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

  “It’s all right,” said September, stroking his long neck. “It’s not so bad. I always wanted to take you home to meet my mother. Now you could fit in our house! Don’t worry, oh, please, don’t be afraid! After all, little begins with L…”

  A crashing, echoing, ear-skewering boom shot through the night. September’s hands flew up to her ears. Her eyes squeezed shut and her whole body stiffened—Ciderskin had come back for them, that terrible fist would sweep through the meadow and the ponds and this time she did not have Aroostook’s door to protect her, she would be crushed. Saturday leapt toward her with his new trapeze-man’s swift strength, covering her with his arms.

  The boom rang out again, clapping sharp against the cold.

  No paw followed, any more than thunder followed the lightning in the Lightning Jungle. September opened her eyes. A third rolling, smashing blast sounded, and what followed it was neither blows nor storms but laughter, tinny and thin. Through the ponds of the Ellipsis, a cannonball flew, beneath the water, the color of Jupiter, all cream and fire. The shot began in a pool some ways farther off from them and barreled through the waters, streaming bubbles behind it, disappearing when the little lake ended and reappearing once more in the next. Finally, in the dark circle nearest them, it found its target. The ball exploded against the grass basket of a great striped hot-air balloon suspended down beneath the rippling surface. The perspective made September feel a little sick; the balloon hung down deep into the water as though the water was the sky and they stood on some strange circus platform higher than the heavens, looking down on the creatures of the air. The balloon’s basket rocked back but did not break. A hissing blast mark blossomed on its woven grass, joining many other smoking star-shapes already there.

  “Call that a love letter, do you, Marigold? Smells like a burnt bugbear’s least favorite beehive.” The tinny, thin laughter tittered out again. It came all the way up through the pool, softening and quieting and thinning out along the way. September peered down into the pond. The balloon’s stripes gleamed white and teal. Jets of bubbles burped out of its neck now and then, keeping it aloft, or submerged, however one ought to measure a thing that flew underwater. But she could not see anyone in the basket. Someone hid there, surely! A small door in the charred grass opened; the mouth of a cannon popped forward, silver so pure it looked like glass, blown into the shape of a man’s head, mouth wide to fire true, every curl of his hair a strand of silver butterflies. The body of the cannon, his arms, bound back and down into a hospital straitjacket. A second cannonball roared out of the man’s silverglass mouth, the color of Neptune, hot turquoise and boiling white.

  But this one did not speed through all the ponds and up far off into the range of mountains beyond—another balloon bobbed into the dark of the second pool, turning on like a lightbulb where it had not been before. The second balloon was more nimble; the Neptunian shot careened off the basket’s bumpers, skipping up through the ponds like a stone, but never disturbing the surface. A second voice giggled, muffled, as if they had their ears against the bottom of a glass tumbler pressed up to a locked door.

  “I know you miss me, Tamarind, but you miss me by so much I wonder if you love me at all!”

  September peered down into the other pond. She could see the owner of this voice, under her gold and wine striped balloon. It belonged to a thin, pearl-colored insect shaped like a wintry twig, delicate and coiling, but hard and brilliant. She peered over the side of her basket eagerly. Her antennae, chartreuse and much longer than her body, snapped like horsewhips. She crawled around the edge of her basket, her body softening and arching and inching along like a caterpillar. When she stopped to speak again, she hardened back into her branch-like posture.

  “It does sting so to miss a person!” the insect cried, her tiny sapphire eyes blazing. “The only solution is to be doubly careful with one’s trajectories!” An identical door opened in the basket, and an identical cannon showed itself—but the head was a woman’s.

  Candlestick cleared her throat. No cannonball burst from the twig-insect’s balloon.

  “Good evening, Marigold,” the Buraq said. She turned to the first balloon, the first pond. “Tamarind. How lovely to see you getting along so well.”

  Saturday frowned. “They’re shooting at each other!”

  The tinny, thin, invisible voice floated up to them out of the depths. “Hold still, my darling! I’m going to kiss you right in the face!”

