The Poisons of Caux: The Hollow Bettle (Book I) (19 page)

vy was the first on the Skytop Glory and the last off.

Clothilde had enlisted Rowan already to help unload the cargo, a favor that he was more than willing to perform. Ivy was forgotten, which was fine. She wanted a moment with the trestle, which inhabited the cavernous tunnel end in a permanent twilight. Hulking and rusty, it spanned an impossible gorge.

Although decrepit and abandoned, it reminded her of home. It was of the same basic construction as Axle’s, and she was suddenly thrown into a vivid recollection of the trestleman’s sturdy and welcoming residence, its tangles of vines and roosting mourning doves.

The wooden platform, Ivy noticed, was barely presentable—a high contrast to the luxury of the train. It was rotted through here and there, and entire planks were missing in places where planks would be most useful. She didn’t think she was
imagining the sway of the old bridge, either—and she wondered whether it was wise to park such a heavy train here.

Ahead, the tracks were blocked with rubble cast off from the living mountain wall and, by the looks of it, had been for some time. Large gaps opened to a view of the bridge’s lower framework and tangles of rusted barbed wire. Creeping along, Ivy noticed the old wood had an unlikely sound to it—light and airy, like chalk. Beneath her, the chasm rolled out in a dark carpet of rocks and echo.

“Hello?” she called. She realized she’d been hoping to find some evidence that the trestle was occupied. Clutching Axle’s book to her still, she missed him fiercely.

Hello? Hello? Hello?
Her voice sounded small and afraid coming back at her.

An unlikely flock of birds—crows, perhaps, but tatty and unkempt—was startled at her arrival. They squawked all at once, quite unpleasantly, and reminded Ivy nothing of her old friend Shoo.

“Oh, stop your complaining,” she called out, waving away the confetti of dust and feathers floating about her. She watched as the birds descended into the black chasm, disappearing. Heavy in her other hand was Rowan’s copy of the
Field Guide
, and, curious, she opened it.

The first page, with Axle’s round writing, caught her eye.

Taste and Inform
.

Hadn’t Rowan said something to her at the Eath—that
perhaps Axle had meant it as more than an inscription? She ran her thumb along the dark lines. The ink had dried, making a noticeable ridge in the paper’s texture. Shrugging, she brought her thumb to her mouth to taste.

Suddenly a large crack sounded—very much like lightning. The noise dislodged the remaining unpleasant birds from their shabby roosts, and Ivy ducked as they darted around her head in terror. The bang reverberated throughout the gorge, awfully.

Looking down, she realized the source of the noise was in her hands. To her dismay, the binding of Rowan’s
Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux
lay broken. The emancipated pages were littering the old trestle, falling like leaves at her feet. Recipes for mulled cider, directions for various useful knots, instructions for setting a table and making toadstool tea—all now hopelessly muddled and made even more incomprehensible by Ivy’s frantic gathering. Clear over the edge of the trestle went chapters and maps, floating in the twilight as on a lake, down to the murk below. Several pieces of the parchment were hopelessly snagged in the tangle of barbed wire beneath the bridge and fluttered helplessly.

Ivy was faint with dizziness. What would Rowan say? His beloved book!

There, flitting beside her in the thin air, a pressed flower.

Axle’s cinquefoil.

She slapped her hands together, capturing it. The frantic
squawking of the birds began to fade, and through it, a voice. Albeit thin and distant, it was undeniably that of her friend Axle.

Ivy Manx
, he began as the black of the gorge closed in around her and, inexplicably, the winds picked up.

Rowan, for his part, was in high spirits. Even the unfriendly comment from Clothilde, concerning his relative strength to his size when he was unable to move a single chest on his own, had little effect on his mood. His youthful wish for adventure—to climb the tallest mountain in Caux—had been realized. He could taste the thinness of the air and feel the coldness of the mountain on his back.

Clothilde had marched off in long strides, and he was forced to trot to keep up with her. He quickly found himself in a smaller tunnel, lit with simple strands of clinking bulbs. Ahead, Clothilde’s whiteness glowed luminous within the mountain.

The path headed down, further into the mountain’s belly.

Soon they came to a widening, and Rowan saw in the vast room an outcropping of white structures perched willy-nilly. Each had a circle for an entranceway and a high, peaked roof—an odd scattering of giant birdhouses, he hazarded a guess. But he needn’t have troubled himself further, for his debate was interrupted by the form of a familiar flash of white bristle. From one of the dwellings rushed Poppy—they were
apparently the perfect size for pigs, he realized—and Rowan now found himself on the rocky floor happily reunited with the bettle boar.

