The Shepherd of Weeds (23 page)

Poppy snapped at the treacherous hummingbird, but Aster got away—darting for the window in the nick of time, and with the resolution that a new plan was called for.

But alas, Aster had not failed entirely. Her visit had provided the distraction for which Flux had been waiting. The bored captive saw the pig playing with a bumblebee. Glancing quickly across the workshop, Flux casually reached into his waistcoat, finding the vial within its secret pocket. He then administered a deadly dose of its contents to the boar’s water bowl; the only evidence of his deed was a small, unlovely smile that played about his thin lips.

Outside, Aster’s heart beat even more rapidly than usual. She would need to rethink her plans—and quickly. Birds from the caucus had started appearing, dropping down from the sky, first a few, then several—and Aster knew that soon the air would be thick with wingbeats as the convention arrived.

The hummingbird decided to make for the Guild, for Rocamadour, ahead of the battle. Surely someone there would take interest in her warning.

he morning found Rowan again at his windowside vigil. He had slept fitfully, waking often, and with the sense of dread and disorientation that comes from being watched by unknown eyes.

Today, though, Rowan’s wait was to be rewarded—and more so than he could have ever imagined. For as he stared glumly out the palace window, the sky fell in. Or, more precisely, bits of it began raining down. Small, floating, feathered bits—blotting out the weak sun.

Where in one moment there was a pale blue satin sky, in the very next it seemed that dark holes occurred throughout, riddling its perfection—tearing at the very fabric of the firmament. The sky appeared a boiling black and was accompanied by a noise like that of a screeching train—a hundred screeching
trains—and Rowan’s panic was followed by the very real need to cover his ears.

The former taster’s heart sank, as he had been treated once to such a vision—an awful one, when dark, stinking vultures arrived to spy on him and Ivy upon the Knox. But Rowan quickly saw that these birds before him now were not vultures; they were in fact everything
but
vultures—birds of all shapes and sizes, fowl from all parts of Caux (and beyond!). More birds than he ever thought possible.

When he had recovered from his shock, he realized that all of the chatter had stopped at once, and he peeled his hands gingerly from the sides of his head.

The city below him was utterly, completely quiet.

A few brave citizens were beginning to peek their heads out of shuttered windows. A street sweeper, caught out at the onset and soon overwhelmed with birds himself, shook his broom free of a flock of sparrows and was tiptoeing to safety. An unlucky laundry line sagged beneath a colorful string of parakeets and clothespins. Signposts, streetlamps, lead gutters all sagged with the arrivals.

In the distance, Rowan could just make out Cecil, accompanied by several sentries and a small trestleman—Peps, he guessed. They had emerged from the workshop above the Apothecary to investigate.

Rowan ran for the door himself—nearly tripping over the small package from Grig that now awaited him. Congratulating
himself on his good fortune, he grabbed the packet eagerly, feeling as if he had been reunited with an old friend. Turning not to the street, but in the other direction, he ran away from the palace doors, up—through the nearest set of stairs that he knew would take him to the roof.

The stairs let out on a landing, and before him was a small, wooden door. Heart beating, head a mixture of both heavy and light, he wrenched open the wooden beam that secured the exit. He was treated next to a spectacular view of the great capital city. Templar stretched out before him, beneath its blanket of birds. Above, the satin-blue sky was restored.

He was on a small platform, low ramparts flanking him on three sides. The bird cover stretched as far as the eye could see. With his arrival, they held their perches, shifting their weight from foot to foot, thousands of wings patiently folded.

Rowan inspected the sky again. High above, there were two specks. These gently coasted, soaring on wide wings in ever-smaller circles.

The utter silence was broken only as Rowan opened his small canvas satchel from Grig and, with a familiar
whoosh
, released the tensed coils of wire and canvas that were his beloved springform wings.

Those of us who are made to walk the earth cast our eyes skyward, envy stirring in our hearts. For who among us has not dreamed of soaring effortlessly beside the clouds? But only creatures of the air are gifted with flight.

Rowan pushed this thought aside as he stood balancing on the low rampart, wings spread wide and glorious. He did not look down as he jumped. Instead, chin high, he let his feet depart the castle wall in a demonstration of utmost faith in Grig’s invention.

Air surged by his ears in a giddy rush, but soon—quite soon—it did not. It met resistance in the small, oiled scales of the wing’s partitions, and miraculously, Rowan found that he was rising with each flap of his arms. Soon he was high above the old palace, high above even the tallest flagpole on the towers. A feeling coursed through him—one of utter and complete fulfillment.

