The Tasters Guild (6 page)

The Prophecy remained unfulfilled.

She had yet to get to Pimcaux and cure King Verdigris.

And the only known Doorway to the magical sisterland was hidden deep within the Tasters’ Guild, at Rocamadour, where they were headed soon.

Mrs. Pulch was clearing her throat and adjusting her reading glasses, eager to begin memorization drills on elemental tables, when a clattering jangle announced someone at the workshop door.

Ivy jumped to attention, but her tutor’s position beside the entrance made it impossible for Ivy to get there first.

“Hello?” Mrs. Pulch called through the door, hand on the knob.

“Delivery,” came the answer.

“Delivery?” Mrs. Pulch frowned. The Steward had informed her that there were to be no interruptions in the girl’s lessons, under any circumstances.

“Delivery from the palace,” the disembodied voice tried again.

These must have been the magic words, for in Mrs. Pulch’s mind, great things come from palaces.

The door popped open, and a boy held out an enormous brown-paper-wrapped cone—a bouquet.

“For Poison Ivy.”
Mrs. Pulch scowled at the card, reading, then waving, and dismissing the boy without even a minim.

“For me?” Ivy grabbed at the thing, but Mrs. Pulch moved swiftly—she possessed the advantage of years of tutoring, enabling her to anticipate any number of strategic maneuvers in her young pupils.

With a prim brow raised, Mrs. Pulch explained that she would be confiscating the delivery until lunchtime.

So it was that Ivy Manx sat down to learn her elemental distillation temperature tables, which, as they sound, are hard enough to memorize without the added distraction of a partly delivered flower arrangement a mere few feet away.

F
inally, it was time for lunch. Mrs. Pulch normally took hers right where she sat for most of the day, in the straight-back chair at the front of the workshop, removing a frugal sandwich from her embroidery bag. But today was Friday, to Ivy’s great elation, and on Fridays Mrs. Pulch had another engagement.

So Ivy sat with her nose buried deep in
The Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux
, her friend Axle’s wildly popular reference book. It was a borrowed copy—Rowan had kindly loaned her his own, slightly jumbled version for their stay in Templar.

Before her, the bouquet.

But not any bouquet.

To be sure, it was quite an odd-looking collection of leaves and twigs, filled with strange and wild clippings, some potent and fragrant herbs, even a fungus or two. The arrangement itself was peculiar: uneven, asymmetrical, and even possessing several upside-down flowers. Not entirely a
nosegay. The bouquet was from her friend Rowan Truax, and it was a code.

Page 746 of Axlerod D. Roux’s famed
Field Guide
begins a long treatise (entitled “The Secret Language of Flowers”) of various and ancient meanings assigned to the vast floral population of Caux’s gardens and woods. While the origin of the coded meanings remained unclear, Flower Language was said to come from a time when plants behaved according to their true natures, and their names illustrated these natures variously. In this way, one might be kept up all night by the barking of the dogwood tree, or the rays of the sunflowers might light up the eastern sky.

This magical time was long gone, but what remained of it was embodied in Flower Code. Axle maintained that with the help of his book, it was entirely possible
to carry on a witty conversation
in complete silence
while enjoying one of Caux’s many gardens or woods.

The Secret Language of Flowers was just as fusty and particular as the man responsible for recording it in writing. Not only did each flower, herb, or bough have a precise meaning, but its position in the final bouquet, and its presentation—whether, for instance, it was stripped of leaves or bark, or placed upside down—expressed an even deeper meaning, and in this way one’s preciseness was limited only by one’s creativity. So it was that a sprig of witch hazel could be deciphered as either
protection
or
jeopardy
, while foxglove might mean
honesty
or
insincerity
.

Rowan’s bouquet managed to be quite detailed. He gave a specific update on Peps’s condition (lady’s slipper for
resting comfortably
, sapbreech for
enjoyment of hot beverage)
and mentioned an amusing encounter between the bettle boar Poppy and an enormous stray cat (cat’s-claw and pig’s ear). But most curious to the young girl was the bouquet’s mention of a meeting. A meeting at a storefront upon the Knox.

