Authors: Ysabeau S. Wilce
“It’s a good thing for me Espejo only reads lofty literature,” she said, laughing, but it wasn’t funny.
I continued, “And you invoked Pig. Only a Haðraaða could invoke Pig.”
“I was hoping you’d think he came on his own. And was I surprised when he showed up in the form of Evil Murdoch. What happened to Sieur Plushy Pig?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “But, really, Flynn gave you away I asked you to find Flynn and you did.”
“Actually, Pecos had already found him. We were watching you at the Line when Flynn crossed, you know. Pecos followed him and caught him and took the sigil from him. It was a good sigil. Where’d you learn—”
“Never mind! None of that matters!” I said impatiently. “When you came to me that night, you said you had a plan. Was that your plan? To let me be the bait?”
“No, that wasn’t my plan. My plan was to lure Espejo out into the open, track him while he thought he was tracking us. And at first, I thought we were doing just that. But when we camped for the night, Pecos caught up with me and told me that they’d found Oset’s body, and then I knew he’d done the old switcheroo. Espejo isn’t a Flayed Priest, but he’s got enough mojo to pull off such a trick, at least for a while. By the time I got back to the camp, you’d already taken refuge in the cave. I had to wait until the storm was over before I could intercede.”
“You should have told me what was going on.”
“Maybe so. But I wasn’t sure if you could keep your cool.”
“Is that why you drugged me?”
“I’m sorry about that, honey. I didn’t want you to do anything, try to be helpful and just make things worse. Like your shotgun shells. It was a clever idea, but I fear such a sigil would have only pissed Espejo off and lost us our advantage.”
“You took my shells? I thought Espejo did that.”
“Naw, it was me. Advice: never leave your drink or your firearm unattended. But I underestimated you. You did excellently well. That poison trick was marvelous. If Espejo hadn’t been a pophead, it would have worked. It was very good quick thinking. And that Curse was also superhelpful. Another second and he’d have had me.”
“Everything I tried to do failed,” I said dolefully.
“You saved us both,” Tiny Doom said. “That’s not a failure.”
“I got Oset killed.”
“Better her than you or me. If that sounds cold, well, the world is a cold place.” Tiny Doom’s cigarillo had burned down; she lit another and inhaled deeply. Death was nothing to her, I guess; she’d sent hundreds to their deaths, which is how she’d earned the nickname Butcher. But if she didn’t care that Oset was dead, I did. And I would never let myself get hard enough not to.
I said, “I’m leaving tomorrow, you know. Were you just going to let me leave without finding out that you’d been nearby all along?”
“It seemed better that way” she said quietly.
I said hotly, “Well, I’m sorry! I screwed up, I know it, and I led Espejo to you, just because I wanted to find you—more fool me! You didn’t want me then and you don’t want me now. Well, I don’t want you, either!” She didn’t stop me when I turned toward the door. She just sat there, smoking that cigarillo and twirling her coffee cup by its handle. She was going to let me go. I turned back. “You know, in Califa, they worship you. They have replaced the Goddess Califa with you. They think you will save them from the Birdies—”
“I barely saved myself from the Birdies,” Tiny Doom interjected.
“But you did, didn’t you? And now here you are, hiding from them like a coward! Your death almost killed Poppy He’s never been right since. He’s ruined, and he ruined us, too, my entire family, and yet you were never even dead—it was all for nothing. How cruel can you be? Do you ever think of anyone other than yourself?”
“I thought of you, Flora. I thought of nothing but you. That’s why I gave you away! I’m sorry that my choices dismay you, but I did the best I could at the time!”
“It wasn’t good enough!”
She said furiously, “Well, fike you! I’d like to see you do better. It’s fine for you to sit here now and tell me what I should have done. I hope you have no regrets later, that you do everything right the first time. But life isn’t fiking like that, Flora. I’m sorry I couldn’t be who you wanted me to be, but there it is. Take it or leave it.”
I glared at her, and somehow it enraged me even more that she hadn’t dropped the Glamour. She still stared at me with La Bruja’s flat black eyes.
“Drop the Glamour! Just drop it! That joke is over and done with.”
“It’s not a Glamour,” she said softly. “That form, that night of the storm, when you recognized me. That was the Glamour. This is my true face.”
“What the fike are you talking about?”
She bowed her head, her voice muffled. “I’m sorry I thought I was trying to spare you the truth, that you probably couldn’t handle it, but maybe I was just sparing myself. Nini said,
Console your loss with vice, and pour vinegar on an open wound.”
