quality alone—a self-possession that so eluded Sorrel Flux’s own character—that roiled the taster into a smugness at the unfortunate man’s straits.

When Sorrel had recovered from his surprise—after all, this was the man in whose bed he’d slept for an entire miserable year—he shifted ever so slightly so that the queen was directly in front of him.

“Hmm,” said the king. And then again, “Hmm.”

The Royal Diarist broke the silence that followed. “The king contemplates!” he clarified.

The thing was, the king had never before seen an apotheopath in person, nor had the queen—except for their first encounter in the nether regions of the dank basement of the castle.

Apotheopaths were rare creatures indeed after the coup that brought the Deadly Nightshades to power. Even before the takeover, Verjouce had seen to it that the entire profession was persecuted while he still had the ear of the old king Verdigris. They were said to be at best charlatans and at worst, well, King Nightshade wasn’t quite sure what Verjouce had said the worst of them were. Only that their brand of healing was never to be trusted, and they were capable of much Verdigris mischief.

And here one was, in person.

Not much to look at, either.

“Do you have a name, apotheopath?” asked the king.

“Yes, Your Highness. Cecil Manx, Your Highness.”

“You say you can cure the king?” asked Lowly Boskoop, who looked like he should be in bed, recovering with a hot water bottle and a good book.

“I was hoping to.” Cecil nodded.

“Is it painful?” asked King Nightshade, with the memories of Gudgeon’s last fitting fresh in his mind.

“No, I shouldn’t think so, Your Highness. Just a few drops of a brandied tincture in your mouth.”

“Well, then.” The king looked around the room, and remembering his cobbler and the painful next fitting, he made a quick decision. “I’ll give it a try. Providing, of course, you try it on yourself first. Can’t be too careful, you know.” The king patted his wife’s hand affectionately.

“Well, Your Highness, the thing is … they took my medicine when they arrested me. If I just might get it back …”

Lowly Boskoop cleared his throat and consulted a long scroll of parchment.

“Yes. When he was jailed, they would have most certainly confiscated his medicines.”

“Can they be brought up from wherever they are being held?”

“Um. They would have been destroyed, Your Highness.”

The king sighed. Another disappointment.

“But perhaps the apotheopath can make his tincture again?” Boskoop suggested. The king perked up.

“Why, yes—there’s an idea! You could just dash off another bottle! My wife would be more than happy to loan you her workshop.”

“I would?” the queen asked.

“All hail the generosity of the king!” the Royal Diarist piped in.

“Perhaps Mawn might even be of some assistance, Artilla?”

But before the queen could find a reason why her trusted perfumer could not help cure her husband’s deformity, the prisoner spoke.

“Well, Your Highness. The thing of it is, I don’t really know what the ingredients are.”

“You don’t know what’s in your own bottle of medicine?!”

The Royal Diarist scribbled, trying to keep up.

“You see, my niece made it.”

“Your niece?”

“Yes, my niece—she’s very clever with these sorts of things.”

“Your niece …” The king drummed his fingers. In truth, this was beginning to bore him. He had the thought that this niece sounded a lot like she, too, was an outlaw.

Sorrel Flux thought of the little brat, how she was always busy doing something to annoy him. He was insulted by his master’s attention to the girl and suspicious of it, too. It was because of her that he was here—in this dreadful castle! His master would be incensed if the king turned his attention her way. The Guild wanted to keep her away at all costs from the king. But for what reason? He saw no value in the child’s company—only tediousness. In fact, he harbored a slight notion, although this was tempered with vanity, that the brat might have been poisoning him while he stayed with her.

So naturally, it was appealing to him that Verjouce’s hard-laid plans might run amiss, but he thought it prudent—for now—to just watch and listen.

“But I’m certain she could do it again,” Cecil tried hopefully. “We could just pop over and get her….”

Lowly Boskoop cleared his throat again and consulted his paperwork.

“The Crown was at this man’s residence—a tavern
apparently called the Blemished Bettle—and reported no one there. No girl. No one except a score of dead sentries.”

At this news, Sorrel prudently ducked deeper behind the queen’s throne.

“Really? How odd,” said the king, referring not, it turned out, to the dead men. “Everyone knows bettles can’t be blemished! What a curious name!” The king smiled at the thought. “A bit of the old poet in you, eh, apotheopath?”

Boskoop busily thumbed through another stack nearby.

“Um. Your Highness. Something else. There’s no record of prisoner eleven thousand eight hundred and two even having a niece.”

