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) (12 page)

I drew Udo’s shirt over his head and off, thus revealing a clotted red mess on his left shoulder. My tum twisted and my breakfast rose upward. I swallowed hard; I was not going to give Udo the satisfaction of urping. Valefor grabbed the bloody shirt and whisked back to the top of my wardrobe, where he began to make slurpy sounds.

“How could you go this long without doing something?” I said. “Doesn’t it hurt?”

“I didn’t even feel it,” Udo twisted his head so he could inspect himself. “I can hardly feel it now. Anyway, I was busy with other things.”

The Zu-Zu, I warranted, and suddenly I felt very mean and rather hoped that the wound hurt quite a bit.

“Wait until the excitement wears off.” Valefor had stopped smacking. “And then you’ll be howling like a monkey. I remember when the Butcher Brakespeare shot Hotspur, it was the night of Pirates Parade and he—”

“Val—
shut up.
You are distracting me,” I said. Pouting, he obeyed. I poured more water and dabbed at the wound, while Udo squirmed and ground his teeth. Eventually was revealed a long red furrow running the length of his bicep, skimming the top of his shoulder.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Udo said, disappointed. “It’s just a little scratch. The bullet must have been spent when it hit. And I never even felt it. Ain’t that weird—you should know when you get shot, but I didn’t even notice.”

“You need to see a doctor,” I said. “Maybe it’s worse than it looks. It could get infected.”

“No way!” Udo answered in alarm. “If I go to a doctor, they’ll want to know what happened, and it’ll get back to Mam and the Daddies, and then I’ll be in a world of hurt for sure. It’s just a scratch.”

“Udo, you’ve been shot, for Califa’s sake! You have to see a doctor. I told you that stuff with Springheel Jack wasn’t a game—someone was going to get hurt.”

Apparently Valefor was done with the shirt, for now he drifted down from the wardrobe. “Pah, you are an old nurse, Flora. It’s nothing. Just wipe it out with some bugjuice, bind it up, and he’ll be fine. But we have to do something about that drippy outlaw.”

Springheel Jack! We had to get Jack out of the stables before Poppy found him. And I had forgotten I was supposed to be getting ready for the Warlord’s Birthday Ball. It was almost time to leave. But how was I going to explain to Poppy that I had to take Udo to the surgeon? No lie I could possibly think of was going to be good enough to satisfy Poppy
and
keep us out of trouble. And if I missed the Ball, who knew when I would have a chance to get close to Lord Axacaya again. Blast Udo!

The Eschata
has a whole section on first aid, for rangers often operate far beyond the reach of doctors, or have medical needs that they do not wish to disclose. Luckily for Udo, I’d read that section three times already and even done some practice by bandaging up Flynn. The wound didn’t look that bad. It had already waited and Udo hadn’t yet died. Surely it could wait longer.

But suddenly Udo was not quite so perky He lay back on the settee, his face pale, his eyes closed, while I tore up one of my outgrown chemises. He wiggled only a little as I carefully cleaned the scratch with the bottle of apple gin I had long ago confiscated from Poppy and kept around just in case. I folded a piece of the cloth into a nice little pad, soaked it with the bugjuice, and then secured it over the wound with a goodly quantity of brown paper tape. Nini Mo advises that you can pack a wound with cobwebs, but I didn’t have any, so the apple gin would have to do.

I said, “There, you are done. If your arm turns green and falls off, Udo, it won’t be my fault.”

“Pooh,” said Udo, drowsily “You aren’t a very nice surgeon.”

“You are lucky I didn’t just whack your whole arm off as a precaution.”

“Ha-ha,” Udo said weakly, and I poked him in the chest.

“Hey. You can’t pass out now, Udo. We have to figure out what to do with Springheel Jack.”

“You’d better give him another jolt of that apple gin,” Valefor suggested, and for once his idea was a good one.

Udo took the glass of gin. “Turn Jack in is what we are going to do,” he said. His hands were now shaking so hard he could barely get the glass to his mouth. I took it from him and held it against his lips. He drank, sputtering, but I didn’t take the glass away until the entire jolt was gone.

The kitty-clock on the mantel said it was five o’clock. I had to leave in forty-five minutes. The gin had turned Udo’s cheeks bright red, and now his eyes looked glassy, though that might have been the shock of the gunshot catching up with him. He wasn’t going to be good for anything. Once again, it was all up to me.

