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) (44 page)

Still flipping pancakes, Poppy said mildly, "Shall we call you Nyana then? Everyone will wonder why the change.”

I didn’t feel up to explaining any further, so I said, “Ayah, well, then, I’ll be Nyana disguised as Flora, but I won’t be Flora Segunda. Just plain Flora. You’d better remember that, Valefor.”

“I’ll try,” Valefor muttered. “Nyana!
That
certainly explains a lot.”

I ignored him and said to Poppy, “What if Mamma sees Valefor?”

“Hung for a sheep as well as for a lamb,” Poppy said, setting a plate of pancakes in front of me. I poured ginger syrup and began to wolf. If Poppy wanted to take on Mamma—let him. It was of no account to me.

Poppy sat down across from me. “Now, let’s have a little palaver. I’ve told Valefor that he can come down, as long as he behaves himself and keeps out of Buck’s way”

“I will, I will!” Valefor said happily.

“You’d better be careful with him, Poppy. He bites,” I said.

“I don’t think he’ll bite me, will you, Valefor?”

“No, of course not, Hotspur, I would never,” Valefor agreed. “What Buck doesn’t know can’t hurt us, ayah.”

“Did you tell Mamma what happened, Poppy?” I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, but I supposed I’d better. I hadn’t decided which was worse—that she didn’t know, or that she did and hadn’t said anything about it to me. Perhaps we were going to ignore everything; we are good, Fyrdraacas are, at ignoring things.

"No. I didn’t want to upset her.”

Ayah, ignoring. What did Haðraaðas do when they had family problems? Murder each other, I guessed.

"But Axacaya broke into our House! He tried to kill Flora!” Valefor protested.

Poppy replied, "Oh, I haven’t forgotten any of that, no fear. But if Buck finds out about his trespass and what he tried to do to Flora, she might do something rash.”

Poppy worried about someone doing something rash—what a joke.

"And that would ruin everything,” he continued. "Never fear, I’ll take care of Axacaya, but let’s let him cool down a bit, think he’s out of the woods. They take the blow harder when they don’t see it coming.” And then Poppy turned the conversation toward something else, and that was it. Subject closed. I thought of many things I wanted to say, but Poppy’s matter-of-fact tone when he said he would take care of Axacaya had been chilling, and it didn’t invite further comment.

After breakfast, on Poppy’s orders, I cleaned my room, folded a whole bunch of threadbare towels, helped Poppy carry the groceries in, and gave the dogs baths. All of this put me in an extremely bad mood. What was the point? I’d saved the City, come back from the dead, found out I was the Head of the House Haðraaða and I was still doing chores? Still hopping to Poppy’s tune? Still the same old Flora? Flora Segunda?

Since I had woken up from the fever, I had felt full of nothing. Now I was full of horrible thoughts—of running away to Bilskinir House, where no one could push me around. But as furious as I was, the thought of going to Bilskinir made my insides curl; I just couldn’t face that yet. I could run away to some other place where no one had ever heard of the Haðraaðas
or
the Fyrdraacas. Idden had scarpered, why couldn’t I? But where could I go alone? How would I live? What would I do?

I remembered what Nini Mo had said:
Success is all that counts.
By that measure I had been successful: I had saved the City, saved the Loliga, saved Udo. But despite all these successes, I felt like a failure. Nini Mo’s stories were all lies. I had failed in my attempt to find a Gramatica teacher. And I had been completely fooled by Axacaya. I was a gullible, idiotic fool.

Still in this awful mood, thinking these awful thoughts, I finally joined Poppy in the parlor for our lesson. Valefor was in the kitchen, happily polishing silver, and the dogs were in the back garden, chasing ducks. The parlor table was covered with books; clearly this was going to be a long lesson.

“Howdy, Pig,” Poppy said, when I sat down and put Pig on the chair next to me.

Pig didn’t answer, just looked at Poppy expressionlessly.

“You aren’t trying to tell me something, are you, Flora?” Poppy asked.

"What do you mean?”

"Bringing Pig to the party is like sitting down to play poker and putting your gun on the table. It sends a message.”

"I just like his company.” And I did. Even though he had shown no sign of life since Bilskinir, he made me feel safe.

"Pig’s always been good in a pinch. Azota had a lot of Will. Her sigils stick.”

