The Poisons of Caux: The Hollow Bettle (Book I) (17 page)

Ivy grabbed it back at once, and Rowan had a sharp pang of sadness at both the bettle’s departure from his possession and the look directed at him by his friend. He wasn’t sure if Ivy believed him at all.

owan could no longer disguise his distaste for his current hosts and the creaky lodging they occupied. He stormed out when Clothilde suggested to Ivy that he had desired the bettle enough to steal it—furious, too, that Ivy seemed to consider this a real possibility His heart sank to his shoes and his stomach was knotted up in tangles from the withering look his friend had delivered. He intended to see that his missing robes were returned. He would brave the Mildew Sisters to file a complaint.

The Mildew Sisters’ style of housekeeping was one that overlooked neatness and timely repairs and embraced chaos and decay. The old retreat existed as a collection of many smaller structures linked by old garden walks and trellised paths—once a spectacular way to spend a summer. Through the dark, he could just detect a light—from the looks of it, a
chandelier straining to stay still. He found an old door leading to an outdoor pathway and unfastened it, but the wind caught it—and it rammed open with great force. It took all his strength to pull it closed again; as he did so, his borrowed robe pressed against his back in an unfamiliar way—a further annoying reminder of his errand at hand.

He paused outside, with nothing but his imagination to provide the setting to either side of him—it was a pitch-black brought on by both storm and night. Ignoring the impenetrable darkness, he focused on the amber light ahead. He could see long tentacles of vines, set free from their trellis in the wind. They batted about the archway like sharp whips and stung at Rowan’s face. He covered his eyes with his forearm just in time to prevent a blinding blow—he was bleeding now from his brow. As he shuddered at the close call, the image of the sightless Director came to mind. Verjouce and the knotted scars that once were his eyes—what would drive a man to snuff out his own sight?

Through a small windowpane, Rowan peered into what was once a fine dining area but under the Mildew Sisters had settled into something of a repository for old tables and chairs. It was at that moment that he realized his own hunger, but his hand froze on its way to the doorknob. Inside, he heard the recognizable sounds of tea service: the clinks of spoons and tinkles of refills, the occasional splash.

“They will burden us for just one night—” came a hoarse voice he recognized as the mushroomed one’s.

There was a grunt in response, a sigh.

“A member of the Guild—here! Nothing good can come of it!” grumbled the bracken-clothed one.

“Yes, well, we can always lash him to the raft and set him off for Tower Island,” suggested the last sister. “Her plans are only with the girl.”

At that, Rowan’s hunger vanished.

“She said he’s a wanted one, you know. There’s a lien on him. A handsome reward’s being offered.”

At that, Rowan recoiled.

“It could be ours for the taking.”

And at that, Rowan turned on his heels and set out for the shore.

He was outside immediately, once again fighting the whipping tangle of vines. He shielded his face the best he could as he dashed blindly through the underbrush and ran toward the shore. The rain had set in, and he was quickly drenched, and although normally this condition would have caused him pause, not so now. He was becoming hardened to the indignities of travel.

His ears still stung from the conversation he’d overheard.

They can’t turn me over to the Taxus Estate if they can’t find me, he thought bitterly. The whole day had been truly his
most awful: he had been poisoned by the very hands of their host, issued a faulty windwhipper, and then made a mockery of upon arrival to this wretched place. To top it off, his robes had been waylaid!

He’d soon be done with the painful memories here.

At the pebble beach there was an inlet he’d spied upon arrival, where he remembered seeing some rickety watercraft. Anything would do, so long as it could float. He found his way there against the wind’s assault, but he groaned at the state of the boats. On the short walk his mind had been imagining himself setting sail, and gracefully harnessing the wind to do his will with skill and bravery. It was a heroic picture, a heroic departure.

But he soon saw, as he wiped the streamlets of rain from his eyes, that he was offered two choices. Neither a dignified one. He could cling helplessly to a raft and hope to make it across the vast waters without any means of steering, or he could trouble himself in a small and battered paddleboat, the kind made very much for leisure and not at all for quick escape. With each, if he didn’t sink to the bottom of the lake, there was the very real chance of alighting upon Tower Island and becoming prisoner to the Nightshades.