I
t was Mrs. Pulch’s habit to meet her colleague on Smudgepot Lane, at the end of which, coincidentally, her favorite tavern could be found. Together, Mrs. Pulch and her friend and companion Mrs. Spittlethread would dine in the somewhat dignified interior of The Deadly Dose. There, Ivy’s tutor was happy to detail the Child of the Prophecy’s great and miraculous healings to Mrs. Spittlethread, whose unfortunate profile and nervous fidgeting were more than a little suggestive of a parrot.

Mrs. Pulch was quite proud of her commission with the Noble Child, and occasionally she was inclined to brag. Like many in Caux, Mrs. Pulch was an enthusiastic storyteller in her own right and at times would not hesitate to insert a few of her own flourishes. From The Deadly Dose, these tall tales spread through the population of the tavern; from Smudgepot Lane, they quickly made their way down Savory Street (where the well-to-do took their tea), darting across the city, and
eventually even breaching Templar’s stone walls and on to all of Caux. And since the people of Caux were nothing if not creative, with each telling, Ivy’s incredible feats of healing grew more and more dexterous.

And soon expectations of Ivy’s abilities rose until all of Caux was discussing the ancient Prophecy, and the very future of the land rested upon the young girl’s head.

Today Mrs. Pulch had a larger audience than usual. The Deadly Dose was more crowded than ever, for many of the displaced patients of the Child of the Prophecy had found their way from the Knox to safety (and a hot lunch) behind the tavern’s doors.

So it was that when Ivy made her way quickly past The Deadly Dose, Mrs. Pulch saw none of it. In her hand was a cup of hot buttered rum, and from her mouth came a new and exciting triumph of the Noble Child, who, for the second time in the day, was sneaking away from her studies to the Knox.

R
owan’s bouquet had been specific about the location of the shop, but Ivy—being an expert poisoner but only a mediocre lock picker—sighed with relief when she came upon the open door. She felt the wall for a switch, and in the corner beside a desk, a tired bulb blinked to life. The filament was old and ineffectual, and the light seemed unwilling to leave its small corner, so Ivy was forced to wait while her eyes adjusted to the dimness. She did so before the wall of Dumbcane’s illustrated alphabet, and she thought at first she was experiencing a trick of the stingy light when her eyes fell upon the showy letters.

In the dusky shadows of the small shop, the letters shifted and moved within their ornate boundaries, shimmering eerily as if caught by a breeze.

She leaned in to examine what was Dumbcane’s letter
B
.

Seated on the top cascading hump of the capital letter was a delicately drawn bettle, flaunting its wings. But what technique—what ink! It shivered and shuddered, seeming to
flap its crystalline wings within the dim shop. Ivy was at once reminded of her own red bettle—the flash of light coming from its hollow core. Said to have the power to protect the bearer from poison, these gemstones were once valued above all riches in Caux—but Ivy had loved hers because it reminded her of the tavern she had called home. With the fall of the Nightshades, her own bettle had hatched, bringing with it a cascade of colors, as all the other bettles in the land had hatched along with it. And then, with one parting visit, it was gone.

She looked again at Dumbcane’s depiction of a bettle. He had taken liberties. Although very much a bettle, it lacked the glorious beauty and grace most would readily associate with such a thing; it was in fact rather ugly, and Dumbcane had chosen to draw it with a nasty-looking human head upon its shoulders—a head currently delivering a miniature scowl to Ivy.

“Eww.” Ivy recoiled and nearly tripped over something at her feet. “What—?”

An extraordinary animal greeted her eyes. It was a cat, in fact—but it took Ivy a full moment to come to this conclusion. It was quite large, for one, and, incredibly, amazingly dirty. Matted and lumpy, its gray fur was splashed with dark paint—no,
ink
, Ivy now saw. And it was simply crawling with fleas. But although the insects jumped about the poor animal’s ears and scruff, it hardly seemed bothered by them.

