Stargazy Pie by Victoria Goddard

Author:Victoria Goddard [Goddard, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Greenwing & Dart Book One
Publisher: Underhill Books
Published: 2016-01-23T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

“Well,” I said, with an attempt at sangfroid. “I don’t think I’ll be going to any of Dame Talgarth’s dinner parties any time soon.”

“What is Domina Ringley taking?” Mr. Dart said. “She looked … I don’t even know …”

Violet shook her head slowly, not in denial but in concern. “Jemis, she looks like you did when you were high on wireweed.”

“You tried wireweed?” Mr. Dart asked in astonishment.

“Not on purpose,” I replied, closing the door again and trying to avoid meeting anyone in the market’s eye. I looked back to see that Mr. Dart and Mrs. Etaris were both frowning mightily at me, while Violet looked distressed.

The courage of one’s convictions, I thought, and to say the truth … I sighed and crumpled my handkerchief in my hand. “It was when I tried smoking a pipe … it turned out someone had laced the tobacco with wireweed.”

Outside in the market square people were going about their business, carefully not looking at where Dame Talgarth and her sister were arguing between the statue of the Emperor Artorin and the memorial to the Fall. I’m sure they were all, however, paying close attention.

“What did it feel like?” Mr. Dart asked curiously. “People say it’s the most extraordinary feeling, all centred and focussed and utterly sure of oneself and exhilarated at the same time.”

“Maybe if you don’t take it with tobacco,” I said. “It was awful. I was sick for days.”

“You didn’t feel anything? She looked exhilarated. Exalted.”

I thought of the cold outhouse, the vomiting, the weak days in bed. Lark coming to see me, smiling at me, falling in love. That had been the exaltation, the transfiguration, the exhilaration. I swallowed against bile. “I am sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Dart.”

“Why take it, then?”

I shook my head, looking at a woman pushing through the crowd towards Dame Talgarth and Domina Ringley. Tall, stout, regal in her bearing, wearing a fashionable dress in this year’s colours, strong nose and cold blue eyes—yes, I thought, that could be the wizard attendant, hastening past us, nearly catching her skirts in the iron railing at the base of the Memorial—in which case—

“They say,” began Violet. The breeze swirled by and I sneezed; and was left shaking my head in mystification and annoyance that the thought I’d nearly had had slipped away in a sneeze, again.

“The Lady’s blessing upon you,” Violet said. She had been known to come up with the best benedictions to my sneezing of anybody but Hal, but her mind appeared now to be on other matters; when I turned to her she was frowning at her hands.

She continued: “They say that taking wireweed opens one to the spirit realms. Lark said—” She cast an apologetic glance at me. I shrugged, a bit despondently, and she continued. “Lark said that it’s used in some religions to forge a connection. Between the taker and the earth, or between two individuals if they take it together, or magically in some circumstances—and it augments certain types

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