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 Read Free Book Online Page B

am tired.” Dealing with Poppy is exhausting and sick-at-heart-making, and now I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and stay there a week. It was a relief to have the mess cleaned up, and popcorn was tempting, but I still wanted my bed.
    “You are a stick, Flora, that’s what you are, an absolute stick,” Valefor said.
    I did not give in, but Valefor would not give up. Still begging, he followed me as I turned down the lights, banked the stove, and went upstairs. He leaned over me as I stopped by the Stairs of Exuberance, to listen for noise coming from Poppy’s Eyrie. (Dead silence.)
    “You are
bugging
me!” I shouted, after I had shut my bedroom door in his face and he had floated right through, anyway.
    He looked hurt. “But I thought you liked me.”
    I threw my boots into the wardrobe and pulled my nightgown out from under my pillow. “I just need to go to bed and get some sleep. And I can’t do that if you are following me everywhere. Can’t you leave me alone?”
    “I told you, Flora, we are connected now, and I can go where you go, at least around the House. I will be very quiet,” he said, sitting down on the settee. But of course he wasn’t. He chattered on about this and that, and that and this. Having someone around to clean things up was nice, but I could see now that it had its cost.
The meal’s not free if you still have to leave a tip,
Nini Mo said.
    “...and a shame that a Fyrdraaca should be sleeping in a broom closet—”
    “This was a broom closet?” I interrupted. My room is not fancy, but it’s not tiny, either. It has a fireplace surmounted by a mantel carved with cunning little monkeys, two big windows that overlook the kitchen garden, a cushy settee, and a banged-up wardrobe big enough to play house in. Sure, it is messy, but that was nothing against the room, only against my interest in keeping it tidy.
    “Well, not this room. This room was, I think, where I stored extra toilet brushes or something; I don’t remember. Anyway, I mean there—” Valefor pointed to my bed. “That closet!”
    At first glance around my room, you wouldn’t see my bed at all, and you’d think maybe I slept on the settee. But then you would notice a set of doors on one wall, and when the doors slid open, there was my bed, tucked inside a little alcove, all snuggly and secret. I love my bed; when the doors are closed and you are pillowed down into your comforters with a dog at your feet, you are hidden and no one can get you. Had my bed been a broom closet?
    “See how it is that the Fyrdraacas are constrained,” Valefor said. “I am as wide as the sky when it comes to space, and here the Fyrdraacas are, crouching in utility rooms. Even your kitchen is just an extra kitchen I made in case some guest brought his own cook, and these rooms, all of them, spare servants’ quarters for spare servants, and here you are living as servants in them. Or in your case, a slave, Flora Segunda.”
    Valefor was right. Why were we living in servants’ rooms, like servants? Because we couldn’t get to the rest of the House without the Butler. Whom Mamma had banished. Another thing to hold against her, I supposed. But not tonight. “I really have to go to bed, Valefor,” I said. “Are you going to shut up or shall I kick you?”
    “All right, all right!” He settled down on the settee and began to read one of my Nini Mo yellowback novels. I climbed into bed, pulled the door mostly closed, and put my nightgown on. The dogs had already settled in, and they shifted around to make room for me.
    “Must you throw your clothes on the floor?” Valefor asked without looking up from his reading. He waved one hand and my stays and chemise drifted upward, then floated over to the wardrobe, tucking themselves inside. My kilt and pinafore wafted into the dirty-clothes bin, and my pullover flitted over to Valefor, who put down the yellowback to receive it.
    “There’s a giant hole in the elbow!” he said,