“Well, he deserves to stay there after all that, the little snapperhead. Why do you look so downcast, Flora? You are saved. The Dainty Pirate is saved. Everything is working out just dandy.”
I said gloomily, “Ayah so, maybe, but there’s still my Catorcena, and I haven’t finished my dress, or my speech, and now there is no time.”
Udo evicted a dog from the settee and sat down. “Don’t be a snapperhead, Flora. Look at what you are wearing. It’s the most magnificent Catorcena dress I’ve ever seen. It will do just as well as that other old rag, which wasn’t half as nice. You even got cleavage. And the House, it’s clean enough, I doubt Buck will notice if it’s any cleaner—she won’t be home long enough. The kitchen was the big thing, and I got that mostly done. And as for the speech—here—” Udo thrust a stack of papers at me. “Last night I was just sitting here, going crazy, and so I thought I had to do something, waiting for you to come back, so I wrote your speech for you.”
“Really?” I read the top sheet: First and Most Fabulous of all the Fyrdraacas, Azucar Fyrdraaca was known for his fashion sense and exquisite taste...
“Well, I guess you’d have to say I didn’t really write it, exactly, Flora. I mean, you’d already written a lot. I just fixed what was there. I lost the lines about being a slave, and how Crackpot only has one potty. Actually, I guess I had to redo most of it. You are lucky I’m a fast writer, and pretty good at the flattery, too.”
“Thank you, Udo,” I said. “It’s kinda cheating, though, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s really a collaboration. I never heard any rule about a collaboration, and besides, beggars can’t be choosers, Flora. You speak it from the heart, like you mean it, and that’s what counts, I think.”
The rumble of cannon fire shuddered through the House, and the dogs jumped up, alarmed, and flung themselves out into the back garden, yelping.
The ferry-arrival gun.
Mamma would be home within the hour.
FORTY-SIX
The Bibliotheca Again. An Understanding.
SO UDO WENT HOME to change, for he couldn’t go to my Catorcena, he explained, with me looking better than him. And I had two things to do before Mamma came home, both of which I dreaded but felt I should do. Had to do. Must do.
I was determined that the Elevator should give me no trouble, and after I told it so in no uncertain terms, it got the message, for it whirled me upward as though its cables were greased with butter.
The thin light streaming in through the windows of the Bibliotheca threw shadows, wavering and gray, but there was no sign of Valefor, or even sign that there ever had been a Valefor. The room looked anciently abandoned, dusty and derelict.
I said, and a Gramatica flame kindled before me. A tall candelabra sat upon the library table, and I used the coldfire spark to light it. The candlelight projected cheerful warm light a few feet into the darkness, and that was all. The pages covered with Splendiferous script that I had seen on my first visit to the Bibliotheca were scattered on the table; I held one to the light and squinted until I could make out the title: I, Valefor Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca, This is My Story. Val’s autobiography.
“You should have learned by now to mind your own business,” Valefor wheezed from high above me somewhere.
I let the paper waft down to the surface of the table and peered up into the dimness, trying to find a form to match the face, but he was hidden in the gloam.
“Come on down, Valefor, where I can see you.”
He ignored the request. “What gloomy thoughts to match a gloomy face. I would have thought that you would have returned triumphant, the woman girt with the sword before her, and instead, here you are, as dumpy as an apple cake but not nearly so sweet.”
“Lucky for you, Valefor, that I still don’t believe in violence,” I answered. “Otherwise, perhaps, I should rip you up into tiny little bits and throw you to the four corners of the earth. Come out where I can see you.”
“And every corner girded with fire and ice,” Val said, unimpressed. He drifted out of the murk, coughing. “I guess your pacifist nature works to my advantage, for once.”
“I see, denizen Valefor, that you are not looking so perky now.”
Indeed, gray and tattered, he looked more than ever like a ratty dust rag. His hair straggled gray, his gown straggled gray, and his eyes were the same color as his skin: gray. Having been so recently flyaway myself, it was hard not to feel a spark of pity for him, but I didn’t let this show.
“It’s true,” he said dolefully. “You are saved, and brilliant, but I am the same as I was before, forlorn.”
