The Shepherd of Weeds (22 page)

“Great, thank you! Very helpful of you.” Grig handed his discovery to Rowan. “It’s the final piece for my current device, and it wouldn’t do to misplace it. So there we are!” The trestleman looked at Rowan, his rosy cheeks like two small, shiny crab apples. “Now—what was it again that you wanted from me?”

Rowan cleared his throat uncomfortably. Hemsen Dumbcane’s storefront held disagreeable memories, and although there was no visible remnant of the forger’s business, Rowan couldn’t help but wonder if the dark, cramped corners contained something dangerous.

“The springforms, sir.”

“Oh yes! Of course! Don’t you worry, young man—I have hardly forgotten. I must congratulate you for testing them! No one, er, ever wanted to actually
use
them.” A cloud passed over the trestleman’s face. “It’s a good thing—for you especially—that they performed as expected. Shall I bring them to you, then, in the morning at the palace? They are in tip-top shape—just a few adjustments needed.”

Rowan smiled, relieved. “Yes—and thank you! Oh”—he handed the coil of copper back to Grig—“here you go.”

Rowan’s enthusiasm for departing the cramped shop now got the better of him, and his shoulder met with a stack of blueprints. What began as a small disruption to the hastily piled scrolls soon became an avalanche, and as the taster and inventor moved to staunch the cascade of papers, for their effort they were soon covered high in them.

Flushed and embarrassed, Rowan began to apologize, but the words stalled on his lips.

The stack of mechanical drawings had been propped against a wall, and now, with their absence, Rowan was treated to a view of what lay behind. Tacked to the chipped plaster were a few of Dumbcane’s sketches, an attempt at an ornate alphabet—Rowan remembered these from his last visit to the calligrapher’s shop. They had been fanciful and grotesque, and one even appeared to have the image of Ivy upon it. He had had enough of the forger’s treachery for a lifetime.

It would be another several minutes before either he or Grig could find the exit, the process of which involved a good amount of trestleman ingenuity and patience. Alas for Grig, for in somehow finding the door, he managed to lose the tubing.

owan had hardly emerged from the scribe’s old storefront when he collided with another former inhabitant of the Knox Bridge.

“Peps!” Rowan gasped. “I didn’t see you! Are you okay?”

The trestleman muttered as he dusted himself off, his face reddening.

“What were you doing there by the door?” Rowan suddenly wondered.

Behind Peps was a group of several dozen townsfolk. Rowan recognized a few in the forefront as the hardened street urchins Peps sometimes kept company with.

“Just out for my usual constitutional,” Peps explained casually.

“With forty of your good friends?” Rowan joked uneasily.

Peps shrugged this observation off, preferring instead to glower at the large quill dangling above the taster’s head in the twilight. Rowan followed his gaze.

“Someone should see to that,” Rowan decided. The less he had to think about the scribe, the better.

“Hardly.” Peps’s jaw was set. “Let it serve as a reminder of our enemies. Yours, above all.”

“Mine?” Rowan was shocked.

“Master Truax”—Peps stared at him intently—“surely you haven’t forgotten that the calligrapher has sworn vengeance on you? He blames you, rightly so or not, for his current predicament. When Axle and I saw him in his cell in the catacombs, he was mad with rage. The one name he repeated over and over? Yours. He had been on his way to obscurity when he was visited by the Taxuses—who held a lien on you for the death of your charge. Now Dumbcane is captive—a slave to Verjouce’s desire for ink.”

Rowan sagged. His first commission after graduating from the Tasters’ Guild—and he had killed the man. Rowan had taken an oath to stay by his charge, Turner Taxus, but instead he had run. A stolen scroll from Dumbcane’s shop had inadvertently been turned over to the Taxus clan, along with Rowan’s Guild papers, and, indeed, caused Dumbcane’s arrest.

It was beginning to dawn on Rowan the seriousness of his predicament. He looked nervously from Peps to the crowd behind him. Peps softened.

“But if we have our way, there will be nothing left of the weasely cheat but this quill over the door,” Peps said.

“But what does the Director mean to do with all of Dumbcane’s ink?”

“You don’t know?” Peps scowled. “He’s going to unwrite the Prophecy.”

eps was right, Rowan realized as he trudged to the palace—and to his cold room. He thought about what the trestleman had told him as he moved him aside to speak with Grig about weapons. The Prophecy, as Rowan had come to know it, was ancient—before even the time of the Good King. It was what bound him and Ivy together on their adventures—in search of Pimcaux, it brought them to the darkest regions of the Tasters’ Guild, and was therefore the reason Axle was imprisoned. The Prophecy rallied them, was the reason Cecil was plotting the assault on Rocamadour.

But what do I really know of the Prophecy?
Rowan wondered. Certainly he had never been privy to it—nor did he ever pay it much attention. It was not spoken of in the teachings at the Guild. And those wise men who knew of it only
knew
pieces
of it, not the thing in its entirety, for it existed only in fragments. If Verjouce was successful—if he could somehow change the Prophecy—
or erase it altogether
—what would become of them, of Caux? With scourge bracken, Peps had said, there would be nothing left but razed fields and rubble.