“What’s this? No niece?!” cried the king. The whole thing was making his head hurt. Niece or not, this apotheopath/poet was not living up to expectations. Weren’t they supposed to harness the forest and use it at their will? Did they not reveal the true, secret nature of plants with their increased powers of perception? It was high time that he cast this prisoner off to his wife.

Cecil Manx paused. He was about to break a promise to a trestleman—not something advisable under any circumstance—but he saw this interview was not going in his favor.

“Your Majesty, if I may. She’s not
technically
my niece. She was found as a baby, floating in the river in the middle of the Windy Season. I named the child Ivy and raised her as my own.”

At this confession, Sorrel Flux’s many suspicions were, if not entirely confirmed, then at least validated. He was one of only a few who had access to the remaining ancient dusty books in Rocamadour’s Library, where the many scholars deciphered the incomprehensible works night and day without halting. He knew now why his master had been so disappointed with him. Sorrel Flux put two and two together and arrived at a new and completely fascinating twist.

He knew the child in the great and ancient Prophecy to be a foundling.

vy was realizing a tender heart was needed to find beauty in a wild, bristly boar. Poppy was enormous by anyone’s standards, especially an eleven-year-old girl’s. At the boar’s highest point, Poppy was heads taller than Ivy. The muscled ridge between her shoulders crested with large spiky bristles, like an amusing drunken crown. And she was wide, half as wide as she was tall, making her quite stocky in overall appearance—and rarely, if ever, is stoutness confused with beauty.

And then there were the tusks. Long and bowed, they jutted from her pink gums, accenting her incredibly long snout and giving her a permanent snarl. But her eyes—light blue buttons—were deep and kind, and it was in these eyes that Ivy found hope.

This long snout was what the bettle miners so prized: it
was capable of sniffing out a vein of the raw stones through ancient impenetrable rock. But another of the bettle boars’ jobs high atop the Craggy Burls was transport. Not of human cargo, as she carried now, but of an equally priceless burden: freshly mined bettles.

Poppy carried the taster with care through the doorway of their secret exit. The passage stretched upward, endless in the dim light. Ivy bounded after her. The way was quite narrow at times and steep, but since Poppy was born and bred to navigate steep mountain passes, this translated quite well to carrying a taster up the uneven stone steps.

Clothilde was last. She had stayed just long enough to extinguish the fire in the fireplace, and with a last look at the wondrous Amber Room—the inner sanctum of Caux’s most magical king—she shut the door to Underwood, sealing it to its fate.

At last, the stair let out into a small room, and with a surge of affection Ivy breathed the air of the early morning—a surprise indeed to see they had passed the entire night beneath the forest.

The small room held little more than the hearth, several open windows, and a rustic table, and it seemed—at first glance—they had left Underwood by way of the little forest cottage. They emerged from the fireside passage, up through a door cut in stone. A small cozy fire was burning in a fireplace beside them, and to this Poppy brought the sick taster, ever so
gently depositing his limp form on the stone hearth. She sat down beside him, hind legs jutting out from under her plump belly.

Rowan was very pale when Ivy turned to him. His breathing was shallow, and his eyes, although open, were glazed and unfocused. He muttered to himself in a worrying way, and Ivy heard him say the word
Estate
several times.

“He needs help,” Clothilde said matter-of-factly “He needs an apotheopath.”

She looked at the taster, leaning in for a better view of Rowan’s dilated pupils. “Hasn’t Cecil been preparing you for just this? Are you not meant to follow in his footsteps? You must have years of study under your belt.”

Her uncle. Cecil would know what to do. If only she had better attended to her studies rather than being so disobedient! She tried to collect her thoughts and assess his symptoms as she had been taught to do, but she found it impossible to recall her lessons.

“He thinks the Estate has come for him,” Ivy found herself stating helplessly. The poor taster was moaning lowly now. Poppy looked concerned as she nosed his face with her wet snout.

“What,” Clothilde demanded pointedly,
“has
he been teaching you?”

“Even if I knew what to give him, I left all of the
medicines with Axle,” Ivy lamented, a jittery panic rising to her throat.

“Think,” urged the lady. “Something less … traditional? Surely you can improvise.”

There was one thing.

There was the elixir she carried.

But opening it would break a promise to a trestleman—something no one should ever do. At the trestle, Axle had taken her aside while Rowan still slept and made her pledge not to waste a drop, saying it would be clear to her when the time had come to use it. Surely, though, Axle wouldn’t wish her to let Rowan die?

