Flora's Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Impo

by Ysabeau S. Wilce

If I was honest, I had to admit that she was right. I was not fully immune to Tharyn’s charms. He was solid where Udo was flighty, and sensible where Udo was flippery. He didn’t chastise me or treat me like a child. He understood me in a way that Udo, brought up in a happy family could not. We had a lot in common. When I was with him, I felt safe and secure. I liked him an awful lot. But I didn’t love him.

  Udo. As far back as I can remember, Udo has been constant. When dusty dirty Crackpot Hall, with Poppy screaming in the Eyrie, had been too much and I had gone on the bum, Udo had cheered me. And even when I couldn’t be cheered up, he’d made me come stay with him at Case Tigger with his giant family of happily squabbling siblings and his three stable, loving parents. He had brought me back to life, even after I had drowned, so that I could save the Loliga. He had tried to rescue me from Espejo. He had lent me fifty divas when I ruined the teakettle making green hair dye (even though Buck had told me specifically not to make green hair dye in the teakettle), so I could replace it without Buck finding out. He had let me copy his maths homework when crazy Poppy had used mine as kindling. When he was captured by the pirates and I’d thought I would never see him again, my heart had felt pierced by a fiery needle. When I thought he might die of his injuries at Barbacoa, a part of me had felt that life without Udo was not worth living.

  I did love him. I had just been too stupid and stuck-up and blind to see it. Oh, Flora, you fiking snapperhead!

  But Tiny Doom. She had given me life, given me up, tried to protect me, and I had led Death directly to her. She was my mother. I had to save her. No matter what the cost.

  Cutaway said, “Look, I’ll even sweeten the deal, Flora. Not only shall I take your love for Udo, but I’ll take away your memory of your love for Udo. You’ll never even know you’ve lost something. Come, come—decide. We are wasting time here, and you told me before that you had no time to waste.”

  “You have to promise me you won’t do anything to Udo.”

  “Of course I will not do anything to Udo. This is between you and me. Do we have a deal?”

  I had no choice. I had to get to Fort Sandy and this was the only way to do it. And anyway, the sacrifice was all on my side. Anyone who almost gets you killed is someone you are better off without. Udo had the Zu-Zu. He had his sparkly red Jack Boots and his newly minted heroic stature and his pirate ship. He did not need me. He did not love me.

  “Ayah, madama. We have a deal.”

  “Excellent.”

  At Cutaway’s order, I pulled open my jacket, unbuttoned my bodice, and unsnapped the front of my stays. “Is this going to hurt?”

  “Depends on your definition of hurt.” Cutaway unsheathed her scissors. The blades were very long and looked very sharp. I didn’t see how it wasn’t going to hurt, but, well, Grin and bear it, Nini Mo said. I tried to grin, hoping that this would help me bear it.

  “Hold still!” she ordered, and plunged the scissors through my chemise, into the middle of my chest. I shrieked, flailing, and she pushed me back onto the seat with one hand, saying, “Hold still!”

  But there was no pain, just a strange tingly sensation. I quit thrashing, and looked down. Although Cutaway had sliced a large incision in my chest, there was no blood or guts. She stuck one hand into the gash and began to fiddle around ticklishly.

  I giggled. “That feels really funny”

  “Lucky you. Let’s see, your love for Udo, where is it? I see your love for chocolate ... Here’s your love for dogs ... Love for your little brother ... It’s got to be here somewhere. Ah, here it is, but it’s very tangled.”

  “Tangled with what?”

  She had pulled a thick skein of sparkling threads out of me, like a wad of tangled knitting. Now she picked through the threads, trying to unknot them. Some glittered redly, others were a sticky oily black. Some were gossamer and blue, others clear like ice.

  “Oh, fear and desperation, desire and anger—you know, the usual things knotted up with love. What a mess! Hold still. This is going to be tricky” Now it wasn’t so ticklish; I was beginning to feel a weird painful stretching, like my muscles were being overextended. “It’s no use; I’m going to have to take it all. It’s too bound up together.”

  Before I could protest, the scissors went snip-snip. The weird painful stretching feeling disappeared. Cutaway held the wad up, examining it, and then slipped the wad into her purse, out of which she produced a small sewing kit. Removing a very large curved needle threaded with red thread, she began to sew me up. That didn’t hurt, either.

  “Those are awfully big stitches. Am I going to have a scar?”

