Flora's Fury: How a Girl of Spirit and a Red Dog Confound Their Friends, Astound Their Enemies, and Learn the Impo by Ysabeau S. Wilce

Author:Ysabeau S. Wilce
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012-05-08T06:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FOUR

Frozen. Blood. Vision Serpent.

I HAD NEVER SEEN the face of an adult Birdie before. Birdie aristocrats wear masks of jade, leather, or gold. Everyone else obscures their features behind thick paint. The Birdie’s silver mask dangled from his hand, and the face thus revealed was horrifying. The sides of his skull had been shaved and his warrior lock was long, stiff with blood, woven through with feathers, bones, and tufts of fur. His face was painted black, bisected with a yellow stripe across his eyes and the bridge of his nose. Golden thorns pierced his ears and his nasal septum, and his lower lip. His teeth, when he opened his mouth to speak, were stained red, the canines sharp.

The Birdie said, “You are traveling with Wraathmyr, the wer-bear. You were with him at Valdosta’s.” He paused to lick his lips. His voice was strangely familiar. When he spoke again, saying, “You helped the skinwalker escape me,” I knew where I had heard him before.

He was Madama Valdosta’s buddy at the lodge. The man who had set us up. “He belongs to the Lord of the Smoked Mirror, the skinwalker does. He has been marked. But you, you are very ... familiar to me. Who are you?”

The Birdie licked his lips again. He needed to get some Madama Twanky’s Lip Repair, I thought somewhat hysterically.

If they get you, said Nini Mo, keep yer yip shut. I tried to stay silent, but I could not. At the touch of his finger on my lips, my mouth opened. Luckily for me, the compulsion was simply to speak, not to tell the truth.

I croaked, “What skinwalker?”

“The boy,” the Birdie said impatiently. “His scent is all over you.”

“I don’t know anything about any skinwalker.”

The Birdie touched my lips again and I shut up. He raised a quizzing glass to his eye, peering at me through it. But he couldn’t be looking at me, for the glass itself was black, completely opaque.

The Birdie let the quizzing glass drop on its chain, and stood up. His black shift was tufted with golden fur around the neck; his bare arms were covered in long scratches. Some were half-healed, still scabby; others were new enough to be stippled with red. He was either a magician or a priest—or both. But he wasn’t a Flayed Priest; his skin appeared to be his own. Beneath my fear, another terror, even sharper, began to bloom.

He said, “I saw you in the mirror, while I was tracking the skinwalker. You are so familiar, and yet why? The Smoke drifts in your veins, twisting and turning, and yet you do not control it. Who are you?”

Now my fear shifted into hope. He didn’t know exactly who I was; he was suspicious, that was all. If I could persuade him I was nobody, then maybe he’d let me go.

I whispered, “My name is Nyana Romney. I’ve been in the Current, it’s true, but I’m not an adept.”

The Birdie looked amused. “You call it the Current, as though it is something that can be channeled, controlled, or ridden.

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