The Tasters Guild Read online

  “Kingmaker?” Ivy frowned. It was probably a good idea to keep a poison called Kingmaker away from a man bent on ruling the world.

  Axle reached into his waistcoat and retrieved a small package.

  “I had this brought from home for you, Ivy.”

  Ivy brightened. Opening the simply wrapped package, she found something utterly familiar.

  “My Guide!” she squealed. Indeed, it was her very own personally inscribed Field Guide—the one she had left in her rush as she abandoned her uncle’s tavern. It was filled with her curly scrawl and splattered with various spills from her experiments. It smelled like home.

  “Thank you, Axle! Now I can give yours back.…” She turned to Rowan.

  The taster nodded. He was allowing his attention to wander. The fresh air on deck was a relief to his congested head. He had been feeling wheezy and disagreeable and had found it hard to concentrate since boarding the Trindletrip. It would not be long before he realized the source of his discomfort. Folded within a coil of greasy rope was a cat of enormous proportions.

  A filthy, ink-stained cat.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Six

  Hey, that’s the cat from Dumbcane’s shop!” Ivy said when Rowan had revealed the animal’s napping spot.

  The cat slept on, oblivious. “I’m sure of it. My, he’s a big one!” Ivy continued, drawing nearer. “What is he doing here, I wonder?”

  In fact, he was an invited guest.

  Trindle had long needed a mouser, and when a cat appeared—one with a massive appetite—he was relieved. Houseboats exist in a state of siege; rats and mice and other uninvited pests were often skittering around the water’s edge. As Trindle searched for a name for his new pet, one soon presented itself. The cat survived both a dip in a dirty oil pan and twice a fall overboard, and was safely said to be on his sixth life—if indeed it was true that a cat as large as he was only granted nine lives. Trindle easily decided upon a name.

  He was called Six.

  “For the time being,” Axle laughed.

  “And look—he’s got six toes on each of his front paws!” Ivy noticed.

  Like his parents and their parents before them, the creature was indeed born with an extra digit on each front foot, and all twelve toes gave him an even more unfair advantage when hunting.

  And six gleaming claws on each, Rowan couldn’t help but notice. The taster was appalled. He had never once heard of a cat doing anything useful. Here, revealed, was the cause of his intense discomfort! His allergies had never been worse. The monster cat seemed to care nothing for presentation, or any of the usual cat-type pastimes of bathing, cleaning, or preening. There the thing was, its noisy purring punctuated by occasional deep, raspy growls. As he watched the source of his misery through increasingly itchy eyes, the thing perked up a ragged ear and yawned—half its face seemed to disappear in a bountiful row of teeth and gums. It was simply crawling with fleas.

  “Humph.” Rowan narrowed his eyes at the creature. “The filthy thing has been splashing about in Dumbcane’s ink!”

  In fact, the cat Six would soon prove to be a large amount of trouble. Here was a cat with no loyalty—or rather, a loyalty of his own design (not much different from any other cat). But, alas, there was no way of foretelling the mischief ahead—even for such a wise man as Axle—for loyalty is only revealed when it is tested.

  Rowan resisted the impulse to throw the thing ashore by his ragged, inky scruff. What a poor substitute for Poppy—his beloved bettle boar! And to his horror, Ivy was currently tickling Six’s torn ear with a tentative finger. Worse still, he was soon to find that under no circumstances was Trindle agreeable to deporting Six.

  Apparently the trip upriver to the dismal city of Rocamadour was to be made even more disagreeable than the taster originally thought.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Cure

  Peps D. Roux had quietly taken to bed in his new home on the Trindletrip, where he was convalescing alone—dismal and feverish. He vaguely felt the engines come alive and the boat take on a more buoyant quality. He imagined the bed beneath him floating along the Marcel, raftlike, and when he forced open his bloodshot eyes, he was at a momentary loss as to his whereabouts. When he noticed several chatty partridges perched upon the shelf in the upper corner of his cabin, he thought nothing of it and asked them kindly to leave him be. When they became insulted (Peps had tried very hard to be polite) and altered themselves into hideous vultures to demonstrate their displeasure, the trestleman hid beneath his blankets shivering. When the vultures then began swooping about his small cabin, bashing into walls and upsetting furniture, letting their filth spread upon the floor below, Peps cowered deeper. Beneath his bedding, he heard their hissing, which soon became an outright argument as to how best a trestleman tasted—and it was only then that he finally dismissed the birds as delirium. But to be sure, he remained beneath the piles of blankets.

