Free 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 Page A

Mamma’s room, and as I crept by their door, I saw it was closed. He must have gone to bed early and taken the dogs with him—lucky, lucky for me. I crept the rest of the way down the hallway trying to muffle my wheezing, to my bedroom, where I found Valefor lounging in my bed, reading a yellowback, and eating toffee.
    “You are nearly late,” he said, crunching loudly. I closed my bedroom door and locked it. “And you have liver in your hair.”
Crunch, crunch.
    “I know, Sieur Bossy Boiler.”
    I felt as though I had just crawled across the entire Arivaipa desert. The thought of collapsing upon the settee and never moving again was blissful, but I had to get clean first. If Poppy smelled the smoke on me, saw the liver or the broken glass in my hair, he’d be mighty suspicious. The Stilskin Puppet Show does not involve pyrotechnics or organ meat.
    I pitched my stays and pinafore on the floor and got my dressing gown out of my wardrobe. “Is Poppy in bed?”
    Crunch, crunch.
“Oh, no, he’s gone.”
    “Gone?! Where did he go?” Poppy hadn’t left Crackpot in years. “Did he take the dogs?”
    Crunch, crunch.
“He locked them in the stables when he left. I don’t know where he went. You are lucky he’s gone. You stink of smoke, magick ... and failure, so I’m guessing it didn’t go so well.”
    “Go kiss a horse, Valefor,” I said rudely and went to take a bath.
    In the loo I saw that Valefor was right: I was a mess. My hair was matted with liver, sparkly with glass shards. The smell of smoke hung about me like a pall, and my eyes looked like soft-boiled eggs. My teeth were zinging with a galvanic buzz—an aftershock of the Ominous Apparition, I supposed. The hem of my kilt was shredded, and when I pulled off my grimy chemise, I saw I had a livid welt mark around my waist, along with red lines from where my stay-bones had been squeezed into my flesh. All the little pains had merged into one giant throb.
    Lots of rose-smelling soap washed off the liver and smoke. But nothing could erase the smell of failure. Clearly Firemonkey was a dead end. The Horses of Instruction would have to leave the City if they wished to stay ahead of the militia, and how could a man on the run teach me Gramatica?
    And then there was Idden. Blast her! Couldn’t she have run off to be a gambler or a farmer? Something harmless? Well, she had made her bed, and I hoped she enjoyed lying in it; when Mamma found out what Idden had done, she was going to explode—and who knows what that would mean for the rest of us. The more I thought about Idden, the more I felt like kicking her, which reminded me of someone else I would like to kick: Udo.
    After all we’d been through, how could he leave me in the lurch for that stick girl? She’d just given him a Look and away he went, with not a thought of me, his best friend—me who had just kept him from ending up as some outlaw’s bull’s-eye. Well, fine. If Udo wanted to play it that way, I didn’t need him. I had more important things to think about than Udo, his stupid Chickie, and his zombie outlaw.
    Like the tentacle that had tried to kill me. I had never heard of a tentacle erupting out of a toilet before. Mamma loves to tell the story about how when she was a shavetail lieutenant in Arivaipa Territory, her commanding officer was attacked by fire ants while he was sitting on the pot in the Officers’ Sinks. And last year the
CPG
had reported on a guy who’d had his hinder bit when a rat popped out of his potty. But that’s completely different than a tentacle. After all, you expect fire ants in the desert. And it’s not unusual to find rats in a sewer, though you hope they will stay there and not pop up in your pot when you are sitting upon it.
    How could a tentacle even get into a potty pipe to begin with? I don’t know much about Califa’s water pipe system, but if it was full of tentacles, surely you’d read about it in the
CPG
. People would be constantly complaining.