The paddleboat seemed the safer of the two, and in he went.

He went about the bone-chilling business of untying the old and frayed rope, and finally settled upon simply loosening
it sufficiently to cast off. As he rubbed his hands together to warm them and sat, readying his legs to paddle against the breaking waves, he felt his first regret.

It was not his biggest of regrets—for they seemed to come not in order of importance, but instead in small, manageable packages. But it caused him to remain in the boat, unmoving, while he contemplated it. For he had thought of his favorite book, still in his room where he had left it. He thought of Axle’s
Field Guide
, with its personalized—yet cryptic—inscription.
Taste and Inform
. Why had the trestleman autographed it that way, with such a revered Guild credo? Didn’t Axle mistrust the Tasters’ Guild more than practically anyone? And as thoughts can do, this one small reminder ballooned into his next regret.

From Axle’s guidebook, he thought more of Axle himself. And the promise the trestleman had extracted from him before they’d left—his promise to stay by Ivy’s side. Was he really about to break a promise to a trestleman? As he contemplated this awful thought, and the storm and the dock were conspiring to batter his small paddleboat, he had no powers of perception to spare. This deficiency caused him to miss the arrival of another individual upon the rickety dock. A grand individual, one who seemed to possess in her a subtle light for which to mark the treacherous way, dressed immaculately in white.

“You’ll not get far in that contraption,” came Clothilde’s strong voice over the wind. “Come ashore.”

Rowan shook off his plaguing regrets at the sound of her voice, and with a look over his shoulder, he started paddling.

“I’ll take my chance on the water, thank you,” he called.

“Nonsense.”

Clothilde was outfitted with a white umbrella of remarkable size, and it was no effort for her to lean it out slightly and cover both herself and the captain of the paddleboat. The effect of the umbrella was remarkable. It brought with it not only a shield from the weather, but the warmth of a summer day, and soon Rowan was unwilling to leave its comforts. Suddenly quite overwhelmed with fatigue, he took Clothilde’s outstretched hand and joined her on the relative safety of the dock.

“You’re quite foolish, you know,” she began.

Clothilde’s white umbrella possessed a separate and distinct weather pattern of its own, Rowan was now discovering. He looked about him and saw to his amazement that they were in an oasis from the slashing rain and wind, as one might reasonably expect from an umbrella of any design. But beneath its white boundaries was cast not a shadow, but a sunny day, or afternoon, or perhaps the glowing of a particularly nice summer sunset—which of these Rowan was unclear because the evening was so dark and the umbrella so welcoming. He began to dry.

“Someone told the Mildew Sisters about the Estate, and I’d rather not wait around for them to turn me in,” Rowan began.

“Someone?”

Rowan nodded.

“And you think I encouraged them, naturally.”

“Uh …”

“Well, Rowan Truax. Do you realize that the Taxus Estate is the least of your worries? If you’re caught by the Nightshades—or anyone, for that matter, who will deliver you into the hands of the Guild—do you realize what your destiny will be?”

Clothilde leaned in, examining the young taster’s face in the summer light of the umbrella. A moth had found its way under its protection—guided by the warm light—and Rowan watched it flit around.

“It’s grim. You will face the Director, and as punishment for breaking your Oath, you will be degulleted. The ultimate penalty for a disgraced taster. They will remove your tongue, and what will you be then, taster?”

Rowan hardly needed to answer.

“An Outrider,” he whispered.

he next morning brought with it very little of a dawn. In fact, most of the night just stayed on, uninvited, and Ivy had a hard time making out much of the view from her bedroom window. The dark gray of the Eath’s piqued waters distinguished itself from the dim storm clouds only by sheer will.

As Ivy leaned on the windowsill, she contemplated the gloomy scene. She was desperate to leave the Eath at any cost. The uninviting landscape did little to buoy her spirits as she thought morosely of the lost potion. Axle had said to keep it safe—and now look what had happened. There was no way to re-create it—she hadn’t kept proper notes and by the end was impulsively experimenting with every possible ingredient she could find. She considered Shoo, his nervous hovering, and sighed. If she could just somehow convince the ornery bird to talk, she was certain he would know the recipe.