  September, and Ell beside her, peered closer till their eyes felt like peeled grapes—and finally saw that the first duelist was a grasshopper, his wings iridescent, his great bulging eyes black as the water, sparks gleaming dully within. He was so nearly the color of the grass balloon-basket that he seemed no more than grass himself.

  “Don’t mind them,” Candlestick said. “They’re Lunaticks.”

  “Oh, that’s unkind!” yelled the grasshopper.

  “Princess Lunatick to you, you old mule!” cried the wintry twig.

  September sighed a little.

  Marigold drew herself up to her full frosty height. “Don’t you sigh at me, young lady! I suppose you think Princessing is nothing more than dresses and blushing and dancing and the occasional side-job as a distressed damsel! Young people today, why, they’ve no more sense than a gumdrop!”

  September winced—for that was precisely what she had been thinking. The Duke of Teatime had wanted to make her a Princess, and she’d felt then just as she felt now—that if one had to be in the kind of stories that had Princesses, it was much better not to be the Princess, for they were given very little to do other than weddings and distresses, neither of which offered much in the way of excitement or exercise.

  “Where I come from, being a Princess is a job, young primate!” huffed Marigold. “A position in the civil service! We are Executive Branch, child! Why, I never wore a dress except on a dare! I wore a suit, like any government employee. And a fine suit, too, with a hat to match! I had more ties than a railroad! A Princess must be serious and calculating, she must learn Fiscal Magic and Severe Magic and Fan Magic, both Loud and Shy Magic as well as Parliamentary Procedure, Heraldry, and Constitutional Conjuring. I had a desk at the castle like all the other Princesses, and we ate packed lunches every day, I’ll have you know. Of course I had ten fingers then, it’s much easier to run a kingdom when you have fingers. I was an excellent Princess, one of the best. I loved my work! I personally negotiated the peace of Parthalia, despite the ogre-of-record eating the first, second, and ninth drafts. The Fairy Queen Tanaquill herself gave me my first double-breasted jacket. I don’t suppose she is queen anymore. But how proud I stood that day! She saw Princesses for what we are: the engine that fuels Politicks. No Devious Dragon or Knavish Knight would dare tower me up as long as I wore my suit of armor, my sharkskin shield! Ah, but then, but then!”

  Tamarind’s wings buzzed. “Then we came to the Moon. We’d only just married, we were young and bald and had all our limbs! We wore our hearts on our sleeves!”

  “That’s what you wear to your wedding if you’re a Lamia, which we are,” chirped Marigold. “To show that you mean it, to show you know that love means wearing your insides on your outside. And under the first waxing moon after the ceremony, you swap.”

  Tamarind chittered. “You swallow your love’s heart, and they swallow yours. Then forever after, your heart is living inside your mate, and theirs lives inside you.”

  “You’re not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You’re only playing.” Marigold gazed across the thin strip of raingrass between her black pond and her husband’s, and her gaze shone deep and warm.

  “But you’re not a Lamia!” scoffed A-Through-L, who counted Lamiai safely within his alphabetical kingdom. “A Lamia is a beautiful person with long shining hair who has a snake’s tail and sharper teeth than you want to know about. They drink blood!”

  Marigold snapped her antennae. “Don’t be superior. Everyone drinks blood. Blo
od is a word that means alive. You can do without almost anything: arms, legs, teeth, hope. But you can’t do without blood. Lose even a little and you grow slow and stupid and not yourself at all. We are all of us beautiful and complicated vessels for carrying blood the way a bottle carries wine. I suppose you think there’s no blood in your roast beef? Life eats life. Blood makes you move, makes you blush, makes the pulse pound in your brow when you see your love walking across a street toward you, makes your very thoughts fly through your brain. Blood is everything and everything is blood. That’s the law of the Lamiai.”

  There must be blood, September thought, and rubbed her finger where she had pricked it, so long ago, and bled to open the doors of Fairyland.

  “Don’t act like you’ve never eaten anyone’s heart,” Tamarind said.

  “I haven’t!” cried September. Saturday opened his mouth, but thought better of it. He rubbed at the backs of his blue hands.

  “Then I’m sorry for you,” the grasshopper sighed. “It’s a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.”

