“See how helpful I can be?” Valefor said happily. “The mirror is not exactly the same, of course. I don’t have enough for that, but I don’t think Buck’s subtlety will extend to noticing the difference.”
Valefor was helpful. While I let the dogs in, he whisked about the Below Kitchen, humming Gramatica under his breath and wiggling his fingers. When he was done, the kitchen was so clean that it almost sparkled. The copper pans hanging from the ceiling shone like stars, the stove glowed like a polished black pearl, and the floor looked clean enough to eat off.
“There we are! Let’s have popcorn!” Valefor said when he was done.
“I thought you didn’t eat food.”
“Well, I don’t eat to live, but sometimes it is fun to live to eat. Come on, Flora, tra-la-let’s have a party! Oh please, let’s!”
“I have to go to bed.”
“Pah! Bed! There’s time enough to sleep when you are dead, Flora.”
“I am tired.” Dealing with Poppy is exhausting and sick-at-heart-making, and now I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and stay there a week. It was a relief to have the mess cleaned up, and popcorn was tempting, but I still wanted my bed.
“You are a stick, Flora, that’s what you are, an absolute stick,” Valefor said.
I did not give in, but Valefor would not give up. Still begging, he followed me as I turned down the lights, banked the stove, and went upstairs. He leaned over me as I stopped by the Stairs of Exuberance, to listen for noise coming from Poppy’s Eyrie. (Dead silence.)
“You are bugging me!” I shouted, after I had shut my bedroom door in his face and he had floated right through, anyway.
He looked hurt. “But I thought you liked me.”
I threw my boots into the wardrobe and pulled my nightgown out from under my pillow. “I just need to go to bed and get some sleep. And I can’t do that if you are following me everywhere. Can’t you leave me alone?”
“I told you, Flora, we are connected now, and I can go where you go, at least around the House. I will be very quiet,” he said, sitting down on the settee. But of course he wasn’t. He chattered on about this and that, and that and this. Having someone around to clean things up was nice, but I could see now that it had its cost. The meal’s not free if you still have to leave a tip, Nini Mo said.
“...and a shame that a Fyrdraaca should be sleeping in a broom closet—”
“This was a broom closet?” I interrupted. My room is not fancy, but it’s not tiny, either. It has a fireplace surmounted by a mantel carved with cunning little monkeys, two big windows that overlook the kitchen garden, a cushy settee, and a banged-up wardrobe big enough to play house in. Sure, it is messy, but that was nothing against the room, only against my interest in keeping it tidy.
“Well, not this room. This room was, I think, where I stored extra toilet brushes or something; I don’t remember. Anyway, I mean there—” Valefor pointed to my bed. “That closet!”
At first glance around my room, you wouldn’t see my bed at all, and you’d think maybe I slept on the settee. But then you would notice a set of doors on one wall, and when the doors slid open, there was my bed, tucked inside a little alcove, all snuggly and secret. I love my bed; when the doors are closed and you are pillowed down into your comforters with a dog at your feet, you are hidden and no one can get you. Had my bed been a broom closet?
“See how it is that the Fyrdraacas are constrained,” Valefor said. “I am as wide as the sky when it comes to space, and here the Fyrdraacas are, crouching in utility rooms. Even your kitchen is just an extra kitchen I made in case some guest brought his own cook, and these rooms, all of them, spare servants’ quarters for spare servants, and here you are living as servants in them. Or in your case, a slave, Flora Segunda.”
Valefor was right. Why were we living in servants’ rooms, like servants? Because we couldn’t get to the rest of the House without the Butler. Whom Mamma had banished. Another thing to hold against her, I supposed. But not tonight. “I really have to go to bed, Valefor,” I said. “Are you going to shut up or shall I kick you?”
“All right, all right!” He settled down on the settee and began to read one of my Nini Mo yellowback novels. I climbed into bed, pulled the door mostly closed, and put my nightgown on. The dogs had already settled in, and they shifted around to make room for me.
“Must you throw your clothes on the floor?” Valefor asked without looking up from his reading. He waved one hand and my stays and chemise drifted upward, then floated over to the wardrobe, tucking themselves inside. My kilt and pinafore wafted into the dirty-clothes bin, and my pullover flitted over to Valefor, who put down the yellowback to receive it.
