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) (17 page)

And how could Poppy be so unfair? His good behavior was all a lie. He was like a bowl of rice pudding that had sat out too long. The cinnamon on top smells divine, but underneath the custard has curdled. Poppy would never really change.

And the Loliga. I had failed there, too. If it turned out that the earthquakes were being caused by the Loliga and she did turn the City into rubble, it would be all my fault.

I had gone to the Ball with such high hopes, and now I felt crushed and forlorn. The Fyrdraaca family was an endless pit. I would never get ahead and I would never escape. All my plans and all my hopes would forever come to naught. I rolled over and put my face to the settee, to drown Valefor out, and felt something soft against my cheek. The plushy pig. Now it looked sympathetic. I hugged it tightly to my chest and closed my eyes again. Drifted off into misery, hating Udo, hating Valefor, hating Springheel Jack, hating Poppy, and most of all hating myself.

A tap on the window and Valefor’s sudden silence jolted me out of my daze. I sat up, still clutching the pig. Valefor flipped open the casement window. A blue-and-green parrot perched on the windowsill.

“Go away, bird,” he said, making a shooing motion. “We don’t want any.”

The parrot fluttered up, then over Valefor’s head and landed on the back of the settee, where it regarded me with bright beady blue eyes. Small green parrots live in the trees outside Saeta House. They are not native to Califa; long ago they escaped from a cage somewhere and then bred in the wild. But this parrot was as large as a housecat, and handsome, too, with blue-yellow feathers and a beautiful rounded coral beak.

“Don’t you dare poo in my house, bird,” Valefor said, “or I shall be having parrot pie for supper.”

The parrot ignored him and extended a pink foot toward me. A small silver cylinder hung from its knobby ankle. I’ve seen messenger pigeons before, and for a while the Enthusiastics (Mamma’s old regiment) had a messenger eagle named Old Reg, but a messenger parrot was a new one on me. Inside the cylinder was a rolled-up piece of paper.

“Who’s it from?” Curious Val tried to grab, but I whisked the paper out of reach.

“Axacaya! Axacaya!” the parrot croaked.

A spark of excitement sizzled through me. At first glance, the paper appeared to be blank. But before I could take it over to the lantern to see if heat would reveal words, glittery pink coldfire letters began to scroll across the paper. The message was short and to the point:

Please meet me at the Potato Patch at two o’clock tonight. Wear your bathing costume.

I had just enough time to read the message twice before the coldfire letters began to run together, expanding outward. I dropped it as the page began to burn; with a sugar-scented puff it was gone, leaving not even ash behind.

“Parlor trick,” Valefor said with a sniff. “I would have written it on the wall in letters of fire ten feet tall. That’s the way to send a message. Not with a fat bird.”

The parrot fluttered its wings impatiently, squawking, “Answer?”

“Tell him I’ll be there.”

“Ayah so, ayah so.” The parrot launched back into the air. It circled once around Valefor, who shrieked and batted at it, and then zipped away through the open window.

Lord Axacaya did not hold Poppy’s outburst against me, and he still took me seriously. Suddenly I felt a whole lot more cheerful.

“You can’t go meeting Lord Axacaya in the middle of the night,” Valefor protested. “It’s scandalous. And besides, you are confined.”

“’There’s no prison that can hold me, not even death,’” I answered, getting up. “Didn’t Nini Mo say that?”

Val sniffed. “Ayah, but she meant the Ultimate Ranger Dare—to escape death. Not escape being locked in. You aren’t being menaced by ice hamsters, Flora Segunda—”

“Ice weasels; not ice hamsters.”
Nini Mo vs. the Ice Weasels: the Ultimate Ranger Dare
is the hardest of all the Nini Mo yellowbacks to find, and the most famous, of course. In it, Nini Mo drowns herself in an icy river to escape the clutches of the Ice Weasel gang and then, before she can cross the Abyss into true death, is brought back to life by Boy Hansgen. I’ve never managed to actually find a copy of the yellowback, but the event is recounted in her autobiography,
High Jinks in Low Places,
which I’ve read four times.

“Whatever—I don’t care about Nini Mo—she was killed in a duel and no one has seen her since, so I guess that puts a lie to her trashy stories. I only care about you, Flora Segunda—and my House! What does Axacaya want? Oh, Flora, you should be careful. I don’t trust him. He’s never been a friend to our family What if Hotspur finds out you are gone?”

