The Shepherd of Weeds (2 page)

A powerful king—or eleven-year-old Ivy Manx.

Ivy was a poisoner of some skill, and she soon found that her vast knowledge of herbs made her a remarkable healer. But her talents were mysterious and unpredictable, and a cure came with a hefty price: a visit to her father’s terrifying Mind
Garden. This was Verjouce’s realm, a dark destination found only in his ruined imagination, where nightmares thrived like weeds.

Ivy and her friend Rowan Truax entered Rocamadour by way of the dank sewers, and were welcomed by the revered Professor Breaux and his granddaughter, Rue. But a wrong turn down a twisted alley delivered Ivy to Irresistible Meals, the dreaded course taught by the subrector Snaith. Before the entire class in the vast lecture hall, Ivy was poisoned with scourge bracken. Risking everything, Rue saved her.

Sickened and feverish—but to Snaith’s utter disappointment, somehow still alive—Ivy arrived in Pimcaux, Caux’s sisterland. There, she recuperated atop the cheery lighthouse of the alewives—the banished companions of Caux’s trestlemen. Rowan was left to explore a nearby village. For his efforts, he was rewarded with a peculiar shop, eerie and abandoned, its inhabitants long gone. A weathered sign announced the place as once being the
Four Sisters Tapestries of the Ancients and Royal Haberdashery
.

Meanwhile, with the help of the alewife Wilhelmina and a pair of enormous seabirds, Ivy found the ailing King Verdigris. Unfortunately, she also found her wicked former taster, Sorrel Flux, who had adapted quite well to life in Pimcaux. Appallingly, Ivy’s mother, Clothilde, appeared to be under his command. King Verdigris, from his gruesome throne of hawthorns, issued Ivy a command. Giving his great-granddaughter
two strange stones—fruit pits—he told her to plant them in Caux.

Dismal, desperate—and pursued by Flux—Ivy and Rowan returned to Underwood, to their first glimmer of happiness. Ivy’s beloved crow, Shoo, had emerged from the enchanted tapestries, where, alongside a mysterious woman in white, he had been imprisoned.

But the reunion was to be a brief one. The Prophecy—the future of Caux—still rested heavily upon Ivy’s small shoulders. She had yet to cure the King, and time was running short—for the trestleman Axle, her wisest friend and the famed author of
The Field Guide to the Poisons of Caux
, had been captured. His was an existence of woe; the trestleman was being kept for the amusement of the Director in his chambers atop the dreaded spire in Rocamadour. And each day, Vidal Verjouce was growing stronger, his powers greater, and scourge bracken more tempestuous.

hrough a gate of jagged iron needles sat a decrepit brick building. At some point in its long life, the fence along the gate had endured a botched repair and was bandaged in places with barbwire, which sat rusting in sharp and dangerous clots. Behind it was a plot of rubble that could never be mistaken for a play yard, but in some sad coincidence was indeed just that. It was littered with stones, bits of broken glass, and scraps of rusting metal. The only visible toy was a small, weathered doll that sat headless and dejected. When there was a thin window in the brick building, long, uneven bars stretched across it. A faded sign announced this destination as a final one.

It was, in fact, a picture of perfect misery. But appearances did not matter for the Wayward Home for Indigent Orphans
and Invalid Hotel, as there were never any visitors (unless you were unfortunate enough to be an orphan or an invalid).

No visitors, that is, except tonight.

From somewhere up the battered pathway and in the general vicinity of the crippled entry, a blast of impatient knocking shook the old front door. And then,
rat-tat-tat-tat
, a second. From the stoop, in the silence that followed, there was an irritated complaint, a muffled swear, and the thud of a large package hitting the ground.

Stillness followed.

Above, the worn slate roof was the same color as the cold night sky, except where a yellow incision of moon was carved beside a crumpled weather vane. Dark thornbushes scraped against the old walls, making strange, unsettling whispers. Vines edged over the creaky windows in a tenuous green curtain.

Finally, the peeling wooden door opened just a crack and a slash of weak firelight escaped from the orphanage.

“Who goes there?” accused a falsetto voice, the matronly one of Mrs. Mulk. “We are not due for another delivery.” She attempted to close the door but found a stranger’s shoe to be preventing this. Examining the shoe, she saw it was of unusual quality—possessing an oily sheen—and terminated in a silk stocking that bagged upon a bony ankle. It wriggled, trapped. Mrs. Mulk narrowed her eyes, and contemplated squishing it.

“Wanda,” the visitor murmured.

It was a whisper of a word, and the darkness somehow made it more potent. The name—the softness of the letter
W
, the gasp of the final
da
—was a name of broken promises.

“Wanda,”
he said again.

The name stayed her hand.

“Who’s there?” the custodian hissed. She brought an eye thick with mascara to the opening and peered out. The tar upon her lashes clumped together rebelliously, and when she blinked, it threatened to seal her eye altogether in a gluey mass. “If you prefer your foot attached to your body, I suggest you remove it at once. Otherwise, it will become the property of the orphans and invalids in my care. They are, it just so happens, in need of a new toy.”

“Wanda. It’s me,” the nasally voice repeated, this time louder. It took on a pout. “Surely you have not forgotten?”

Mrs. Mulk thought for a moment. Few knew her by her given name.

Could it be? While
there was something familiar about the voice, there was something quite different, too—and it had been so long.

Times had changed in the kingdom of Caux. The Deadly Nightshades had been deposed, and while many in the land awaited news of their previous ruler, Good King Verdigris, a stubborn few hoped quietly—sinisterly—for the return of a more dangerous way of life.

Mrs. Mulk was one such person. She saw that now there were far fewer poisonings, and fewer poisonings meant fewer orphans. It was bad for business. Wanda Mulk did not like the current state of affairs in the least.

She thought for a moment, a name upon her lips.

“Sorrel?” Mrs. Mulk was suddenly tentative. “Dear Sorrel—Sorrel, is that really you?”

“Yes, Wanda. It’s me.”

The door was flung open and the generous form of the orphanage’s lone custodian filled the frame. Wanda Mulk greeted her old friend and cohort with a look of genuine pleasure. Theirs was a friendship born from great misfortune—not their own, but that of others.

“Oh, Sorrel!” Mrs. Mulk’s hands met at her bosom and her fingers laced and unlaced themselves in nervous expectation. Between them on the ground was a large and unwieldy package, wrapped tightly in an old rug and finished with rope.

“And, as usual, Wanda,” Sorrel Flux continued, “I come bearing gifts.”

n the parlor the orphan maker and orphan minder conversed in low tones while the package lay unopened at the bottom of the cellar stairs, beside a few crusted barrels of saltpeter in the tallow room. The reunion was punctuated with Mrs. Mulk’s muffled trills, Sorrel Flux’s nasal tones threading between. Soon the tinkling of glasses grew more boisterous, while—perhaps in a trick of the candlelight—the woven carpet that haphazardly wrapped Sorrel Flux’s gift seemed to pulse and swirl. It possessed a weave that was at once complex and captivating, and dark and discouraging, and, above all, ancient. But the years had not been kind, and the carpet was threadbare in places, and matted and overgrown in others—and the entire thing possessed an overwhelming odor of rotting vegetation.

While Sorrel Flux allowed himself the attentions of Mrs. Mulk, and liberal cupfuls of her sherry, he plotted the package’s demise. This came quite easily to the miserable taster, as his dislike of anyone other than himself was what commanded the weak pulse in his sallow wrists. He talked long into the night, quite happy to hear his own voice—dripping with vainglory and tinged with conceit.