And the smell.

Ivy found herself stepping back, involuntarily, pushing up against the yellowed papers of Dumbcane’s display.

“Hi, kitty,” Ivy tried.

The cat was unresponsive and wore a look upon its large moonface that was indecipherable. Ivy flattened herself further against the wall. In the stalemate that followed, a disturbed page drifted lazily from the wall to the ground between them—but not before Ivy caught a good look at it. What she saw upon the page was preposterous, and she stepped forward. The cat growled menacingly.

“Oh!” Ivy exclaimed, eyeing the creature narrowly. “So it’s going to be like that, is it?”

The rickety door of the calligrapher’s shop burst open then and a stream of light poured in, slashing across the parchment at her feet.

“Ivy?” came a familiar voice. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Uncle Cecil! Axle! Rowan!” Ivy smiled, reserving a wink for Rowan. “You must come look at this! There’s a picture near this cat that looks
exactly
like me!”

W
hat cat?” The Steward of Caux stepped forward in the small shop, and years of accumulated dust fell upon his shoulders. Ivy blinked. Indeed, the curious cat was gone.

“Yes, what cat?” Rowan asked tentatively. He was highly allergic and sniffed the air nervously. He regretted leaving Poppy at the palace—she possessed the appropriate animosity for just these sorts of wretched creatures.

“That’s strange.” Ivy grabbed the parchment from the floor. “Never mind. See, here! The girl in this drawing. Doesn’t she look exactly like me? And there—on the fence. The crow! It’s Shoo! I’d know him anywhere.” In fact, a crow was perched upon an ancient and dilapidated iron fence.

The group peered in at the page. The paper was yellowed and fragile, the drawing made long ago. It was Dumbcane’s attempt at the letter
C
. In it, a small girl with golden hair stood beside a locked gate with a large crow by her side.

“Hmmph,” Axle grunted. “It
does
possess a particular resemblance.” The trestleman turned to the Steward. “Cecil?”

Cecil looked closely at the parchment and then, with a new urgency, around the shadowy shop. “Apparently this Hemsen Dumbcane possessed a vivid imagination.”

His eyes came to rest upon a sad collection of flowerpots in the store window. They contained nothing but cobwebs and ash.

“
C
is for ‘Crow,’” Rowan realized, talking to Ivy. “And there are cinquefoils pictured, too.” The taster was referring to the flower that made up the Good King’s crest. “Of course!
C
is for ‘Child’—the Noble Child!” He examined the page closer and could make out some sort of vast garden nearby, but the paper was profoundly faded.

“Strange, though. This appears to have been drawn a long, long time ago.” Rowan shrugged.

Ivy rolled the page up and, finding an empty pocket in her apron, stuck it in.

The adults were busy now rifling through the cast-off documents and odd pens, brushes, and blotters that made up a regular part of Dumbcane’s trade. Axle looked distractedly down at his feet where the calligrapher had carelessly abandoned a stack of scrolls. One lay open, only partially completed.

“He seems to have been quite a talented forger.”

“And quite prolific.” Cecil unfurled a nearby parchment recklessly, holding it out toward the small light. A dark look passed between the Steward and the trestleman, and they hastily made their way over to Dumbcane’s chaotic drafting table.

“There’s only one place I know of where so many ancient, magical texts might still exist,” Cecil said carefully.

“Rocamadour,” came Axle’s bitter response.

Ivy and Rowan, from their vantage point, could see the out-of-favor Nightshade seal that still hung from the calligrapher’s storefront. It creaked in the slight breeze.

“Where do you suppose he went?” Rowan whispered.

“If there’s a brain in his head, away from the Tasters’ Guild,” Ivy replied.

“It hardly matters. Once Vidal Verjouce discovers he employed a thief, he’ll stop at nothing to find him.”