It was almost midnight now. I had some time, but I’d be damned if I would spend it locked in my room like a recalcitrant bride in a sentimental novel. “I don’t care if Poppy finds out I am gone. Let him think I am gone for good. Let him consider how it feels to lose
two
Floras.”

I have a bathing dress, though I hadn’t had occasion to wear it since last summer. When I dug it out of the bottom of my wardrobe, I discovered it was a bit moth-eaten and, when I huffed and puffed my way into it, was a wee bit small. Maybe more than a wee bit. The skirt barely came down to the middle of my thighs. The jersey across the chest was mighty strained. The wool smelled musty.

“You look like a sausage in a woolen casing,” Valefor said. “Don’t you wish now you’d laid off all those pancakes?”

“It’s nothing to do with pancakes,” I said. “I’m just growing, finally.”

“Ayah, out instead of up.”

“Shut up. I’d rather be round than look like a stick.” I threw a smock over the bathing costume, drew on my last clean pair of socks, and buckled my boots. At least with the bathing costume there was no need for those hateful stays. I added my redingote, then my dispatch case, slung over my shoulder buckler style, and I was ready to go.

“What if Hotspur finds you gone?” Valefor followed me to the window.

“More trouble to him. He can explain to Mamma why I’m gone. Then there shall be no Fyrdraacas at all, and whose fault will that be?”

“What about me?” Valefor whined. “What should I do?”

“Eat him, too,” I answered maliciously.

M
AYBE NO PRISON
could hold Nini Mo, but there were plenty of prisons that I would have a hard time getting out of. Happily, my bedroom wasn’t one of them. If Poppy thought that locking me in was going to keep me confined, he was in for a sad surprise. The climb from my window, down two stories to the garden, isn’t hard. I’ve been able to do it since I was six years old. There’s no real skill involved, just nerve and determination. And tonight I had plenty of both.

Ignoring Valefor’s whines, I swung over the windowsill and balanced on the ledge, one arm wrapped around the firedragon-head rainspout. Valefor reluctantly pulled the window closed, and I scooted along the ledge until I reached the roof of the mudroom. Climbing across the roof is the trickiest part because it’s small, slanty, and tiled, and those tiles can be pretty slickery. Plus, you must be superquiet because Mamma’s window overlooks this roof, and you certainly don’t want to make a noise that might inspire Mamma—or in this case Poppy—to look out that window.

Over the peak of the roof, and scoot down the other side—if you slip now, you’ll end up in a huge mess of rosebushes; not that the thorns will bother you, because you’ll already be hurting from the fifteen-foot drop. At the rain gutter, there’s a very handy overhanging eucalyptus tree—just grab the fat branch, clamber down onto another fat branch, and then it’s just a four-foot drop to the ground, or if that still seems too far, you can grab at the ivy that covers the mudroom and slide down that.

Sweet as chocolate.

Except when you get to the roof of the mudroom and glance down, and Poppy is sitting in the dark, on a chair right outside the back door, surrounded by sleeping dogs. I almost didn’t see him in time; luckily for me, Flash snores like a miner. His snores made me pause, and then I smelled the stench of Poppy’s cigarillo.

I retreated to my bedroom, where Valefor said with a sniff, “Well, it’s not like you are the first Fyrdraaca to be confined—or to sneak out a window. Hotspur was confined for an entire year for setting the War Department on fire with an exploding cigar. Do you think he spent that time sitting in his room? He knows all the tricks.”

I swore, and found that swearing did not improve my mood, but it didn’t hurt it, either, so I did it again. Nini Mo said a good swear is like a good purge—it don’t taste so good, but it sure does clear out your system. What was I going to do now? Maybe wait until Poppy was asleep? Go over the top of the roof? I’d never tried that before, but maybe I could do it.

Valefor, perhaps feeling a bit guilty for eating Springheel Jack, came to my rescue by suggesting that I try pressing on one of the fireplace tiles—the one painted with a rabbit. Though I was skeptical of Valefor’s helpfulness, I had nothing to lose. So I pressed the tile and watched in amazement as one of the wooden wall panels swung open to reveal a dark, narrow set of stairs. These stairs led to a low door that opened near the Bog, which we haven’t had to use for a very long time, thanks to Poppy’s skills as a plumber. I couldn’t believe I’d never known about this bolt-hole before, but it certainly came in handy now.

