The Shepherd of Weeds (5 page)

Ivy’s Mind Garden dress was tight enough to restrict her breathing and made from an unusual lace with a chaotic, menacing pattern—jagged teeth and eerie shapes, not some pretty doily. It was made, too, by the ruined imaginings of her wicked father. She was happy to see it was decomposing here, back in Caux. The dress came off her in clumps like dried moss.

“Water, you say?” Mrs. Mulk wanted very badly to punish the offending orphans before her, but a greater desire coursed through her now. She wanted to throw Ivy’s dress into her despicable vat. She turned to Rue, who stood shaking in the shadows beneath the stairs. “What are you waiting for, you wretched brat? Show her where the well is.”

he parlor streamed with welcome light, after the dim and smoky cellar. The barred windows were decorated with a faded calico—a pattern of which women of a certain age seem fond—and the flooring was a worn and stained carpet of similar taste. There was an overabundance of cozies, normally little lace coverlets sewn to shroud a teapot, but here, in the parlor, they protected Mrs. Mulk’s large collection of miniatures.

The room, despite the light, possessed an inexplicable repellency. The few orphans still in residence were reluctant to enter it, and the invalids—well, upon this subject they would all agree their mite-infested beds were preferable to Mrs. Mulk’s parlor. If forced to conclude just what the nature of the unpleasantness was within these four walls, the task would not be easy. Perhaps you might point to the smell—the whiff of
decay, a pinch of desperation—but this would be explained away easily, since the room was directly above the molten vat bubbling in the laundry room. The place was a threshold of loneliness.

And it held one occupant. A small one.

It, too, had a cozy.

The door to the basement creaked as Rue and Ivy entered the parlor, and the creaking seemed to have some sort of effect upon a creature beneath a splash of lace suspended from the stained ceiling.

It emitted a frightened
cheep
.

This, after a moment, was followed by the most mournful of songs Ivy had ever heard. The two girls paused beside the cage.

“Is that … a bird?” Ivy asked incredulously. The song stopped abruptly.

Rue nodded dismally.

Ivy lifted the cage’s cover enough to see two things. It was a small warbler—nearly featherless. And, like the residents of the orphanage, it lived in squalor.

“This is unacceptable!” Ivy shook her head in dismay. The wood warbler was her uncle Cecil’s favorite, and she had grown up with many of them beside the Hollow Bettle, the tavern that was her home. Together, Ivy and Cecil had made small houses for them out of worn brandy casks, which they nailed to posts beside her garden and the nearby river. The
tiny warblers belonged in the field, flitting about at dusk near the orchard with their tiny wings cutting through the air and feasting on insects, not moldy scrapings.

“We shouldn’t—” Rue looked behind her, worried. “We’re not supposed to go near it.”

Ivy shifted her decomposing carpet to her far shoulder—she would not leave anything further for the Boil Pile—and flung off the lace cover of the birdcage. She pried open the little door.

“For shame!” Ivy scowled. “How dare she keep a wild bird caged like this!” She bent close to the opening. “Hello,” she coaxed. As Ivy reached her hand in, the bird began flapping madly, disturbing its litter and upending a small tin of dreary seeds.

“Ivy—”

“It’s okay,” Ivy cooed. “I’m not going to hurt you.
Here—I’ll leave the door open. Stretch those wings! But don’t take too long—you-know-who’s likely to return!”

Ivy turned to Rue, grabbing her hand. “What is it with this place?” she whispered. “He looks nearly as bad as you.”

The well was not far from the orphanage and bordered the encroaching marshes. But it was in an appalling state. The stand of bricks teetered, and in one very worrying place appeared to be missing entirely. An old bucket was discarded beside it, a length of decaying rope attached. The well bespoke weariness and caution—not a cheery spot to put down a picnic and pass a pleasant afternoon. Winter’s grim light left the slight hill bleak and frozen. Ivy dumped the appalling carpet upon the frozen turf and Rue set herself wearily down upon it, and then Ivy approached the stand of bricks.

“This is the place?” she asked with some trepidation. Rue nodded.

Inching forward, Ivy peered in. A familiar smell hit her nose—of swamp and disuse—and she was reminded at once of Rocamadour’s deepest tunnels and crypts. Her stomach lurched. She peered down the long hole—several dead mice floated on the water’s dull surface. Pulling back quickly, Ivy looked at Rue.

“Surely she can’t expect us to drink this?”

“Mrs. Mulk says this is just fine for the orphans.” Rue nodded.

“Well, I’m not an orphan.” Ivy frowned. She pondered for a moment. “Where does she get
her
water?”

Rue paused. She shivered, and pulled the carpet around her.

Then she told Ivy about the other well.

rs. Mulk drew her water from a well found at the end of a walk over rolling hills and down a long, rough path, said Rue. Once a week, she would saddle up an orphan or two in harnesses that held a yoke and secured two wooden pails, one on each side, and they would journey to the spot. The well was clear and pure, and it was rumored that something very special—but long forgotten—was buried deep beneath it.

It was hard and drenching work to collect Mrs. Mulk’s water, made worse—much worse—by the fact that the orphans were under strict orders not to drink it lest they contaminate Mrs. Mulk’s personal supply with their orphanness.