Elixir or not, she needed to get to Templar to find her uncle.

Just
how
was the question. The Mildew Sisters’ lodge at one time offered its guests a pleasant variety of summer pastimes, but with the demise of the off-season caretaker, the few remaining watercraft were abandoned, tethered to themselves haphazardly. It was these that Ivy could barely spy below her—waterlogged and in need of great repair. A floating raft, at one time a swimmer’s destination, bobbed lopsidedly in the distance. She watched as the wind picked the waves up by their scruff and sheared their tops off—sending them hurling at the shore.

With the worst of the weather still to come, this was no place to stay—but from what she saw out her window, they’d never make it to shore. Even if Rowan somehow agreed, the windwhippers were out of the question in this weather.

With a knock at the door, she found herself happy to see Rowan.

“Rowan! Your robes!”

Indeed, the taster was back in his somber vestments, which looked clean and pressed and none too worse for the wear.

“Yes,” he answered somewhat haltingly. “Clothilde gave them to me just this morning. When she brought me breakfast.”

“She brought you breakfast?” Ivy hadn’t eaten.

Rowan flushed and looked uneasily around the room.

“Listen,” he began quickly. “I wanted to tell you something. I’m sorry for last night, Ivy. Axle asked me to watch over you, and I should never have stormed out like that.”

“Rowan—” Ivy wanted to apologize to him for thinking that he’d tried to steal her bettle, but he didn’t give her the chance.

“And also, I wanted to thank you for saving my life, Ivy. Before, in the cottage.”

It was Ivy’s turn to flush.

“I think I know what Shoo felt like after Axle gave him your potion.”

It was true: after his swift and astonishing recovery, his heart beat a pleasing rhythm in his chest, and his thoughts were surprisingly unmuddled. Rowan thought himself lucky to have sampled it.

Ivy’s face clouded over again at the thought of her lost elixir. The bottle would be safe if Clothilde hadn’t touched it—and she mentioned this now to her friend, miserably.

“And you know what else? She’s never going to take us to Templar,” Ivy concluded.

“She is! She said so.” Rowan was certain. He was even sure that the grand lady would take them further on, to Pimcaux, but thought better of mentioning it. In fact, after his encounter with Clothilde under the umbrella, his feelings for the woman were sunny and tempered.

Ivy was casting him a dark look, arms crossed.

“What else did she say?”

He took a breath.

“That you can make more of that potion.”

“No, I can’t.”

“I could help, Ivy!”

She shook her head, despairingly.

“Besides, I don’t want to.” She waited to see if Rowan might object, but a confused frown flitted across the taster’s face. “I just want to find Uncle Cecil and go home again. I don’t care about Axle’s Prophecy!”

“Wait!” He produced the trestleman’s wondrous volume from an inner pocket. “I wanted to show you something.”

Rowan pointed out the page where Axle had written his personalized greeting to the young taster.

“‘Taste and Inform,’” Ivy read. “So what?”

“The Tasters’ Credo,” Rowan explained. “I was thinking that it’s not just an inscription. It’s
instructions
.”

He stole a glance at her, but she was still pouting. She extended her hand.

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

He eagerly handed the
Guide
over, but Ivy flipped to the midsection and began folding out a map.

“I need to get to Templar. Even if I have to go by myself,” she sniffed.

Given time, Ivy was certain her powers of persuasion would have easily won Rowan over. But the interval for this or any other private conversation ended abruptly as the pair was joined by Clothilde. Ivy watched Rowan’s eyes shine as he gazed upon her, and she set her jaw defiantly.

“Time to depart,” Clothilde announced. Rowan nodded in appreciation, and flashed Ivy a superior look.

“Quickly, though, if you will. I’m afraid those foolish Sisters have indeed notified the Nightshade outpost, and they are here, downstairs, to collect you.”

Judging by the noise outside the door, the sentries weren’t waiting.