He looked woeful, and within me, the pity warred with irritation. I remembered how desperate I felt when I thought I would blow away in the wind and never see Mamma and Poppy and Idden and Udo and Flynn again. Such desperation I would not wish even upon my enemy, and Valefor was not my enemy. He was, for better or worse, a member of my own family.
“However,” I said, “that’s no excuse for taking advantage of me.”
“Maybe not,” he agreed. “Does not your revenge feel good? You, free and clear, and me, still locked up, alone, quickly diminishing.”
“Pooh,” I said. “Revenge is not my motive. Despite your insidious little tricks, I would not see you diminish any further.”
“You are not your mother’s child, then, for sure,” Val said. “But whether you wish revenge or not, revenge is surely what you will get, because without my restoration, I am lost. You may not be fading, but I still am.” Here he sobbed and wrung his wasted hands together in a very melodramatic fashion.
“I couldn’t restore you, anyway. Didn’t you know that? Only Mamma can release you, just as only Mamma could lock you up. You, the Fyrdraaca House, and she, the Head of that House.”
“I wasn’t sure,” Valefor admitted. “But it seemed worth a try. Well, Flora, you did your best; do not think of me when I am gone, though I suppose that you will perhaps miss my slaving, no?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I cannot free you, Valefor, and I guess I ought not to have tried. But you are not diminishing further, Lord Axacaya said. You shall no longer grow strong, but you shall not further fade, either.”
“Small consolation to be stuck like this.”
“Maybe, Valefor. But it’s better than disappearing completely, eh? And Lord Axacaya said that we are still linked, we shall always be linked, for we are both Fyrdraacas. If you focus strongly, you should be able to take some small solace in that, and perhaps it will strengthen you a bit.” Lord Axacaya had not actually said focus would give Valefor strength, but it seemed to me that it couldn’t hurt to give him a little hope, could it?
At this, Valefor perked up a little bit. “Are you still my friend, Flora Segunda?”
“If you behave, and no tricks.”
“What about my fetish?”
“I will keep it safe, Valefor. And maybe one day I can get Mamma to restore you. But you must behave.”
“I will try, Flora Segunda, I really will, but it is hard. My gift is rhetoric and confabulation, and it’s so hard not to practice what I have no choice but to preach. You should understand something of exaggeration, being so prone yourself.”
“We are not talking about me, Valefor, we are talking about you. Will you promise not to trick me again?”
“Trick you once, shame on you; trick you twice, shame on me,” Valefor said, which I took to be as much of a promise as I could expect from him. “If we are still friends, will you bring me newspapers, and maybe a muffin or two? Even a little kitten or a mouse, if I am good? A tiny spark of Will to keep me perky?”
“We’ll see, Valefor. We’ll see.”
And so Valefor.
And now Poppy.
FORTY-SEVEN
Poppy.
IDDEN AND I HAVE never been expressly forbidden to go up to Poppy’s Eyrie, we just never have any inclination to do so. Better to leave him alone. Today I was not going to leave Poppy alone. Today I could not leave hi
m alone.
I can’t imagine why the stairs were named the Stairs of Exuberance when there was nothing particularly exuberant about them. They were narrow and gloomy and lit only by slender slits in the heavy brick walls. Round and round they circled; wide on the outer edge, narrow on the inner. By the time I got to the top, I was dizzy from the spirals and, thanks to Paimon’s tight lacing, breathless from the climb. I paused on the threshold of the half-open door (imagination would have it barred and bolted from without, like in a lurid mystery novel) and rested my burning leg muscles. They didn’t call the top of the tower the Eyrie for nothing.
“Poppy?” I peered around the doorjamb. When I got no answer, I sidled in, careful to keep the door to my back. A good ranger always knows what is behind her.
Four windows, one in each wall, stared at me like four wide eyes. There was a narrow iron cot, no wider than a grave but not nearly so deep. Since Poppy always looks like a corpse, I would have thought that the Eyrie would be an equal mess, all dank and crumpled, messy with blood and bottles, and Goddess knows what else.
But it wasn’t. The cot was neatly made; the wooden floor was neatly bare. A small altar sat in the northwest corner, which is, of course, the direction from which Death comes.
