The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

  They stumbled out into a clearing in the Lightning Jungle. The sharp whip of ozone snapped at their noses. Lightning sprouts buzzed and tingled all in a ring round a thousand thousand domes like a pincushion—and quite the size of a pincushion, too. The Sajada spread out before them, the domes gorgeous and ornate and no bigger than toadstools. Crescent moons pronged up from their tips just like the one on Candlestick’s diadem. Little courtyards and fountains and walkways dotted the meadow between the domes. The fountains made a tiny trickling sound like the lightest rain. The domes flashed in cascading patterns, flickering pale colors, bright and dark, bright and dark.

  Candlestick looked over it with pride. “I grew up on the Moon. If I don’t know my own mother I don’t know anything.” She kicked at a tuft of charcoal sod with her pale hoof, digging deep into it, pushing down and in and scrabbling against the soil. It popped and steamed like boiling cake. The Buraq finally flipped up the divot—and underneath it gleamed a mosaic pattern of gems. “Oh, it’s thin here. You’d have to dig down ages most everywhere else. Scientists used to come up here all the time trying to suss out the secrets of the Moon, but I kept them away. The Fairies never cared. Fairies don’t have fates, you know. I’ve heard it told that they stripped them off, eons and eons ago, like winter jackets. No one tells a Fairy what to do! Held a bonfire in the place that became Pandemonium, and if you looked too close at the pyre, you could catch one of them, one of the fey fates. What a dangerous day that was! A glow worm became Queen of Fairyland, though she died within the week, poor, short-lived creatures. One of the hillside towns caught the reflection of the flames in the windows of their houses and their baths and their chocolate shops and their water mills and their museums and the buildings revolted, hauling off to the long plains to live together and love each other and dance at the full moon with their foundations hitched up like skirts and have heaps of little baby amphitheaters and post offices. But everyone else, everybody else’s fates are here, under the skin of the Moon.”

  September stared at the mosaic. Is mine in there? What does everybody mean, in Fairyland? Candlestick noted her gaze.

  “In the old days it used to take the patience of a planet to find your own. Most everyone gave right up. But not me. I’m stubborn as the last word. When I found my fate, under the smoky stone eyeball of a caladrius posing rampant near the equator, we sat down for a long jaw, the longest I’ve ever had. I sweat so much I soaked right through to my bones. Finally, when that little Candlestick had had enough, well, we agreed to disagree, and I returned triumphant. No, I would not die young quarreling with the heart of Fairyland! What a load of bunk! Dying is a very poor way to end a conversation. No sportsmanship at all. Instead, I went on a Grand Rhetorical Tour, had a foal or two, wrangled with the Woodwoses’s anxieties, mediated the theologicals between the Manticore and the Ant-Lion, and galloped for a decade in the Centaur Rodeo—before coming home and here. To mind the storms and to mind the Sajada. Lightning is the only thing quick enough to trip me up. Such clean, brilliant logic a lightning-tree has! Reveals folly in a flash. It was just crumbling, no one to look after it but the Weathercock Elks, and if their arrows are in a tizzy there’s no getting them on task. So I rinsed the place with static electricity and soaped it up with hailstone lather and hung it up to dry with the sheet lightning. Now it shines. The Sajada is how the Moon remembers all those thousands and millions of fates. It is a sacred place. It keeps a record. Every dome you see is a catalogue, every sparkling crescent a Dewy Destiny System, organizing our fortunes so that one, out of all, can be called up and hollered at.”

  “What an extraordinary life!” September breathed, and Saturday stared at the luminous ground.

  “And more yet to wrestle,” neighed Candlestick.

  “I…I think I should like that,” said September. “To dash about and do a hundred things, to do anything one might call Grand.”

  “Then you ought to pick a bone with your fate. Nothing like it for the constitution.” The Buraq brandished her donkey’s chest: broad and strong and thick. Had she a fist, September felt sure she would have thumped it. “I could take you. I took a fine gentleman once—longest beard you ever saw.”

  “I fear I haven’t time for a journey—”

  “A pilgrimage. That’s the word, dear.”

  “A pilgrimage. But you see I’m already journeying! We’re heading to the other side of the Moon to find the Yeti Ciderskin.”

