The Shepherd of Weeds (14 page)

For comfort, Ivy clutched Axle’s book. She stumbled as her father’s ravaged whisper returned to her ear—a slight song, in the tune of insanity—the sound of gnashing teeth. Unbeknownst to Ivy, it was a contribution not from Axle, but from the book’s owner, Rue, that was to prove to be invaluable to their journey. Something slipped from the pages of Rue’s
Guide
then, and drifted for a minute in the open air before settling on the snowy ground.

Blinking, Ivy stooped to examine the object—a plant, a pressed clipping that Rue had preserved between the pages of Axle’s enormous and heavy book. A prime specimen, it was. A small cutting of aconite, its rousing color faded to a brown, the delicate blue flowers now nearly transparent upon its stem. Rue had spread it attractively before flattening it, and Ivy held it in her opened palm, admiring it.

Aconite, Ivy knew, was known by another name. Wolfsbane. Its dark shiny leaves were keeping the wolves at bay.

A shadow fell over her; she felt the sun’s glow glide away.

Ivy
—came a voice on the bitter wind; in the new darkness it was ready, waiting. Her father’s.

She closed her hand around the specimen as she sank to her knees. Lumpen’s scratchy arms were about her then—for it had been merely Lumpen’s expansive shadow Ivy had sensed—and she felt herself hoisted upon a sturdy broad shoulder.

he crumbling walls of fieldstone gradually tapered off, and through a meager copse of young pin oak, they vanished entirely, converging quite suddenly upon a house of some worth—as evidenced by its size, if not its upkeep.

“Here we go,” the well keeper announced. “This is the place.”

But the estate of Lumpen Gorse’s memory was now destitute, shutters rusted and hanging at odd angles, and doors rotted or missing entirely. What remained of the windows was wondrous, however: great towering panels of interlaced colors, peaked archways of stained glass, and, above the entrance, a circular rose window of some great magnificence. Vandals had managed to mar its perfection with the toss of a few well-placed stones, but the windows had survived their years
sufficiently. Within their deep cobalt blues and drenching reds, still wrapped by veins of lead, one word was written.

“What is this place?” Ivy asked.

“A place as good as any other to rest for the night—unless you want to be walking in the dark, miss.”

Ivy didn’t.

And for the first time since their journey from the orphanage, Ivy realized she had found a landmark of sorts—and she eagerly opened Axle’s
Guide
, hoping to learn anything about their whereabouts.

After searching the extensive index for the word
Jalousie
, she found it under the broader category Estates, Fortresses, and Palaces and flipped quickly to page 1421, section 4. Under the heading of Noble Manors, Ivy read:

Ivy’s heart sank. No wonder everything was so unfamiliar—Requiem was a lonely outpost to the north, an area where the land holds up the sky with its ghostly stone walls. From here, she knew, it was several days’ journey to Templar—if they were lucky. With Rue barely able to lift her head, even this seemed unlikely.

In the gathering gloom, Ivy could just make out Jalousie’s small, untended graveyard. Amid the toppled graves, and a dilapidated vault, there were a few unmistakable shadows. The wolves were gathering for the coming of the night.

The great doors complained bitterly as the threesome entered the manor, and Lumpen was forced to lean on them with her substantial backside to shut them again. Together, the travelers lowered a wooden hasp in place, barring the way. The yelping of the wolves was closer now.

“Nothing’s getting in that way,” Lumpen insisted.

Ivy heard the skittering of some animal in the ceiling above her. The neglected floor was scattered with dead leaves and made an unsettling noise as they passed over it. Piles of brush had migrated to the corners and seemed to house a variety of rodents.

Lumpen made her way casually up a set of servants’ stairs to the upper floor, which to Ivy’s great relief was a more open space, and together the airiness and large windows formed a chamber that at one time must have been the home’s proudest. A set of louvered doors clacked against an unfastened railing—Ivy could see a small, lonesome balcony off one wall.

An old iron bed was thrust against one wall haphazardly, and its rotting canopy was a spectacle of dust. The thing disintegrated entirely as Lumpen moved it aside, placing the sleeping form of Rue upon the pallet. The old woolen carpet had somehow survived Ivy’s journey to the orphanage and currently wrapped Rue against the night chill, her pale moon face emerging from within its dark weave.

