Free The Shepherd of Weeds by Susannah Appelbaum

it are only dreams of fire.
    Before he slipped away again, however, there was one other arrival.
    At the window—at first the small man thought it was another of those awful monkeys come to jeer at him—was a winged creature of the glossiest black. The crow cawed softly to the trestleman, and while the remainder of the room was distracted by ink, Shoo flew to the trestleman’s side and delivered the following message:
    Great enchantments are soon to be broken.
    And since Axle knew quite well that crows never lie, he was bolstered, determined to survive. He would begin with the dark, long night ahead.

Damp Idyll No. IV
    Axle’s study was suddenly quite crowded. It was home normally to the remnants of Caux’s finest literary achievements—what few books survived the awful fire ordered by Vidal Verjouce, a vast and messy desk, the trappings of a reclusive writer. But it was abandoned, and this showed distinctly in the disorder and chaos—as if the place had been turned upside down and shaken. Yet its intricate pulley system remained and crisscrossed the entire room along the low ceiling, and currently Lola, Fifi, and Gigi were forced to stoop to avoid it
.
    And now, with the arrival of their lost sister, Babette, the room had taken on a rather dramatic silence. Beneath the trestle, the frozen Marcel cracked harmonically, like the string of a cello, a hollowish noise of some distinction
.
    That Babette—the Mildew Sisters could not have failed to notice—had not experienced the ravages that they themselves had endured was a curiosity. And upon this very topic Lola could not help but comment
.
    “I say, Babette, how incredibly
well
you look!”
    Babette
did
look well. Especially before the current company. Her eyes sparkled, reflecting the prisms of dew that seemed to coat her cloud-spun ball gown. Her skin was pink in all the right places and her posture the picture of grace and purpose. But Babette’s face was unreadable, and it was this alone that gave Lola pause
.
    “
And who is this—your companion at the window?” Lola indicated the small transom, where, quite silently, a large black crow perched, unblinking
.
    A moment passed in silence
.
    “
Do say something, sister,” Lola urged nervously
.
    Babette coughed once, daintily, into her hand—a dry cough, that of coarse wool. And then she spoke
.
    “Look at you three,” Babette declared, to which the Mildew Sisters dropped their eyes to the floor miserably. “I thought perhaps to punish you for your treachery, but it seems that you have managed quite well on your own. I suppose being cursed by Nature, abandoned by one’s sisters, and rolled up and delivered to the king has its advantages after all.”
    The crow cawed and shook out his wings, shedding a few frayed black threads as he did
.
    “I’d say, in the end, you’ve gotten the better of the deal,” Lola managed to point out to a chorus of agreements by the other two. “Preserved in that tapestry for these long years.”
    On this Babette concurred. She then turned her attention to the room, the discarded pamphlets and disorderly stacks of manuscripts. It was a place steeped in sadness, a trestleman’s abandoned desk
.
    Approaching a hefty tome, Babette ran her otherwise delicate
finger—the tip of which was wizened and rough from her years of tapestry-making—along the book’s spine. But when Babette opened the ancient book, a puff of soft insects fluttered about languidly, an event that was followed with great gasps and horrified expressions from the four trespassers
.
    “M-moths!” Fifi stammered
.
    “Oh, get them away—horrid creatures!” Gigi complained
.
    “Well, of all things!” Lola attempted to quell her shaky voice. “There appears to be one upon my shoulder.…”
    “Oh!”
    “Here—oh, someone, do something before the thing does damage!” Gigi shrieked
.
    Babette clapped the book closed and came to the aid of Lola, brushing the moth aside with a brave flick of her