  Candlestick’s wrinkled face wrinkled further. “Oh, isn’t he just the sourest old ape? My poor lightning-larches lose their tempers when he shakes the place and it takes weeks to quiet them. They go darting off to dally with delinquent thunderheads, cruising the canyons for masts and crowns and turrets and golf clubs.”

  Saturday said, “We mean to get him to stop all that.”

  Candlestick laughed. It was a nice laugh, a grandmotherly laugh, a laugh that said: Isn’t it sweet when the little ones try to reach the tallest shelf?

  “You’ll be sure to come back and tell me how that went, won’t you? As best you can with your heads rearranged and your torsos on backwards.”

  Ell puffed out his scarlet chest—but his heart did not seem to be in it. It was so strange for him to have no one to tower over! “We’ve managed Feats before, I’ll have you know! They begin with F and they are our speciality!”

  The Buraq considered for a moment. “I should very much like to argue with a Yeti! A first in the histories, and that’s what I call a thing worth doing.”

  September ducked as a lightning-sprout streaked through the air. “If you’d like to come…”

  “Oh, no, no, child, that’s not at all right! Don’t just let me muscle in because I feel like it! Tell me to stick to my own business! I could be anyone! I could be an agent of destruction, and a slowpoke besides. Resist! Resistance is the beginning of the truth.”

  September fretted. “I would like to, ma’am, because I know you like it frightfully, but you’re much older than I am and you’ve done many more things, so I expect if you think you’d like to come along then who am I to argue?”

  “Who are you to argue?” The Buraq flexed her tail in astonishment. “Who are you to argue? Why, you are yourself! You are…” She drifted off expectantly, not having been introduced.

  “September.”

  “You are September!” Candlestick roared. “And whoever that is, it is somebody! Who are you? You are the person with something to say! Only the dead don’t argue. And even then there are exceptions. Didn’t anyone tell you? Respect your elders is just a secret weapon, and like most secret weapons, it’s a cheap trick. It shuts everyone else up for free, without having to break a sweat. And she who shuts up first loses.”

  “But,” said September with a grin, “I don’t want to argue. The more we have with us the better, for even standing on our shoulders we couldn’t look a Yeti in the eye. Just because you tell me I should argue with you doesn’t mean I should, if I get what I want without it! If you wanted to quarrel, you shouldn’t have offered the best outcome right out of the gate! The object is to be the one who’s right, and I’m right when I say what I want, because who could know that better than me?”

  Candlestick opened her green wings—lightning-sprouts flew from all over the jungle, tiny and burning and bright, to huddle up near her skin. She folded her wings down over her charges. The jungle darkened and seemed to sigh around them.

  “Well done,” the Buraq said with a wink. “We’ll make a brawler of you yet. But that is what we call a Fallacy. No one knows themselves very well. Who has the time these days? Have you been formally introduced to yourself? Made the effort to get to know your faults and your strengths, sit yourself down to tea and listen to all your troubles, answered the call when yourself falters? Then how can you say you know yourself in the least? You must be so careful with Fallacies. They’re contagious, you know. Pustulant. I call an end to this argument at once on the grounds that I am no longer entertained and would rather harangue
the sheet lightning as it comes out of its nap. You have lost! Don’t feel bad. You’re bound to, in the beginning. And in the end. And the middle, too. I’ve no doubt you’re capable of Feats, and that getting on your way is most important! But it’s when you’re dead set on your way that you most need a pilgrimage. Going straight in a line to anyplace is the saddest path. Come now, wouldn’t you like to have a word with your destiny? Skip to the end and have a peek at how it all works out? Maybe your fate has written an academic paper on How to Defeat a Yeti, you never know. And I’ve streamlined the process—very modern now! I keep records, coordinates, cross-references! I can find you quick as a rod draws a bolt in a rainstorm.”