  “Not that anyone will see. There you go. All done. Get some rest. We’ve a long way to go yet.”

  Cutaway yawned, snapped a facemask over her eyes, and lay back against the seat cushions. I pulled my clothes back together. I was exhausted, but too keyed up to sleep. Each mile we went took me further from Califa, away from Buck, and Pow, and Poppy and Tharyn, away from Paimon and Valefor, away from everything and everyone I had ever known. I was alone now, truly alone. No, not entirely alone, a pesky wet nose reminded me; I scratched his ears gratefully. Whatever was to come, I would face it with Flynn. And that was, somehow, a big consolation.

  Cutaway snored delicately The gentle rocking and the muted roar of the carriage were lulling. Conserve your energy and don’t fret ahead, Nini Mo said. I gave in to that lull and leaned my head against the cold glass. Eventually I fell asleep.

  A LONG TIME later, I woke up to a slam and a slant of light. The driver was peering in through the open door. His skin was mint-green and he had one eye, right in the middle of his forehead.

  Cutaway sat up, stretching.

  “Are we there yet?” I asked.

  In answer, she sang, “The moon has riz, the moon has set, and here I iz in Elsewhere yet! Alas, no. Not yet. This is Las Palmas.”

  The Phaeton had pulled up before a long, narrow building. Tall street lamps marked out a square of harsh white light; beyond that, darkness. A glowing green sign hung on the building: WIGGLY PIGGLY.

  I left Flynn in the Phaeton; he leaned against the window and yapped mournfully as I walked away. Inside the Wiggly Piggly, loud music, heavy on the horns, was blaring. The air smelled of overfried pork. I followed Cutaway to a hallway at the back of the store, where two doors stood side by side. One had a sign with a silhouette of a cartoon bull with its legs crossed; the other had a cow in the same position.

  “So cute,” said Cutaway, and picked the door with the bull. While I waited for my turn, I examined the papers taped along the wall across from the bathroom. They looked like Wanted posters, but instead of bad drawings, each had a blurred ferrotype image on it.

  MISSING: GOOD WILL. ON Saturday, August22nd, LENA ERICKSON lost all her Good Will on the No.19Crosstown Bus when a Man Wearing a Black Cowboy Hat Tripped and Spilled Hot Coffee on her Cross Word Puzzle and then Cursed Her for Being in His Way. Ten Dollar Reward for Its Return. No Questions Asked.

  MISSING: WILL TO LIVE. On the Sixteenth Germinal II, Philippe François Nazaire Fabre d’Églantine lost his Will to Live when He stood before the Hôtel Crillon and realized that Madam Revolution didn’t care one wit about his calendar. No Reward. No Expectation of Return.

  MISSING: WILL POWER: On the sixty-first day of their voyage in the ship FIREDRAGON, Sven Redsock did finally lose all his Will Power and drink the last of the mead, thus causing Hakon Dirtyhair to call him a PIG SWILLING SON OF A TROLL and Throw Him Overboard, thus making Sven the first Norse man to set foot on Markland. Pity the rest of him did not make it. Fifteen silver pieces REWARD so his Spirit May Go to Valhalla Whole.

  “What are these posters about?” I asked Cutaway when she came out of the bathroom. She shrugged, fluffing her hair.

  “People lose their Will. They want their Wills back again, but they can’t find them, so they offer rewards. It’s a waste of time. When your Will is gone, it’s gone.”

  “I lost my Will once, and I got it back.”<
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  Cutaway smiled. “Did you, now? Hurry up, I’m dying of thirst.”

  The bathroom was black with grime, and smelled like mold. I managed to get in and out without touching anything but the floor. At the front of the store, our driver was sucking on a lollipop and holding two giant cups. “Do you want an orca bacon dog?” he asked Cutaway, gesturing toward the counter with one of the drinks. On the counter, a row of fat red cylinders were displayed in a glass-fronted silver case. Now I knew where the overfried meat smell was coming from.

  “Goddess, no. You know I’m a vegetarian, Roger. Is that my freezie?”

  “Ayah. Beetroot, just like you like.”

  “Thank you, Roger. Do you want a drink, Flora? The freezies here are excellent; that’s why we always stop here. I recommend the beetroot salt and pepper, but the cucumber soy rhubarb is also lovely.”

