Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) (27 page)

Tiny Doom seemed to think I
was
rangery cool, even if I didn’t have a cool nickname or know how to fix my eyebrows. She obviously thought I was already a ranger. It made me feel a little bit bad to let that lie continue, but I had no choice: I had to return with the book—not only did the fate of the City rest on me, but how would Lord Axacaya respect me if I returned home empty-handed? I was confident Nini Mo would know how to get me home.

How fabulous it was to be with someone who so completely agreed with you on everything. Unlike
some
people, Tiny Doom didn’t argue with me or think my plan was stupid;
she
didn’t constantly talk about her hair;
she
made no unkind comments when I had a third helping of blueberry buckle (conjured up by Nursie and so yummy delicious—I was starving). In fact, she had a fourth helping herself.

While we were gussying ourselves up and eating the buckle, Tiny Doom explained the circumstances by which she had become Hardhands’s prisoner. As her braids indicated, she was in her third year at the Barracks, which is when you declare your regimental intentions. She’d declared for the Ranger Corps, but Hardhands, as Head of the House Haðraaða, had different ideas—Pigface, where had I heard
this
story before? He wanted her to go into his regiment, the Skinners—ugh! At least Mamma had never tried to force me there. When Tiny Doom had returned to Bilskinir for Hardhands’s birthday celebration, he’d tried to force her to recant her choice. She’d refused, so he had disinherited her and then locked her up so that she couldn’t tell anyone what he had done.
Anyone
in this case meant Nini Mo, “Who will never let him get away with this, believe me. When she finds out what he’s done, there’s gonna be trouble...”

Tiny Doom had many other things to say about Hardhands and his behavior, all unrepeatable. By the time she was done with her story, I was starting to feel rather glad to be a Fyrdraaca. Mamma is pretty tough, but I couldn’t imagine her actually disinheriting me, or locking me in a tower forever. I wondered that Tiny Doom’s parents let Hardhands treat her like that, but I suppose since he is the Head of their House, they had no choice. Poor Tiny Doom.

Tiny Doom told me all this as we hunkered down on the wooden canopy, waiting for the coast to be clear. Downstairs, Tiny Doom explained, Paimon was preparing for Hardhands’s birthday party, which sounded as though it would (had already?) put the Warlord’s birthday party to shame. The appointments were so lavish—chocolate fountains, flaming ice sculptures, etc.—that all of Paimon’s focus went on them. (That explained why Tiny Doom was able to try to scry the future without gaining his attention—and why the kakodæmon had not rung his bell.) The party would culminate in a performance by Hardhands’s band, and that would be our chance: Paimon’s attention would be so focused on amplifying the band—“The Tygers of Wrath play really fiking loud,” Tiny Doom said in disgust—that we would be able to snatch Georgiana Segunda’s
Diario.
“It’s buried with her, you know, and then we’ll make our getaway—”

“Tiny Doom! Tiny Doom!” Nursie’s voice interrupted.

“What?!” Tiny Doom said impatiently. She crawled across the blankets and peered over the edge of the canopy.

“He calls for you! The party is about to begin and you are required.”

“Didn’t you tell him I am sick?”

“I did, my dove, but he insisted.”

“I’m really sick—puking. He doesn’t want me puking on the Warlord, does he? Tell him that. Only nicely”

Nursie was insistent. “He is coming to see why you delay. Come down and I shall fix your hair and dress.”

Tiny Doom jumped as though she’d just been barbed by a stingray. “Fike! He is on his way? Hardhands is on his way?”

“Ayah, so, my darling.”

Tiny Doom looked at me wildly “Fike! If Hardhands sees you, or the mess, we’re screwed. Fike, you gotta hide—no, not here; he might hear you. The bathroom—get in the bathroom and lock the door so he can’t get in!”

We scrambled down into the day nursery, where Tiny Doom pushed me into the bathroom. She didn’t have to push me too hard. After all I’d heard about him, I had no desire to run into Hardhands in the flesh—I’d seen his corpse once, in the Cloakroom of the Abyss, and that glimpse was enough for me. Even dead, he was beautiful. But even dead he didn’t look like someone you’d want to cross.

“Your face!” I hissed, as Tiny Doom started to close the door on me. I threw her the soggy bear mask and she yanked it on. Her skirts were still a deflated mess of crinkled shocking-pink satin and her feet were bare, but at least her shiner was hidden.
That
would be impossible to explain.

“Silent and secret!” she warned me, pausing in the doorway.