Once free, I turned on the skaddle, and by this skedaddling got to the intersection of the Slot, Geary, and Kearny—the intersection everyone calls the Potato Patch—only about five minutes past the rendezvous time. During the day, trying to get across this intersection is a fool’s game: It’s called the Potato Patch after the rough patch of ocean right outside the Oro Gate, the mouth of the Bay of Califa. Many a ship has gone down in the Potato Patch, done in by the shallow reef and the horrendous smack of the water.

The intersection of the Slot, Geary, and Kearny is just as dangerous. If a horsecar doesn’t run you down, you could get squashed by a teamster hauling cargo, or some fancy man’s barouche, or a whole herd of pigs being driven toward the China Bay pig-processing plant. If you avoid these dangers, the scrum of pedestrians can run right over you if you don’t keep up with their hectic pace, and even if you do, you could still step into a rut and end up to your eyeballs in mud. During rush hour, a traffic signaler stands on an elevated pulpit high above the melee, trying to keep order, but the toot of his whistle is not much of a goad toward taming the ravenous traffic beast.

Tonight the Potato Patch was perfectly deserted. I could have lain down in the middle of the intersection and gone to sleep and been in no danger of anything other than getting my redingote extremely muddy. There was no sign of Lord Axacaya. For a second, I wondered if he had meant the real Potato Patch, but that seemed improbable—yet that might explain the bathing costume, but how on earth would I get out there? A rowboat? A surfboard? Dog-paddle?

A light rain was beginning to fall, so I crossed over Kearny Street, kicking up trash as I went—the Warlord should divert money from his cheese fund to the Sanitation Department—and took refuge under the overhanging portico of the Califa National Bank. From there I could lean against the locked iron grating and observe the intersection.
Better,
said Nini Mo,
for you to see them first, than for them to see you first.

“Got a light?” said a voice out of nowhere.

I nearly elevated out of my skin. Despite the late hour, the gaslights in front of the bank were still lit, but the porch was in darkness. Still, I could have sworn no one had been standing there when I climbed up the steps.

I dropped my hand to the fan case
(Be discreet but be armed,
said Nini Mo) and pretended I hadn’t heard. It was probably just a bum who had taken refuge for the night, but I sidled farther away, just in case he was a Stealie Boy.

“Got a
light?”
The bum was persistent, I had to give him that. He sidled closer. Now I could smell him: the ripe smell of rotting trash, and flesh in desperate need of some washcloth time. A particularly stewy stewbum.

“I don’t smoke!”

“I didn’t ask for a ciggie, now, did I, dolly? A light,
quiero un luz.”

“I don’t have any triggers, either.”

“Not that kind of light,” the voice said, annoyed. “A proper light. Pink and sparkly, sweet Current.”

“I have no idea what you speak of, sieur.” I knew he was asking for a coldfire spark, but he wasn’t going to get it from me. If I sidled any farther, I’d run into the huge bronze turtle anchoring the portico’s left. Where was Lord Axacaya? A cold feeling quivered over me. Maybe he had already come, not found me, and then left. But I hadn’t been
that
late.

“You ain’t gonna get onto the car without a light, dolly.”

“I’m not a dolly And I’m not waiting for the car. I’m waiting for a friend. A big friend. A very tall friend. She will be here any minute, and she don’t like to be bothered by strangers.”

“I’m just trying to be helpful, dolly, but you can have it the way you want it, with cherries on top if that’s what girts your sword.”

“I got a light!” another voice chirped. A bright pink wink of coldfire bloomed in the darkness, and I saw that not only was I not alone, but the portico was clustered thick with figures. The coldfire flicked out, but the afterimage of what it revealed continued to float before my eyes. Not people, but things. Entities. Praterhuman entities.

Some I recognized from the Entity Spotter, but not all. The stewbum asking for a light was not a stewbum at all, but a ghast, his flesh hanging precariously off his bones, slime trickling from his eye sockets. The scrawny greenish girl sitting next to him, puddling water, was an out-of-water nixie. I saw an ogre in a tuxedo reading the
Warlord’s Wear Weekly,
a siren drinking from a takeaway cup, and a gryphon carrying three grocery sacks.

But the other entities were completely unknown to me. The guy next to the nixie could have passed for human except that he had two heads, one normal, and the other small and wizened, with blank bug-eyes and a slack mouth. The thing offering the light was covered in plush purple fur and had four eyes. Next to it wavered a diaphanous figure that seemed to be made of some sort of gauzy goo.