The Tasters Guild by Susannah Appelbaum Page A

which all others are judged.”
    After what seemed to Ivy like an absurdly long time, a dark object was lowered beside the stern. It was an elevator of sorts, she realized. On it was a note.
    It read:
    No Vacancy
.
Go Away!
    “Go away?”
Peps was incredulous.
    Axle was still holding the offending note—written onimpeccable stationery with a fine script atop confirming the sender to be the Snodgrass Toad.
    “Who do they think they are?” Peps was working himself up into a froth of insult.
    “I suppose it is their right.” Axle shrugged.
    “They are a
hotel
, Axlerod. A hotel, no less, for
trestlemen.”
    At this, Ivy looked upward with renewed interest.
    Axle was feeling around in an inside pocket of his greatcoat for a pen, thinking perhaps a polite missive would gain their entry. A simple misunderstanding, he felt sure, and he would right it by explaining himself. He set about composing.
    Peps adjusted a flashy orange scarf, throwing it casually about his shoulders, and polished his signet ring. “Don’t bother! I will investigate this further.”
    And with that the small man hopped aboard the elevator.
    “No you don’t—not without me!” Axle admonished, joining his brother.
    Ivy, too, would not be left behind, and Rowan—Rowan under no circumstances wanted to be left anywhere with Six.
    Peps flipped an ancient-looking control, and the entire thing lurched upward.
    “Humph,” Peps complained, inspecting the drab inside. “Seems we’ve been relegated to the freight elevator.”

Chapter Twenty-five
No Vacancy
    T he Snodgrass Toad was a majestic and ornate trestle that harked back to an earlier time in Caux, a time when great things were built to last, if not to look at. A trestle hotel, it was big and grand, made from stone and wood and iron. A fancy place—inside. But from the exterior, the stone and wood and iron made up a hulking bridge, which spanned two sheer limestone cliffs in an ungraceful arc. The Toad threatened to either leap up and away or fall into the waters below, depending on the time of day you looked at it.
    The architects were baffled. Their designs—all seven hundred pages of them—called for elegant lines and graceful bends, but what they got was a place that would, when completed, look remarkably like a crouching toad straddling the waters below. They tore it down and began again, only to be rewarded with the same vision, only beastlier. It was plain that there was some sort of magic responsible—a spell, perhaps from a disgruntled alewife.
    Indeed, since alewives ruled over waterways, everyone knew their blessing was necessary to successfully complete any bridge or crossing. And the builders had neglected this one very important act: obtaining the alewives’ approval.
    Upon the trestle’s completion, wild snodgrass grew up in tufts atop its bulging roof, untamable, filling in every last detail of the toad’s silhouette. The sheer cliffs to either side and the waters below formed at this point in the river’s geology a sort of wind tunnel, and the Toad at times was even made to sound as if it groaned. But no matter—if indeed there was a curse from an unhappy alewife, she was thwarted in the end. The Snodgrass Toad became instantly famous and a wildly popular attraction, and soon all the people involved in the execution of the remarkable trestle would imagine that they had never meant it to appear any other way.
    As the lift made its slow, incremental progress up the underside of the expansive trestle, the group was silent. The trip was punctuated with worrying pauses, when the elevator would stop its ascent and hang aloft, twisting lazily—and then lurching back downward. Ivy gripped the worn brass rail that ran along the side of the interior, but that did little to alleviate the distress of the ride. There was some sort of thick green moss clinging to the underbelly of the trestle, and their journey seemed to be disrupting it. Large clumps of it dislodged from the damp