“There’s a giant hole in the elbow!” he said, accusingly. I’m terrible at darning. I can sew fine, but somehow when it comes to knitting, my stitches get muddled. Valefor smoothed the sweater between his palms, and when he held it up, smugly, the hole was gone. “You are welcome!”
“Thank you, Valefor.”
“You are welcome.”
“Well, then, if you are going to stay, at least turn the lights down.”
The lights dimmed accordingly, and I slid the bed door shut and snuggled into the nest of dogs. Flynn squirmed his boniness between my feet, and Flash and Dash curled together against the wall. The sheets were doggy warm, but they could have smelled fresher.
I lay there and let the darkness overwhelm me. Sometimes it is very hard not to sink. Udo calls this feeling the little black ghost in my head, and while sometimes its wheedling is muted, I can never quite completely pull free of its influence. Sometimes it seems as though there will never be an end. Poppy will continue to be drunken, Mamma will continue to be gone, and I will march off to the Barracks and fulfill the Fyrdraaca family destiny, which is nothing but ruin and sorrow.
“Why are you crying?”
My heart jerked, and I lifted my head. The dogs hadn’t moved, but Valefor’s eyes, faint coldfire sparks, glimmered next to me.
“Pigface Psychopomp! I think I just lost ten years off my life.”
“Fyrdraacas die young, anyway,” Val said. “Where’s your nightcap?”
I wiped my eyes on the pillowcase. “Go away and let me go to sleep.”
“But you weren’t sleeping,” he pointed out. “You can’t sleep and cry at the same time. And if you cry yourself to sleep, you’ll only wake up with a headache tomorrow morning.”
“I wish you would mind your own business.”
“This is my business. I mean, I’m the House Fyrdraaca and you are a Fyrdraaca, so that makes it my business. Besides, you are getting my sheets wet. If anyone should be crying, it’s me, over the decline of our family. Once so numerous and distinguished, oh, we had generals and lawyers, artists and statesmen, we were the beauty of the world, and now down to four Fyrdraacas, and none of you particularly distinguished compared to the Fyrdraacas of old.”
He was a snapperhead, and for a savage sudden minute, I wished he’d stayed in his library and rotted. Cold feet squirmed against my ankles and I yanked away. Flynn growled and crawled to the other edge of the bed.
“Aw, finally, toasty. I get so very cold,” Valefor said. “I remember when your great-great-great-grandmother Idden Fyrdraaca made this comforter. She cut up captured battle flags to make the quilt pieces, and when it was finished, she stuffed it with the hair of her enemies. Took her four years to get enough to fill the quilt. That’s why it is so nice and warm.”
Ugh! I had come across the quilt, brilliantly colored and crazily sewn together with bright swatches of silk, in one of the huge clothespresses in the laundry room. It had been on my bed ever since, and it was very warm, but I resolved now to burn it in the morning.
“Don’t you have to get back to the Bibliotheca?” I asked hopefully.
“Oh no.” Valefor laughed. “I feel so much better right now, I just can’t believe it. Isn’t this fun? It’s just like one of those slumber parties I have read about. The girls l
ie in the dark and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings, and eat popcorn, and then they give each other green facials.”
“You are not a girl.”
“Oh. Well, yes, I suppose you are right, but now that I feel better, I could be a girl, if you wanted me to be—”
“No,” I said hastily. He was confusing enough as he was. “Just stay the way that you are.”
“Don’t you want any popcorn?” the whiny dark asked.
I sat up, disrupting dogs and kicking aside cold feet. “Look, I am trying to go to sleep. I have had a long day and I have to get up early in the morning. All right? For Pigface Psychopomp’s sake, can’t you shut up?”
“Well, fine,” said the darkness, snippily.
I flopped down, turned my back to the sulky silence, and pulled the covers over my ears. At least I didn’t feel like crying anymore.
SEVEN
Sickness. Med-I-Cine. Waffles. Val Proposes.
