The Poisons of Caux: The Hollow Bettle (Book I) (27 page)

hat a year in a Nightshade dungeon could do! Ivy’s elation turned to heartbreak as the lone prisoner was ushered in before the queen. Cecil Manx was a sad sight to see. The apotheopath had received far better treatment over the off months when the royal family was sunning themselves in Kruxt and the guards and local staff were able to care for him. But now, with his presence known, the cruel tortures of dungeon life had quickly overtaken him, and he was distressingly feeble. He trudged into the forest glen.

“Ah, the apotheopath,” King Nightshade noticed. “How cleverly wicked of you to invite him to dinner.”

“Yes, I thought you’d approve.” The queen smiled.

Cecil was in no condition to notice his niece. Rowan managed to nudge Ivy’s ankle under the table in sympathy, and she felt some strength from that kindness. Her uncle was led to a small clearing where his presence wouldn’t be overly intrusive
to the mood of the diners but where he might still be called upon at the whim of the queen. He stood bound at the wrists with his head lolling slightly. He mumbled under his breath.

Vidal Verjouce was silent, the holes of his eye sockets betraying not a thing—but there was a new keenness to his countenance, as if the evening had just become a little more interesting.

Ivy didn’t have much time to consider her uncle’s plight, for the meal charged on, and she knew she needed her wits about her. She glanced down at the golden dinnerware beside her plate—an appalling collection of strange and foreign utensils like none she’d ever seen. Beside them, a card.

When it came to food, Queen Nightshade’s tastes could only be described as gruesome. She took distinct pleasure in others’ discomfort in all aspects of life, and the dinner table was no exception. She was known for her awful experiments with turtledoves baked in pies. She did terrible things with cute bunnies and vinegar. She raced turtles into the soup pot, allowing the victor the horror of seeing the others to the kettle before he, at last, joined them. In short, it was the stuff of nightmares.

It will remain forever unknown, however, if the queen actually
knew
that the main dish on her menu would produce the greatest horror in her guests—or if she stumbled upon it simply by accident. It was one that, when announced, drained all the life from both Ivy’s and Rowan’s complexions.

“We have for your enjoyment this evening quite a rare treat,” announced Sorrel Flux.

It had been only the day before yesterday when the great beast arrived at the walls of Templar and was caught by the sentries and immediately turned over for the pleasure of the queen. It was a rare find indeed, one that was not ever seen below the cloud line of the Craggy Burls. And one that quickly became the star of the menu.

“Have any of you ever had the pleasure of dining upon bettle boar?” The queen smiled, looking around. There was an approving murmur from the ambassador, while King Nightshade perked up at the mention of the priceless jewel.

“I thought not.”

Ivy’s breath caught in her throat. Then, with a wet
plop
, her attention was drawn to her plate and away from the spectacle. A large and warty toad had just landed in the middle of it, and she was pretty sure he had come from behind her, from the tapestry. She thought of nudging him gently away—he seemed quite at home—and she tried to decide which of the many surgical-looking utensils might do the trick. She settled on one that seemed to be made for toad-pushing, but by the time she returned her attention to her plate, he was gone. In his wake, the merest spot of mud. Ivy peered about the table, but he was lost to the arrival of the appetizers.

It took the strength of several servants to place a large curled horn in the table’s center. As they stepped back, live eels and sea snails cascaded out, slick and gooey. The eels slithered busily around the tabletop, leaving the diners the unpleasant task of spearing them with their forks. With dismay, Ivy watched Flux use the golden nutcrackers beside him to crush a snail alive, while another traced Rowan’s dinner plate, leaving behind an unsavory trail of slime.

“Really, now, Artilla. I must insist on reading my prepared toast!”

“In a minute, dear.” The queen brushed away a stray leaf on her husband’s shoulder, only to have another replace it.

Queen Nightshade smiled as a new platter arrived before the diners. It contained small, delicate pheasant eggs, and Ivy
watched as the ambassador’s taster selected a tiny pearled spoon and expertly cracked one open. Inside, to Ivy’s distinct horror, was a nearly hatched bird.