“Spare me the stupid sayings and just tell me the fiking truth!”
She lit another cigarillo and took several long draws, stalling, I guess. Finally, just as I was about to scream with impatience, she said, “I never thought they’d ever dare actually do anything to us—diplomatic immunity, blah, blah. I thought the Warlord would just cough up a ransom, we’d sign a peace treaty on their terms, then go home. Well, I was wrong. There was a trial, and we were found guilty of breaking all sorts of Birdie moral laws we’d never even heard of. I was too polluted to be given to any of the Birdie gods other than the Lord of the Smoked Mirror—he likes ’em bad, I guess. Hotspur was given to the Virreina, to fight as her champion. They’d already taken small Flora, Flora Primera. Poor Sorrel got thrown in with me, guilt by association, I guess.
“At first, I didn’t actually care what happened to me. It seemed as good a time as any to get it all over with, and as good a way to die as any. When ole Tezca eats you, you are gone—no Cloakroom of the Abyss for you—and escaping Paimon sounded rather appealing. But then I realized I was pregnant. And suddenly I wanted to live. I wanted you to live. So Sorrel and I escaped. We had to leave Hotspur and Flora behind, but we escaped.”
“How?”
She shook her head. “I’d rather not say Some of the people who helped us are still around, and I don’t want to compromise their safety Anyway, Sorrel and I made to Arivaipa. But then I realized that Espejo was never going to let me go. As long as I lived—as long as you lived—he would be after us. As far as the Birdies are concerned, our entire family belongs to the Lord of the Smoked Mirror. As you have seen, Espejo is very tenacious when it comes to things he thinks are owed his master. So I came up with a plan. I guess you know what that was.”
“Give me to Buck to raise as her own child.”
“Ayah, so. I knew she could keep you hidden. I knew she would love you like her own. I knew she would keep you safe. And be a better mother to you than I could ever be. So we kept ahead of Espejo until you were born—”
I interrupted her. “Where was I born? Buck told me I was born by the side of the Shasta Road during the Trinity campaign, but obviously that wasn’t true.”
Tiny Doom laughed. “You were born in an encampment of the Red Turtle clan, up north, in the mountains. It was thanks to them that we were able to avoid Espejo for so long. I owe them an awful lot. Tezca may be pretty powerful, but he’s no match for the power of the Dithee.”
“So I was born in Arivaipa? I’m not even a Califan?”
“It’s not where you are born that counts, it’s how you live. I’d say you rate pretty high as a Califan, honey. Anyway after I sent you to Buck, I gave myself up to Espejo, but first I made him promise to persuade the Virreina to allow Buck to ransom Hotspur. And he did. He’s many things, dear Xava is, but he is a man of his word.”
“But why did Major Sorrel give himself up, too? He was safe.”
She sighed. “Oh, Sorrel. He was so honorable, sometimes he was downright idiotic. He had this idea that I should not face the plinth alone. I couldn’t persuade or even order him out of that notion. Califa forgive me, but in the end, I was glad he was there, though it left his children fatherless.”
“But you didn’t die. Or you did die, and then you pulled the Ultimate Ranger Dare. You came back.”
She shook her head. “He cut my heart out and ate it, honey. There’s no coming back from that. Even Nini Mo herself couldn’t have managed that trick.”
“You aren’t a ghoul, are you, or a vampire?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“No, yuck—Goddess, no. I am a revivifico. My Anima remains here, in the Waking World, but my body is gone. Consumed by Espejo. This body you see belonged to another. I have borrowed it, kept it sweet with a sigil. Soon it will decay and I shall have to borrow another. And then another and another. And so it goes.”
A revivifico! My mother was a revivifico! I stared at Tiny Doom in horror. Revivificos aren’t as ravenous as ghouls or mindless like zombies, but they are still animated corpses. Where did she get the bodies? I didn’t want to know. Nini Mo was right. Ignorance is bliss. My hands were shaking. I clenched them so she would not see. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of being proven right that I couldn’t handle the truth, so I swallowed my horror and said, as airily as I could, “Well, at least you aren’t a ravenous ghoul.”
“Absolutely. There are advantages to this state. I don’t need to sleep, I don’t feel pain, and I don’t need to eat.” She laughed, but the sound was not mirthful.
“If you aren’t really alive, then Espejo could not have killed you. You were never in any danger at all.” This, more than anything else, enraged me. I had risked so much and for nothing. Nothing at all!