  “I don’t want anything, thank you,” I said. I was hungry enough that the orca bacon dogs almost smelled good. But it seemed maybe not such a good idea to eat anything while I was with Cutaway. I’ve heard plenty of stories about witless people who eat the wrong thing at the wrong time and end up enchanted or ensorcelled, and I’d already done both this year. Better hungry than sorry.

  The slack-jawed clerk rang us up. Roger paid with an unfamiliar green bill, and then we went back to the Phaeton. Beyond the glare of the white lights, the blackness was beginning to fade to purplish pink. I was reassured. The darkness was just night. And night always ends.

  The Phaeton roared through a thin pink dawn, which revealed the landscape as scrubby and flat, occasionally punctuated with a spindly tree or a weird iron sculpture, parts of which pistoned up and down. Cutaway had stuck little white stones into her ears and closed her eyes. Faint tinny music emanated, pulsing and droning. I slumped, with my head against the window, and watched the scrub go by, the trees slowly growing thicker until we were traveling through a forest, dark and dim. Sometimes I caught glimpses of animals, shadowy among the trees, like deer, only bigger and with sharp jagged antlers. I saw a red fox crushed by the side of the road; a huge black bird was dipping into the cavity of the fox’s stomach, stringing out long skeins of gut with its beak. And once we passed a little yellow house with a girl in front of it; she waved as we passed by, but by the time I waved back, she and the little yellow house were long gone.

  After several hours of the forest, the trees began to give way to muddy fields, patched with black-and-white cattle that watched our passage with bovine indifference. Now the Phaeton was climbing up, the road twisting and turning around a rocky landscape. The trees and the fields disappeared and were replaced with high rocky cliffs, occasionally punctuated with roaring waterfalls, and, off in the distance, jagged granite mountains.

  We climbed higher and higher, and below us I could see the road we had traveled over, gleaming like a silver snake in the barren gray-green landscape. Snow began to appear along the side of the road, first just a thin veil, and then piled high, so that the land looked smothered in a giant eiderdown. We passed through a brief tunnel, and when we popped out, we were surrounded by a gleaming expanse of glassy-white ice: a glacier. Dark fissures crisscrossed the rippling ice. I saw a gash of bright blue water far below, bounded by mountains.

  “Where are we?” I asked Cutaway but she didn’t answer. Her eyes were still closed and now the tinny music was dirge-like, throbbing.

  The Phaeton went through another tunnel and emerged into a sea of green tasseled corn, twelve feet tall or higher. The corn lasted the rest of the afternoon, and as a large round moon began to peek over the fringy tops, I began to get alarmed. Time works differently in Elsewhere, but I wasn’t sure we actually were Elsewhere. In fact, I had no fiking idea where we were. But we’d been traveling all night and all day, with no sign of stopping and no indication that our destination was any closer. The whole point was a speedy delivery. This did not feel like a speedy delivery to me.

  The fields of corn disappeared into the darkness, and the moonlight vanished as we began to pass lighted buildings, more and more until we were traveling through a city again, passing other Phaetons, people hurrying along the streets, glittering bright signs, brilliant shop windows. Then the lights, the people, the buildings began to thin again and we were back in a moonlight landscape of rolling hills.

  And then we stopped.

  Cutaway opened her eyes and pulled the white stones out of her ears. “I do love The Tygers of Wrath,” she said. “Out you go.”

  The Phaeton’s door opened. A blinding white light angled into the dark interior, so blinding I could not see beyond it. The light was accompanied by a blast of furnacelike air.

  “Are we there?” I asked.

  “We’re here and this is as far as I go. Traffic report says there’s a bit of a jam up ahead and I have to get back to the office. But first—I like you, Nini. You remind me of myself at your age. Espejo is not an adept, he’s a priest, a very powerful nahual, probably the most powerful nahual alive. Or dead. Or whatever the fike he is. But he does have a pretty big weakness.”

  “Ayah?” I said warily.

  “His power comes through Tezca and is rooted in darkness. Night is his time. At night he is almost invincible. He can’t change into the god’s totem animal during the day. And he can’t stand the sun. It won’t kill him outright, but it weakens him greatly Makes him sluggish. Foolish.”

  “What does he do during the day, then?”

  “Takes shelter. A house, a hotel, a hole in the ground. Anything to avoid the sun. And Arivaipa is a very sunny place. Come on, out you go. You are letting all the cool air out.”

  Roger stuck a clipboard in my face. “Sign this, please.”

  “What is it?”

  “Delivery confirmation.”