Rowan’s next thought chilled him to the bone.
What of the child of the Prophecy? What would become of Ivy?

Back in his cold bedroom with a thin moon rising through his window, Rowan was restless. In Templar, he felt out of place and unwanted in the bigger world of adults, and he had found himself spending many hours in this very room, usually at his window, thinking about Ivy. He was drawn to the window, for he felt (although he didn’t know why) that something big was brewing. The skies, and the short moments he had spent in them aloft, beckoned him. Until there was news—any news of Ivy—he would wait here with a cold pit of dread in his stomach.

Now he wanted nothing more than to speak with Cecil. Cecil had potent allegiances of his own, Rowan knew. The master apotheopath had served with King Verdigris, his powers were vast and indisputable, and for him the Prophecy was not some mysterious tangle of riddles. But Ivy’s uncle had been extraordinarily busy and uncharacteristically bad-tempered, and had little time for Rowan’s questions. And Flux—that despicable turncoat of a former servant to Vidal
Verjouce—he might be bound and guarded by Poppy, but his mouth was quite free and seemed ever ready with a snide quip or sneering aside at Rowan’s expense.

Rowan turned from his perch at the window, agitated. Since arriving at Templar, he had had the unsettling feeling that he was being watched. Even here, alone in his room, he could not unwind. His eyes drifted to the side table, where he had placed Ivy’s stones.

They had not fared well in his care.

When Ivy had slipped them into his hands in Underwood, they were a glistening gray tinged with pink (like gristle, Rowan thought). Now they had shriveled and had taken on a decidedly unhealthy brownish coloring. Thinking that perhaps they required air, he had removed them from his pocket and placed them on his table beside his silver acorn from Pimcaux, but with their new surroundings they seemed—if anything—worse.

He stared at them dismally. He should just throw them in the ground and be done with them. He did not enjoy being their guardian, and a new thought had occurred to him—one that made a dull ache appear at his temples. If Ivy was really gone, as Sorrel Flux maintained, then it fell to him to complete the Good King’s task.

Plant them
, the King had told Ivy.
You will see when it is time
.

Impulsively Rowan reached for the stones, but as he
touched them, he was at once filled with such a feeling of dread, of utter revulsion, that he quickly let them drop. His heart was pounding, and just for a moment, he thought he had heard something gurgling.

He threw open the heavy wooden door to his chambers, thinking perhaps the noise came from the impressive hall, but nothing was there. The small stone step up to his room was just as he’d left it an hour ago: empty. Grig had yet to deliver the springforms.

Returning miserably to his bed, he threw himself under the covers and awaited morning.

As it turned out, there were great forces bent on destruction. But tonight, as Rowan slept, it was a small one—a tiny one—that moved about Templar. A hummingbird, no bigger than a bee, was darting through the square below him, keeping to the shadows, making haste on her own vengeful errand.

ster had remained at the caucus, even after it became painfully clear to her that the consensus was not with her. She had argued strenuously against entering into battle with the girl, but in the end the crow had outranked her. Her anger grew inside her; it burned with a cold glare. The Shepherd of Weeds traveled with the very one responsible for her mate’s demise! She vowed vengeance against Ivy, Prophecy or not, as she flew ahead of the caucus, her wings a spray of translucent gray, her tiny soul capable of great destruction.

Aster buzzed about the city of Templar looking for the man called Sangfroid, knowing that somehow in his proximity a plan would hatch. But Sangfroid was not at home, and he had neglected his bird feeder—an unforgivable oversight. She
alighted on a bare flagpole upon the Knox Bridge and thought through her options.

At first, she thought she might just have a look at the curious canary-colored man that the warbler Teasel had sung of. Flux, he was called. He seemed of similar temperament to Sangfroid, she reasoned, and perhaps with his aid she might mete out some real vengeance. But where might he be? The warbler Teasel had not said.

She flitted about, finally settling upon a pulley (that routed a pail from street level to the upper floors) in an open square. Here, she noticed, was an Apothecary, flanked by many brightly colored flags, wind-shorn in the winter air. Above, a bank of steamy windows—one cracked open to let in the cold.

There seemed to be a great deal of activity inside. And there! Languishing to one side, a yellowish man. He was reclining on a chaise with one elbow propped beneath his head, a bored expression upon his face. There were others with him (much less yellow), but they attended to some business on the other side of the workshop, and Flux seemed uninvited and petulant. What a partnership might be like between a hummingbird and human, Aster did not ask: she was simply drawn by the driving need to warn someone—anyone—of the caucus’s decision.

A small creature such as Aster would have no problem squeezing through the opened window, and indeed this event went as planned. She alighted on a bookshelf, then upon a
darkened brass lantern, and finally—after gathering great courage—she raced to Flux. Only too late did she see that at the former taster’s feet lay a mountain of white fur, a massive prickly bulge of bristles. As she flew above it, it gathered itself into the shape of a boar—a wild, grimacing boar—who snapped at her, teeth and tusk very nearly ending her mission of betrayal.