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) (30 page)

“Georgiana Segunda,” Tiny Doom said. “She was a crush, Grandmamma. A real stunner.” She was making a beeline for the fireplace. Following her, I tripped over a discarded shoe, twisting my ankle and muffling a curse. Tiny Doom turned to glare at me.

“What you do, Tiny Doom?” a small grating voice said, and we both froze. The voice came from the buffet. There, lying in the middle of an enormous tray of shrimp, looking bloated and picking his teeth, was a merman the size of a small house cat. A familiar merman. In fact, the exact same water elemental who, on my previous visit to Bilskinir House, had tried to persuade Udo and me that Paimon was going to eat us for dinner, thus inspiring us to flee from Paimon like giant idiotic snapperheads. Alfonzo something-or-other.

“Quien es su amiga
?” Alfonzo asked. His fancy black jacket was smeared with shrimp sauce. He flipped his frilly red tail and ate another shrimp, without bothering to peel it.

Tiny Doom gave me a pointed look meaning
keep yer yip shut
and said, “Think you’ve had enough shrimp, Alfonzo?”

“Think you’ve had enough lip,
chica?”
Alfonzo said. “You are supposed to be watching the show—
muy bueno
—not wandering about causing trouble.
El jefe
will be—” His voice vanished suddenly as Tiny Doom slapped the bowl of shrimp sauce over him.

she said. The inside of the bowl filled briefly with bluish vapor, and when the vapor cleared, there was Alfonzo, coated with sauce, snoring.

“What did you do?” I asked, slightly in awe of how quickly all this had happened. Tiny Doom certainly didn’t hesitate much; she decided and she acted.

"Put him into a little snooze. He’s a fiking sneak, Alfonzo is, one of Hardhands’s little snitches. You can bet that he’d be off like a shot to tattle. Well, the little pumpion can tattle to my darling husband all he wants when he wakes up—by then we’ll be long gone. Come on.”

We were almost to the glass doors when her words sank in.

Darling husband.

I skidded to a halt. Hardhands was Tiny Doom’s husband. As far as I had ever heard, Hardhands only had one wife, Cyrenacia Brakespeare—

Awful understanding turned my blood to water.

Tiny Doom was the Butcher Brakespeare.

O
F COURSE
Tiny Doom wasn’t the Butcher Brakespeare yet. Right now, in this time, she was just a kid, slightly older than me, already rather sour. But she was going to grow up and become the Butcher Brakespeare, whose crimes were legendary and almost too long to list. Forgery, murder, treachery, treason, necromancy, grand theft—she’d done it all. If the Birdies hadn’t executed her, the Warlord would have; they just saved him the trouble.

The Butcher Brakespeare, she whose memory was now a rallying point for all who wished to see the City descend into chaos and mayhem. And Poppy’s long-lost lover, whom he’d been mourning for as long as I could remember, unable to break away from her spell, whom he had loved more than Mamma, than Idden, than me. Whose death had made him mad and drunken—

“Come on! Hurry up!” The Butcher hissed, and I followed her, because I wasn’t sure what else to do. Clearly, ranger or not, I shouldn’t trust her. Yet, I needed her help, and for that I
had
to trust her. For the moment.

We reached the safety of the glass doors and passed into the cool night air. After discarding our masks by throwing them into a fountain, we crossed the dark expanse of Bilskinir’s Great Lawn, scattering the huddling sheep, and went into the trees beyond. The pathway was narrow, barely a path at all, the ground rough with roots, the way thick with slappy tree branches. No one had come this way in a very long time, I wagered.

“This isn’t the way to the Cloakroom of the Abyss,” I said. Maybe she wasn’t leading me to the Cloakroom at all, but into a trap. No, that was stupid. Why would she rescue me just to trick me?

She held a branch back for me so I could slip by. “Who said we were going to the Cloakroom of the Abyss?”

“Didn’t you say that the
Diario
was buried with Georgiana Segunda?”

“Ayah, but I never said Georgiana was buried in the Cloakroom.” She put her finger to her lips. “Silent and secret.”

So, silent and secretly, we crept along, and as we went, I kept sneaking glances at the Butcher out of the corner of my eye. It was awfully hard to reconcile this ordinary girl with the notorious Butcher Brakespeare, she who they called Azota, the Whip, for her habit of flogging people who didn’t agree with her. This girl was crabby and a bit hateful (at least as far as Hardhands was concerned), but otherwise was actually pretty cool. And certainly brave and intrepid. But she couldn’t compare to Mamma, who is a hundred times more beautiful, and braver and stronger, too. Clearly, the Butcher had somehow enscorcelled Poppy—maybe even used a sigil on him. Otherwise, his preferring the Butcher over Mamma just didn’t make any sense.

The Butcher had been trying to scry her future—but she wouldn’t want to know.
Sometimes it’s better to be blissful and ignorant,
said Nini Mo. Never more so in this case. She might be happy to know she would get her revenge on Hardhands, but she certainly had nothing else to look forward to. She was never going to be a ranger. Now I saw exactly why Nini Mo had counseled against trying to discover your future: How would you go on if it was only bad?

The Butcher was a dark shape before me. She muttered
and an Ignis Light flared, turning the branches above into the darkened arch of a tunnel. The roaring pound of the surf grew louder. The Butcher stopped suddenly, and I careened into her, grabbing on to her as I did. I fell back, pulling her with me, and landed hard on my hinder, the Butcher
oo
fing on top of me.

“Thanks,” she said, pulling herself up. “Fike, I think I just lost a year off my life.”