  “But we couldn’t wait, you see,” Marigold whirred in her balloon. “We couldn’t wait for the waxing Moon. So we took the road all the way up—when you’re on the Moon, we reasoned, it’s all the Moons together, waxing, waning, new, old. We met here, with a little flask of fizzing whipwine, to devour each other’s hearts and begin our lives together. And just as we’d held our rite and Tam started back toward the Jungle, just as I’d called him husband and he called me wife, that Yeti, that terrible Yeti, came bawling and brawling out of the wood, clutching his bleeding wrist and caterwauling like the stars had gone out.”

  “His foot came down and I was under it,” wept Tamarind, shaking his head.

  “His next step took me, too,” whispered Marigold. “And the Yeti’s blood filled up his prints and caught us in their black cups. And here we stay, separated by a step. We cannot get from one pond to the other. We cannot even see each other properly. The balloons crashed down into the water during a Thaumaturgists’ duel some time later. The cannons are all that’s left of the duelists—they can break through, but we cannot. And now my heart’s living over there in that old grasshopper and what am I supposed to do?”

  Tamarind went on. “We had no plans to live forever! But blood is everything; everything is blood. The Yeti’s blood got old, too. It’s not exactly blood now, though I suppose that’s obvious. It pickles us, preserves us, pumps through us and keeps us running like a couple of old clock towers. We live and live, but it doesn’t keep us young. We started shrinking and shifting and warping, the way anything does when it ages enough, turns to stone or dust or stories. Only we became—well, first I was an iguana, wasn’t I? You were a water dragon. Oh, wasn’t that nice! Halcyon days! Then I was a salamander and she was a rattlesnake, then she was a turtle and I was a boa, then for a long bit we were both frogs and it was like we were young together again, then I can’t remember, sometimes she was the male of the species and sometimes I was, sometimes I was female and sometimes she was, sometimes I had legs and sometimes I didn’t, sometimes she had a mouth and sometimes she had mandibles, and then on our anniversary we suddenly got wings and I was a butterfly, she was a dragonfly, I was a bat, she was a moth, I was a ladybug, she was a beetle, and so on and so forth and at the moment she’s an inchworm and I’m a grasshopper.”

  “It never bothered me any, you being a grasshopper,” sighed Marigold. “Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you’re changing into a hundred other things, but you can’t let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he’s a rabbit, or a mouse while he’s still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he’s a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It’s harder than it sounds.”

  The Buraq nodded sympathy. “It’s Yeti’s blood, you see. Time speeds down there like it’s racing against the world. For them, it’s been thousands of years. More. Thousands of thousands. They’ve gone a bit mad, started firing broadsides and counting obsessively—which is how they’re useful to me.”

  “Are we going fishing?” cried the inchworm with delight.

  “If you’re not too tired after your cannonades.”

  “Never!” buzzed Tamarind.

  Candlestick beckoned September forward. The Buraq instructed her to put her hand down into the ponds, one after the other. When September did as she was told, her fingers disappeared as though they had been severed. The cold black pond drew closed over her wrist like a curtain. Tamarind and Marigold’s antennae quivered and snapped in their private pools. Then without warning, the balloons shot out twin clouds of blue-white bubbles, collapsed down into scraps of cloth, and disappeared wholly.

  “The mosaic covers the whole of the Moon,” Candlestick explained, her peacock tail waving in the starlight. “Even with the records in the Sajada, it would take months to find the little pebble that hides your fate. But once I met the Lunaticks, I discovered they’d counted everything on the Moon, every tile of the mosaic and every root and every fish. The pools have seeped down and down and down until they run all over the insides of the Moon like veins, and they’ve had so long to look for some little place where their waters might meet. When I want a fate, I send my lightning-sprouts through the Sajada to find the record and light it up—for the Sajada has veins, too, and roots as well. But if I want it faster, I send the old kids fishing—they get a taste of you, a smell of you, and race down through the Moon to find the lit-up tile that tastes and smells like you and bring it back fast as thinking.”

  Sure enough, Tamarind’s balloon bounced back up underwater like a lightbulb coming on. Marigold’s appeared a moment later.

  “I win!” the grasshopper cried. “That’s three in a row! You’re losing your touch, dear!”