“Not true. Technically, the bodies I borrow are dead, so he can’t kill them. But he could have destroyed my Anima, and then I would be done for permanently. And he certainly could have killed you. The danger was real enough.”
“But it’s over now. Espejo is taken care of. You have to come back to Califa.”
She shook her head. “No. No.”
“The people worship you. They’ll rally to you. It’s all well and good to have a blockade, and the jade stuff, but that’s not the same as a leader. Rebellions need a leader, someone to rally around.”
“Buck is the leader of the rebellion. And the return of Sylvanna Abenfarax is the rallying point.”
“But she’s been Birdie-ized!”
“No, she has not. She’s made very nice to the Birdies so they would let her go home, but once she’s there, they will find they have been mistaken about her. Badly mistaken. Listen, the woman they call Azota—she doesn’t exist anymore. She’s dead. I am not her. I am someone else entirely Flora! Don’t you understand?”
“Nyana! My name is Nyana! And I do understand. I understand that you are a coward!”
She sighed heavily, rubbed her face. “Nyana. I have done all I can for Califa. I have to let Buck do the rest—”
“You just don’t want to face Poppy. You don’t want to tell him you’ve been dead—alive—whatever the fike it is you are. You are a coward.”
“Perhaps I am,” Tiny Doom answered. “But what I do is my choice, not yours.”
“And what about Axacaya? You said in the letter you left for me that you were coming for him. Where are those brave words now?”
“Oh, I have plans for Axacaya, but now is not the time for them. I can’t go back to the City. But you should.”
“Why should I?”
“You are the Head of the Haðraaða family. You are the focal point of Bilskinir House. Califa needs you. The City needs Bilskinir, needs our family’s power. Getting rid of the Birdies isn’t going to be easy Buck will depend on you.”
“Are you fiking me? Califa doesn’t need my kind of help. I’m the last thing Buck needs,” I said bitterly.
“You have fiked up plenty of this, it’s true,” Tiny Doom said. “But you’ve also stepped up and followed through when you had to. You saved the lives of those troopers and brought them home safely. You saved Tharyn’s life not once, but twice. You stood against a nahual. Don’t be so sorry for yourself, kid. Life sucks, you know; it’s full of crap we don’t want to do, but sometimes we have to suck it up and do it, anyway.”
“Because it’s my destiny?” I said bitterly “Because I am a Haðraaða?”
“No. I can’t afford to believe in destinies. If I believed my entire life and death had been ordained, I’d go insane. Instead, I’d rather believe I made my own fate. Just as you will make yours. Go back because Califa needs girls with sand, and you, Nini, have a fikeload of sand.”
Instead of soothing me, her words filled me with rage. How dare she tell me what to do? I hadn’t come all this way and risked so much for her to lecture me. Let her stay in Arivaipa. Why the fike should I care? She had given birth to me, but that was all. In all other ways, she’d abandoned me. She couldn’t tell me what to do now. She wasn’t anything to me, just a moldering corpse. I didn’t care what she did.
I sprang to my feet and ducked out of the wickiup. Tiny Doom called after me, but I ignored her. Flynn scrambled behind me. Tiny Doom could go to the fiking Abyss for all I cared. Tomorrow I would leave Fort Sandy and I would never look back.
You are either with us or against us,
Nini Mo said. Well, I was going to be neither. I was going to be far away from Califa and its problems.
At the parade ground, I stopped. The flagpole was empty. But in my imagination I saw the colors fluttering there: the blue and white regimental flag; the red and black insignia of the Warlord; the gorgeous purple flag of the Republic of Califa.
Califa. A wave of homesickness washed over me. I had been too frantic to think about Pow or Poppy or Paimon. Was Poppy still sober? Could Pow talk yet? I thought of Paimon alone in giant Bilskinir House, waiting for his family—for me—to return someday The cozy clerks’ office. Bilskinir’s clean towels. Faithful Sieur Caballo. My annoying sister Idden. Buck.
If I went with Tharyn, it might be years before I saw Califa again. Pow would be grown. The rebellion would be over. Buck and Poppy would be old. Maybe even dead.
But how could I go back now? How could I explain to Buck what had happened? Why I’d run from the Dainty Pirate? Where I’d been all this time, and why? I couldn’t reveal Tiny Doom’s secret, and who knows how Buck would take my silence. Maybe she’d court-martial me. Worse, be disappointed in me. She had done so much for me, and see how I had repaid her?