“Silent and secret!” I answered back. As soon as the door was shut, I locked it and leaned against it. The last surviving candle had gone out, but the bathroom was suffused from above with a soft night-light glow. The ceiling was a deep velvety blue, the nighttime sky twinkling with silvery stars and the comforting warm shine of a full moon. A few wisps of coldfire vapor eddied, left over from the Working. Pig had returned to his throne; I picked him up and squeezed him. He was soft and friendly, and very reassuring. I crept to the door, but I didn’t need a glass to hear; every word was painfully audible.

“...downstairs, ready to receive the guests,” said a man’s deep voice. He sounded annoyed.

“I cry your pardon, Your Grace,” Tiny Doom answered. She sounded contrite. “I have a bad tummy I did not think your guests would enjoy me much if I had a bad tummy. Things keep coming up.”

“Tell Nursie to give you some of Madama Twanky’s Sel-Ray Psalts. No one shall pay you that much attention, Tiny Doom—I have spent much time in making sure of
that.
But I still want you there, and I shall expect you downstairs in five minutes, with your brightest smile on. This is the first time that the Warlord has visited Bilskinir, and we wish to give him a good accounting and show him welcome.”

“Ayah, sieur. I shall attend,” Tiny Doom said sullenly.

Footsteps leaving, and then, just as I was about to unlock the door, Hardhands said, “What’s that I smell? Have you been conjuring, Tiny Doom?”

“No. Of course not.”

“I hope you do not take advantage of Paimon’s distraction. But I fear—” Now the heavy footsteps were getting closer. “I have told you not to meddle in the Current. It is dangerous and you are inexperienced, and if the Warlord should discover that we have not abjured completely from the Art, it will not go down well.”

“I have not,” Tiny Doom repeated. “I haven’t done anything—”

“Then why do I see coldfire seeping out from underneath the bathroom door?”

I glanced down and saw, with horror, that pink tendrils of coldfire were swirling around the floor and, apparently, wafting under the door. I grabbed the nearest towel and stuffed it against the gap, but of course, soggy cotton can’t stop the flow of coldfire.

“It’s just steam from the bathtub,” Tiny Doom said, which had to be about the lamest excuse I had ever heard. In almost no way do coldfire mist and steam look similar. At least she was trying. I swished my kilts back and forth, trying to dissipate the fumes.

The doorknob rattled.

“Why is the bathroom door locked?” Hardhands demanded.

I didn’t hear Tiny Doom’s reply, if she made one; I was too busy looking for a place to hide. The bathtub wasn’t deep enough, and still full of Currenty water, anyway. Califa knew what would happen if I jumped in there.

“Is there someone inside? Who is in there?” The door thumped demandingly “You in there—open the door before I get Paimon up here!”

“I’m getting out of the bath. Just a minute,” I hollered. I snatched a towel up off the floor, threw it over my shoulders, and cracked the door wide enough to peer through. “Yes?”

“Who are you?” Hardhands asked. I could only see a sliver of him: the edge of a sangyn sleeve, a napkinlike cuff dripping with silver lace; a slice of sangyn frock coat, sangyn kilt and then jackboots, champagne shiny and beetle-black. “Come out where I can see you right this minute.”

“I’m not dressed,” I lied.

“Now! Or I’ll smash the door in.”

I hastily opened the door and slithered out, then slammed the door shut behind me, so that he shouldn’t see the mess. I remembered well the expression on the corpse Hardhands—cold, stiff, and forbidding. That look was downright friendly compared with now. Mamma has a Look that can make colonels cry I’ll bet that Hardhands could make the Goddess Califa herself cry. He was certainly having that effect upon me.

He stepped forward, pushing me aside, and opened the bathroom door. He looked at the coldfire-stained walls, the broken mirror, the sloshy bath. He turned around and looked at me, fully dressed and draped in a towel. He looked at Pig, nestled in my arms. Of the three of us, Pig was spotless and, therefore, appeared blameless. He looked and looked and didn’t say anything, and each second of his silence grew more and more ominous. My knees were starting to feel rather wobbly.

“Take off your mask,” he demanded and Tiny Doom did so, glaring right back at him, her lips as thin as wire.

He looked at her battered face, back to me, and then he said, very quietly, “What is going on here?”

“A kakodæmon came up the drain,” Tiny Doom said, but her lie didn’t sound enthusiastic, and therefore not particularly convincing. “It almost ate me. Pig saved me. Us.”

Hardhands turned his eyes slightly toward Pig, whose mouthless expression remained inscrutable. Somehow I had the feeling that Hardhands’s Look was making no impression on Pig. He turned the Look back upon me. “Who are you?”