Beside Peps a plateful of live dormice were protesting. Their tiny squeaks were sad and mournful, for they had been dipped in honey and were, as a result, quite sticky. They were then invited to a further indignity by being rolled in poppy seeds. Stricken, Peps covered his mouth with his silk scarf as they swam dully about their bowl.

Ivy perked up momentarily, seeing that there, hiding behind a gelatinous blood pudding, was the toad. He navigated the busy tabletop successfully as the last dish arrived. It was set in front of Rowan, in the only free space. The servant removed the golden dome from the platter, revealing what seemed to be a mass of velvety sausages, boiled and tossed with an unappetizing greasy dressing. Not one was alike.

“Salad of tongue.” The servant bowed, pointing out various components of the truly awful dish—from the lolling ox to the tiny hummingbird tongue.

Rowan nearly fainted, thinking of how many animals had lost their voices for this dish. He looked helplessly at Ivy. His hands shook and his own tongue felt slightly swollen in his mouth; a bead of sweat appeared on his forehead. He thought of the Outrider—his harrowing grunts—and his mind turned to his great attachment to his own tongue.

Sorrel Flux, always one to pick up on another’s discomfort, was amused at the young taster’s distress. Rowan held his breath—something entirely against his taster’s training—and took a small bite under Flux’s gaze. Although he tried to concentrate, he found himself returning to the awful scene at the Hollow Bettle, when he tasted the soup Flux had poisoned. He thought of how many people he’d let down that day, the start of this long adventure. The tongue’s texture was springy and dense, and it sat like a lump in his mouth. He tried hopelessly to muster his education. Everything rested on his pronouncement—their very lives, perhaps even Caux’s future.

“Fit to eat!” came Ivy’s clear voice beside him.

So much for the tasters’ Rules of Silence. But Rowan was grateful. He trusted her pronouncement more than his own, and he quietly spat his mouthful into the small spittoon beside him.

Ivy’s voice, the buoyant voice of a child, was a breath of fresh air in the stale protocol of a royal dinner party. Indeed, Cecil raised his head from his state of despair and looked in her direction. Ivy’s heart leapt. Had he recognized her voice? Sure enough, there was a gentle twinkle in the corner of his eye—she had missed it so much. It was all she needed to bolster herself against what was to come.

Yet across the table the queen’s taster frowned.

That voice
—infused at once with annoying innocence and wisdom. Cecil was not the only one to find it familiar.

eep within the dark blue light of the snowy chasm, after tumbling a great way and skittering down a frozen gorge, Poppy made it back through an icy passage to the mines and then to Skytop Abbey, as only a bettle boar might be expected to do. The chasm pit was a series of snaking tight squeezes, but she just followed her nose. In fact, she had made it there rather easily and found it not at all troublesome to do so with Ivy’s bettle in her large mouth.

From there, it was a snap to follow the children’s trail down the Burls, and Poppy had been trying to figure out a way into Peps’s apartment beneath the bridge when she was captured. Her snout had told her that her friends were near. The boar had put up quite a fight—in the end, it had taken many lengths of rope and the whole battalion from the bridge to subdue her.

Had everything gone as Flux suggested, the hounds would have chased and terrorized the snow-white boar around the room for the amusement of the crowd. But the hounds had been returned to their lair beneath a back set of stairs, and for no amount of coaxing would they emerge. There they stayed for months to follow, in fact, until they were almost forgotten—for the fearsome scent of the Guild’s leader hung about the castle as if there to torment them.

Flux’s plan had been to exhaust the boar with the dogs, thereby disabling her, and then she was to be tossed into the boiling cauldron—along with various savories—and become dinner. It was to be a particularly vicious dinner, one of his greater triumphs.

But it was absent any hunting dogs nipping at her feet that Poppy made her grand entrance. She was a beast transformed, though: her hackles were raised and her lips pulled back in a grimace—snapping and snarling at the room full of spectators. Ivy kicked Rowan so hard he almost cried out.

“Artilla! What a thoughtful gift! What a treasure she is—look how she sits there with her teeth clenched and that cute snout all wrinkled up! Almost as if—” The King of Caux was on his feet, advancing on Poppy with great enthusiasm.