Ivy also didn’t want to open the bottle for fear that Poppy would tackle her again if she smelled the bettle. She suddenly felt crowded by both the boar and Clothilde. And she didn’t care for the look in Clothilde’s eyes—one of distant amusement. Odd and unsettling, considering the current circumstances.

But Ivy saw that she really had no choice, and when she produced the brandywine bottle, Poppy merely looked up, nose sniffling slightly—and returned her gaze to the ailing taster. Ivy opened the delicate cut-glass top to the elixir, unwinding the thread of golden wire. Within, the bettle blazed against the fire. The stopper untwisted easily. Prying open Rowan’s mouth, she carefully took several drops of the golden liquid and placed them on his tongue.

The effect was remarkably instantaneous.

The young taster’s complexion went from gravely ashen, as the tonic touched his tongue, to a slow golden spread of health beginning from his mouth and seeping across and up his face, down his neck, to the tips of his fingers and toes. He seemed to sparkle. An unseen breath tickled his hair, passing down his dark robes and over the soles of his boots. Little swirls of golden sparks graced his cheeks, leaving a summer’s flush behind, twinkling as they blew away. A great sigh—one of pure contentment—passed from his mouth, and he looked the picture of peace.

His eyes fluttered open, and in his face rose a healthy blush when he realized everyone was staring down at him.

“Well,” Clothilde said softly. “Well.”

“Wh-what happened?” Rowan managed. He felt himself reddening, but for the first time in memory, he didn’t seem to mind.

The room was silent.

“What have you been hiding there, my dear?” Clothilde’s eyes were narrow with interest.

“It’s nothing,” Ivy said as she wound the thin wire back into place. She was determined to forget the whole thing.

“That’s some brandywine,” Clothilde pressed.

“I’ll say,” Rowan agreed.

“May I see it, please?” Clothilde asked.

“No, I don’t think so.” Ivy was not feeling the spirit of cooperation.

“Give it here,” Clothilde ordered in a voice quite unused to refusal.

“No,” Ivy said, stronger. She put the entire thing behind her back and glared at the white lady.

“Ivy Manx,” Clothilde began carefully, menacingly. Her arm tensed by her side, and Ivy wondered if she was going to take the bottle from her all the same. But her tone changed suddenly.

“As you wish,” she said, this time sweetly, with complete composure. “Let’s just keep that bottle safe. I’m not sure you realize what you have.”

“I think I do,” Ivy muttered.

“May I have some more, please?” Rowan asked eagerly. He was feeling better than he ever could remember feeling. His heart beat a pleasing rhythm in his chest, and the world seemed somehow more colorful. He stretched his legs, which still tingled pleasantly.

“I wouldn’t have had to use it at all if you hadn’t poisoned him!” Ivy glared at Clothilde.

Rowan’s eyes widened indeed as he recalled this trespass.

“It was remarkably easy.” Clothilde shrugged, and everyone was once again reminded of his failures as a taster.

“Well, it was a rotten thing to do,” Ivy said bitterly. “He could have died! And for what? What did he ever do to you?”

“Rowan was never in any mortal peril. It was a small dose of baneberry—”

At this, Rowan groaned. It was an elementary poison at best, one any first year would have known.

“—and if you couldn’t have cured him, I had the antidote.” Clothilde produced a small vial from her pocket. “Ivy, it was the only way I could be sure that you were who they said you were.”

“What does that mean?” Ivy failed to see how poisoning her friend was a necessary step in their introduction and said so.

“Cecil was supposed to have explained everything to you—it’s quite tedious to have to do so myself. It was careless that he left it so long.”

“Well, my uncle never mentioned you. And I don’t know anything about a meeting.” Ivy scowled.

At this, Clothilde softened.

“No, I don’t suppose you would. It was arranged quite some time ago. You were a small child.”

She paused.

“Ivy, I poisoned Rowan so that you might cure him.”

She turned to the taster, intently. “My apologies, Rowan.”

Rowan nodded, dazed.

“I needed to know if you were the one.” Clothilde’s crystal eyes didn’t blink.

“One? What one?”

The sun chose this moment to break through the night, declaring morning officially begun. The soft light shimmered against the plank floor, reaching across to touch the wall. It ended the standoff completely, as sunshine sometimes can.

“The Noble Child. The one who has come to save Caux.”