The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, Page 21
Catherynne M. Valente
The Wyverary snorted. “You’re not Changelings. I know all about them—they begin with C. Changelings are human. All squishy and small and stubborn and they never stop talking.”
“We’re the other kind,” said Hawthorn. “We grew up in Chicago and we came back.”
September looked sharply at them. “You came back? When? How long ago?”
“About three days now, I think. A lot has happened.”
September, Saturday, and A-Through-L furrowed their brows all together, identically.
“I think,” said Saturday, “it’s time to go and see Charlie.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE SPINSTER AND THE KING OF FAIRYLAND
In Which an Egg, a Crown, and a Small Bird Decide the Fate of a Very Large Number of People
September threw the backgammon dice up in the air and caught them in her mouth. She spat them back onto the board with terrible force, so terrible that the glass burst up into a great glass hand reaching out of the points and the pips—and in the hand squirmed Charles Crunchcrab the First, King of Fairyland and All Her Nations, in his nightclothes.
Our September has learned a thing or two while we’ve been away.
“You’re here” the King cried when he saw them all. “I knew you wouldn’t forget your old Charlie, who helped you across the water when you were just a little thing.”
September shook her head. A-Through-L growled in his throat, and if there was to be a good growling, Blunderbuss would not be left out. Their rumblings harmonized nicely. “Is that all you can think about, Charlie?” the Spinster sighed. “When Fairyland is shaking itself apart? You’re King! Can’t you feel it in your kneecaps?”
“I’m six hundred years old, I feel everything in my kneecaps!”
“A King feels thermo-narrative mass disturbances in his kneecaps,” snapped Saturday. “We have a whole diagram in the Rum Cellar that shows where a monarch feels the twitches and bellyaches of Fairyland. Maybe you ought to take a look sometime!”
September dragged the King of the Fairies out of the glass dice-hand. He brushed himself off, sheepishly, a child who knows he’s broken a cup and there’s a lecture coming he can’t get out of. “The Gears of the World are coming apart! And all you can think about is quitting your job and settling into some cozy hole in the Summer Country. It took me months, months, but I’ve finally figured it out. It’s all mass. Two Changelings came back, and the mass of Fairyland is greater than the mass of the human world. It’s wobbling. And if you listened to your kneecaps instead of your own moaning, you’d know that!”
“So we’ll send them back,” groused the King.
“No!” cried Hawthorn and Tamburlaine together. “We only just got here. This is where we belong. It’s not fair,” Hawthorn finished for the both of them.
“You can’t make us,” Blunderbuss whispered, though her whisper wasn’t soft or small anymore. “I’m not supposed to live in an Apartment #7. I’m supposed to run and bite and fly. You can’t make me be a pillow anymore. I’m bigger than you. I don’t have to do what you say.”
Scratch spun his crank, warbling out:
Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack
I don’t care if we ever get back!
“Nothing’s fair,” September said softly.
“I won’t do it,” the troll insisted. “I’ll run, I’ll fight, I’ll bite, but I won’t go back.”
Blunderbuss blinked back wombat-tears. The Wyverary lifted her woolly chin with his long red tail.
“Me neither,” said Tamburlaine softly.
A great Quiet filled the air. Hawthorn and Tamburlaine would never have thought a Quiet could be so loud and strong, but so this one was.
“Er,” said Hawthorn. “There’s a dodo behind you. Has there always been a dodo behind you?”
A quite large and bright purple dodo, in fact. She stared at the Changelings with Quiet eyes and nudged September with her round beak.
“Aubergine!” September’s face opened into a map of joy. “I didn’t hear you come in!”
“That’s the idea,” the Night-Dodo demurred in a whispery, feathery voice. “I was thinking. I was thinking because I know something, something you don’t know, but I couldn’t decide whether I wanted you to know it, because I don’t want anyone to know it, but I think you need to know it.”
“It’s all right, Aubergine,” Ell crooned Quietly. “We’ll take good care of it, whatever it is.”
The Dodo bent her head and worried at her feathers. Gingerly, she pulled out a steely-bluish violet ball whose skin swirled like oil. She laid it at the Spinster’s feet, and the feet of the King, and the feet of four other people she didn’t know at all, which made her feathers fluff with nervousness.
“I never told you what a Dodo’s egg does,” she clucked. “Why everyone wanted them. So when Dodos roamed wild over Fairyland. Wanted them enough to drive us to the end of the world just to hide and have our chicks in peace.”