I said, “Look, Valefor, can you get to the stables and guard Springheel Jack? Make sure that Poppy doesn’t go out there. If he looks like he’s heading that direction, then come back and tell me quick and I’ll try to distract him. We’re going by cab, but Poppy might decide to check on the horses or something. I’ve got to finish getting dressed and then I’ll be down to move Jack to a more secure location.”

“He’s going to spoil,” Udo mumbled. “We gotta turn him in.” He was snuggling up with the pink pig, his face buried in the pig’s fat neck. The pig stared at me with beady little eyes; now his expression seemed rather amused.

I said, “We can’t do anything right now, and I have an idea where to stow him. Go on, Valefor. We haven’t got any time to waste. Can you get there? You should have gotten
something
out of Udo’s shirt.”

Valefor stuck his nose in the air. “You are bossy, Flora Segunda.”

“Go!”

With a wiggle, Valefor disintegrated. Now that I had purpose, I was able to snap my busk with minimal fuss. I yanked my laces as tightly as they would go, tied them off with a bow, then slithered into the red dress. Caught my hair back with my red Sanctuary ribbon and hung my fan case on my sash. In the beauty section of
The Eschata,
Nini advises that even if you wear no other maquillage, you should always wear lip rouge. I didn’t have any lip rouge, but Udo would. He was asleep, so he would hardly squawk if I borrowed it. Snatching up his jacket from where I had tossed it, I went through his pockets, finding a crushed box of Madama Twanky’s Coffin Nails, a silver lighter engraved with the initials O. A., his bankbook (in which the balance clearly showed that Udo was in no danger of being broke), a lip rouge in the shade of Death in Bloom—and a package of Madama Twanky’s Netherglove sheaths, size extra large.

Quivering, I dropped the coat and stared at Udo. Could he and the Zu-Zu possibly...? But they had just met—just yesterday! Surely Udo wasn’t that rash? How could he, with such a skanky slag?

I opened the tin and saw that the sheaths were all there. Well, why should I care if one
was
missing? If Udo wanted to fondle that stick girl, then all the more welcome he was to her. They were equal to each other in vanity and idiocy. I had bigger things to worry about than Udo’s bad taste in women: the Birthday Ball, Springheel Jack, Idden. Udo’s love life was low on my list. Actually Udo’s love life wasn’t on my list at all. Not even at the very bottom.

“You look nice, Flora.” Udo opened his eyes as I leaned over him to tuck the blanket up over his shoulders.

“Thanks.”

He said, sleepily “But you need some lip rouge; Zu says you should always have a good lip rouge.”

“Huh,” I answered, the little glow of his compliment now extinguished.

“Zu is a stunner, don’t you think?”

“If you like them with one foot in the grave,” I said sourly but Udo didn’t answer. He’d passed out.

I
GALLOPED DOWN
the Below Stairs and, at the bottom, skidded to a breathless halt, startled. A bright red stranger stood at the stove, his back to me. This stranger wore the Alacrán regimental dress uniform; his frock coat, a deep bluish crimson called sangyn, had gilt-encrusted bat sleeves, and the hem of his sangyn kilt just brushed the top of his polished black boots. His sangyn wig was in the style called the Flail, because the long braids are gathered together so they look like the lash end of a whip. His sabre sling was empty, showing he was prepared to dance, not fight. But the gun on his hip showed he was prepared to dance
and
fight.

The sangyn stranger turned around, and was, of course, Poppy.

His face was painted as white as bone, the scars on his cheeks, one slash to each side of his nose, striped with red. His lips were red, too, bright and shiny, as though touched with blood. Two lines of small sangyn marks dotted his forehead. I didn’t have to count to know there were sixteen of them: the number of scalps that Poppy has taken. The Alacráns are the only regiment in the Army that takes scalps. This adds to their terrifying reputation and has earned them the nickname Skinners.

I had never seen Poppy in his Alacrán uniform before, and the initial sight was somewhat terrifying. But looking beyond the bloody uniform, I saw that the white powder on his face smoothed the lines and made him look younger, like the Poppy I had seen at Bilskinir House, when Udo and I had accidentally gone back in Bilskinir’s history. The loops of the crimson wig reminded me of the skeins of that younger Poppy’s hair, which had been long and coppery rather than short and silvery. The younger Poppy had been beautiful; this Poppy would have almost been handsome if it weren’t for all that bloody red.

Poppy said, “Here, let me blot your lip rouge; it’s a bit too bright.”

I dodged his outstretched napkin-waving arm and said, “I have to run out to the stables for a minute. I forgot to grain the horses.”

