The Tasters Guild

by Susannah Appelbaum

  “Lichen,” he sniffed, indicating his desire to be left alone.

  “Fine.” Ivy turned on her heel. But she couldn’t resist a parting word. “Orange lily,” which she really didn’t mean, and “Larkspur,” which she did.

  The next day was uneventful, considering the circumstances of their departure, with one notable exception.

  Rowan had been staring glumly over the railing when the boat slowed its progress somewhat and the river widened into a placid pool. The trees at the edge of the clearing were mostly the leftover yellows of birch and ash—the autumn rarely had much showiness after the ravaging Winds of Caux. Still, this was a small spark of hue, and one made doubly luscious as it was reflected in the mirror-like surface of the Marcel.

  Rowan stared, unthinking, at the water. A muskrat was swimming dejectedly through the glassine reflection, a wave of ripples behind him. He headed toward the mud banks of the shore, creeping along a path until he found some safety in the tall grasses. The taster grew tired of waiting for the thing to make a reappearance, and he was just about to rise up from his slump and perhaps search out another form of entertainment when something caught his eye.

  A swath of brush grew up from nearby, and it was there that Rowan saw some movement. With only dull yellows and browns in this wood, the patch of brilliant scarlet was conspicuous.

  Rowan squinted, just to be sure.

  Yes—there. A red-hooded figure retreated into the dusk.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A Cautionary Note

  The weather had now become a factor, and with the loss of light, a great chill was in the air. Axle was preoccupied with the low-lying clouds—he wanted urgently to consult some of his brass instruments against Caux’s night sky. He was forced instead to spend his time muttering and examining old tomes or pulling on his beard and cursing the swollen river.

  Ivy found herself happy for her thick woolens—she had discovered them when rummaging in her steamer trunk. She put them on at once. Her Field Guide lay open where she had tossed it on her bed. Inspired, she proceeded to dump the entire contents of the trunk onto the floor, taking inventory. Small notebooks—good for cataloging one’s experiments with herbs—and lead pencils. Many more of her books. Seed packets. (Whoever packed her trunk must have known her quite well.) A waxen bag of violet-infused gumdrops. At the bottom she found it—a small leather satchel containing her poison kit.

  Upon it, there was a letter.

  My dearest Ivy.

  This is a cautionary note.

  What we know of the Prophecy are mislaid fragments; much of it was lost to the fire. But what we do know is that there are great and potent forces determined to see you fail. Your path as a healer is your salvation. You will need to remember this to combat what lies ahead of you.

  You will practice your own brand of healing.

  Not mine. Since your knowledge is of these potent herbs, I would be remiss in sending you to Rocamadour—and Pimcaux—without them. But exercise the utmost restraint. Your beloved assistant Shoo might not be by your side, but he is never very far away in spirit.

  Have faith in the ancient writings, my child:

  Those Who Seek

  Look to the Crows

  For Crows Never Lie

  Your loving uncle,

  Cecil Manx

  She realized she had been holding her breath as she read, and, exhaling sharply, she donned her stiff apron.

  And set about tinkering.

  Interestingly, Ivy knew a few recipes for the alleviation of allergy symptoms, but many more for causing them. Her old ways—the ways of Poison Ivy—had produced for her an impressive profit from the sale of itching powders, and dreary potions and tonics that could mimic Rowan’s current state—or worse (much worse!). But she set to work now—with a sprinkle of pussy willow and a soupçon of ragweed—to help Rowan return to the sunny side of health. And temperament.

  She normally felt very much at home with the poufs of odd smoke and choking wafts of powdered charcoal, but today she found there was a new thought intruding upon her concentration. She was unusually distracted, forgetting to turn over the small hourglass that timed her distillations. Annoyed, she blew a stray hair from her face and began again.

  Her mind was not on her work. If only Shoo were here, he might gently guide her in the right direction.