“Oh, Poppy! We missed you, girl!” he cried over her endearing grunts and snorts. “I’m so glad to see you!”

“Really, Poppy,” Clothilde scolded. “Such a display.”

Poppy pulled back but remained by the taster’s side.

When Rowan rose, sufficiently rumpled, he found a crowd had gathered. In the mines it was rare to have visitors. The miners—and each of their own bettle boars—had gathered to greet them. They wore prickly beards, and their hearty mustaches were trained out to either side with wax, not unlike a pair of tusks. In their arms, long staffs of lit torches pointed at the visitors.

“Boxelder,” Clothilde addressed the head miner. “I see Poppy made it in time to deliver my message.” She tossed Poppy’s prized orange bettle at her, and the pig caught it eagerly. “The old train was a welcome sight.”

“We said anytime, and we meant it,” replied the burly man, his boar sniffing the air by his side.

“Well, I can’t say enough how grateful I am. As a small token, I’ve managed to bring you a few supplies.” The miners appeared to have endured no shortage of supplies, Rowan thought, if their waistlines were any measure, but all the same they seemed quite delighted with this information. “The burden was too much for the taster, and I’ve left them beside the train.”

“Taster?” The miner named Boxelder redirected his flame at Rowan.

“He is on an errand with me,” Clothilde responded, and this seemed sufficient.

It was dawning on Rowan that he was in a mine. Miners and bettle boars really could mean only one thing—but was it possible he was deep inside a bettle mine, where the priceless jewels of the kingdom were carefully extracted from the living rock wall? The very origin of Caux’s privileged indulgence? He looked around with a keener eye along the dark corridors of the mine, but there was little to indicate what magic existed within the Craggy Burls.

Beside them was a small widening in the cave. The miners finished conversing with Clothilde, and several of them had opened dented flasks, filling the room with the smell of something hot and bitter. Boxelder directed their attention to a corner, pointing with a tool that normally hung by his side from a thick leather belt.

The miner’s boar trotted on ahead to the corner. There was a break in the hard rock, a vein of loam. Now that Rowan had noticed it, he became aware that this crumbly soil was everywhere in the walls of the mountain. It was layered with stripes of it, and as it turned out, these layers were where the bettles were mined.

The beast, excited to burrow in the loam, eagerly began sniffing the entire work area, sticking the length of her snout
into the rich earth. She bounded around from point to point enthusiastically, snorting—sneezing once. Soon enough she found what she was looking for, and her whole body tensed. She began digging feverishly.

Boxelder took his pitchfork and ordered his boar back by his side—no easy task for the excited animal. He began carefully digging in the loam, separating the thick clumps by hand at times. The dark earth smelled rich and satisfying in the sterile rock of the mine, and Rowan was reminded of his father digging carefully for potatoes in the back garden. From his years of study Rowan knew the miner needed to be careful here—bettles come out of the earth soft and gummy and are easily damaged. When exposed to air, they instantly harden, becoming virtually unbreakable—the only known substance that can break a bettle is another bettle.

But Boxelder worked intently and not long after was rewarded by a find. He turned around to the group to display the bettle—a small green one, still with clumps of earth clinging to it.

“A souvenir,” said the head miner, and casually tossed it to Rowan. A current of desire moved through the boars. He caught it and looked about the dimly lit cavernous space, incredulous.

“For me?”

“A gift. From your host, Vidal Verjouce,” he said soberly.

Rowan nearly dropped the jewel, which was still warm and
slightly slippery. Of course the mines were controlled by Verjouce; his mighty grip on the precious commodity was to be expected. In his excitement Rowan had forgotten this, and now, hearing the Director’s name, he began to feel claustrophobic. Clothilde, however, seemed indifferent and had resumed her hushed tones with another miner. It was a good thing, he realized, he had found his robes.

“If you don’t like it, you can always give it to the boar,” Boxelder advised, misinterpreting the taster’s look. Poppy, by Rowan’s side, was watching the bettle with an intensity saved only for prey.

But there was no giving it away. Rowan stammered his appreciation. He was a product of Caux, after all, and had just been given something few could afford on their own. A clever dark sea green—wonderful.

His wonder turned to surprise, however, when he realized that Ivy was nowhere to be seen. He had assumed her to be right behind him. Figuring she was back by the trestle, he volunteered to accompany Clothilde and the clan of burly miners on the errand of retrieving the chests, where he hoped to show her his new acquisition.

t was not black at all, Ivy was realizing, but a very dark storm she was witnessing as the vision unfolded before her. The familiar Winds of Caux blew about her relentlessly Ahead, the Marcel. It was nearly impossible to discern the edge of the raging waters she was seeing against the blackness of the sky, the snap of the branches as they whipped against the shore. Somehow, she could just make out the hulking steel skeleton of a familiar trestle.

