The Shepherd of Weeds (41 page)

And within the trestle—Axle’s trestle—preparations were being made for a spectacular celebration.

Or rather, preparations were being burnt.

In the trestleman’s sunny kitchen, a place that held the memories of many a good meal, Ivy was neglecting a bubbling pot on the small polished woodstove, while smoke billowed from one of the tiny oven doors. Stacks of dishes awaited washing, and a sack of flour had rebelled, coating most of the floor in a conspicuous dusting. Ivy blew a stray lock of hair away from her eyes as she arranged a vase of purple and white violets. Her face was streaked with both flour and stove black, which she now successfully transferred to the bouquet. Discovering the oven, she cried in dismay and grabbed a flowered towel—but the tray that emerged held only random, blackened lumps.

Waving away the smoke, she flung open the small window
and looked guiltily over her shoulder. Out the window went the entire ruined contents of the tray, which fizzled when they landed in the river. With all the best intentions, Ivy had planned the menu for the day, but from the start it seemed that everything had gone wrong.

The door did open then, and Ivy assumed what she hoped was a casual pose. Rowan entered, and she relaxed somewhat, but scowled when he burst out laughing.

“Just look at these!” she said, displaying an earlier attempt at corn fritters. They were runny in the middle and charred on the outside, and Rowan was pretty sure this was not her desired goal. “I don’t know how Axle does it! Everything he makes is so … perfect.”

“Hmm.” Rowan smiled. “How refreshing!”

“Refreshing?” Ivy eyed him suspiciously.

“Yes. Apparently, you can’t do
everything.
” He patted her on the shoulder when he saw her glum expression. “Ivy, it’s the gesture that counts. Maybe it’s time to let Axle back in his kitchen?”

“I wanted to surprise him!”

“I think it’s too late for that. The poor man is pacing back and forth in the hall, wondering when you’re going to burn his house down!”

“Oh, I give up.”

“It’s okay. Potion-making and cooking are quite different talents, you know.”

“Maybe, but I haven’t been able to do either since—”

Rowan looked down as a white rabbit loped by.

“—since Shoo left.”

She bent down and tenderly lifted the rabbit, dusting off his heavy coating of flour and cradling him around her neck.

“Come.” Rowan held out his hand. “Your friends are waiting for you in the parlor.”

It was a fine gathering indeed, albeit slightly cramped. Beneath the trestle’s low ceilings an array of bright faces awaited Ivy. It had been a few weeks since she’d seen most of them, and, after a brief pause, the room erupted in welcome.

Grig was there, sipping on mulberry wine, with many of his familiar assistants. Cecil sat beside the small men, stuffed uncomfortably into a tiny chair, and a plate of burnt cookies sat conspicuously in their midst. In one corner, the trestle’s renowned owner fretted beside his brother, Peps, but as Ivy entered, Axle brightened, and he raced to join her. After nervously inquiring about the state of his kitchen, he vanished to inspect it himself.

“How did everyone like the cookies?” Ivy asked, regarding the room. “Grig—you’ve hardly touched yours!”

Looking sheepish, Grig leaned forward and, taking one, attempted to bite it. The resulting crack did not bode well for his teeth.

The trestleman looked around helplessly. “They’re quite … toothsome!”

“Yes—delicious!” Peps added quickly.

“I simply must have the recipe,” Rue enthused. She whispered something to her grandfather, Professor Breaux, and the old man cleared his throat. “A respectable attempt,” he pronounced thoughtfully.

“I’ll second that,” Malapert, the Guild’s disgraced Librarian, agreed.

The room was silent.

“You’re all awful liars!” Ivy burst out laughing. “But don’t worry; I suspect Axle is in charge now.”

And indeed, as they mingled, excitedly speaking among themselves, somehow a plate piled high with hot biscuits and peach jam replaced Ivy’s blackened attempt, alongside a pitcher of sweet spiced cider.

“I don’t know how he does it,” Ivy said, turning to her uncle with her mouth full.

“We all have our particular talents.” He smiled, eyes twinkling. “And apparently cooking is not one of yours.”

toast!” Cecil stood, stooped beneath the low ceiling. He held his glass high.

“Well, let’s hear it.” Peps smiled, raising his own.

They were gathered around the bounty of Axle’s table, the trestleman finally looking relaxed as he served platter after platter of scrumptious food. The meal was nearly over, and their bellies full.

There was the sound of chairs scraping against the polished floor as one by one each guest stood.

“To Ivy,” Cecil said, turning to face her. “Whom I’ve been proud to call my niece. Without you, we would not be here to enjoy this—or any—bounty.”

Ivy felt the color rise in her cheeks. She stood now, looking around the table at the welcome sight of so many of
her beloved friends. “Thank you, Uncle,” she said. “But I suspect we each have many things to be thankful for. And I’d like to offer a toast of my own.” Ivy adjusted the particular silver pin that held her hair in place, and as she did, the light caught it, dancing wildly across the crowded walls. She raised her birch beer. “To those whose faces I do not see here today.”

The room sat silent, thoughts of the fallen still heavy in everyone’s hearts.

Axle was next, standing chest high to the table. “I have one of my own,” he spoke softly. “To my brother, Peps. For without him, you’d all be eating Ivy’s cooking!”