  She thought of the dark, mysterious garden she had seen. What lay beyond the gates? Whose garden was it—and why had Dumbcane drawn it, rendering it quite expertly with his strange inks alongside the image of her own face?

  And, most of all, she wondered what grew there.

  Her own potion needed something, she realized, and walking over to her messy bed, she plucked a few hairs from Six’s backside and added them to the brew before her. The cat eyed her uncivilly and then, with a swish of his tail, turned away.

  Scourge bracken.

  She found herself fascinated with the potent plant.

  At her uncle’s tavern, with Shoo by her side, she had concocted a true panacea for poisons, a helpful cure-all for anything. But she could not duplicate the recipe no matter how hard she tried. It was the greatest disappointment. With scourge bracken, she found herself thinking, what other potions were possible? Surely she, Poison Ivy, would be knowledgeable enough to use it with the proper restraint—to overcome its domination? Queen Ivy, she found herself thinking. Princess of Potions.

  With a shudder, she realized her error in thought. Surely this type of reasoning was what got Hemsen Dumbcane in trouble to begin with! And, worse, she found that it reminded her of someone. Someone quite close to her.

  Her mother.

  Hadn’t Clothilde wished for herself the very glory of curing the King? Wasn’t she quite troubled that this was not her destiny?

  Ivy stood up in disgust, disturbing the vials and scales before her, her experiment upended.

  It was a fine thing that Ivy abandoned her tinkering then, for Rowan would not have been persuaded to ingest it. Rowan would not be persuaded to do much of anything—especially reveal the mysterious scarlet figure he had glimpsed that day. Such was his misery that he was determined to keep the incident to himself.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Fog

  The last thing they saw before the thick, rolling fog set in was a small iron trestle some ways above them, spanning the cliffs that now drew high on either side. It was a comforting sight. Even from below, Ivy could see the amber light of a fire dancing on the ceiling, and she thought of Axle’s lovely trestle beside her childhood home. And then, quite suddenly, there was only gray.

  This was a fog of some proportion. It had heft and body to its billowing wisps—and a smell of damp basements. It was, in fact, emanating from the Marcel, as the early cold snap pressed against the warmer river. It made Ivy tired, and finally, she went to bed.

  Stretching out upon the cot, and fighting Six for space, she opened the Guide. She found herself at a page at the rear of the reference work—a densely annotated section entitled “Appendix IVb: Dictionary of Symbols.” Upon it, the image of a snake consuming its own tail.

  Ivy read, thinking of the strange imagery from Dumbcane’s shop, the fantastical creatures. The golden door with this very same symbol.

  Ouroboros:

  A serpent consuming its tail. An obvious symbol for Taste, adopted by the Tasters’ Guild as their own, but harking back to a much earlier time.

  She had a feeling that there was more to this. She made a note to discuss the ouroboros with the Field Guide’s author at the very next opportunity.

  In the morning, Ivy awoke with the edge of the book imprinted upon her face. Something was different. The engines had ceased.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Snodgrass Toad

  There was nothing at first, just the fog. Ivy was huddled on deck now with Axle and Peps when Rowan joined them. Trindle had slowed the boat to a near crawl and was forced to blare his foghorn dully.

  Then, as if a giant�
��s breath blew through, the fog shifted and rolled. It lay still listless on the earth and river, but above, enormous, hulking stanchions of heavy iron materialized as if from the ether. They dwarfed the Trindletrip. The passengers craned their necks at the black vertical trusses—the thick metal emerged from a cloud above only to return to it below, disappearing into the impenetrable fog. They were disembodied legs, eerie and immense.

  “The Toad,” Axle called to Trindle in the steerage compartment.

  Trindle cut the engines entirely and the boat bobbed along as if in a cloud, until in another breath the trestle’s supports were gone.

  Ivy heard herself gasp.

  From somewhere above, a clanging of metal against metal, and then silence.

  They were thankfully treated to another break in the fog, and as the shroud slowly lifted again, here and there blackness replaced the gray. There was now a body to those legs—a body of a trestle on a grim cloud, ghostly and ungrounded. It was completely unreachable.