The springform wings had brought him safely to Ivy’s side in Rocamadour. And they would not fail again as he soared high above the city, the vision of two enormous albatrosses approaching, the reunion with his lost friend stirring in his heart.

“Rowan!” came a rejoicing shout upon the wind. “Rowan—is that really you? Why, look—you’ve got your wings!”

“Ivy!” Rowan banked sharply, a wonderful feeling of control as he steadied himself beside her. “Flux said you were dead!”

“Nonsense. Never felt better!” She smiled happily at her friend.

Rowan turned his head into the winter sun, so close now, the pale light overwhelmed his vision in a shock of force. After
a disorienting moment, he could see properly. He gasped. There was another girl atop the second seabird. “R-Rue?” In his surprise, for a horrid moment he felt his momentum stall, but some innate knowledge soon righted his balance. Rue smiled, waving.

“Rue! Why, look at you! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry!”

Rue, while her health was restored, was still clothed in Mrs. Mulk’s preferred orphan attire, and her hair was inelegantly chopped about her face. But her smile was the same—the one he remembered from the Guild’s dark lecture halls and her grandfather’s garden. Captivating.

Together, the three friends flew graceful circles, lower and lower, cutting through the light clouds and feeling their cool
caress as they descended. Rowan weaved happy figure eights between the two girls.

Klair and Lofft, wise old seabirds that they were, merely cocked their heads to examine the most unusual sight: a winged boy.

“Astral trespasser!” Klair called. “How does a boy grow wings?”

“You fly well, son,” Lofft decided. “Not like you fell from the nest too early. Who was your tutor?”

“Um, well. No one, sir,” Rowan admitted. He smiled as he gently cupped his wings inward to ease his landing, catching the air in a perfectly natural way, as if he’d been flying his entire life.

“And to think—landing is the hardest part.” Klair was admiring.

And here it was that Rowan thought it was some measure of his surprising day that he was conversing with a pair of giant albatrosses—and this was the least of his momentous experiences.

Ivy and her windswept group descended into the central square before Cecil’s Apothecary. A surge of excitement coursed through Ivy’s body as she watched her beloved city of Templar from this new vantage point. She could just make out the shock of gray hair that marked her uncle’s pate as he rushed to join the throng in the square. And was that Peps beside him? Had he really managed to escape Rocamadour?

But as she alighted from the back of the giant seabird with a bright smile for her uncle and the trestleman, she got nothing in return. Cecil Manx stood stock-still, a dazed look upon his face, and it was a point of question as to whether he had even acknowledged his niece’s arrival at all.

For this wisest of men was being treated to a very unusual sight.

This was not the hundreds of thousands of caucus members who fluttered and flapped, and draped the city in a curtain of feathers—although they were wonderment enough. No, what shocked the Master Apotheopath was another, even more astonishing arrival.

Lumpen Gorse stood before him, legs wide, determined chin held high, her yarrow stick thrown over one shoulder. A slight wind played about her burlap frocks.

And she was not alone.

Impossibly, she was accompanied by an endless array of scarecrows who crowded the Knox behind her. They had appeared silently, announced only with a vague rustling—like wind through grass. They settled into rows on the cobblestones as the birds fluttered to make room, and when they had exhausted the cobbles, they stood upon lampposts, flagpoles, rooftops—wherever space would have them. The scarecrows carried pitchforks and pointed sticks; a few had homemade bows slung over their shoulders. Their silent forms draped over the railings of the Knox, congregated in taverns, were propped against storefront windows and entranceways.

An eerie quiet washed over the city.

Ivy saw Jimson, her own scarecrow from the Hollow Bettle, nearby. Shoo was upon his shoulder. Squawking, the crow flapped noisily over to Ivy’s.

“Long live the Shepherd of Weeds!” Lumpen cried, raising her yarrow stick in the air.

The scarecrows stood silently, the wind their only reply.

But the silence ended there as the caucus erupted in their own welcome—and with that, Cecil blinked, and realized his niece stood smiling before him.

Looking around at the chaos, Cecil turned to the trestleman, bending down. “Well, Peps. Looks like we’ve got our army.”

“Indeed.” Peps’s eyes sparkled.

Cecil appraised the scarecrow throng. Hay, wild caraway, and clover buds burst from their overstuffed clothing.

The apotheopath was no stranger to the ancient ballads.

“An Army of Flowers, no less.” He smiled.

ow many are you?” Cecil asked Lumpen as she made her way forward to deliver the scroll from the folds of her dress.