  Which was where Ivy found him.

  She and Six had been exploring the boat when she came upon Peps’s sickroom. At first she mistook the bed as simply unmade, but as she flung open a window to refresh the stale air, she heard a pitiful cry. Its source, apparently, was beneath the bedclothes, which she also threw off. Finding the proud trestleman a mere shadow of himself—pale and drawn—alarmed her, and when he began babbling about mean-spirited birds bent on his destruction, she went at once to find Axle.

  It was generally agreed that Peps’s ill fortune was brought about by his move to the houseboat. Everyone knew trestlemen did not fare well on water, especially after the disappearance of the alewives who ruled the waterways. It was as if he were thumbing his nose at fortune by relocating away from the natural abode of his kind—that is, beneath a bridge. Since he had chosen to live upon water rather than over it, well, it should come as no surprise he should end up unwell.

  Unwell he was.

  “Ivy.” His eyes fluttered open; his voice was raspy and hoarse. He was a mere lump in his bed, covers replaced tightly to his chin. “Help me,” he cried miserably.

  “I will, Peps,” she assured him softly at his bedside. The others aboard the boat—Axle, Rowan, and Trindle—stood somberly behind her, having come when Ivy had raised the alarm.

  In her workshop apron were a few odds and ends, a spare river stone that she favored, various-sized corks, Dumbcane’s fanciful letter C, which she had taken from the shop. In short, nothing of any help. Everything that she needed was strewn about on the Knox.

  She looked down at Peps’s distorted face and held his cold hand. She parted the few clumps of hair that lay across the trestleman’s proud brow and placed her hand upon his forehead. But it was here that her own attempts at relieving Peps’s discomfort began and ended, and another, more powerful force made itself known.

  An unwelcome smell—the stench from Dumbcane’s—briefly filled her nostrils, and her light-headedness returned, while quickly the floor, the boat itself, seemed at once to heave a great sigh. Blinking, she saw not the Trindletrip, nor the murky Marcel, but a small, eerie copse of alder trees.

  She was somehow wrapped in a shroud of mist and shadow and felt at once larger than the longest river and smaller than the most modest acorn. Wisps of ragged fog caught upon the unfriendly branches of the wood, small, wretched clouds torn from the sky.

  Peps was there, but he was not. He was made from the same murk that darkened her vision. He seemed asleep.

  Her attention was drawn through the wiry, inhospitable trees to a cloyingly familiar gate. Green serpentine ivy snaked up the poles, brilliant in the bleak landscape. It beckoned in a new breeze. The tall ironwork was splendid, she saw as she drew closer, and was topped with carved figurines. But a strange silence greeted her—an unusual absence of bees or birds, or general garden activity.

  “Hello?” she called, pressing her face against the bars. Where had she seen this courtyard before?

  She looked around. It was a vast garden, one of great beauty, but kept with a
strict and disciplined hand. The manicured rows and trained grapevines stretched on, disappearing into the distance in a thicket of dark fog. A small garden shed—a folly—off to the side. Woven bell-shaped hives for bees.

  She tried again. “Anyone home?” Rattling the gates, she found them locked.

  Then, a rumble of distant thunder, and Ivy remembered Peps.

  The clouds were rolling in quickly and a sudden storm now threatened, and she was overcome again with the acrid smell of Dumbcane’s inks. She ran hurriedly through the thrashing trees, which now had grown thicker, more dreary.

  She hurried but made no progress. Behind her, the sound of metal on metal—and as she turned, she saw the garden gate hanging open. But the view now through the archway was one of devastation—gone were the manicured rows and ordered vines. In their place only bramble. A thick, knotted spiky growth had overtaken everything. The world then lit up in a pale, shivery blue as she was treated to a bolt of lightning—and Ivy had the uncomfortable sensation that she was due for another.