“Now, miss, I think you best tend to your friend,” Lumpen whispered.

Ivy knelt unsteadily beside Rue, who was dreaming, muttering protests in her uneasy sleep.

“Lumpen—” Ivy began, her voice failing.

“Isn’t that what they say about you? You’re the healing child?” Lumpen crossed her arms over her broad chest, the ashen thumbprint left by the scribe a deep-set shadow in the center of her forehead.

“Yes,” Ivy allowed meekly.

“Well, here’s a good use of your talents.”

“I—can’t.”

“You don’t know how?”

“No—it’s not that. It’s—I’ll enter
his
realm.” Ivy’s voice was low and anxious.

“Whose realm?” Lumpen asked patiently.

“If I perform a cure, my father will know it. I fall under my father’s control—he will find me. I cannot risk it.” Ivy felt terrible. Here was the very real truth—if she attempted to heal Rue, Ivy would find herself in the dismal and appalling world of her father, in Vidal Verjouce’s insidious Mind Garden. She didn’t know if she could return.

“Then your friend will die,” Lumpen declared.

Ivy looked around desperately for a sign.

Night was coming on, but the last remnants of the day are sometimes the brightest, and their fleeting moments often offer surprising revelation. The setting sun cast its eye upon the magnificent windows of the madman’s estate, illuminating them spectacularly.

The room had once been decorated with a botanical theme—wallpaper, now yellowed, peeling, and water-stained, depicted stylized patterns of foliage. The neglected bedclothes beneath Rue were a swath of ferns and palm fronds; the iron posts of the bed were capped with pineapples. And the windows, too, were dedicated to that which grows of the earth. Brilliant variants of the color green—a shocking emerald, a pale spring sap—coursed throughout the display. The plants were all labeled stylistically in the old tongue, and here and there the stained glass held ivory-colored cartouches—miniature billowing scrolls in which some small descriptive text was written.

Ivy knew this phrase. It was said that King Verdigris led with an army of flowers, a reference to his mighty alliance with Nature. The
Field Guide
had mentioned these windows, too, and Ivy realized they must be quite old. She examined them with more interest.

The center panel was a ruin, a lost city. Ivy could just make out a tall spire beneath the mounds of greenery that shrouded the place like a living blanket, orphaned columns emerging from the deep thicket. A place no longer touched by men—the forest had emerged and taken over. Ivy marveled at it—it was as peaceful-looking as it was mysterious.

The baying of the wolves outside the windows was closer now, more desperate. Ivy wrenched her eyes away from the panorama and realized something was in her hand. She still held the pressed wolfsbane from Rue’s book.

Ivy opened her fist.

A final slice of sunlight slipped in from the balcony, shearing the room in two, and it alighted upon Ivy’s open palm. The dried and lifeless flower had vanished. Just as in Professor Breaux’s moonlit garden, the ruined plant was now in full bloom, flourishing inexplicably, drenching the stale air of Jalousie in golden summer.

Ivy placed the deep blue flowers beside Rue’s pale cheek and readied herself to meet her father.

vy’s first dramatic healing, on board the
Trindletrip
, seemed like a lifetime ago. Now she sat beside the ailing Rue, and, as with the trestleman Peps upon the houseboat, Ivy cleared her mind, allowing the world to drop away. And it was here that Ivy’s more practical abilities with herbs and potions left off and a more miraculous, a more
inexplicable
talent made itself manifest.

There are those that run through life with great determination, while others meander aimlessly along a course not of their own design. It is left to the great sages—Axle is one of them—to debate the merits of each. But then, there exists the rare few who are somehow destined for greatness, and operate with enviable ease, as they are not subjected to the same rules as others.

This was Ivy Manx.

And as the world lurched and seemingly tore itself apart at the seams, only to reweave itself together in a vapid, dismal incarnation of a ruined garden, Ivy wondered—not at all for the first time—why it was she could not just inhabit a world where much less was expected of her.