As she listened to her old friend’s reedy voice, the vision became clearer. In the deep gray, she saw the small form of the trestleman as he struggled against the wind (how unlike Axle to be out in this weather!), making his way down the embankment. There, with the help of his outstretched walking stick, he was attempting to dislodge a small crate that bobbed in the waves in a tangle of driftwood.

It was extremely precarious, and he lost his footing more than once, grasping at river reeds to save his fall. Drenched and exhausted, he was successful in the end. Bringing the crate to shore and from there up to his warm apartments, he finally opened the box as Ivy watched.

Beside the fire, she saw what lay inside. A bundle, wrapped in gossamer—a familiar white fabric seemingly impervious to dirt and damp. And within, completely warm and safe, slept a miraculous baby girl. And Ivy knew at once what she was seeing: this sleeping child in the trestleman’s nervous arms was herself. And if that were not enough, she saw, as the trestleman’s shaking hands unwound the stark white gauze that swaddled her, that nestled with her was a red bettle. The very bettle of the Hollow Bettle’s namesake.

A child of special birth, of extraordinary circumstance
, Axle was saying.

The vision was dissipating and with it again the feeling of electricity.

Although I wanted nothing more than to keep you safe …
Axle’s voice trailed off.
I am, after all, a trestleman (and a particular one at that), and I knew you should be with your own kind. So Cecil raised you as his own, and together we swore to keep the secret of your arrival safe, safe from even you, until the time was right
.

Ivy could no longer make out Axle’s voice, and she realized she was once again beside the cogwheel train, high above the dark chasm. At her feet, curiously intact, was Axle’s book.

Clothilde was her mother? The Good King Verdigris was her great-grandfather? Ivy was reeling.

She knew that white fabric; it was unmistakable.
Child of special birth
. Remembering that in her breast pocket was the red bettle, Ivy clasped her hand to her heart.

But any further contemplation was to be impossible for now, for a roar like no other filled her ears. Snarling, snuffling, and the clattering of hooves filled the vast chamber, and Ivy’s next thought was a surprising one: apparently not all bettle boars come in white. For before Ivy, and nearly filling the entire cavern, was an army of boars. And they were racing her way. In fact, although many were indeed white like Poppy, many more were not—some were spotted and dappled, some were shaggy and brindled—but all were breathing steam as they pounded toward her in the cold mountainous air. Ivy caught a momentary glimpse of Rowan, in among the beasts, an exuberant look upon his face—but he was lost in the pack of animals almost as quickly.

For as far as Ivy could see, there was nothing but tusk and fur.

And then, through the sea of boars, Rowan was suddenly by her side.

Panic was rising in her chest, but her friend’s arrival calmed her somewhat. Still, she did the only thing she could: she held the bettle above her head in a desperate attempt to
ward off the onslaught of snorting and huffing animals all bent on seizing it.

A fierce chorus of whistles filled the air, obviously meant for the bettle boars, and to Ivy’s great relief, the animals froze—their eyes on her upstretched fist, their noses quivering in anticipation. A few of the stout miners pushed their way into the bundle—a most peculiar group, thought Ivy. Rowan’s eyes—in fact,
all
eyes—were upon her upstretched arm.

The cavernous chamber was suddenly achingly quiet, and Ivy noticed it had taken on a new, strange illumination. The entire audience, too, was bathed in a subdued light, and beast and man alike stared unblinkingly at its source.

It was coming from above her.

In her clenched fist high above her head, Ivy’s bettle was glowing with an intensity unlike any flame before it. Her entire hand blazed a crimson red, and where her small fingers met, the light poured forth as if she’d scooped up a star.

Ivy slowly lowered her shaking hand and, cradling it in her other palm, opened it.

For a moment, before her eyes adjusted, she was overcome with a brilliant, hot light, but that quite quickly faded to a dull glow, and as the room looked on, the bettle’s inner light dimmed slightly and pulsed in her open palm.

A cry rose from the gallery. “The mark of the Good King!”

Beside her, Rowan could see Ivy’s face and, upon it, the blazing outline of a cinquefoil.

“Verdigris’s crest,” he heard Boxelder utter from somewhere nearby, his voice hoarse and unsteady.

And then, in a final surprise, the bettle, warm in her outstretched hand, gave a little jump. A small pulse, or flutter. There was no mistaking it, and Ivy was so surprised she nearly dropped it to the ground.