  “It’s enormous!” she whispered.

  “Shh!” Axle held his finger to his lips and listened.

  Indeed, as Ivy waited, there came a clinking sound—at first very far off, but then definitely on approach.

  “Ah. You are in for a treat!” Axle was saying to Ivy and Rowan. “First-class service. Simply spectacular! The Toad is the pinnacle against which all others are judged.”

  After what seemed to Ivy like an absurdly long time, a dark object was lowered beside the stern. It was an elevator of sorts, she realized. On it was a note.

  It read:

  No Vacancy.

  Go Away!

  “Go away?” Peps was incredulous.

  Axle was still holding the offending note—written on impeccable stationery with a fine script atop confirming the sender to be the Snodgrass Toad.

  “Who do they think they are?” Peps was working himself up into a froth of insult.

  “I suppose it is their right.” Axle shrugged.

  “They are a hotel, Axlerod. A hotel, no less, for trestlemen.”

  At this, Ivy looked upward with renewed interest.

  Axle was feeling around in an inside pocket of his greatcoat for a pen, thinking perhaps a polite missive would gain their entry. A simple misunderstanding, he felt sure, and he would right it by explaining himself. He set about composing.

  Peps adjusted a flashy orange scarf, throwing it casually about his shoulders, and polished his signet ring. “Don’t bother! I will investigate this further.”

  And with that the small man hopped aboard the elevator.

  “No you don’t—not without me!” Axle admonished, joining his brother.

  Ivy, too, would not be left behind, and Rowan—Rowan under no circumstances wanted to be left anywhere with Six.

  Peps flipped an ancient-looking control, and the entire thing lurched upward.

  “Humph,” Peps complained, inspecting the drab inside. “Seems we’ve been relegated to the freight elevator.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  No Vacancy

  The Snodgrass Toad was a majestic and ornate trestle that harked back to an earlier time in Caux, a time when great things were built to last, if not to look at. A trestle hotel, it was big and grand, made from stone and wood and iron. A fancy place—inside. But from the exterior, the stone and wood and iron made up a hulking bridge, which spanned two sheer limestone cliffs in an ungraceful arc. The Toad threatened to either leap up and away or fall into the waters below, depending on the time of day you looked at it.

  The architects were baffled. Their designs—all seven hundred pages of them—called for elegant lines and graceful bends, but what they got was a place that would, when completed, look remarkably like a crouching toad straddling the waters below. They tore it down and began again, only to be rewarded with the same vision, only beastlier. It was plain that there was some sort of magic responsible—a spell, perhaps from a disgruntled alewife.

  Indeed, since alewives ruled over waterways, everyone knew their blessing was necessary to successfully complete any bridge or crossing. And the builders had neglected this one very important act: obtaining the alewives’ approval.

  Upon the trestle’s completion, wild snodgrass grew up in tufts atop its bulging roof, untamable, filling in every last detail of the toad’s silhouette. The sheer cliffs to either side and the waters below formed at this point in the river’s geology a sort of wind tunnel, and the Toad at times was even made to sound as if it groaned. But no matter—if indeed there was a curse from an unhappy alewife, she was thwarted in the end. The Snodgrass Toad became instantly famous and a wildly popular attraction, and soon all the people involved in the execution of the remarkable trestle would imagine that they had never meant it to appear any other way.

  As the lift made its slow, incremental progress up the underside of the expansive trestle, the group was silent. The trip was punctuated with worrying pauses, when the elevator would stop its ascent and hang aloft, twisting lazily—and then lurching back downward. Ivy gripped the worn brass rail that ran along the side of the interior, but that did little to alleviate the distress of the ride. There was some sort of thick green moss clinging to the underbelly of the trestle, and their journey seemed to be disrupting it. Large clumps of it dislodged from the damp beams and rained down upon them like sludgy wet beards.