At the mention of Tiny Doom’s other nickname, a tiny needle ran through my heart. Poppy had never mentioned her to me before. When he had still been drunk and crazy, it didn’t take much to set him off into catastrophic wailing. Was he going to erupt into a huge sorrowful meltdown?

He didn’t. He just said, quite calmly, "I started to suspect it when you came to me on the day of your Catorcena and told me off. You sounded exactly like she did when she was calling me on my crap. Which she did quite often, me so often being full of crap. I knew I was right when Pig arrived. There is only one Pig. There was only one reason Paimon would send him to you.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just stared at Poppy. He was sharpening a pencil, the long strokes of the knife curling up shreds of wood, not looking at me.

"You are probably pissed at your mother for not telling you. I was rather pissed myself. I still am, but actually I suppose I can’t blame Buck for feeling as though I was not a steady bet to keep a secret. I see her point—the fewer people who know, the better.”

“Why? Why does it have to be a secret?” My voice sounded cracked and high.

“The Birdies believe in doing things thoroughly, Flora. It’s not enough to condemn a prisoner and put her to death. If her crime is great enough, it pollutes her entire line, sours it. They didn’t just sentence Azota to death; they sentenced her entire family. Which would have included you, if they’d known about you.”

“But won’t they know now?” I squeaked. “Won’t Axacaya tell them?”

“Oh, I wager that he’ll keep this to himself for a while, while he tries to figure out how to use it to his advantage. He may be a Birdie himself and under their protection, but that don’t mean he’s happy about it. He chafes. He’d like to be free of them as much as we would—only for entirely different reasons. I don’t think he’s going to blab.”

“But what about his Quetzal guards? Aren’t they loyal to the Birdies?” I felt a pang at the thought of Axila Aguila. She’d been trying to kill me, but that didn’t make me feel any better.

“They’d blab, for sure, if any of them were alive to do so.” Poppy smiled wolfishly and I didn’t want to know any more. "Don’t fret, Flora. The Birdies aren’t going to get you. I’m not going to let them. Your mother—Buck—is not going to let them.”

"But why didn’t Mamma tell me?”

"I guess she thought she was protecting you.”

"But I have the right to know. I should know. She should have told me.”

"Ayah, that’s true. And now you know. What are you going to do about it?”

"I don’t know.” I wanted to confront Mamma, but I was afraid. Afraid of what she would say when she realized that I had been gulled by Axacaya, that I had given him ammunition against our family, that I had meddled in the Current. Afraid that she would drop the pretense of being my mother, and then what? What if she had lied about loving me, too? Soon there would a new Fyrdraaca. A real Fyrdraaca. Once Mamma had that baby, would she need me anymore?

"Well, you think about it, and let me know. And that brings me to something else, Flora...”

Uh-oh—here it came, finally Where Poppy lectured me about being a fool, and to forget about magick, forget about Gramatica, forget about being a ranger. Where Poppy got all grown-up and paternal and commanding-officer on me.

"The Current is dangerous and unpredictable. You can’t muck around in it; it’ll drag you in and drown you. And you are leaving tracks—traces—that any good magician will see. You have got to lie low, not send up signal flares letting everyone know where you are and what you are doing. Keep it cool, Flora, or Califa knows what’ll come sniffing around. Ayah?”

Poppy telling
me
to be more discreet! I said angrily “What do you know about magick, anyway, Poppy? Are you a ranger or not? What about that badge you gave me?”

“I’m a ranger in a manner of speaking. I wasn’t trained as a ranger, but toward the end, they needed all the help they could get. Delicacy ain’t my line, but I do know a few tricks. They recruited me, and I did what I could. So I guess you could call me a provisional ranger.”

“Does Mamma know?”

Another wolfish grin. “No.”

And then I could no longer contain that which had been most weighing on my mind, which seemed to have swelled in my brain until there was no room for anything else. “Don’t you love Mamma, Poppy?”

“Of course I do, Flora.”

“Then what about
her
?” I couldn’t say her name. It seemed stupid to keep calling her Tiny Doom, and Azota didn’t seem right, either, but I couldn’t call her Mamma.

“You can love two people at the same time in different ways, Flora. Buck and I were affianced in childhood, for our families’ sake. We did our duty and we married and loved each other. But Azota—” He broke off and looked down at the pencil he was twirling, round and round and round. "That was different. It didn’t make any difference between Buck and me. Your mother—Buck—understood. And you must not listen to the lies the Birdies spread about Azota; she wasn’t the monster they made her out to be. She was ... difficult ... but she wasn’t a monster.”