“Well, I do.” King Charlie was staring hungrily at the egg. “I know. I just didn’t know there were any left. It restores what’s lost.”
Aubergine glared at him. “Only for the person who cracks it. And it rarely goes to plan. But yes. Don’t you touch it, Chuck.”
Hawthorn remembered how carefully he’d written his notes. And he’d still gotten kidnapped by his baseball. The egg lay in the middle of the rum cellar like an unexploded bomb. No one went near it. Tamburlaine squeezed his hand.
September wanted awfully to open it right then, to grab it and hold it tight and open it for herself. She would be herself again. She would restore what was lost and be fifteen, with school in the morning and her mother making oatmeal and her silly dog yelping at the sunrise and her father, her poor father, just waking up and looking for his glasses. She could deal with the wobbling of Fairyland in some other way. She had earned this. Hadn’t she?
But September’s heart had got quite Grown-Up (and at least a little bit Yeti) and it moved faster than her hands.
“Together,” she said. “The Changelings and Charlie and me. All together.” The Dodo began to protest, but September knew she was right. “Don’t you see? It won’t work for all of Fairyland if the King doesn’t do it, too. If his kneecaps aren’t connected to his country and the egg. He won’t tell. He doesn’t ever want to tell anything again.”
“But we don’t want to be restored!” Tamburlaine plead.
“No, Tam. It’ll be okay. We weren’t lost. We were never lost. We’ve lost plenty, but we aren’t going anywhere. We restored ourselves.”
They knelt, the four of them, round the purple egg. Blunderbuss couldn’t watch. Her yarny heart thundered in her armored chest. Scratch wound his crack gently and bent his bell over Tamburlaine:
A cherry when it’s blooming
It has no stone
A chicken when it’s piping
It has no bone
The story that I love you
It has no end…
The Night-Dodo tapped the top of the egg with her glossy beak. The cap of her egg shattered. Quietly, and after a long moment, an answering beak poked out of the cracks in the shell. A tiny Dodo, this one all black with a long white beak, shook off ropes of glowing yolk and burst up to the warm blue sky of the rum cellar. It let out a piercing cry and soared up into the rum barrel moons with their starry spigots. For a long moment they all watched it spiral up and up toward the distant glamoured ceiling they could not see.
One of those pale rum barrel moons shattered. Shards and slats rained down to the ground. A great pale creature leapt through the ruined ceiling and screamed as he fell—a creature in a long, white fur coat with terrible black runes scribbled all over it, with a huge bald head and a golden mouth. He hit the royal floor and sent Crunchcrab and September flying with one fist. Saturday and A-Through-L ran to the crumpled pair.
“I am Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth,” the giant bellowed, “King of Fairyland and All Her Nations, and I will eat you whole!”
“Silence, rodent!” he roared again. “I am King!”
“I think that’s very unlikely,” said Hawthorn. “I’ve hit you with a bat ever so many times. I don’t think you’re meant to hit Kings with baseball bats.”
“Also it says Spalding on your back,” Tamburlaine added.
Goldmouth twisted round to get a look at his gigantic back, yanking his cloak up. Among the fell runes and occult seals and ancient, demonaic tongues written over every surface of him, was the unassuming word Spalding, in elegant, fey calligraphy.
Take me out to the ball game, Scratch played merrily, his brass legs skipping in the mud. Take me out to the crowd…
“Silence! Be silent! You will bow! You will crawl!” But they did not. They could not. They giggled helplessly, rolling in the brilliant, many-colored dirt of wherever they had got themselves to, afraid and exhausted and excited and at the mercy of Hawthorn’s baseball.
“Don’t be so cross,” Hawthorn laughed, holding his stomach—which was rather a larger stomach than he had carried about before. “If you’re good I’ll bat you again! As many times as you want!”
“Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!” Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth screamed. “I will never forget that, you little stump,” he snarled. “I’d have taken you with me, all of you, to be my seneschals in the Bonecask, my grand palace in the Brasspot Mountains. I may have been helpless, once, in the dread despairing swamp you call a washing machine, but there is a throne here that belongs to me and I will have it again. I’d have made you princes and princesses. I’d have thanked you for bringing me out of my miserable sportsman’s prison. You could have swum in emeralds and eaten swan’s eyes every night of your life until you died fat and ancient and drunk. I’d have let you watch while I ate every one of my enemies, a few of my friends, and whole countries of no-one-that-matters. And I’d have spared you. I’d have spared you, because without you I could never have come back to the country I own. But now you will have nothing—”
“What’s a seneschal?” Blunderbuss chirped, wiggling her purple nose. “Is it delicious?”
