The Tasters Guild by Susannah Appelbaum

she found herself thinking. Princess of Potions.
    With a shudder, she realized her error in thought. Surely this type of reasoning was what got Hemsen Dumbcane introuble to begin with! And, worse, she found that it reminded her of someone. Someone quite close to her.
    Her mother.
    Hadn’t Clothilde wished for herself the very glory of curing the King? Wasn’t she quite troubled that this was not her destiny?
    Ivy stood up in disgust, disturbing the vials and scales before her, her experiment upended.
    It was a fine thing that Ivy abandoned her tinkering then, for Rowan would not have been persuaded to ingest it. Rowan would not be persuaded to do much of anything—especially reveal the mysterious scarlet figure he had glimpsed that day. Such was his misery that he was determined to keep the incident to himself.

Chapter Twenty-three
Fog
    T he last thing they saw before the thick, rolling fog set in was a small iron trestle some ways above them, spanning the cliffs that now drew high on either side. It was a comforting sight. Even from below, Ivy could see the amber light of a fire dancing on the ceiling, and she thought of Axle’s lovely trestle beside her childhood home. And then, quite suddenly, there was only gray.
    This was a fog of some proportion. It had heft and body to its billowing wisps—and a smell of damp basements. It was, in fact, emanating from the Marcel, as the early cold snap pressed against the warmer river. It made Ivy tired, and finally, she went to bed.
    Stretching out upon the cot, and fighting Six for space, she opened the
Guide
. She found herself at a page at the rear of the reference work—a densely annotated section entitled “Appendix IVb: Dictionary of Symbols.” Upon it, the image of a snake consuming its own tail.
    Ivy read, thinking of the strange imagery from Dumbcane’s shop, the fantastical creatures. The golden door with this very same symbol.

    Ouroboros:
    A serpent consuming its tail. An obvious symbol for Taste, adopted by the Tasters’ Guild as their own, but harking back to a much earlier time.
    She had a feeling that there was more to this. She made anote to discuss the ouroboros with the
Field Guide
’s author at the very next opportunity.
    In the morning, Ivy awoke with the edge of the book imprinted upon her face. Something was different. The engines had ceased.

Chapter Twenty-four
The Snodgrass Toad
    T here was nothing at first, just the fog. Ivy was huddled on deck now with Axle and Peps when Rowan joined them. Trindle had slowed the boat to a near crawl and was forced to blare his foghorn dully.
    Then, as if a giant’s breath blew through, the fog shifted and rolled. It lay still listless on the earth and river, but above, enormous, hulking stanchions of heavy iron materialized as if from the ether. They dwarfed the
Trindletrip
. The passengers craned their necks at the black vertical trusses—the thick metal emerged from a cloud above only to return to it below, disappearing into the impenetrable fog. They were disembodied legs, eerie and immense.
    “The Toad,” Axle called to Trindle in the steerage compartment.
    Trindle cut the engines entirely and the boat bobbed along as if in a cloud, until in another breath the trestle’s supports were gone.
    Ivy heard herself gasp.
    From somewhere above, a clanging of metal against metal, and then silence.
    They were thankfully treated to another break in the fog, and as the shroud slowly lifted again, here and there blackness replaced the gray. There was now a body to those legs—a body of a trestle on a grim cloud, ghostly and ungrounded. It was completely unreachable.
    “It’s enormous!” she whispered.
    “Shh!” Axle held his finger to his lips and listened.
    Indeed, as Ivy waited, there came a clinking sound—at first very far off, but then definitely on approach.
    “Ah. You are in for a treat!” Axle was saying to Ivy and Rowan. “First-class service. Simply spectacular! The Toad is the pinnacle against