I waited for him to continue, but he just stared at the twirling pencil. There was much I still wanted to say: How could he not know about me? How did Tiny Doom smuggle me out? Where was I really born? How much magick did he know? How did he find out that Axacaya was after me? But the questions were stuck in my throat. We sat in silence for a few minutes, and he just kept twirling that pencil until I wanted to grab it out of his hand and stick it in his eye.

Finally, Poppy put the pencil down and said brightly, "Well, then, did you read chapter eight of Captain Kotz’s
Customs of the Service for Non-Commissioned Officers
as I requested?”

"No.”

"Well, I suppose it don’t really matter. I never liked Kotz; he was the most stuck-up pumpion I’ve ever met. He preferred charges against me once for whistling too loudly on the front porch of Building Fifty-six. What a whey-faced prune. So, good-bye, Kotz.” Poppy picked up the book and tossed it away; it landed on the sofa next to Flynn, who half jumped out of his skin.

“How about chapter nine of
Hardel’s Tactics?
”

“No.”

“Massey’s
Gunner’s Handbook?”

“No.”

“Chapter one of
The Morphology of Littoral Languages and Their Cognates
?”

“No.” I’d never even heard of that book. What the fike was a littoral language?

“Well, it would have been amazing if you had, Flora. Valefor!”

“Ayah?” Valefor’s disembodied voice answered querulously. “What do you want? You interrupted my spoon count and I shall have to start all over again now.”

“Valefor,” Poppy said quietly. “Would you please bring me Thornton’s
Morphology
and Xing’s
Didactic Grammar?”

“They are proscribed, in my Special Collection—”

“Valefor.”

With a thump, two fat books materialized on the table. “Anything else?” Valefor’s still-disembodied voice asked, in a much nicer tone this time.

“No, thanks. Don’t forget to polish the pickle forks.”

“Ha!”

Poppy cleared the table, then pushed the top book toward me. It was as thick as two redboxes stacked on each other, and the elaborately tooled leather cover was locked with a gold hasp. A faint galvanic burr was coming from the book, low and steady, like the purr of a cat.

“I’m not fluent,” Poppy was saying, “but I know enough to get you started. If you are going to muck about, you’d better know what you are doing. Be able to cover your tracks. If you are not with us, Flora, you are against us. I hope you will be with us.”

I looked up at him, startled, remembering Nini Mo saying the exact same thing. Poppy smiled faintly and nodded toward the book. I undid the hasp and heaved the book open to the title page, which at first appeared to be blank. Then tiny, sparkling glyphs began to scroll across the page.

Gramatica.

L
ATER
, P
OPPY WENT
out to take care of the horses, and I headed toward my bedroom, to take a nap, my head spinning, my tongue still buzzing from my first lesson in Gramatica. I resolved to thump Valefor as soon as I saw him again; I’d scoured the Bibliotheca for books on Gramatica and found not a one. Clearly he had held out on me.

I met Udo on the stairs, leading a charge of barking excited dogs. He handed me a cake box—“from Arden’s Cake-o-Rama, your favorite, chocolate chile with caramel frosting”—and escorted me to the kitchen. As I cut the cake, Udo got straight to the point. He wanted Springheel Jack’s boots, which we had left at Bilskinir House. He wanted me to go back with him and get them.

Go back to Bilskinir! The delicious cake dried up in my mouth. I knew that someday I would have to go back to Bilskinir. But not today Not tomorrow. Not for a long time.

“I can’t, Udo.”

“I want those boots, Flora. I went through a lot to get them, and they are mine. I remember everything that happened while I was Springheel Jack, though I sure wish I didn’t, and I want something for all that pain. I
earned
them. I want that bounty. I need those boots.” Udo was so upset that he didn’t seem to notice or care that his pompadour was wilting. “I already went to Bilskinir alone, but Paimon wouldn’t let me in. He didn’t even answer the door. He’ll let
you
in. And you have to face the fact that it’s your House sometime, Flora.”

“Can we talk about something else, Udo?” My throat was starting to close up in panic.

“You do what you want, Flora. Ignore it, but I promise it won’t go away. And I won’t go away, either. I want those boots. You owe them to me after everything I’ve done for you. I’m just asking you this one small thing. Go with me to get the boots and then I don’t care if you never go back to Bilskinir ever again. You owe me, Flora.”