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 B

Udo. “Are you going to share those lime meltaways, Flora?”
    I passed him the platter. “Every servitor has a physical item that binds it and links it to the physical world—” “So it’s kinda the physical representation of Val?” Udo interrupted.
    “Ayah.”
    “Then shouldn’t Valefor’s fetish be Crackpot Hall?” “No, the House is too big. No adept could charge something as large as an entire house. No one has that powerful a Will—”
    “Azucar Fyrdraaca—,” began Valefor, but Udo cut him off.
    “So what’s your fetish, Valefor?”
    Valefor looked a bit embarrassed and mumbled something unintelligible.
    I said, “What? I can’t hear you.”
    “I have forgotten,” Val admitted sheepishly.
    Udo snorted. “You have forgotten? How can you forget something like that? That’s pretty lame, Valefor. It’s like forgetting your own name.”
    Valefor said plaintively, “I am insignificant and reduced, and I have been drained. There is so much about myself that I no longer know; why do you think it is taking me so long to write my memoirs? Buck has cut me off from much of myself, and, of course, my fetish, for with it, I should be whole and in command.”
    “So what do we do if we don’t know what your fetish is?” Udo asked. “We can’t reconnect you to it if we don’t know what it is.”
    Val said eagerly, “You could kill Buck and let her heir take her place as the new Head of the House. Idden and I always got along quite well, I am sure
she
would restore me—oh ayah, it was just an idea. You don’t have to get all stuffy about it, Flora. Remember, there will be Fyrdraacas in this House long after you are gone.”
    “I will not kill Mamma,” I said, adding maliciously, as payback for such an awful suggestion, “I guess, then, you are out of luck.”
    Val turned the piteous all the way up to high and wrung his narrow hands together. “You don’t know how it is, Flora. To be all alone in this empty room, to hear voices from so far away, lovely voices, and to know that they cannot hear you. To sit alone, with all these books telling the stories of other lives, not your own. And to feel yourself growing weaker and weaker every day, whilst your walls crumble and your family falls into ruin. And there is nothing you can do, alone, outcast, adrift, lost.” “There’s got to be something that we can do, Flora,” Udo said. “It sucks to be in lockdown; boy, don’t I know it. I’m with Valefor on this, all the way. Wasn’t Nini Mo’s motto ‘Free the Oppressed’?”
    “Thank you, Sieur Landaðon,” Val sobbed. “You are so very kind.”
    “Quit crying, Val,” I said. “We will find your fetish.”
    The sobbing stopped, and the tears on Valefor’s pale cheeks were gone. “How?”
    “We will use the Discernment Sigil.”

ELEVEN
Discernment Sigil. Smoke. Searching. A Tea Caddy.
    R ANGERS, OF COURSE, are always looking for things—information, people, clues—and so
The Eschatanomicon
was full of sigils that find things. There was the Acquisition Sigil to find something you need but don’t have; the Retrieval Sigil to find things you had but then lost. The Recovery Sigil, which seemed to be exactly like the Retrieval Sigil, only you had to have lost by your own fault the things you were looking for. The Discovery Sigil to find things that you didn’t even know that you needed, and the Recollection Sigil to help you remember what you had forgotten. And the Revelation Sigil for things that were in front of your eyes but you were looking right through.
    Some of these sigils were quite complicated. The Recollection Sigil was the obvious choice, but it called for several arcane ingredients (attar of crimson corn, starfish eyes, and a bowline knot), required that the adept prepare by drinking nothing but fizzy lemonade for three days before, and ended with the adept setting herself on fire. The Revelation Sigil would have also probably worked, but it called for six adepts and copious