VALEFOR WAS GONE when I awoke, and I did not feel so well. My head ached, my bones ached, and generally I felt punk. Rangers suck up pain and sickness; they don’t let a little thing like weakness of the body get in the way of their obligations, so I dragged myself out of bed, did my morning chores, and got to Sanctuary just in time for first bell.
But the day was such a horrible loss; I should have stayed home. In my furry brain-haze, I left my Lit vocab list at home, so I got a zed on the hand-in, which meant that even though I got a plus-ten on the pop quiz, there went a fourth of my grade. In Scriptive, I knocked over the ink bottle and flooded out an entire stack of Catorcena invitations—twenty-five to do over. And after much finger-pricking, thread-snapping, and swearing in Dressmaking, I discovered that I had put the left sleeve of my Catorcena dress in upside down.
Every time I passed Archangel Bob in the hall, he would give me the eye, as though he had noticed I was not up to snuff and was wondering if he should send me to the Infirmary. With Mamma due home on Monday, I had too much to do to go to the Infirmary, and anyway, that was not where I wanted to spend my weekend, swallowing nasty medicine and eating nothing but oatmeal mush with spelt flakes. If you have to die in bed, it’s better that that bed be your own. Nini Mo didn’t say that, but I’ll bet she would have agreed. Of course, she didn’t die in bed, but it’s the principle.
It seemed like the day would never be over, but finally it was, and before Archangel Bob could make up his mind and grab me, I schlepped home. I kicked the dogs into the garden, hung the laundry out, and mucked the horses. The dogs came back in, and I shut them in the parlor, leaving the terrace door open so they could let themselves out. I blearily climbed the zillion stairs up to my bedroom, where I flopped onto the settee and fell into a snuffling sleep.
Time became a sickly blur of waking, stumbling to the potty, stumbling back to the settee, and sleep. Waking, stumbling down to feed the dogs, back to the settee, and sleep. Sometimes it was daylight when I woke, sometimes it was night. Always I was shivery cold, shaky, and miserable.
Finally, I woke up feeling a little better, not nearly as shivery, but still terribly cold. And hungry, too. I didn’t have the energy to get up, light a lamp, check on the dogs, find some chow. I didn’t have the energy to do anything at all. I lay on the settee, staring miserably up into the darkness.
Then I remembered Valefor.
“Valefor,” I croaked.
A thin wavery cloud coalesced at the end of the settee. I could barely make out Val’s narrow face. The cloud crept down over me, and I shivered at the coolness. I put my palms up and he put misty hands against mine, and he immediately brightened into a more solid shape. He bent over and I breathed a deep breath into him, feeling him grow concrete, sucking the ache from me. For a few seconds, my insides felt airy, as though my skin were filled with nothing but a tingling purple light.
When Valefor stood upright, he looked the best yet, not at all a starveling. In fact, if it weren’t for the purple eyes and his purple hair, he could have been a normal boy. He wasn’t exactly pretty, but he sparkled.
Valefor grinned at me and waved his arms about. “Thank you, Flora Segunda. I feel much better. You don’t taste so good right now, but still, it’s enough.”
I flopped back on the pillows, feeling like I had inhaled little sparks of fire. I suddenly felt a lot more perky, albeit a tad breathless. “You are welcome.”
With a gentle hiss, the radiators came on, even though I hadn’t shoveled any coal in over a week. In the fireplace, the fire flared up, bright and friendly.
“This is much, much better,” Val beamed, balancing on the settee arm. “Why didn’t you call me earlier? You shouldn’t be lying around like this, Flora. It’s bad for your mental state. Once you lie down, you might not get up again for ages. Great-uncle Gussie once spent four years lying on the sofa in the Drawing Room of Depredations. You don’t know how hard it was to dust around him.”
“I’ve been sick.”
“Ah...” Val fished around in his long hanging sleeves, then came up with a small green bottle. “I have just the trick.”
“What is it?”
He proffered a spoonful of pinkish liquid. “Open up. It will make you all better.”
I recoiled. I knew from experience that liquids that promise to make you all better usually make you wish you could die. “What does it taste—oof.”
Valefor had shoved in the spoon. I started to choke and then the lovely buttery syrup flowed down my throat and seemed to settle into a warm fuzzy haze in my wheezing chest. Now I was really feeling pretty good.