“Ah,” said Ivy. “That’s more like it! Show me where this well is, Rue.”

The well at her childhood home was prized for its taste—and made the brandy of the Hollow Bettle famous. But Ivy’s memories of clear, fresh water drawn by her millhouse were shattered as Rue slumped against a small, ruined tree, crooked and charred from a lightning strike.

“Rue?”

Ivy could hear that Rue was crying quietly.

“How awful of me! You’re tired, of course. We’ll just rest until you feel more like yourself—”

But Rue’s sobs grew louder and more miserable.

“Rue?” Hesitating, Ivy finally sat down beside her, smoothing the mildewed rug. “What is it? Don’t worry about
her
—I’ve seen worse, much worse! Why, if I can handle my own father—”

At the mention of the Guild’s Director, Rue’s crying only increased. Ivy was quite concerned—this seemed to be unusual behavior for Rue, although Ivy could not say for sure. Rue had been Rowan’s friend and classmate, and upon meeting her in Rocamadour, Ivy had somewhat petulantly disliked her. Ivy remembered Rue had once desired to be a subrector herself, and had even apprenticed under the detestable subrector Snaith. She had been well on her way when she risked everything for Ivy, rescuing her from scourge bracken poisoning. If Rowan were here, Ivy thought bitterly, he’d know what to do for Rue, but the last she’d seen of him was on the journey home from Pimcaux. They’d shared a few private words before she awoke in Mrs. Mulk’s clutches.

“Rue,” Ivy said suddenly. “How did you get
here
—to Mrs. Mulk’s?”

“Snaith—” Rue turned to her. “Snaith sent me here. As punishment. For …”

“For helping me?”

Rue nodded quietly. Ivy felt awful. The harrowing trip from Snaith’s lecture hall, as the scourge bracken in the irresistible chocolate cake took effect, would forever be burned into Ivy’s memory. Ivy had been losing the battle when Rue stepped in to help her. The streets of Rocamadour were a swirling menace of darkness, and indeed, from then on, Ivy would never again feel right in the shadows. She was now—at best—a wounded healer; the scourge bracken poison within her was biding its time, she knew, waiting for her to falter. And if she did, it would be ready.

“I could have gotten worse …,” Rue added quickly, and Ivy knew she was right.

“And my father …?” Ivy hardly dared to wonder what evildoings he practiced in his broken chambers atop the tall spire. Time had passed while Ivy was in Pimcaux—it was winter now in Caux.

“The last we heard from your father”—Rue’s expression turned fearful—“he was babbling, and made little sense. Most of his talk was of ink, some ink he is making beneath the city. He is close to perfecting it. He terrified us—the younger ones were crying. There was no comforting them.”

Ivy’s stomach lurched. Her father’s madness was complete.

“Did he say anything else about the ink?” Ivy demanded.

“Only this: ‘What is written can be unwritten.’ ”

“What is written can be unwritten,” Ivy whispered. What did this mean?

“We didn’t hear from him again. Instead, we were addressed by his Watchmen—usually Snaith. And the stench! No learning happens in that foul air; there is some sort of fire belching out yellowish fumes from beneath the city. What few students remain are fearful and desperate. We were herded into a lecture hall to pass the day. Grandfather”—Rue gulped back a sob—“tried to make the best of it. He carried on his lessons as best he could, but he, too, is considered an outsider. They locked us in.”

Ivy’s heart sank. Her last memory of Rocamadour was not a pretty one—a crypt beneath the ancient city in the heart of the catacombs. There, they had found hallowed ground, the only place where scourge bracken grows. All was lost if Hemsen Dumbcane, the traitorous forger from Caux, was successfully making ink from the diabolical plant—for scourge bracken was at its worst when concentrated into the deep, rich ink, and Dumbcane was the only one who knew the recipe. He had inadvertently discovered it scrawled in the margin of an ancient, stolen text—and he then, unknowingly, produced the perfect vehicle for the deadly plant. The recipe made the weed impeccably concentrated, irresistible, and portable. And poised for destruction.

After a gloomy moment passed, Rue wiped her tear-stained face and tried to smile.

“How was Pimcaux?” she asked hopefully.

If possible, Ivy felt even worse.

In a low voice she told Rue of her trip, of the tiny alewives and her ride on Klair and Lofft—two magnificent seabirds with ribbon harnesses and the power of speech. But King Verdigris had sent her home, back to Caux, with a task—and an unusual pair of stones.

“He called them
an old King’s burden
,” Ivy recalled. “And told me to plant them here, in Caux, when I returned.”

“What are they, these stones?” Rue frowned.

“They look like the pits from some sort of fruit—like a peach or a plum. Their coloring is strange—deep gray, with pinkish, fleshy ridges. And they’re quite heavy. They’re—they’re like nothing I’ve seen before. But …” A distant memory tugged at her. “But at the same time, they are so utterly familiar.”

Something from deep within the fetid well gurgled.

“If
you
don’t know what sort of tree they are from, I doubt anyone in Caux does.” Ivy’s spectacular expertise in botany was known even to Rue.

“I can think of someone,” Ivy replied glumly.