I pulled myself up and looked beyond her; my stomach dropped into the very bottom of my boots. The path had vanished. We were standing on the edge of a cliff, before a void of air. Below us, waves beat angrily upon the jagged rocks. We were, I guessed, looking north, for we had a magnificent view of the Gate, the silvery flow of the water moving from the freedom of the open ocean to the captivity of the Bay Lights gleamed on the dark land rising up on either side of the Gate: Fort Point and Fort Gun. Ahead of us, the Potato Patch surged and foamed. A tiny light twinkled: the Chicken Point lighthouse, on the other side of the Gate.

The Butcher was shouting at me, but the buffeting wind and the water’s thunder tore her words away. I leaned forward and her lips were warm against my ear; her breath smelled of applejack and tobacco.

“My mother jumped off this cliff!”

I jerked back. The more I was around the Haðraaða family the more ordinary and happy my own family seemed. Murder, suicide, madness: It seemed there was no vice that the Haðraaðas had not dabbled in. Perhaps it was a good thing that the family line had died out. The Fyrdaacas are sometimes insane, and often high-strung. They sometimes die in foolish accidents, and they occasionally murder someone—but they do not murder each other, nor do they murder themselves. No wonder the Butcher had turned out the way she did. Blood will win out, no matter what.

The path had not actually disappeared. It had merely turned to follow the cliff top, and so did we, carefully, for one misstep would terminate us and the expedition both. It was slippery, sweaty going, but at least we had the Butcher’s coldfire light to guide us, and the light of the moon riding high above us. We grabbed at the branches and trunks of the stunted pine trees that were encroaching upon the pathway, and our feet dislodged rocks that spun out over empty air and disappeared into the foam below. Finally, the path turned back into thick brush, and I was glad to exchange the chance of slippery death for the surety of slappy branches.

Then the branches were gone, the path was gone, and we stood on smooth manicured grass. A perfectly manicured hedge stood before us, as solid as a wall. Its tightly woven branches reared up, impenetrable.

“The Great Maze,” the Butcher said. “Georgiana Segunda’s tomb is in the middle of it.”

“You didn’t tell me there was a maze!”

“Grandmamma was the Pontifexa of Califa. Did you think she’d just have a tomb like anybody else? A slab and a bunch of flowers? A welcome mat for any grave robber? A bier upon which she’d lie like a side of meat?”

“The other Haðraaðas do—”

“Grandmamma is special! Anyway, don’t fret. I am a Haðraaða; of course, I know the way.” And with that, the Butcher plunged ahead, and it was follow or be left behind. I followed, and soon discovered that, well, of
course
the Butcher knew the way, for it was marked clearly with fluorescent blazes at every turn. You’d have to be blind not to be able to follow the markings, and it made me wonder why you would have a maze at all if you were going to point the way to the center.

The hedges were a tight squeeze, and the branches prickled as we pushed through them. Paimon had not been attending to his gardening duty here, because in some places the branches had almost grown together and obscured the way altogether. But we sucked it in and pushed, and ignored the scratching, and on we went, through the twists and turns. Sometimes the pathway sloped down, sometimes up. Sometimes we passed intersections I could have sworn we had passed through before, but the blaze had moved: Before it had indicated right, now left.

Califa, I was tired. What I wouldn’t give for a nice long nap. Or, barring that, a ginormous-huge coffee.
You can sleep when you are dead,
said Nini Mo, and the Butcher didn’t show any signs of fatigue, so I forced myself to stumble on after her, lifting leaden feet smartly and stifling my yawns.

“How far is it to the middle?” I asked, after it seemed as though we’d been walking for hours. “Are you sure we aren’t lost? We keep passing the same intersections.”

“You just think that—that’s part of the maze’s magick,” the Butcher said. “Anyway, we’re almost there. Smell that?”

I sniffed deeply I
did
smell something, something earthy and spicy, something that on the top smelled rather like ginger cookies but underneath had the unpleasant metallic tang of decay.

“Funeral incense and death,” the Butcher said. “Pig’s favorite smell.”

Pig was riding in the Butcher’s knapsack; as she moved in front of me, I could just see the pink tip of his snout sticking out from under the top flap. A few more twists and turns, and then suddenly the hedge fell away Before us, in the clearing, sat a huge black object.

Georgiana Haðraaða’s tomb.

A
BLACK OBSIDIAN
plinth sat in the middle of the grassy clearing. Upon the plinth sat a massive black sarcophagus. Upon
that
sat a stone pillow painted to look like red satin. Upon
that
sat a pudgy wirehaired terrier. Remembering the Haðraaða corpses in the Cloakroom of the Abyss, I was willing to bet that although this terrier looked asleep, it was actually dead.

“The
Diario
is inside the sarcophagus,” the Butcher said. “With Grandmamma.”

Before, I had decried the Haðraaða habit of exhibiting their corpses in the open air. Now, looking at that colossal marble lid that surely weighed a colossal heavy weight, I rather thought that the open-air habit was a pretty good one.

“How we are going to get that lid off?” I said, aware that a bit of a whine was creeping into my voice but not caring. Every time I thought things would be smooth sailing, the water got rough again. No one said rangering would be easy, but this was getting ridiculous.

“Oh, that’s easy,” the Butcher said. “We’ll just invoke some leverage, and Pig will help.” She popped Pig out of her knapsack and held him up. He looked about as strong as a bowl of blancmange. In fact, he seemed the very definition of flabby. But then, he had almost eaten that kakodæmon, so he had to be stronger than he looked. She tossed him, and he landed with a
plop
on top of the sarcophagus.

The Butcher clambered up on the plinth. She balanced on the narrow edge and extended a hand down to me, which I ignored, because it wasn’t that high up—only about four feet or so. I hopped and huffed and pulled myself up, the marble cold against my skin. The plinth made a tablelike support for the sarcophagus, which was shaped very much like a tea caddy.