The Shepherd of Weeds (33 page)

There was a moment of utter silence.

A ravaging howl filled the room then, reverberating upon the dank walls and floors and shaking the trestleman’s golden cage. The stunned monkeys cowered and whimpered their own symphony.

Vidal Verjouce pawed desperately at his eyes. Scourge bracken was abandoning him—sensing his defeat—as it had Dumbcane, and those who came before him. For that was the nature of the weed. It was fickle, and desirous, and in Ivy—in the Child of the Prophecy—it now had found boundless power.

Ivy stood before the broken Director, her face blazing with dark knowledge, her hands on her hips. All around them the
walls, Verjouce’s mad scribbles, glowed like embers. The cryptic words suddenly were all made clear, and danced before her eyes.

“Ungrateful child!” The towering Director gripped his face, stumbling. “After all I’ve done for you!”

He whirled about, his long cloak caught the edge of his boot—and suddenly he lay humbled and confused upon the floor, more helpless now than he was when blind. The light—a stranger to him for so long—burning his eyes.

n the corner, the ink monkeys now turned to Ivy, Shoo forgotten. She narrowed her eyes, ready for the onslaught, but instead a look of rapture spread across their gruesome faces. Then, like rats, they surged across the uneven stones and began flocking to her, scrambling to be first. They poured over the Director, who was quietly sobbing, trampling his heaving figure indifferently.

The ink monkeys rushed Ivy—grasping at each other with their leathery hands, biting, gouging eyes with their awful horn buds—as they made their way to their new mistress. They leapt at her, an eerie adoration washing over their faces.

But in an instant, they were gone.

Where they had been but a moment before, nothing but silty outlines of their unlikely figures remained, their hollow
insides small, drifting dust motes, hovering for a moment and then falling finally to the soiled floor.

As Ivy stood in the room atop the spire, she felt a surge of furious power, of infinite possibility, course through her small form. She heard the great cries of the caucus in the skies as they warred in her name. For Kingmaker rules alone—it does not share power, and Ivy’s dominion over plants was the ultimate attraction. She was surprised to find that she was crying, and, wiping away her streaming tears, she was stunned to see they were as dark as ink.

The Good King’s stones were in their proper place, his burden lifted. Verjouce lay at her feet, shattered by his loss of power and stunned by the return of his sight. Ivy had cured her father’s blindness. It was Axle’s turn, and as she rushed for his cage, the room began to sway.

The floor buckled.

And as the world began to peel away, fraying like a mildewed tapestry, she braced herself for the return to the abysmal Mind Garden.

The last thing she saw, as the room descended into darkness, was a strange, jaunty scarecrow loose in the room. One with particularly shiny shoes.

lux was no stranger to his former master’s blindness. He had, in fact, had a hand in it. He had nursed Verjouce when the injury was fresh, and had he not endeavored to dispose of his master’s discarded goods, he was quite sure no one else would have. As he set out for the long walk to the Infirmary, a thought occurred to him. He suddenly, gleefully recognized that a blind master was the best sort of master. His laziness and penchant for insubordination would surely go unnoticed now.

And as he was finding the trip to be a tiresome one, Flux placed the Director’s eyes in a trash pile, bound for the incinerator.

But as he turned on his heel, Flux saw a strange thing. A dark bird—a pitch-black crow, he thought idly—plucked
them from the pile of Guild refuse and flew away.

Even better—thought he. Now the evidence of his indiscretion was thoroughly eliminated.

Here he was, Sorrel Flux mused, back in the spire now, after what felt like so long. He had been watching the proceedings in his former master’s chamber closely before revealing himself. Flux watched unemotionally as the brat bested her father—the clash of their deep purple insects a mere curiosity to the traitorous assistant. He bided his time as his master was stricken with the return of his sight. And then he pounced.

As the ink monkeys dispersed to the wind, evaporating in a twinkling vision of dust motes, he dashed at Ivy, coughing through their remnants.

He was quick.

His polished boots trampled through the fine silt that coated the room now. His straw hat and wispy silhouette perplexed Ivy, and only too late did she see her attacker was Sorrel Flux. Inconceivably, her former taster was dressed as a scarecrow. A familiar pocket watch draped luxuriously from a frayed buttonhole, and a jaunty hat sat slightly askew on his irregular head.

Before Ivy knew it, a burlap-clad arm had encircled her neck. Flux’s other arm snaked its way up to her face, and his hand pinched at her cheeks roughly, then her nose as he attempted to pry open her mouth. In his fist, a small vial.