  September glanced at Saturday. If she went, if it was as quick as Candlestick said, then they might be even. She might be able to understand him a little, if she saw her own life the way he saw his. She could make it better between them. Make it straightforward. And after all, hadn’t she been trying to grow up? Wouldn’t it be a relief to know what she had done in the end, what she had turned out to be good at, who she would be when she grew up, a griffin or an armchair or a shark? Wouldn’t it be easier to know how she’d solved the trouble of the Yeti before she tried to do the solving? Or know it just wasn’t solvable, not her fault, no shame in it, nothing to be done? She had only just gotten to the Moon. She had time. She had to have time, September reasoned, or else Almanack would have hefted its shell and run back down the road to Fairyland. It would never let its folk come to harm, even if a thousand Yetis rained down their fists on its prongs.

  But then September saw her Wyverary watching her uncertainly, ever so much smaller than he had been when he met, ever so much more uncertain. Saturday lifted his eyes to hers and she saw the same plea there: Don’t leave us. We’ve only just found each other again.

  “Don’t you worry about them,” Candlestick crooned comfortingly. “A girl’s fate is her only possession, her unflappable friend, her truest mate. When everyone else has gone, her fate remains. Closer than a shadow, kinder than a death. Some things are to be done in private, such as weeping, praying, embezzlement, and the writing of novels. I’ll set them up with a nice spread and they can watch the storms come in from their shifts.”

  “I suppose it’s far too late for afternoon tea,” sighed A-Through-L. September did not feel particularly hungry for once, but a Wyvern’s belly has many rooms, and it is impossible to fill them all at once.

  “It’s rude to discuss religion,” the Buraq sniffed. “But I don’t hold with Teatimers. I’m of the Midnight Snack school. You have tea because it’s three o’clock and that’s what’s done and yes, yes, it’s pleasant to have a nice cup and a sandwich with no crusts on, but pleasant is not enough for me! When you tuck into a Midnight Snack, it’s because you’re hungry in the dark. You want that bit of roast you couldn’t finish at supper and you want it now. Midnight Snackery is primal, like a wolf in the wood, hunkering down over her kill.”

  Candlestick quivered her tail and stomped the ground. A sparkling cloud of round white-violet sparks as big as apples came sizzling through the wood with a willow-wood basket hefted on their backs. They set it down and nuzzled the Buraq excitedly while Saturday opened the basket. Inside lay drumsticks wrapped in wax paper, a flagon of brilliant, sparkling, glowing something, and a large clutch of lightning-grapes. When he opened one of the wax papers, she saw that the drumstick came from no chicken. A storm cloud flashed and rumbled around a stark white bone.

  “Teatime can be nice,” A-Through-L said, nosing at the grapes, resigned. September was suddenly reminded of his shadow, deep down in Fairyland-Below, who had been friends with the Duke of Teatime and the Vicereine of Coffee, and let their children ride on his back and pull his ears. She shivered.

  “Ell,” she asked quietly, as though if she said it soft enough it would be somehow as if they were alone together, as they had been once, in a field of little red flowers and trees that were rather like persimmon trees but not persimmons at all. “What made you cry, in the Lopsided Library, when we opened the box?”

  The Wyverary clawed the thin charcoal soil of the Jungle with his scaly foot. His orange whiskers flicked once, twice, like a horse’s tail swatting a fly. A-Through-L wrapped his long crimson tail all the way around his body, as tightly as he could, as if to hold himself together.

  “You mustn’t laugh at me. I am a large beast, and very fierce, and I’ve been alone plenty in my life. I can face alone and punch it in the nose.”

  September nodded solemnly, though she wanted to smile very much at her dear lizard and his own fierce nose.

  A-Through-L’s fiery eyes pierced the dark. “I thought of that day in the glowerwheat field. When you wished for us all to be whole and well and we woke up with the sun shining on us.”

  “But that isn’t sad at all!”

  “Oh, September,” the beast sighed. “We woke up and we were whole and well and the sun was so warm and you disappeared right in front of us like you’d never been there at all and it was years, it was three years of the world going on like you’d never been in it! And maybe you were dead or maybe you just didn’t feel like coming back or maybe it was even longer in your world and you’d gotten big and mated and forgot me and I missed you. And when we did find you at the other end of three years, dancing with the shadows in that green valley, well, you up and vanished again like vanishing was the thing you did best in the world! I didn’t get an hour of not missing you before you were gone again! Saturday took it hard, too, of course he did, but before we ever saw him you rode on my back and called me yours. Do you remember saying that? I remember it. I felt…as though I’d grown…I felt as though I’d grown forepaws. Like I wasn’t a Wyvern anymore but something just a little different because my forepaws were shaped like a little girl and with them I could grab up the whole of Fairyland and shake it till everything good fell out. But as soon as I had them they got cut off and I missed you which is a funny word and starts with M but you can’t blame it because it’s the right word. I missed you; you were missing from me. Like forepaws. Like flying.”