  “It was in your hemisphere, that hardly counts,” huffed the inchworm, and crossed two of her wintry, spindly arms. Her cannon slid out from the grassy basket and fired as sharp as a retort. Her Jovian ball blasted through the inky water, arcing beautifully, like a comet—and landed squarely, precisely, in Tamarind’s own basket. It smoked and rolled, gleaming. And it had knocked something free: something small and glinting, rising up through the pond toward them.

  “Oh,” sighed the grasshopper, “oh, it’s still warm where you loaded it into the cannon. It still smells of your perfume.” Tamarind laid down upon the cannonball and closed his wings around his green body.

  September knelt and caught the small, glinting thing as it bobbed up out of the black—though it was not so small after all, almost as long as her own arm. Saturday got down into the grass to help her haul it out and get it upright on the shore.

  It was a Leopard.

  It was her Leopard. Imogen, the Leopard of Little Breezes, the cat who had borne her to Fairyland that first day. September would know those whiskers and those spots anywhere. Yes, she was smaller than she had been and entirely still and silent, but all the same it was her. September cried out and threw her arms around that dear, wooly neck.

  But it was not the Leopard of Little Breezes. It was not a living Leopard at all. September’s arms found no wool on that neck, but cool brass, pocked with onyxes, a statue of her Leopard, with a flat, stony gaze.

  “I thought you said it would be a little toy version of myself,” said September, a little embarrassed. “I am not a Leopard or a Little Breeze.”

  “I…I don’t know why it isn’t!” Candlestick’s face creased in confusion. “Perhaps it’s on account of you being human. I’ve never dredged up a human fate before. That will teach me to make assumptions! Assumptions are the enemy of logic!”

  September looked the Leopard over. It did not seem to be in the least alive and she had no notion of how it might talk to her, let alone argue.

  “Hullo, Leopard,” she said shyly.

  At the sound of her voice and the tiny gust of her breath on the brassy muzzle, the Leopard’s eyes soften
ed and turned toward September.

  “Hullo, Tem,” the beast growled, but it was not an unpleasant growl, nor loud, but cozy as a purr.

  September startled as though she had been struck. Her mother and father called her Tem, years and years ago, when she was tiny. They never did anymore, she was too big for small names, her father always said.

  Saturday squeezed her hand comfortingly. A-Though-L pressed his red forehead into her shoulder just exactly like a cat. And then both of them took a few steps away and turned their backs. It was her fate. They would not leave her, but they would give her privacy. Candlestick followed their example, though she thought not a one of them ought to have come along in the first place. Only Aroostook watched September and her fate, her headlamps illuminating the glittering Leopard’s spots.

  Neither girl nor cat said anything else for a long while. September stared. Everything she could ever be or know was inside this brass creature. What could she possibly say to it?

  “Try the Appeal to Probability,” Candlestick called over her shoulder without looking. “It’s a good opening gambit with fates. It’s a fallacy, of course, but what isn’t? Such and such will probably happen, wouldn’t you agree, Leopard? That sort of thing.”

  But September could not stop staring. She thought of the older Saturday, standing in front of her car, blocking her way. She thought of the Blue Wind laughing at her. She thought of the Fairies, speeding through time so that they never, ever had to wait to find out what happened next, never, ever had to long for anything before they had it in hand.

  Candlestick cleared her throat. “I do like the Fallacy of Many Questions as well, mind you. Loaded questions, leading questions, lying questions…”

  The Leopard stared back at her. September thought of the Sibyl, how surely she had known what her life would look like all along and all through. She thought of Saturday in the circus, how gorgeously he’d flown. She thought of Ell in his Library, shelving romances. And she thought, she could not help thinking, of the awful night when she wrestled Saturday on the Gears of the World, and burnt his back with iron, and how when it was done they had looked up and seen someone. September had seen a little girl with blue skin and a mole on her left cheek—but of all the things she had tried not to think of since she first knew about Fairyland, she had tried hardest not to think about that. She didn’t like it. She didn’t know what to do with it. It sat on the floor of her heart like a toy with a thousand working pieces that could not possibly be put together. Their daughter, Saturday had said, as out of time and out of order as any true Marid.