Poppy knelt in front of the altar, his head bent, his shoulders hunched. The doors to the altar were closed, which is tremendously sacrilegious, even I knew that. The Goddess must be free to come and go as she Wills and it is an insult to her to shut her doors against her.
“Poppy,” I said, quietly. My hands were shaking, and I scrunched them into the fluff of my skirt, clutching fistfuls of fabric. “Poppy.”
“I’m sorry;” he said, without looking up. “I’m sorry.”
He turned his head then, though he did not raise his eyes, and I saw his face. It was masklike, his eyes sunken in the painted black band that bisected them. His eyes were dull and muddy. The contrast between that weary sad face and the handsome face, the bright green eyes, of the Poppy I had met at Bilskinir twisted painfully in my stomach.
“Sorry for what, Poppy?” I asked.
“Sorry that I failed you. Sorry that I could not save you. Sorry that I let you go—let you go on into the darkness, alone.”
“I didn’t go anywhere, Poppy. I am still here.” I reached my hand out and tentatively, lightly, touched his shoulder, which felt fragile and bony beneath my fingers. “You didn’t fail me.”
Now, finally Poppy lifted his eyes, and he looked at me, and with that look, his gaze sharpened like a knife, with sudden avid confusion and a strange sort of hunger.
“Flora? Is that you?” he asked wonderingly. “You are real? You are not a ghost?”
“I am not a ghost,” I said firmly. “I am real.”
Poppy stumbled to his feet and reached out to clutch me. I hugged him back, feeling the ridge of his ribs underneath his sweater, smelling the acrid odor of his sweat. Underneath that smell was another, one I remembered from the embrace of the other Poppy: pipe weed and bay rum.
He said, in a rush of words, “Flora, I tried, I told Valefor to leave you alone. I fed him to keep him off of you, and I took the fetish from Buck to give it to you, but then I forgot where I put it, and I couldn’t find it in time. I thought you were the other Flora before, and when you were lost, I thought you were safe, but then I realized later you were not her, you were yourself, and I thought maybe if you swam in the Current it would fix you, but it didn’t do any good. I’m sorry, Flora, I’m so sorry.”
Suddenly it all made sense, although in a muddled Poppy way. He had remembered and tried to help, but so confused had he been that I hadn’t even recognized his help as help. Poppy’s warning to me about Valefor. Valefor’s fetish in Poppy’s Catorcena chest, locked with Poppy’s seal. Poppy, dragging me off the Folly into the Current, hoping it would fix me—though it hadn’t, it had given me enough jolt to go on a little longer. Poppy, even in his crazy confusion, had tried. He had done the best he could.
My throat closed in on itself, choking down the words, letting out only the most horrific gasping noises. Each wrack seemed to shake me to the core, dislocate my shoulders, wrench my ribs, but I could not stop. I closed my eyes, burning and blurring with running eyeliner, and Poppy’s arms smothered me into the roughness of his sweater, holding me too tight to shudder anymore, and then, at last, I could stop.
“I want...,” I said into his chest, when I could talk again. “Poppy, will you come to my Catorcena?”
He didn’t answer, only slackened his hug and let his arms fall. He sat down on the edge of the cot and bent his head again. Little lines of blackness ran down his cheeks. “I can’t, Flora.”
“Please, Poppy. Please.”
“I can’t, Flora, I can’t bear the light. I can’t see their faces. I can’t.”
I said, with more firmness in my voice than I felt in my knees, so tired and wobbly: “You can’t mope forever, Poppy. Dare, win, or disappear!”
“I’m sorry, Flora.”
“I don’t want your apologies, Poppy.”
“But I don’t have anything else. They took it all. I have nothing left,” he said sadly.
“That’s not true,” I said, stung to hotness. “You have Mamma, and Idden, and me. And Flynn, and Flash, and Dash, and Lash, and Screamie. Even Valefor. Aren’t we something? Don’t we matter? We must matter; you must care, or you wouldn’t have tried to save me. Poppy, don’t you remember, when we were at Bilskinir and we said good-bye, and you said that you don’t fear dying but you were sorry for not being there for me and for not seeing me grow up. Poppy! You are not dead! Remember you said that Fyrdraacas are tough? Fyrdraacas don’t give up! You are Reverdy Anacreon Fyrdraaca. Poppy please. Please don’t give up. Please try.”