My mind went utterly blank. Who was I? Where was I? Why was I?

“Uh-uh,” I stuttered.

“You stink of magick; I can smell the Gramatica in your blood; your blood is infested with Words. You don’t belong here. Yet, there’s something about you—” He stepped forward, sniffing, and gripped my face with one long white hand. His fingernails were painted a glittering silvery black, and a huge intaglio signet ring glittered on his forefinger. His grip was tight and pinchy, and strangely galvanic, too, as though the Current flowed through it. The urge to babble came on suddenly, but before I could give into it, Tiny Doom burst out wildly, “It was all her fault! Her idea! She thought we should try to scry the future on the Current—she opened a Vortex! I told her not to, but she did!”

I wrenched my face out of his grip and protested, “I did not! I did no such thing! I don’t know what she is talking about!”

“She did!” Tiny Doom said, almost hysterically.

Pernicious villain!

“Paimon,” Hardhands said in a quiet voice, so soft that it was almost a whisper. Upon my shoulders came a sudden crushing grip that I didn’t dare try to squirm out of, remembering only too vividly the needlelike qualities of Paimon’s long fingernails.

“How did she get in here?” Hardhands asked.

“She is not on the guest list,” Paimon answered. He was still behind me, and he didn’t sound very friendly.

“I invited her,” Tiny Doom said, pointing accusingly “But she tricked me: She said she was my friend, but she just wanted to get to Bilskinir’s power! She opened the Vortex! I tried to stop her, but she kicked me in the nose!”

My babbling protests were ignored, and Paimon’s grip grew painfully grippy. Though I twisted and turned, I could not wrench myself free.

“Dispose of her,” Hardhands said. “I don’t have time for this. I have guests to attend to, and you, madama”—and here he turned his iceberg gaze upon Tiny Doom—“I want you downstairs in five minutes. We shall discuss this later, after the party”

Before I could say more, or try to escape, or protest further, or blame it all on Tiny Doom, or threaten Hardhands, or beg for mercy, or do anything at all to save myself, Paimon had swung me aloft as though I weighed no more than a pancake. Pig bounced out of my arms and flew through the air, ears flapping, to Tiny Doom, who clutched him to her chest.

“Liar!” I shouted at Tiny Doom, as Paimon bore me off. “Snapperhead!”

The worst thing that can ever happen to a ranger had now happened to me.

I was caught.

D
OWN DOWN
, down, Paimon and I went, down a twisty turny staircase so narrow it was a wonder that his massive bulk could squeeze through. He had hefted me over his shoulder like a sack of corn, and the head bobbing, along with the twisty turning, was making my tum slosh alarmingly. Surely Paimon wouldn’t harm me, would he? He was my friend, wasn’t he? In the future he was my friend. Here and now, he was Hardhands’s servant, and bound to obey him.
Dispose of her,
Hardhands had said. What exactly did he mean by that?

“Paimon!” I said, my voice sputtering in time to the bouncing.
Clip-clop
went his hooves on the wooden steps—such dainty hooves upon which to balance such monstrousness. “Paimon, don’t you know me?”

“Alas, to my sorrow, I do, madama.”

“Then you know I meant no harm.”

“Is that true? What a mess you have created. It shall take me days to get all the coldfire scrubbed away. And your Vortex tore a giant hole in my integrity Who knows what might have come through. I could have been destroyed.”

“But it wasn’t my Vortex. I didn’t have anything to do with it. It was
her
Vortex. Tiny Doom. She just blamed it on me! It wasn’t my fault!” I must admit that a bit of blubbering may have crept into my voice, but then I did have quite a bit to blubber about, didn’t I? And I was exhausted, and out-of-place, and in a world of hurt. Who could blame me for feeling so woeful?

We were still going down. Either Bilskinir’s Nursery was in a tower as high as the sky, or we were headed for Bilskinir’s basement, and I hardly dared consider how far
down
that might be. Or what might be lurking there. Down, down. The wooden steps turned to a wooden floor. Down, down. Flowery carpet bloomed upon the wooden floor. More down, and then the wooden floor turned to sterile white tile.

Paimon turned me over and set me on my feet to face him. I had forgotten how monstrous his visage was: the blue electrified mustachios, the long curving tusks, the enormous fringy ears, the blue wrinkly snout. And the Look he was giving me made Hardhands’s earlier Look seem friendly by comparison. My skin flamed, blushing red with guilt. I tried to smile, but my lips felt numb.