  I took the pencil he offered and scrawled my signature at the bottom of the paper. Flynn had already jumped out of the Phaeton and vanished into the blazing white glare. I clambered out after him into blinding white sunlight, holding my hand up to my eyes, trying to see where I was. Then I felt the unmistakable feeling of a boot in my back. As I stumbled forward, I heard Cutaway say, “If you need anything else, Madama Haðraaða, let me know. It’s a pleasure doing business with you. Please give my regards to Paimon.”

  I tried to catch myself but my hands grabbed at nothing. Air roared in my ears, and then I hit something hard in a blur of gravelly pain.

  THIRTY

  Stage Stop. Hot. Captain Oset.

  MY HEAD FELT as though it had been split in two and reassembled hastily, without matching up the seams. The slurpy pink tongue on my face was slimy, but at least it was wet. The rest of me felt shriveled and dry. Something hard and splintery was digging into my back. I thought I was alive, but I had felt alive before and been dead, so that feeling didn’t signify much at all.

  But if I was dead, then Flynn was dead, too, because, when I opened my eyes, there he sat, looking as eager as always. I gotta give Flynnie credit; he remains perky no matter what. He did not look like a dog that had gone on a very long coach ride through Elsewhere—or wherever the fike we had been. He looked like a dog who had just been for a long walk, with balls to chase, and who now anticipated beef stew for lunch. Darling Flynn.

  “Oh, Flynnie!” I reached for him. I guess I wasn’t as dry and shriveled as I thought, but I wasn’t sure why I was crying. I was alive. Flynn was alive. And we were also, I discovered when I sat up, in the bottom of a well. This I deduced by the wreckage of the bucket under me. I doubted that the bottom of a well was poste restante, Fort Sandy, Arivaipa Territory Obviously, Cutaway thought it would be a funny joke to drop me here instead.

  “Har, har, you stupid snapperheaded witch,” I said, and Flynn barked once, as though he agreed.

  Well, as long as I was in Arivaipa, she could have her little joke. But I cursed her again when I realized I didn’t have my dispatch case; it must have been left on the floor of the Phaeton. When I was ten, I had saved up four months of pocket money to buy that case
from the Army-Navy store because it was just like the one Nini Mo always carried. The loss really stung. I still had the really important stuff in my pockets—my toothbrush, Poppy’s cash roll, my match safe, Pow’s soother, a knife—but that was small consolation for the loss of the case itself.

  No point in crying over sour water, Nini Mo said. I focused on getting out of the well. Fortunately, I had recently conquered the Barracks’ infamous climbing wall; compared to that, this looked easy, and was made even easier by the fact that no one was standing behind me, yelling curses. The walls of the well were knobby and rough, giving me handholds. I used my jacket and my garters to improvise a sling for Flynn. Then, with Flynn on my back, breathing heavily on my neck, I started climbing.

  A long, bloody, bruised time later, I wiggled over the top and lay gasping in the dirt. My neck was wet with Flynn’s drool, and the rest of me was bone dry. To say that it was hot was like saying that water is wet or snow is cold. It accurately described the temperature but did nothing to convey how hot it actually was. I could feel the heat of the rocks through my clothes; the air, as I gulped it in, seemed to scorch my throat. My head felt like it would split open and spill my brains on the ground, where they would fry. Flynn slithered out of the sling and went to lift his leg on a rock. I swear I heard the piss sizzling.

  My hat was long gone, of course, but I did have my sunshades in my jacket pocket. I put them on and saw, above, a burning steel-blue sky; in the distance, jagged red mountains; in between, a prickly landscape of cacti, rocks, thorny mesquite trees, and more cacti, rocks, and mesquite. With a yelp, Flynn jerked back from the cacti he had been exploring, a tiny boll of spines sticking off his nose. It took five minutes of cursing (me) and growling (him) before I got them out.

  “Be careful,” I admonished Snapperdog, and he butted my knee gratefully.

  The well sat by a burned-out adobe building. The soot on the melted walls and the flock of buzzards that drifted up from the interior confirmed that the fire had been recent. For a moment, I wondered if this was Fort Sandy after all, or the burned-out remains of Fort Sandy Maybe Cutaway’s joke wasn’t a joke at all. But then I realized the ruins weren’t expansive enough to be an army post. So which way was Fort Sandy? I walked to the middle of the rutted road. In one direction the road disappeared into a dusty haze. In the other it vanished into a stark mountain ridge.