The room cheered. Peps had rescued Axle from his prison in the spire with the help of the albatrosses Klair and Lofft and, with Ivy’s help, nursed him back to health in his beloved trestle.

“I shall write a ballad for you,” Axle informed his brother brightly. “For never has there been a more deserving trestleman about whom to sing. Right after I finish my current project, that is.”

“What project, Axle?” Rowan asked.

“Ah, such an undertaking has never before been done. A new
Field Guide
—to Pimcaux! But first, I need to finish a truly important work,” Axle replied. “I’m calling it
Potent Prophecy: The Complete Chronicles of Queen Ivy.
”

Ivy smiled at Rowan, who now stood.

“I have one, too,” the former taster began.

Ivy watched her friend with interest. She remembered their last time together in this trestle, as their adventure was just beginning. Then he wore his tasters’ robes with great pride, and Axle had somewhat impatiently told him he had a lot of unlearning to do. Today she was proud to see how much he’d changed. He stood as tall and confidently as he could beneath the low ceilings, and he raised his glass to her. Ivy noticed with a shock that it was she who blushed, not he.

“To my great friend and companion, Ivy Manx.” Rowan bowed. “Whose place is in my heart—not the kitchen.” He winked, and then grew serious. “To our Queen.”

Ivy frowned—glancing quickly at her uncle. She preferred the name the birds had given her long ago, the Shepherd of Weeds, to that of Queen. In the days following the fall of the Tasters’ Guild, her uncle had tried to prepare her for this, her new incarnation. The two had returned to Templar, huddling together in her workshop as Cecil had readied her for the monumental changes that her new role would bring. Yet the title
Queen
was a foreign one to her, one that held distant undertones of poison and tyranny, and sent her scurrying to her small alcohol stove to tinker, or to the comfort of Axle’s
Field Guide
—her own battered copy had been retrieved from Rocamadour.

“And there’s still the little issue of your studies.” Cecil had smiled. “For they’ve been woefully neglected.”

The Tasters’ Guild had been vanquished by the Hawthorn army in a matter of moments, their howling, screaming faces sending the surviving Outriders retreating for their lair in the catacombs. The doors to the dead were sealed from within, and the unlucky subrectors and Guild loyalists that remained on higher ground were captured. And with that, the imprisoned souls of the Hawthorn Wood were gone.

The invasive weeds dropped by the caucus grew wildly up and over the city’s sheer walls—with Ivy’s urging—twisting up the dark spire, and finally covering the entire Guild in a thick blanket of greenery. The Tasters’ Guild was but a shadow, a shroud of thick shoots of ivy and bramble, destined forever to exist in a woven twilight. The needle-sharp point of the spire, the vast halls of learning, the Chapter Room—all were transformed by the overgrowth, their contours dulled like a rusted ax blade, trumped by nature. Rocamadour had become unrecognizable.

Grig had rescued Rowan from the inkworks, which were destroyed by the staunchroot.

“Hardened like glue,” Grig pronounced happily. “There will never again be ink made in that forsaken hole.”

But no amount of urging would convince the forger, Hemsen Dumbcane, to abandon his vigil beside his beloved fountain. In the end, he was left there to fend for himself in permanent dusk, his grieving shadow blending with that of the desperate horse and rider in the fountain’s center.

There was a knock on Axle’s door, and Cecil stood.

The door swung open and the full figure of Lumpen’s patchwork skirts and corncob pipe filled its frame. Her ruddy cheeks bristled with health, and her very presence made Axle’s trestle seem smaller than ever before.

“Lumpen!” Ivy smiled, standing joyfully at the sight of her traveling companion. The well keeper performed a clumsy curtsy.

“Come, let me see you,” Ivy beckoned.

Axle emerged again from the kitchen and set down a pair of bowls upon the floor—one holding the delicate arch of a small fish, the other a froth of fresh cream—as the hem of Lumpen’s skirts bristled and lifted.

“Six!” Ivy squealed as the cat made his way indifferently into the crowded parlor. He eyed Ivy coolly.

“Six, all is forgiven?” Ivy asked, leaning down to pet him.

Blinking once, he paused. The cat contemplated Ivy, and answered finally with a raspy purr before settling himself upon his lunch.

“Uh, Ivy.” Rue stood, shyly. “We have a little souvenir for you.”

Together, Rue, her grandfather Professor Breaux, and the Librarian Malapert presented Ivy with a bulky roll of cloth, tied with a ribbon.

“What is this?” Ivy asked as Rue helped her unroll it upon the cleared table.

The gathering pressed in, curious.

There, the flattened but unmistakable image of a familiar face in a scarlet robe.

“Snaith!” Ivy gasped.

The professor of the dreaded Irresistible Meals wore a perplexed look; his hood lay bunched upon his shoulders, his gloved finger gesturing in the air—a pose he often struck when lecturing. But whatever the subrector wished to say was lost—frozen forever in the ancient weave.

Six padded over, sniffing the tapestry, as Ivy inspected it closer.

It was a work of much distinction. Snaith’s bulbous face, his potbelly, and his scrunched spine bulged unsettlingly from the textured surface, even as the weave contained him.