Free Blood & Flowers by Penny Blubaugh Page B

Floss. I stepped back, moving fast, and tripped on Tonio. I would have landed flat on the floor if Max hadn’t grabbed me and kept me upright.
    â€œEnough,” Max said. His tone was hard and strong and fierce. “Enough, all of you. Just stop everything for one minute. None of you are helping him”—he pointed, of course at Tonio—“and all of you are hurting one another. I don’t have the resources to keep anyone else upright and functioning right now. We all have to take care of one another if we’re going to come out of this intact. But I have to say that right now, Tonio is my main concern.”
    He glared at each of us in turn, then added, “Am I making all this clear?”
    Nicholas was the first to speak. “He’s right. We can’t help if we spend all our energy infighting.”
    â€œSorry,” Floss said, staring at the floor between my feet.
    â€œSorry, too,” I said. I looked straight at Floss when I spoke, willing her to look up. When I saw her eyelids flicker, I added, “Sorrier, actually. I spoke first.”
    Floss shrugged, but she lifted her head. She looked like Floss again.
    Lucia was still next to Tonio. She said, “Nicholas is right. Max, too. We have to work with one another. It’s important.” She sounded so sincere, so honest, that I almost smiled. If we couldn’t get together behind Lucia, who could we get behind?
    And just like that, snap, we were the Outlaws again. Now in more ways than one, apparently, because with the mess we were in, who knew what we might have to do next?

X
“The answer’s in the petals.”
    N icholas was buried in precedents. He wasn’t finding much, or so it seemed, because he kept growling and smacking books on the table. Every time he did that Floss, who was sitting across from him folding complicated-looking paper flowers, would jump and swear in a soft, controlled, not-at-all-like-Floss way.
    Max and Tonio were sitting close, talking in low inaudible voices. Lucia was in the kitchen boiling water for gallons of tea. And me? I was drifting, on the move because I couldn’t seem to sit still. Really, at this point in time, book art didn’t seem to be what was called for, and I wasn’t sure what else to offer.
    â€œPersia,” Floss said. I thought she was irritated because I kept wandering back and forth behind her chair, but all she seemed to want was help. “Come here. These still need stems.”
    â€œOkay.” If I couldn’t do books, I could still do paper.
    Floss rolled a stem, slim and perfect. It looked like she was rolling an exquisite joint. I tried one and it looked more like an unwieldy cigar. “Hmmm,” I said. Making flower stems was more difficult than making a book with cross bindings. I held my stem up for a Floss inspection. She barely glanced at it, then said, in an unusually calm tone, “That’s fine.”
    â€œSo, Floss,” I said to keep my mind as occupied as my fingers. “Why are we making flowers?”
    She looked at me sideways and sighed. If she’d said, “Stupid question,” she wouldn’t have been any clearer. But all she really did say was, “I need to get a message home and I don’t have time to go myself.”
    I rolled a few more stems while I thought about this. My stems were getting better, which was probably the only nice thing that had happened today, but I still couldn’t make the connection between Floss’swords and what my hands were doing. “I don’t get it,” I admitted, after a full minute of thinking.
    Floss pursed her lips. She grabbed a small clay pot and smacked it down between us, smacked it hard enough that Nicholas looked up briefly and frowned. Floss ignored him and dumped a bunch of stemmed flowers in the pot. Like magic they rearranged themselves, became a lively little bouquet. She added three of the flowers with my stems. They