  “I see they’ve fallen behind on the upkeep,” Peps sniffed, watching a trail of green slime slide down the old window.

  They did arrive, finally—the elevator’s topside alighting with a thud upon a set of spring-loaded trapdoors, and then, in a final crescendo of metal against metal, through the underside of the hotel. With a pop, the old thing reached the lobby, bobbing perkily.

  The doors opened to a chamber devoted to stone and mirror. Yet it seemed that at some time previous, light and mirror had quarreled, and light had retreated in a sulk. What remained was mirror and polished stone with little sparkle. It was a remarkable room in that the visitor expected to encounter his reflection at every turn but never did—imparting the odd sensation of wonder at one’s own existence.

  Ivy stepped forward onto a rich red rug, and the rest followed. Before them, a desk.

  Peps was the first to ring the small attendant bell, which he did impatiently as he looked around the lobby.

  “What kind of greeting is this?” he asked to no one in particular, ringing the bell again for good measure. He ran a gloved finger along the tabletop and inspected for dust.

  “You know,” Axle began, “I don’t like to think about how long it’s been since I was here last.”

  As if to illustrate the passage of time, they were now joined by an impossibly old and brittle trestleman whose uniform had been laundered with entirely too much starch. He looked as if he wished very dearly to stoop but was being supported in his upright position by the sheer crispness of his attire. This man was the concierge, who, like the hotel, had surely seen better days.

  “The card said ‘No Vacancy,’” the old man whispered in a creaky voice. He cleared his throat and, with great effort, repeated himself, but only managed it slightly louder.

  “We can read,” Peps replied dryly. “So every one of the hundreds of rooms here is filled?”

  “Excuse me.” Axle stepped forward. “Surely there is some place for us? We will take whatever you have. A storeroom, even? We’ve traveled from Templar. Our errand is urgent.”

  “Master D. Roux,” the concierge, a trestleman named Crump, began wearily. He knew the face of every guest who had ever stayed at the Toad.

  Axle nodded happily.

  “Your errand is of no concern to us.”

  This was a surprise indeed, and Axle’s smile stalled upon his face.

  “If I m-might respectfully disagree,” Axle stammered. “It is of great concern to you, and the others, and in fact all of Caux.”

  Crump paused. His uniform was losing the battle with his posture, and he seemed to be distracted by his shoe.


  “The winds of change have blown, old friend. The Deadly Nightshades no longer rule! The great Master Apotheopath Manx is now Steward of Caux while his niece Ivy—here—journeys to Pimcaux to restore the Good King Verdigris to full health!” Axle’s enthusiastic speech now stalled.

  A strange look filled the entirety of Crump’s sagging features, but not exactly one of relief or liberation.

  “Forgive me, sir. But you are wrong.”

  “Oh, I think you will soon see—” Axle began. But Crump was not finished.

  “You have made it decidedly, horribly, worse.”

  There was a stunned silence. Finally, when it became quite clear that Crump had nothing further to say, Axle drew himself up and produced from his waistcoat a small card of thick stock upon which, in raised oxblood ink, was written his name. He thrust the calling card at Crump.

  “Announce our presence to Rhustaphustian. Now.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Rhustaphustian

  Crump shuffled away holding Axle’s card, leaving the mood in the lobby distinctly darker than he had found it.

  “How have we made it worse?” Peps scoffed.

  Axle was frowning, and Ivy began to notice she had an awful feeling in her stomach.

  She turned to examine the nearby wall and was introduced to numerous panoramic, sepia-toned photographs. It seemed to be a catalog of Caux’s many trestles and their various occupants. The images populated nearly all available wall space, except where there were obvious absences—ghostly rectangles and lonely nails indicated that several had been removed.

  The trestlemen within the dark frames were frozen in an earlier, more innocent time. Ivy peered at the blurred visages, some faces shy and coy, others caught in a moment of exuberant delight. The river beneath them was ever calm; the sun behind them threw a pleasant shadow upon all the gridiron and scaffolding that formed each overpass.