“You should have remembered before you were dressed,” Poppy said. “But go and hurry. The fly will be here any minute. You need a new pair of stays. You are about to explode out of the pair you are wearing.”

“I know, Poppy,” I said, feeling my face go hot. I grabbed my pelisse off the coatrack and threw it over my shoulders. I was suddenly regretting the low cut of my neckline. Maybe I could leave the pelisse on during the Ball. “I’ll hurry.”

I found Springheel Jack sitting on a hay bale, stiff as a board. Udo had been lucky the zombie powder had kept the dead outlaw going long enough to stash him in the barn, but now the powder had worn off and rigor mortis had set in. Udo had kindly wrapped a feed sack around Jack’s head, but the parts of him that still showed—his neck and hands—looked waxy and livid. My arrival dispersed a merry band of buzzing flies that were hovering over him. Bonzo and Mouse hung their heads over their stall doors, complaining. For battle-hardened horses, they were certainly acting delicate.

Valefor flitted down from the shadows in the eaves. “You took forever, Flora Segunda. I thought any minute we would be discovered. The horses are unhappy. They don’t like the smell.”

I didn’t blame them; I didn’t like the smell, either—a meaty spoiled odor like the kitchen trash when no one has taken it out for a week. I held up my arm and sniffed deeply the laundry soap and bleach smells of my sleeve. To make my lie to Poppy less of a lie, I poured sweet feed into the horses’ manger while I considered what to do. The horses left off their nervous complaining and started to gobble. This was actually their second ration of sweet feed today, and now they didn’t care about the stinky outlaw stench.

“What are we going to do, Flora Segunda?” Valefor asked.

I looked at him hopefully. “I don’t suppose you can move him, can you?”

“No. Not unless you give me some Anima, and I know, I know—I’m not asking, just saying. Udo’s shirt was something, but not enough.”

Having been down that road with Valefor before, I had no desire to set foot on it again. I would have to move him myself.

“Any idea how long it takes for the rigor to wear off?” I asked.

“Days, I think,” Valefor answered. “I remember when Aeyptia Fyrdraaca hid in a gunpowder cask during a game of hide-and-seek. She cheated, silly duck, by using a Concealment Sigil, but her air ran out, and when we found her a week later, she was as stiff as a yaller dog’s spine. We had to bury her in that barrel; she was stuck tight as a tick. See what happens to people who cheat?”

“Forget Cousin What’s-her-name. Jack can’t stay here until he softens up. I have to get him going somehow. Do you think more zombie powder would work even if he’s already dead?”

Valefor said in alarm, “I don’t want a revenant shuffling around my grounds, Flora. Once my henhouse got infested by ghouls; they ate all my chickens before I realized what was going on and put the whammy on them. That’s how I lost Gallo de Cielo. Oh, he was a champion fighter—you should have seen his spur. Anyway, where would we move him where he won’t keep spoiling?”

“To the Casa de Hielo. No one ever goes there, and that should keep the flies and the smell down. Maybe by the time we come home, he’ll have softened up again and Udo can get him out of here.”

Valefor was, of course, outraged at my suggestion that we stow Jack in the old icehouse. He began to rave about the pristine quality of his ice, the purity of his spring water, and the absolute necessity of avoiding contamination by decaying outlaws. But he didn’t offer a better idea, so I ignored him and hauled the wheelbarrow out of the hay shed.

I don’t know how much Springheel Jack weighed in life, but the term
deadweight
now rang true. Even if I hadn’t been hampered by yards of poofy skirt and those squeezy tight stays, I would have had a hard time levering him up off the hay bale and into the wheelbarrow. But the worst of it was that although the dead outlaw was rigid, he was also weirdly squishy. My fingers left deep indentations in his flesh. He was sloshy, too, as though his insides were turning to mush, which I suppose they were. The whole thing was horrible; my breakfast kept threatening to splash upward, but I commanded it to stay down. Rangers don’t puke, at least not in the line of duty.

“Focus your Will,” Valefor said encouragingly. “Heave-ho. Put your back into it.”

I let off heaving and stood up, wiping sweat off my face and trying to flap the hay off my skirts. Maybe it would be better to just leave Springheel Jack until I returned from the Ball and Udo could help me. I couldn’t go to the Ball looking like a soggy mess. But I couldn’t risk leaving Springheel Jack in the stables. Poppy was sure to check the horses before he went to bed. And the smell was going to get worse long before it got better. What if it started to drift? What if the wind came up? What if the horses started to fuss again?