Free 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) by Ysabeau S. Wilce Page A

General’s office. As eldest, Udo should carry on the family tradition, but he’d rather go back to the original family profession: piracy.
    His grandmother Gunn-Britt Landaðon had sailed with the Warlord, back in the days when the Warlord himself was a pirate and he hadn’t yet scored his biggest prize: Califa. Now the Warlord is a warlord, not a pirate, and the Landaðons are lawyers, not pirates, and piracy in general is frowned upon, but that hasn’t stopped Udo in his ambition.
    If Nini Mo is my lodestar, then Udo’s is the Dainty Pirate, whose exploits in the waters up and down the Califa coastline are notorious. The Dainty Pirate flouts the Warlord’s Authority and refuses to sail with a Letter of Marque, which means if he ever gets caught, he’ll be hanged. They call him the Dainty Pirate because his manners are exquisite, and so, too, his wardrobe. Udo thinks he’s fabulous.
    I had briefed Udo on Valefor during lunch, and he had demanded to see Val for himself, so we had agreed to meet after school and go back to Crackpot together. Which would have been fine, if he’d been on time, but Udo has a problem with punctuality that many detentions have not straightened out.
    While I waited, I thought about
The Eschatanomicon.
I had stayed up most of the night reading it front to back. It really is a terrific book, full of all sorts of useful information and written in a friendly style, as though Nini Mo were sitting down next to you, talking to you as an equal. Magick books, in my experience, tend to be arcane and complicated, full of tortuous explanations and run-on sentences, and most adepts are superfond of superbig words. But Nini Mo eschewed the fancy words and spoke plainly. I didn’t understand why the book was so rare, or why I’d never heard of it before. It was the best book on magick I’d ever read.
    And after reading it, I was sure that I could restore Valefor, although a few details needed to be ironed out first, if only Udo would hurry up and arrive so we could go back to Crackpot and start ironing.
    I was just about to give up and go to the Tuckshop for a mocha, and then let Udo arrive and wait for
me,
when at last there was a hollering
yahoo,
and here he came, resplendent in a black-and-white-striped frock coat over an emerald green kilt. Perched on his head was an emerald green hat the size of a wheel of cheese, well festooned with black and white ribbons and cruelly surmounted by an iridescent green-and-gold bird wing. Udo is the most conscientious dresser I know; half the time you need to put your sunshades on just to look at him. He is what the
Califa Police Gazette
would call a glass-gazing font of frivolity. If he weren’t so disgustingly handsome, he’d look ridiculous. Instead, he looked glorious.
    “Nice hat, Udo,” I said. “I feel sorry for the bird that had to die so you could be stylish.”
    “Well, ave to you, too, Flora,” he answered, reaching up as though to make sure the hat was still on his head, which it was, thanks to a hat pin longer than my arm. “I dug the bird out of Granny’s old clothes-closet. It’s been dead longer than we’ve been alive, and don’t you think it’s nice to make sure it didn’t die in vain?”
    “What took you so long?”
    “Sorry. I got caught up in Arts Logic. Here, I brought you a mocha.”
    I took the cup he offered. Just what I needed, so lovely warm and chocolatey. “How much do I owe you?”
    “Nayah, it’s on me,” he answered, airily.
    I was shocked. Udo is notoriously cheap. Other than the money he spends on his clothes, most of which he buys secondhand or makes himself, every glory he gets goes straight into his Letter of Marque fund. (Udo has no intention of paying for his piracy with his neck.)
    “To what do I owe this honor?”
    “Well, I missed you, Flora.”
    I had missed him, too, but I hate soppiness, so I said, all business-brisk: “So you should have.”
    Udo rolled his eyes and sat down on the bench next to