The Tasters Guild

by Susannah Appelbaum

  “He looks happy. Not bad for an old crow,” the trestleman said.

  Rowan stepped back further, nearly tripping over the sprawling body of Poppy, the bettle boar, who had earlier made herself quite comfortable in his shadow. Her ears now perked at the stone doorway just beyond Rowan’s golden circle of light.

  “I was admiring the garden beside him,” Rowan confessed.

  “Ancient hands wove these, ones with great and magical knowledge.”

  “In the Guide, you write of Flower Code,” the taster recalled, referring to his favorite book, Axle’s own Field Guide.

  Axle nodded, a twinkle in his eye. He had always thought this young man well read.

  Rowan, encouraged, continued. “So—here.” The taster pointed. “There’s maiden heart and shrew’s berry growing beside Shoo and this lady. According to the Code, that means imprisoned soul and unfinished business. Is it simply a coincidence?”

  Axle was silent for a moment, admiring the weaving.

  “There’s also an acorn there, beside the maiden,” the trestleman commented.

  “Acorn—that’s eternal life, isn’t it?”

  Axle paused. “Or imminent death,” the learned man added thoughtfully. “It depends on how it is presented.”

  “Which is it, then?”

  “The Secret Language of Flowers is everywhere. One need only recognize it for what it is.”

  Rowan waited.

  “Then—and this is the hard part—one must be able to comprehend it. Take all the bits and pieces and put them together into a language. Plants have much to say, much to teach. Except for the really basic meanings, it is a talent beyond most.”

  Indeed, in this, Rowan realized, the difficulty lay. If the natural world outside the door was a vast and intricate language, what might it be saying?

  “The Secret Language of Flowers is a lost language, a dead one—one of ancient kings. Whosoever speaks to the trees speaks to the King,” Axle quoted. “Nature has retreated now and does not want to be interpreted.”

  “Really?”

  “When you use plants to poison and harm, you are not using plants as nature intended. So nature retreats, becomes separate and distant. Angry. But”—Axle’s voice became suddenly more confident—“there is hope! There are signs that the plant kingdom awakens. When Cecil uttered the ancient words before the Nightshades and the tapestries temporarily came to life, there was an unintended effect. Things are simply more potent, more alive now. It’s as if the tapestries never fully retreated.”

  “A lot of good it did Shoo in the end,” Rowan said bitterly.

  The pair turned again to the weavings.

  “Who’s to say this is his end?” Axle mused. “He’s surprised us before,” he reminded Rowan.

  Indeed, the taster remembered Axle feeding the crow Ivy’s potent elixir, watching Shoo’s remarkable return to life. Rowan, too, had been saved by this potion, but his memories of that were steeped in humiliation—he had suffered the indignity of being poisoned. He was truly a taster of little talent.

  “Who is it that Shoo perches upon?” Rowan changed the subject. He squinted at the image of the lady, a bemused look upon her face, but one that held something else in it, too—a cloying complexity. She was amazingly beautiful.

  Axle was silent, frowning. He was a man of great learning, and when confronted with an unknown—not very often—his brows knit.

  “It’s one of the great mysteries of these tapestries,” Axle said finally.

  “And this panel.” Rowan gestured to a nearby nighttime scene. He could just make out the dim imagery of a tidy, disciplined garden. It was so obscured that it seemed to be made of threads cast from the blackest ash, the thickest tar, the deepest moonless night. The woolen clouds swirled about the sky in an unfriendly manner, and the entire copse was surrounded by a very ornate, very imposing wrought-iron fence. “It seems that a storm is brewing,” the taster decided.

  “Quite so,” agreed the trestleman.

  As the taster peered into the dimness, he rose up on tiptoe in an effort to get closer, although feeling a great revulsion for the piece. Behind him Poppy bristled. Rowan could not help but feel that something was there, someone was there, just out of sight. Peering closer, he was struck by a slight scent of mildew. Off to one side was an abandoned folly—a small, circular building with a peaked roof, at one time meant for doves.

  He was interrupted by the clatter of hurried heels hitting the stone hall behind him. The bettle boar snorted, alarmed, but it was merely a page who appeared, greatly out of breath, his chest heaving dangerously against his waistcoat.

  “Ah—Masters Truax and D. Roux—I’m so pleased to have found you!”

  Rowan frowned at the sight of the usually crisp servant.

  “How is Peps faring?” Axle asked, hoping for further news.

  “He mutters only that the waters are, well, unfriendly.” He paused, appearing to weigh his words carefully. “He talks of a Wilhelmina, sir.”

  “Wilhelmina?!” Axle asked sharply.

  The servant nodded nervously.

  “Who is Wilhelmina?” Rowan asked.

  Axle was silent, a furrow upon his brow.

  “I have not heard that name in many years,” the trestleman finally said.

  “Here, I’ve brought your greatcoats,” the servant urged.

  Rowan turned to the page. “Did you see to that … delivery?’”

  “Of course, Master Rowan. It has been done.” The servant held open Axle’s small cloak.

  “Oh, I am quite capable of doing up my own jacket,” Axle muttered.

  “Of course, sir. But do hurry. The Steward awaits you both upon the Knox.”

  Chapter Nine

  Delivery

  Above the Apothecary, in her current workshop, Ivy’s thick books on herbs and plant lore sat unopened, despite her uncle’s admonition that she approach her studies with more seriousness. He had dismissed her from the bridge with a withering look—saying she had done enough healing for one day and Peps would be attended to quite well without her. Ivy sat, chewing on a pencil, staring out the window at the hulking visiting birds.

  As it often did these days, the image of Pimcaux, her small but tantalizing peek through the Doorway, returned to her. Her mother had entered, imploring her to come. Clothilde looked, in that last image Ivy had of her, stricken and sickly against the yellow fields beyond.

  Sorrel Flux had gone instead.

  The thought of Sorrel Flux—her malingering former taster and servant to the Tasters’ Guild—in Pimcaux was almost too much for the girl to bear. The small, pasty man spread enormous blight in his wake. He had been about to tell her—before the wild Winds of Caux slammed closed the heavy door—just who her father was. From the sniveling look of pleasure upon Flux’s yellowed face, Ivy knew she was not going to like the news.

  “Young lady,” came a shrill voice from the front of the room. “Page 137, if you please.”

  A series of alembic copper vessels boiled away merrily in the workshop, spewing their concentrated essences, and a vast array of misted bell jars held living specimens—Ivy’s attempt at a garden. In the corner, a smoke bush, with its lazy pompoms of wispy florets, puffed away, now and then sending up small crescendos of perfumed haze. Her uncle’s favorite snapdragons strained testily toward the window, pushing and shoving, competing for the pale autumn light.

  Mrs. Pulch was a tedious woman, Ivy had immediately decided, and there was something about her tutor that made Ivy resist all attempts to study her texts. She sighed and, dragging out the book in question, propped the massive thing up on her table. But her distraction was complete. She thought then of Peps and desperately hoped her friend was all right. She remembered the look upon Rowan’s face at the arrival of the frightful vultures—and that brought her to the very thought she had hoped she might avoid for a while. The small worry that kept her fidgeting through her long lessons was this:

  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.

  Chapter Ten

  The Secret Language of Flowers

  Finally, 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.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Deadly Dose

  It 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.

  Chapter Twelve

  Dumbcane’s Shop

  Rowan’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 w
as 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!”