“What was that?”
“Madama Twanky’s Sel-Ray Psalt Med-I-Cine,” Valefor replied. He’d replaced both bottle and spoon inside his flowing sleeve.
“It tasted like maple syrup.” The Madama Twanky’s Sel-Ray Psalt that Mamma forces me to take when I’m sick tastes like lamp oil.
“Well, I did improve a bit on the original, but it will fix what ails you.”
“When is it?” I asked, pushing myself back up on the pillows. Ah, the lovely warmth puffing from the radiator. Ah, the lovely warmth in my bones.
“All times are alike to me, so monotonous and boring, but—” Valefor considered. “I think it’s Sunday for you.”
“Sunday!” Panic gurgled in my throat, in my voice. Sunday! The entire weekend gone. My dress, my invitations, my speech, the fifty tamales I had to make and distribute to the poor! Everything I was going to get done this weekend, just in the nick of Mamma coming home. And now she would be home tomorrow and I had done nothing. Even if I started immediately, I wouldn’t have time to get it all done. “I’ve wasted the whole weekend. I’ll never get all my chores done!” I slumped back down into gloom and felt babyish tears prickle at my eyes.
“Never you worry,” said Valefor soothingly. “Valefor is here and he specializes in getting things done. But first, teatime!”
Out of Nowhere, Val produced a plate of waffles and a giant pot of orange tiger tea. While I gobbled the first solid food I’d had in forever, he started tidying. He twinkled his fingertips and suddenly my bedsheets were clean and the bed was made. (Pigface, I’d forgotten to get rid of that horrible comforter!) He waved a hand and my scattered Nini Mo yellowbacks hopped into a neat stack, and the painting of Mamma and Idden hanging over the fireplace straightened. He flapped my socks and they were hole-free. He fixed the upside-down sleeve of my Catorcena dress with a flip of one finger, and hemmed it with a wave of another. He tapped pen to paper and soon enough had a full stack of invitations completed, without a smudge or an ink blot. It was so wonderful to lie there, warm and full, and watch someone else do all the work. In just a few short minutes, my bedroom was cleaner than it had been in years and my Catorcena chores were nearly done. Mamma, why are you so darn stubborn?
“Well,” Val said, finally, after I had drunk the last drop of tea and he had eaten the last waffle. He tossed the tea tray up in the air, and before I could shout, it was gone. “I have been thinking.”
I yawned
again. Between the medicine and all those waffles I was feeling awfully sleepy, but in a yummy tired way. “About what?”
He leaned over the back of the settee and grinned ingratiatingly at me. “I don’t think the Elevator was being obdurate when it brought us together, Flora. That Elevator, that part of me, that is, knew what it was doing, even if you and I were slow to pick up on it.”
“Hmm...” My eyelids weighed fifty pounds, and they kept dropping closed.
“Are you listening to me?” Val’s breath smelled like nutmeg. I opened my eyes. His face was so close to mine that I could see the faint shimmer of golden freckles on his skin, which was as smooth as rubber.
“Do you have bones?” I murmured.
He said snippily, “Of course I have bones. Every stone in this house is part of my—”
“No, I mean, inside your skin, do you have bones? Do you have a liver?”
“What would I need a liver for—disgusting organ—of course not! But as I was saying. I could help you further, if you help me further, Flora.”
“Ayah so?” I yawned again.
He continued, “You just don’t know how boring and lonely it is to be so diminished, me who once had the world begging for favors. And it’s not right, either, to close up such a House and let it molder away just because you are afraid—”
This woke me up some, indignantly. “Mamma is not afraid of anything.” In her youth, my mamma killed a jaguar with a shovel. She’s won the Warlord’s Hammer twice. She’s fought three duels, one bare-knuckled, and won them all. And, of course, she’s been married to Poppy for twenty-eight years, which alone takes an awful lot of sand.
“Pah. You can be as brave as a lion on the outside, Flora Segunda,” Val answered, “and fight bears with your fingernails and stare down monsters until they melt into little puddles of goo at your feet and still be a coward inside, in your heart, where it counts.”
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 5