  But before one came, the scene dissolved, accompanied by vague silvery chimes, and the young girl found herself blinking beneath the yellow light of the sun streaming in from a circular portal, aboard the Trindletrip. Peps was once again at her side.

  The familiar faces around her wore a selection of stunned looks.

  “What just happened?” Rowan wondered, astonished.

  Ivy blinked.

  Six’s matted fur stood on end.

  “Was that lightning?” Axle asked no one in particular. “Inside?”

  “I wonder if it’s going to rain,” replied Trindle, annoyed.

  “Er—Ivy?” Rowan frowned. “I could have sworn you—well … when the lights flashed, it was like you vanished.” He laughed nervously.

  None of this was of any concern to Ivy, for she was enduring a very potent realization of her own. She suddenly remembered where it was she had seen that particular garden gate before. With a chilling jolt, Ivy Manx recognized the gate and the garden beyond as the one from Dumbcane’s letter C. She unfurled it to be sure.

  All were so astonished that it took them several moments to notice that the most enthusiastic of the bunch was Peps—standing, stretching, walking about flush with life.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Charm

  No one could have been more surprised at the proceedings than Ivy. It was as if Mrs. Pulch had scripted it herself in one of her tall tales. She had vanished from the houseboat, arrived at a mysterious garden, and returned with a clap of lightning to a miraculous curing! “Inexplicable,” Axle concluded.

  “Incomprehensible,” Trindle added.

  “Miraculous,” Rowan whispered, and then sneezed. He had seen Ivy’s curative abilities but never quite in this way. She had cured him and Shoo, but that had been with a tonic she had made. This was an entirely new occurrence for which there was no explanation.

  Peps was the first to celebrate his miraculous recovery at the young girl’s hands, standing, his cheeks flooded with color, eyes sparkling.

  “Ivy!” he enthused. “I feel a man half my age!”

  “Indeed!” Axle nodded in awe. “I’ve never seen you better—you hardly appear a day over a hundred and fifty!”

  Peps flushed with the compliment.

  Axle examined his brother again, dumbfounded. But Peps had found one of his trunks and was rummaging inside it, capes, furs, and velvet cloaks flying.

  “Ahh!” Peps shouted, his voice muffled by the fine tailoring. He turned, a look of triumph on his face. “And now I am quite ready to present to you, Ivy Manx, a great token of my appreciation.”

  “Peps!” Ivy was appalled. “I don’t even know what I did.”

  “Nonsense. I’ll hear none of that, young lady. Modesty is so overrated!” He dug his pudgy fist into a small pocket of a particularly elaborate morning coat from the trunk, ending his frantic search. “Hmmph.” A slight look of worry, then triumph, passed over his smooth face, and soon his fist was an open palm—and upon it a small shiny thing caught the light from the round portal.

  “What is it?” Ivy leaned in, curious despite herself.

  It was thin and delicate, with a dark oval hole through one side.

  “A hatpin?” she asked.

  “An embroidery needle?” Rowan suggested.

  “Hardly! What are they teaching you these days? It’s a birdcall. A silver birdcall. A charm, of sorts. It, er, belonged to someone quite dear to me. It will bring you good fortune.” Peps smiled, looking remarkably like his marble bust and treating the room to his gold tooth.

  Axle grabbed his brother’s hand and peered into it, a look of surprise and then fury flashing across his bearded face. “Peps!”

  Peps looked momentarily sheepish.

  “You never told me you had an alewife’s charm!”

  “You never asked.”

  “What do you do with it?” Ivy asked, examining it.

  “You mean, besides wear it?” Peps shrugged. He took the thing, which was threaded upon a silken ribbon, and tied it around Ivy’s neck.

  “Well, thank you, Peps. I suppose I could use all the good fortune I can get.”

