"Cass said something about a duel." Harry announced.
Ermont raised an eyebrow.
"Said something?" Melora asked him. "Like what exactly?"
She was nominally in charge of garden security simply because her boss Tibbs was afraid of everything except possibly papercuts, Noglin was far too diminutive to be imposing, and Gert was a little too old to be chasing after miscreants, though she would have had your head if you implied as much in her hearing.
"You don't think its exaggerating, do you?" Ermont asked him.
Harry very nearly swallowed his tongue at being addressed by his crush. He promptly looked to Melora for help.
"Um no?" Harry said, "Cass said that someone was mad that it was spreading rumors and well, that was hardly its fault. He was just repeating what he'd heard. She went berserk."
"She?" Ermont said. Normally, the females of his acquaintance were far more level-headed. Or perhaps that was only his experience with them.
"Yeah," Harry continued, "I don't know her. I know her cousin. Or at least, we've never officially met but she hangs around here a lot. Has a plant name. But like....it's not a common one. Not like Lily or Rose or something."
"Sorrel." Melora said, trying to suppress a wince. Sorrel's cousins, the d'Arque family, were part of a family that ran a notorious crime syndicate.
"That's the one!" Harry enthusiastically agreed.
Ermont frowned. "Yeah, but she's not...." He paused trying to come up with the word. He could think of it in his mother tongue but couldn't remember the phrase or words in human terms.
"Not combative." Melora finished for him. Ermont shrugged.
"Well, she is still going to be one of the seconds," Harry said, "From what I understand. But..."
Melora sighed. Dealing with the sentient vine was probably one of her least favorite duties as an Assistant Royal Gardener. She usually could foist the job off on one of the other interns, but Cass always managed to confuse Harry to the point he stopped making sense and Harry was the only one on the schedule for today.
"I think I better go have a talk with Cass." She concluded.
"Better you than me." Ermont said, with a look of relief on his face. It occurred to Melora that he was probably glad she hadn't asked him to help.
"Come on, Harry." Melora said, resigned to her fate, "Let's go see what Cass has to say for itself."
She started off across the garden to Cass' last known location, by Greenhouse 2, which was one of the more popular spots as it housed the garden's tropical collections. The glass building was bright, airy, warm, and sometimes quite humid. It was also full of exotic orchids and plants from the highest plateaus in the world. There were also numerous benches where the courtiers could sit and chat. Plus, there wasn't anything in Greenhouse 2 that was dangerous at all.
Unless of course, you counted Cass lurking by the entrance and Melora generally did. There was a reason that Whispering Vines were almost extinct. Probably because people eventually got fed up with them and had destroyed them in great numbers over the centuries. Or at least that was what she'd always supposed. Otherwise, they might have been considered reasonably attractive plants.
Cass itself generally looked like a cross between an ordinary clematis and a Mexican sunflower. It was a vine with many large, bluish-purple eyes that could be mistaken for flowers, medium sized green leaves, and a voice box in the center that was like an oversized slipper orchid that also matched its many eyes if you could see it. Normally Cass' voice box was invisible, much like a human's larynx, as it was covered with leaves much the same way as a person's throat. It also hid what passed in Cass for a brain.
During the fall months on a biannual basis, Cass also produced savory smelling, striped yellow-green pods that looked like orchids and that some people claimed smelled like barbeque. Melora concluded to herself that probably why the Cannibal Plants smelled like bacon.
Sure enough, there was the extremely large blue and gold enamel pot that contained Cass, complete with its matching gilded trellis. Only the best for Cass, after all, since most courtiers rather liked the obnoxious vine and they had enough money to throw away on frivolous things like fancy ceramics when an ordinary container would have done just as well. Either that or it had bribed someone, Melora thought to herself.
Cass clearly had seen her coming with one of its many eyes, which were usually swiveled in every conceivable direction, and all of them turned directly to look at Melora and Harry, who had been trailing in her wake. After all, according to Ermont who had studied other Whispering Vines, they had no hearing but could sometimes feel the vibrations on the ground of people and animals approaching.
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"What's this I hear about a duel?" Melora asked Cass, knowing that its attention was firmly fixed on her.
"A duel." Cass repeated.
"Yes, a duel." Melora said, "Or were you winding Harry up?"
Cass rustled its leaves, which was indication that it didn't know, didn't remember or that it was pretending either one of those things. But Melora thought she heard it hiss something like "snitch" at Harry.
"I don't remember anything about a duel." It said, after a lengthy pause.
"Or you don't want to tell me?" Melora countered.
"Why wouldn't I tell you?" Cass replied, "And, as you probably already know Mel, I've been meaning to speak with you."
"About what?" Melora asked, suspecting that she was going to regret it. In fact, she already did. She just wondered what this was going to be about. Hopefully, it wasn't that Cass wanted a newer, more festive or decorative pot for the upcoming Royal Garden Party that took place every summer. Repotting Cass was a recipe for a migraine since it was so persnickety.
"Noglin's been spraying faerit dust again." Cass said. "And you know I'm allergic. Plus, that monster of Gert's eats just about everything it can fit in its evil jaws."