“This won’t hurt a bit.” He held her head roughly. “Although, come to think of it, all the people who have tried it are dead.”

Without warning, Shoo was upon them—talons flashing, sleek feathers batting Flux’s face furiously, a hoarse cry in his ears. But Flux would not be distracted. He felt his face slashed open, and a spill of scarlet blood met the hay of his collar, clotting there. Still, he held the child.

But oddly, the brat’s body felt spongy—no,
airy
—his grip on the child unsatisfactory. He pulled her closer, trying more urgently to unlock her clenched teeth. She was a mere wisp of a thing—skin and bones.

Then, impossibly, she was nothing.

Flux was left staring at the defeated figure of his former employer, who, squinting, stared back.

howling, screaming, bitter wind scooped up Ivy and Shoo and deposited them before the now-familiar forsaken gates of the Mind Garden. The fireflies seemed to be nowhere, but her crown of flowers glowed in a vivid darkest purple, encircling her golden hair.

Ivy rattled the rusting doors, and they opened.

Gnats and blackflies descended upon them, but with a wave of her hand, they vanished. Marching into the dark turf, the terrain of her father’s imagination, she looked about.

“I’m your master now,” she announced. Her father’s Mind Garden was crumbling as scourge bracken abandoned him.

It was becoming hers.

Just ahead, the mounds of tarry earth rose, the place she had seen the gardener tending to the ink monkeys. She ran at
the small hills and kicked at them, spreading a black viscous goo upon the field.

Hands on her hips, she circled the Garden.

“You are finished!” she called to the wind.

The insect buzzing ceased. The only thing to be heard was the lapping of the waves at the lakeshore.

Shoo rode upon her shoulder as Ivy continued her tour of the grounds.

Along the pea-stone path, her father’s gruesome topiary reared—its carved hedges a collection of fearsome grimaces and lurking beasts. Ivy walked. She was not afraid.

The small leaves of the topiary’s statues were blighted, she saw, dark patches infecting the tiny veins. Small wormholes formed lacy patterns on the larger leaves, tracing a secret long-forgotten language. The dull sky filtered through the hedgerows now—the walls and carved bestiary were made less of leaf and more of deadwood and air, like a moth-eaten tapestry.

In fact, the entire Garden seemed as if it were crumbling. A vast graveyard rose where the ruined topiary left off. Ancient, jutting stones with terrible symbols. The dead of Caux.

Ivy approached the abandoned folly. In a previous visit, it had housed charcoal-colored peacocks, birds almost a shadow themselves. But, like most within the Garden, they had been forgotten, left to a dreary end by her father’s disinterest.

The folly loomed at her, its silhouette much changed.
Walls bulged at unlikely angles, and the thatch upon the roof was unkempt and mangy. Yet there was something familiar about the place—deeply familiar. New, honest-looking apple trees sprouted in a small, homey copse. Balls of mistletoe dangled from several of the taller branches.

She gasped as she approached.

There, clacking in the hot wind, was a sign, written in a young girl’s handwriting. The ink upon the sign was still wet—it ran in dark, moody streaks beneath the letters.

Ivy stared at her childhood home. Or rather, an apparition of it. She sighed deeply, her heart opening to a heavy homesickness. This Hollow Bettle was tinged with scourge bracken—the entire vision, she desperately knew, was false. Yet her heart leapt at the thought of seeing Cecil again, at home behind the tavern bar. Inside the dilapidated door, Ivy saw nothing at first—small, birdlike bones on the floor and dust.

A strange, anemic light drew a crack in the shape of a door on one wall. Her secret workshop. The walls—once listing the outdated menu—were covered with her father’s mad scribbles and etchings. Shoo cawed a low, throaty warning, but Ivy was drawn forward.

The workshop was cloaked in shadow, somehow bigger than it should have been, and shelves that once held notes and apotheopathic medicines now displayed unearthly bottled specimens floating in amber fluid. On a far wall, plants were speared on straight pins, straining at her, waving about helplessly. Botanical specimens and graveyard rubbings littered the floor.

Her alcohol stove was lit, and in the copper vat something bubbled, giving off a thick, bitter cloud—but the concoction was ruined, she saw, nothing but a burnt and tarry sludge. Ink.

As Ivy stood in the facsimile of her favorite room, a great longing filled her.

In the corner was something new.

A set of oars rested against the wall, an elegant extravagance in the murky Mind Garden. They appeared silvery, made of hard olive wood.

lthough her father’s Mind Garden was crumbling, the vast and still lake remained. Ivy decided to take the oars.