“Behold, the king does bravely battle the beast!” cheered the Diarist.

“Careful, dear,” Artilla warned. “This one appears to have a temper.”

“—almost as if she has something in her mouth! Why, look—she does! The boar has a bettle! A red one! Right here, in her teeth! Artilla, you’ve outdone yourself again!”

But there was no amount of cajoling to get Poppy to release her prize, and for his efforts, the king nearly lost a royal thumb. The queen was forced to suggest they just throw the animal into the pot and collect the bettle after supper.

“We’ll serve her with the red bettle stuffed in her mouth,” Queen Nightshade suggested. “Like an apple.”

At that, Rowan stood up and offered to try.

The room’s attention was directed at the trestleman’s taster, a taster who seemed uncommonly familiar with boars. The beast turned on him, and to Flux’s great delight, it seemed like he would soon be mauled. But, sadly, this taster apparently possessed some inexplicable talent for animal training, and the beast was soon clattering about his robes in excited circles.

As Rowan coaxed Poppy to release the hollow red bettle, Ivy had just the moment she had been waiting for. She approached the king’s cask of brandy, but the cork she had noticed earlier was gone, replaced with an odd, furry moss. It covered the entire oak barrel. With the room still enthralled by Poppy, Ivy began frantically pulling off clumps of the advancing greenery. Fistfuls of springy turf fell at her feet, and still she could see no opening. And then—there it was! With
a surge of relief, she flicked open her garish red ring and introduced its contents to the barrel.

And as the king examined the unusual bettle, he was reminded again of his own thirst. He poured himself a glass and, inspecting it, swallowed heartily. The guests were served.

“Now, this really does call for a toast!” He wondered whether he might ad-lib in light of the new events.

Along with the encroaching green moss, something ever so odd was happening around the walls of the room. Cecil Manx’s mutterings were having their intended effect. It was all but unnoticed by the partygoers—a vague tingling of movement from the corner. Ripples of air seemed to gather and disperse in secretive ways, centering around the tapestries. Other things, too. A spotted red toadstool that Ivy was sure she’d seen in the woven fabric suddenly popped up larger than life beside the king’s plate. (The toad made himself happily at home beneath its fluted edges.) A tidy growth of violets bloomed from Rowan’s drinking glass, and a lively carpet of yellow cinquefoils burst up at her feet. Yet no one found this remarkable.

While everyone quenched their thirst from crystal goblets, Ivy caught her uncle’s eye again—this time for longer, and she was rewarded with a slight, yet distinct, smile. And she was reminded of one of the things she knew about apotheopathy The Good King Verdigris had also been an apotheopath, like her uncle, and perhaps her uncle was not as distant from the
king’s magic as the rest of them. Hadn’t Clothilde said he was a Master Apotheopath?

King Nightshade, meanwhile, thought it high time to reward the group with his newly penned poem and was rising from his makeshift throne unsteadily to do so. He unfurled his long parchment and cleared his throat—as he did, Ivy saw a cloud of small flies emerge from his mouth.

The woods were invading from the tapestry.

The king’s beard was sprouting twigs and small branches, his shoulders a nest of leaves. A hairy spider wove a web on the queen’s crown, crawling across her ivory face. Even Peps was not immune—a fiddlehead fern had sprouted from his tailored buttonhole and was unfurling its spiraled head.

King Nightshade cleared his throat to begin his composition, one so terrible he had himself been made ill while writing it. He raised his glass to his wife to begin.

Thankfully, Ivy would never hear this composition of the king’s or any other, for it was then that her potion, mixed with the potent brandywine, chose to work. King Nightshade sagged backward into his temporary throne, quite comfortably and slowly, while the rest of the table succumbed to the intense sleeping draught she’d concocted in Gudgeon’s kitchen with the stolen nightman’s skullcap.

Where before there was lively conversation, now a simple chorus of snores. Peps and Rowan leaned cozily on each other, draped in a blanket of pine needles. The queen’s mouth sagged open and soon became a nest for honeybees. Her terrible lady friends withered and cracked as their pale skin was transformed into birch bark.