He just sat there with his head bowed, and I wanted to whack him, which I knew was a totally useless want, not helpful at all, but it made me so angry to see him so forlorn. For a minute, in his arms, I had thought, foolishly, that somehow things might be different now. But no, that was a foolish thought. Poppy was just the same as always. Weak-willed and broken.
“You love your dead general, Poppy, more than you love Mamma, or Idden, or me,” I said in a mean little voice. “Is that who you are mourning? Is that who you think about all the time? Not me, not Mamma, not Idden, not the other Flora. Her!”
He looked up at me, his face agonized, and I knew then it was true, what Lord Axacaya had said. He answered, “You don’t understand, Flora—”
“Fine, Poppy. Have it your own way. I don’t care. Sit in your tower and think of her. I don't care!”
Outside, a bugle sounded Boots and Saddles. I ran to the window. Below, looking like little toy soldiers, were Mamma and her escort, flags flying. The bugle sounded again, and abandoning Poppy, I tore down the stairs to answer its call.
FORTY-EIGHT
Mamma. Orders. The Barracks.
I MET MAMMA JUST AS she swept into the parlor in a tide of yapping dogs, singing, “With your rifle come and stand, with your rifle come and stand, gather round and assemble, gather round!” to the tune of the Assembly bugle call. “Where’s the birthday girl? Where is she!”
“Mamma!” I waded through the sea of dogs to meet her, and she enfolded me in salt-smelling buckskin arms and kissed my forehead with cold lips. I hugged her back, glad that I was real enough to do so, and also glad—oh, so glad—that she didn’t know how close I had come to never being able to hug her again. “Mamma, I’m so glad you are home!”
“I’m sorry I am so late,” Mamma said. “I thought I would miss the entire ceremony. That blasted fog, I was cursing the weather and the Goddess; the pilot said that he’d never seen such a fog bank before, so thick and squat; we thought maybe it would never lift. But it did lift and here we are, like the cavalry in the nick of time. Get down, wretched dogs, get down! Will you forgive me, darling?”
I hugged her tightly. “It’s all right, Mamma. You are here now, that’s all that matters. But Mamma...” Guilt twi
nged at me, and for one mad moment, I almost blurted out everything.
Mamma saucered her forage cap toward the bust of Azucar Fyrdraaca, but it missed its mark and was immediately seized by a chasing dog. “Dash—drop that hat—what is it, darling?”
“I skipped school!” If I had to confess something, that seemed the safest sin to admit to.
“Oh pooh! A little fault, I think, on this big day. Look at this room, it’s so full of gifties there is almost no room for us! Are you ready, darling? I’m sorry to cut it so close—you look lovely, how well your dress turned out—but we need to redo your maquillage, darling. I sent Aglis on ahead, to make sure that everything was ready at the O Club.”
With a flurry of commands, Mamma took charge. She ordered her outriders to load my gifties and the dogs into the barouche. She ordered me upstairs to get my cloak and hat, and not to forget my speech. She ordered herself upstairs to get her dress uniform, and then ordered me to help her find her silver aiguillettes, which we didn’t find because, she suddenly remembered, they were in the luggage she had taken to Moro. Back downstairs, she ordered her outriders to get Flynn back into that barouche and keep him there. Twenty minutes and twenty more orders and we were ready to go.
“And now, do we have everything and are ready to go, darling?” Mamma asked, surveying the parlor one last time. “Your speech?”
“I have it. Mamma—” I had something to say and now seemed like as good a time as any to say it.
Mamma didn’t hear me. She said, “I lost my Catorcena speech, what a disaster! My lady mother almost had apoplexy. I had left it on my desk and then that blasted denizen came and tidied it up, and couldn’t remem—” Mamma stopped midword. She was looking beyond me, at the doorway, her face suddenly rigid and set.
Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog (Magic Carpet Books) Page 28