  September put her hand on her chest. Her heart squeezed, clenching up, trying to hide within her and burst out of her at once. But she would not cry. She would not. Ell was very fierce, after all.

  “Well then,” she said thickly, straightening her shoulders. See what you see and face up to it. “Let’s go.” The Wyverary and the Marid seemed to deflate like a red balloon and a blue one. They nodded a little, as if to say they had always known it should be this way, after all. It was, after all, September alone, in the end. It always had been and always would be.

  “All of us,” September said gently, and held out her hands. “I know what you said, Miss Candlestick, but however you count it, our fates are stuck together and stitched up good.” She paused for a moment, looking down at her flowing black silks and her own small hands. “Closer than shadows, she finished.”

  The Buraq, her wings and her tail flickering with the fitful lights of concealed lightning, cantered off. Ell ran to keep up with her, abandoning the midnight picnic without a thought, his heart bouncing boisterous in his chest, not left behind, not alone, but leaping through the stormgrowth, squashing the tangled floor of the Lightning Jungle underfoot. With every clawfall, he thought he would bellow fire, so great was his exhilaration—and with every clawfall he hiccuped, a purple bubble popping against the rows of his long teeth. The Wyverary could feel it rising up inside him, the rope of fire getting bigger and thicker and hotter and more inevitable, like a loaf of bread baking within his belly, but a loaf as heavy as an anchor. It was going to happen, he could feel it, and no matter how he tried to make it not happen, he could hardly breathe for the heat in his throat. A-Through-L surged ahead of his friends, of the Buraq. Some things are to be done in private, the donkey had said. He would not let them see or be scorched. Lightning cracked and spangled and knifed around the Wyverary as purple flame finally bloomed out of his snout, curling and writhing into th
e forest canopy.

  But the trees did not burn. The Lightning Jungle seemed to drink up the flame like fresh water. After all, it was nothing but fire and light and surging itself. Baobabs full of firebolts flared even brighter, washing the air in clean flashes, crisp forks.

  September and Saturday, having legs nothing like a donkey’s or a Wyvern’s, bounced along behind in Aroostook, who roared under branches and over blackened trunks, squall-vines whipping at the windshield. The whole of the Lightning Jungle sounded in September’s ears like static from the walnut wood radio in her living room at home. The throng of them hurtled toward the edge of the tree line, the last squat black trunks showing starkly like lowercase letters. Finally, with a last forked snaggle of light snaking out ahead of them, Aroostook burst clear, into a field of pale silver scrub, a meadow of tiny raindrops frozen in the act of splashing upward, growing from the ground like grass. Round, black lakes opened up in the ground, lightless and deep as blood, leading up into the mountains like a sentence without an ending…

  CHAPTER XIV

  NO

  In Which September Meets a Pair of Lunaticks, a Peculiar Computational System, Several Fallacies, and Her Own Fate, Whereupon Our Heroine Performs a Drastic Deed

  September followed the line of pure black ponds as far as she could with her wide eyes—they curved away into the mountains and disappeared long before she could spy an end to them. Each one perfectly round, each one depthless and darker than sleeping. The strange, growing crystal rain that covered the ground, frozen in up-slashes, made stark weeds and reeds and seedpods, as pale as the ponds were not, and crunched delicately under their feet, under Aroostook’s wheels, under Candlestick’s hooves. They stood between two large ponds with but a narrow wisp of pale grassy earth between them.

  “We call it the Ellipsis,” the Buraq said. Her steely curls glittered with lightning-dew.

  “Oh, Ell,” Saturday sighed. The Wyverary still stood taller than the Marid, but not by so terribly much now. He hung his head mournfully.