Cecil’s mutterings had ceased, and he sat placidly regarding the slumber party.

Yet two remained at the table who, like Ivy Manx, did not sleep.

Verjouce had not drifted off, having the only palate sharp enough to detect Ivy’s concoction. And Sorrel Flux was wide awake; having noticed his former master not partaking of the beverage, he had wisely abstained as well. And Flux was looking evilly at Ivy.

It was old magic—potent Verdigris magic—that was in the air. It was dissolving the very borders between woolen pictorial gardens and the dining room. The room seemed to wiggle and pop with invisible currents.

Moss grew up quickly over the place settings and crystal goblets. And into the queen’s coiffed hair. For his part, the king’s antlers had lost most of their golden luster and were returning to their natural state, covered in a springy fuzz. Sorrel Flux, a man already jaundiced, grew a mane of yellow marigolds from the folds of his turkey neck.

Then, from an outcropping in the tapestry, came the bindweed, and it snaked itself up the chair legs, fastening the various guests’ legs to their chairs, moving on to their arms.
Verjouce, blind to his plight, was the first to feel himself secured to his seat by the snaking vegetation.

The forest had emerged from the tapestry quite completely.

In the end, a few of the guests opened their mouths—perhaps in vague protest—but nothing was heard but a cricket’s
chirp-chirp-chirp
. The queen, murmuring contentedly in her sleep, sounded vaguely like a guppy.

“Really, Flux,” Verjouce chastised after a moment of silence. “You surely overdid the narcissus on the snails. I thought over the years you might have learned something of the value of delicacy from me.”

“You think I learned anything but servitude from you?” he snarled.

“So ungrateful.”

Flux, with his position furthest from the wall, had managed to fend off the encroaching bindweed—the longer it was growing, the thicker it became and the more securely it was restraining its victims. He stood haughtily.

“You blind fool—it is I who shall succeed tonight! You can make merry while I make for better lands. I’ve found the Doorway, you worthless conjurer. The Pimcaux Doorway! And it’s mine.”

Ivy was on her feet, running over to King Nightshade’s sleeping form. A small red-crested woodpecker was at work
on his right antler. She uncurled his hand and reclaimed her red bettle and was immediately infused with a warm sense of well-being. Taking advantage of the growing disagreement between teacher and pupil, Ivy snuck over to her uncle.

“Cecil!” Ivy whispered urgently. “Tell me how I cure the king!”

Verjouce was sufficiently bound that turning his head was impossible—but a blind man need not have bothered. His ears performed better than most, and he had not missed the fact that a young girl was calling the prisoner apotheopath by a name he well knew. A name that at one time was very familiar to him. The Guild’s Director realized the child he sought, the child Flux had allowed to slip through his fingers, was in the very room.

“Not that king,” Cecil said evenly. He, too, was being quickly anchored in place by the weeds.

“What do you mean?” Ivy cried, skirting a vine. “Axle said—”

“Not King Nightshade. The
other
king.”

“What other king?” Ivy was at a loss, searching the crowded woody room.

“The real king—
King Verdigris
. You are meant to cure King Verdigris, Ivy.” The calmness of his voice was helping Ivy not to panic but was having the opposite effect on Vidal Verjouce, who began struggling mightily against his bonds.

“King Verdigris is alive? Where?” Ivy was both stunned and relieved.

“In Pimcaux,” Cecil replied more urgently. “You must go!” Sorrel Flux was at the door, a wake of orange petals floating in the air behind him.

“Follow Flux!”

It was here that Sorrel Flux’s enthusiasm for eliminating sentries (and everyone else who got in his way) caught up with him. Had he kept but just a few to patrol the castle’s grounds, they would have stopped the surprised threesome who greeted Flux now as he flung open one side of the immense arched doors.

But as it was, Flux was a man on a mission, and nothing could stop him.

Not the Outrider whom Flux nearly ran into. Not his prisoner, the tall and royal Clothilde. And certainly not the diminutive trestleman by the side of her red skirts.