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)

by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  “Ayah, so, but I have the key! See?”

  After fishing in her cuff-pocket, Tiny Doom displayed a small porcelain jar, the kind that tooth powder comes in. In fact, it was a tooth-powder jar; MADAMA TWANKY’S OLD JUBILEE TOOTH POLISH, it said on the lid in black letters. Give Your Teeth the Old Hurrah! Mamma’s favorite brand, but I think it tastes like cod oil, plus it burns your gums.

  She unscrewed the lid, then shook the jar out over her palm. A small round ring fell out.

  “It’s a ring,” I said.

  “It’s the Key to Bilskinir,” Tiny Doom said. “It’s made from the hair of every Haðraaða who has ever lived.”

  That sounded rather disgusting to me, but she seemed pretty proud of it. She held up the ring so I could peer more closely at it. When I did, I saw that the ring was indeed made of strands of hair: blond, red, gray, black, brown, white, gold, and bright blue. The hair had been braided into one plait, and then somehow the ends of the plait had been fused to create the ring.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

  “I found it when I was going through Hardhands’s underwear drawer. It will open any lock in Bilskinir. I was going to use it to help me escape, but then Hardhands put me under that geas not to leave Bilskinir, so even if I unlocked the door, I couldn’t go through. But it still comes in handy sometimes.”

  “Doesn’t Hardhands miss it?”

  Tiny Doom grinned. “He hasn’t noticed it’s gone yet. And by the time he does, I expect to be far from here.”

  She slid the ring on her index finger and then pressed the tip of her finger to the surface of the meat locker door. “The Ostium.”

  The door swung open, and we stepped through into a round room not much bigger than a closet. Its windowless walls were draped in heavy tapestries, blue embroidered with silver. And it only had one door—the door we had come in by which as I turned, slammed shut behind us.

  “The Ostium,” Tiny Doom said. “Bilskinir’s Secret Center. All doors in Bilskinir lead to this room and this door leads to all of Bilskinir’s rooms—if you have the Key. Lucky we have a key, huh? Now, listen, before we go on, everyone should be watching the show, but we have to be super-low-key careful, anyway. Lucky for us it’s a masked ball, so put this on.”

  I caught what she tossed at me: a rubbery mask.

  “It’s a chipmunk,” I said, when I had stretched the mask out. Not just any chipmunk, but a grotesquely cute bug-eyed chipmunk with a skull-like grin and cheeks as red and round as tomatoes.

  “Sorry, I was in a hurry and I grabbed the first mask I could find,” she said impatiently “Here, switch with me, then, if you are too delicate to be a chipmunk.”

  We switched, and I tugged on the bear mask, which was a bit soggy and smelled of wet fur, but at least it wasn’t a rodent. The eyeholes were large, and I could see surprisingly well.

  Tiny Doom, now grotesquely cute, pressed the tip of her index finger against the surface of the door and said, “The Ballroom of the Battle of Califa.”

  The door swung open and she made a little follow me gesture. We stepped out of the Ostium into the Ballroom.

  Now the music was louder, a pulsating throb counterpointed by the rattling of the pictures on the wall, the porcelain in its cases, the glass in the windows. The Ballroom was empty of people but scattered with the debris of dancing: dropped fans, lost ribbons, stray garters, abandoned hankies. The fire had died down in the enormous fireplace that filled one entire wall; the long expanse of glass doors opposite were open to the night’s darkness and a fresh cool breeze.

  Above the fireplace hung a huge portrait of a woman sitting in a tree swing. A sweeping black hat perched upon her wild red hair; she clutched a small terrier pup to the breast of her dark blue riding jacket, and her bare feet rested on the wide back of a mastiff the same color as her hair. The top branches of the tree were on fire, the green leaves consumed by livid orange and red flames, and behind, the sky seethed with black clouds and lightning.

  “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.

  Thirty-Four

  An Appalling Discovery. Sneaking. The Maze.

  OF 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 oofing 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.

  Thirty-Five

  Georgiana’s Tomb. Toby. Run!

  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 pulle
d 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.

  “Be careful,” the Butcher warned, as I puffed my way up next to her. “Toby bites. At least he used to. Highstrung little fiker.”

  Toby, I assumed, was the terrier. He did look highstrung; his lips were drawn back from his tiny teeth in a sort of sharklike grin, and his ears were flat against his skull. The Butcher reached out gingerly and poked at his side, and when he didn’t move a muscle, she grabbed him around his salamilike middle and offered him to me.

  “What am I supposed to do with him?” I asked. His fur looked a little moth-eaten and his eyes glinted in a rather malicious way I didn’t like the look of those nubby sharp teeth.

  “Just put him aside, there at the end of the plinth,” she instructed, and I did so, wiping my hands on my kilts. Toby’s fur was rough and greasy Yuck.

  A tiny keyhole glinted just below the rim of the sarcophagus’s lid.

  “Will the Key open it?”

  The Butcher grinned. “Ayah, so. It sure is coming in mighty handy, eh?”

  “What were you doing in Hardhands’s underwear drawer?”

  “I was looking for stuff to kip. It drives Hardhands nuts, the way his things keep disappearing, but he thinks it is Paimon’s bad housekeeping. He doesn’t ever consider me, the nook!”

  Her tone was scornful, but it suddenly flashed upon me that this scorn might just be a mask. When I was in sixth grade, there was a kid named Tiro Ram who was always pinching me and calling me names; once, he even threw an inky pen into my hair during Historical Inquiry class. I thought he hated me, but Mamma explained (after she came back from Sanctuary, where she’d been discussing with the Holy Mistress of Heaven why I had punched Tiro Ram right in the grape) that he really liked me but was just showing it in a stupid way because he was embarrassed. I had been skeptical, of course, but that spring Tiro Ram had asked me to the Spring Dance, so I guess Mamma had been right. (But I went to the Spring Dance with Udo, because Fyrdraacas neither forgive nor forget.) The Butcher’s attitude toward Hardhands was pretty negative, but perhaps that was hiding her true feelings, in which case I felt even more sorry for her. And I wish she’d stuck with him, and left Poppy alone.