  “It’s a potent charm,” Axle warned. “I should like very much to study it—”

  Rowan cleared his scratchy throat. “Um, could someone tell me what an alewife is?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Troubled Waters

  The Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux was the preeminent reference book of the land, containing in its vast pages the antidotes to poisons, the secret meanings of flowers, and even a few magical, hidden passages. But in some ways it was maddeningly incomplete.

  The book was written by Axlerod D. Roux in response to the poisonous regime of the Deadly Nightshades and the rise of the Tasters’ Guild, and it was used as a tool by those wishing to remain alive in the treacherous land of Caux.

  It was also the favorite book of the truly wicked Queen Nightshade. Because it was so widely read by friend and foe alike, Axle wisely chose not to include anything controversial—favoring instead the purely factual—lest he be labeled a heretic and imprisoned in the dungeons for treason. Still, some things were too important to Caux’s history to omit, and these he secretly buried within the text. Rowan had discovered such a passage detailing the sad history of King Verdigris.

  But the alewives eluded him for a different reason.

  Axle did not write of them because there was simply too much heartbreak surrounding their disappearance.

  The trestleman cleared his throat and nodded slightly.

  “Alewives,” Axle began, “rule over troubled water.” He appeared to be gathering his thoughts. “They were inhabitants of Caux, and when the Doorway to Pimcaux stood open, they were invited in. But it was an unspeakable trick—and Vidal Verjouce slammed the Doorway shut behind them.…” His voice trailed off.

  Peps took over.

  “They were our wives,” he explained simply.

  Ivy was wide-eyed. Here was another reason to get to Pimcaux, and she said so. They must hurry to Rocamadour.

  But the taster scowled. Rowan somehow could not muster the same urgency to get to Rocamadour as the others did. He was miserable beside Six, who he was sure was menacing him when Ivy wasn’t looking. And he missed the bettle boar Poppy greatly—traveling anywhere without her seemed somehow wrong.

  In fact, the bleak city of the Tasters’ Guild was the last place he wished to find himself. He was a wanted man—an uncollared taster—and his future was grim if he was captured. His head swam and his eyes teared and another fit of sneezing loomed. As Rowan regretted the swift departure, Six was snaking his way around Ivy’s shins, coming nearly as high as her waist, leaving clumps of hair and stalky whiskers behind. He was sure the thing was eyeing him as he did so—the large pads of his feet weaving silently along the wooden deck boards.

  His misery grew. Here he was, being forced to return to the very place he so feared. The Tasters’ Guild
severely punished its renegade tasters with a truly awful fate. One meted out by the Guild’s own fearsome leader, Vidal Verjouce—the ultimate tragedy for a taster, and one that ensures he might never taste again: the surgical removal of the tongue.

  Between Six and Rocamadour, he wanted nothing more than to be alone.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Foul Mood

  There is little enjoyment in feeling ill. Surely one can forgive, then, the distasteful temper that now settled upon Rowan Truax. He was certain in his gloom that Ivy was encouraging the cat—for Six was never far from her side, and he was almost certain the beastly pile of knots and tangles was stalking him.

  But moods are just that, moods—often irrational and overpowering. He took no joy in the delicate little filament bulbs that clinked a fine tune, aflame along every available surface of the houseboat. He took no joy in anything, except perhaps solitude, wherein his mood roiled as they began their way along the ancient river, in the fading light, bound for lonesome ruins and low-lying cliffs.

  Although the daylight was frail and anemic, Ivy’s mood was one of confidence and cheer. Seeing the taster alone, she occasioned to remark upon their method of transport.

  “Didn’t Axle always say that to travel by houseboat is simply the very best way to see anything and everything at all?” she enthused.

  Rowan, however, was not to be engaged on this topic—or any other, for that matter—and responded in his usual manner of late, with stony silence. Ivy stole a sidelong glance at her friend, noting that he had been uncharacteristically withdrawn since boarding the houseboat, but attributed it to the weight of the approaching Rocamadour.

  “Barberry?” Ivy tried, speaking of the flower that symbolizes sourness of temper. “Garden marigold?”

  Unfortunately for Ivy, Rowan was not agreeable to having his pout pointed out, and she received a curt reply.