"It's a puppy, Cass." Melora said, "They chew on stuff. It's kind of what they do."
"It tried to eat Sidonie." Cass pointed out, rather indignantly.
Melora sighed. Sidonie was the other sentient plant at Verdant Acres and it had been here long before there had even been a royal garden or even a city. Sidonie had been an experiment by a sorcerer who had been living in the area in what had been a forest many centuries earlier.
"That's probably because Sidonie looks like a stick." Harry said, causing all of Cass' many eyes to veer wildly in his direction before fixating upon him. The effect could be disconcerting if you weren't accustomed to it and Harry took an involuntary step backwards.
"And dogs like sticks." Harry concluded.
"You don't even like Sidonie." Melora pointed out. According to Gert, who had been working in the gardens for over fifty years, Sidonie and Cass had been mortal enemies ever since Cass showed up some thirty odd years earlier. The only thing they had in common was their affection for the Cannibal Plants.
"No, but the point is that I'm allergic to faerit dust." Cass said, "I've got a rash and I'm dropping leaves like you wouldn't believe. How would you feel about something that made your hair fall out? And you know what it does to dogs, right?"
"Is it toxic? Or like lethal, or something?" Harry asked, nervously.
"It makes them glow in the dark." Melora said. "Kind of the point. Kills narid mites and makes other animals glow in the dark so Noglin can find and dispatch them, if necessary."
"You mean, like glow in the dark armadillos?" Harry said.
News to her. "What glow in the dark armadillos?" Melora asked.
"Nasty vermin." Cass muttered to itself.
"I thought I was seeing things." Harry continued, "You know I didn't sleep so good two nights ago and it got late and I thought I was hallucinating."
"Well, there are some plants that will do that to you," Cass said. "Not me, of course, but I hear that there are some in Greenhouse 5. If that's your pot of tea."
" But...I guess I wasn't?" Harry said, mostly to himself. "They really do exist."
Melora frowned. Armadillos in the garden were the last thing they needed. The mages normally maintained a spell that kept out larger pests. But perhaps it had stopped working. She'd have to talk with them later.
Cass rustled its leaves in a brisk manner that indicated fear.
"So now those vermin glow in the dark? That's the stuff of nightmares." Cass said, "I'll never get any rest out here, Mel. Maybe you should have one of the gardeners put me inside the greenhouse to protect me. I am, after all, a very valuable specimen."
"You're not a tropical plant." Melora pointed out.
"Inside the acrid greenhouse, of course." Cass said, sounding disgusted.
Of course he meant the one which was many acres away and almost completely on the other side of the garden. But it was the only one suitable for Cass, except the experimental lab, which it would have greatly preferred so it could annoy the scientists. And the last thing Melora wanted was for Cass to convince them to use its genetic material in any more of their experiments. The Cannibal Plants were bad enough.
"And how would you harass the courtiers then?" Melora asked, thinking this was a very good argument for Cass to stay right where it was.
"At least they like me." Cass said, rustling its leaves around a few times before it stopped. "I suppose I could go stay in the experimental habitat until this whole nasty business is sorted out."
It's eyes shifted colors, which often happened when it got a new idea, like a bunch of kaleidoscopes whirling from one shade to the next.
"At least then I could keep that stupid chef from trying to eat my relatives." Cass concluded.
He meant the Cannibal Plants, of course.
"How?" Harry asked, seeming confused by that statement. "You don't move on your own. I don't think, right?" He looked to Melora for confirmation and she nodded.
"Rude." Cass replied. "If you hadn't confined my roots, I could reach every corner of this garden easily."
"You're an invasive species, Cass." Melora pointed out. "We can't just let you wander around the garden like Sidonie."
"Whatever gave you that idea?" Cass said, "I'm not an invasive species."
"Um..." Harry frowned because he distinctly remembered the page in the Royal Garden Handbook about Whispering Vines, the one he was made to memorize before dealing with Cass. It distinctly said that under no circumstances was anyone allowed to actually plant Cass directly into the ground for that very reason.
Melora sighed. "Yes, you are. And because you've tried about twenty times in the past five years to get the interns to set you loose, there's a whole paragraph in the Garden Handbook that they now have to memorize before dealing with you."
Cass blinked its many eyes and seemed to be considering something.
"Don't even start with me." Melora warned it.
"Look Melora, maybe I do remember something about a duel," Cass said, "And, of course I'll tell you. You know, in exchange for one tiny favor."
"Like what?"
"Nothing much, just front row seating at the Royal Garden Party. I hear Her Majesty is having her rare Bicentennial Plant brought in and it only blooms once every few hundred years." Cass said, "That's a misnomer, of course, but I'm sure it's a memorable spectacle, especially for short-lived human beings like yourselves."
Melora refrained from pointing out that typically Whispering Vines didn't usually live more than a hundred years, though some species were slightly longer lived than others. Perhaps Cass was unaware of its own mortality.
"I'll see what I can do." Melora assured it. "Now talk."
Cass rustled in agreement. "The duel is scheduled to take place tomorrow night when the clock strikes eleven. They're meeting under the Blood Rose Pavilion." It said.