“A SENESCHAL GETS EATEN LAST!”
A second tornado split the seams of the Briary ceiling-sky, which was beginning to lose its grip on the glamour and flicker into dark stone. And then another. And another. The world was raining bodies like horrible comets. A tangle of iron and lovely limbs hit the Steppe grass with a screech and a crunch. A heap of snarling teeth and black plumage made landfall in the distance. More and more came hurtling down, and finally a black ball of fur and lace and silk and bright, bloody magenta curls slammed through the stone and the sky. Halfway through its fall, the ball stretched out and flexed its paws, as though it had only been napping all this while—which, of course, it had. Iago, the Panther of Rough Storms, yawned and arched his silky spine and flew down to the now-quite-crowded floor, bearing the Marquess and her son, Prince Myrrh, on his broad, dark back. She was still asleep, her hair mussed, skirts tangled. She had lines on her face, not unlike September’s, only these were from her bed linens, where she had lain dreaming for five long years. Prince Myrrh cradled his mother’s head protectively in his lap. He opened his mouth to protest at the abomination of being tossed like a playing-ball across the whole of Fairyland, but he did not get the chance, for it is very hard to talk over the whole world changing just below you.
Hawthorn and Tamburlaine could not hope to know who all these creatures might be. September knew one very well, of course. They were coming to, here and there, brushing the dust and bruises off—all the lost Kings and Queens that ever called Fairyland theirs and lost it, awake and alive and restored. Goldmouth, Madame Tanaquill, Titania, Hushnow the Raven Lord, Anise the Gnome Princess, dozens of them, already eyeing each other warily, searching in their clothes for weapons.
“Better climb on,” Blunderbuss said. “I know lions round the watering hole when I see them.”
King Charlie stumbled to his feet. His hands went to his head—and found nothing. The crown of Fairyland had rolled off his head and was at that moment, that awful moment full of yelling and thundering, full of fallen monarchs and history roaring back from the dead, spinning like a dropped coin, like a backgammon pip, toward Goldmouth. But September was coming awake herself. She moaned and swayed upward, her eyes blurred, touching her own head, her own hair. She touched her face—and there were no lines there any longer. No creak in her bones. But she could not quite stand. She went to one knee to steady herself—and the crown stopped. It rocked back and forth for a moment, as though it was looking at her.
“Don’t you dare,” hissed Goldmouth. “You’re mine, you’ve always been mine, you disloyal slattern of a piece of junk! Come here right this instant!”
But crowns rarely listen to the one that claims them loudest. It rocked forward, backward—and clasped September’s bent head in its circle of golden crab claws. The claws melted like old ice, and when the gold was gone, in its place a circlet of jeweled keys remained, glittering on her thick, curly dark hair, without a single strand of white.
“Oh, September,” cried A-Through-L, wrapping her up in his wings. “Say you’re all right!”
“All hail September!” whispered Saturday. “Queen of Fairyland!”
The Marquess’s eyes fluttered open. She held one graceful hand to her forehead and put the other to her great cat to steady herself. She looked all round at the many impossible things sharing her palace with her.
“What’s happening?” the Marquess gasped.
CHAPTER XX
THE BOY WHO WAS LOST,
THE GIRL WHO WAS FOUND
In Which Thomas Wakes Up
Gwendolyn and Nicholas Rood returned home from their rally late, tired circles round their eyes, coats slumped over their arms. The house was top full of quiet, almost as though it were holding its breath as hard as it could. Gwendolyn put her umbrella away—wasn’t the umbrella stand on the other side of the door when she left? Don’t be silly, Gwen, she thought. You’re just dead on your feet. A little sleep is all you need.
But she went to check on her son before she went chasing that little sleep, for no mother can rest until she knows that her child, if not her umbrella stand, is mostly how she left him. Gwendolyn pushed open the door of Thomas’s bedroom, trying not to make a peep. She looked to his bed for that familiar shape beneath the covers.
But Thomas was not there. He was standing in the middle of the room, dazed, as though he’d been sleepwalking. Moonlight trickled through the window. He must have been playing dress-up in his old costumes, for he was dressed, absurdly, as Robin Hood. He looked up at her, startled, as though he’d only just woken up. He seemed to drink up her face like water after years in the desert with only dew to treat his thirst.
“Hi, Mom,” he said, in the very smallest of voices.
And in another city, not so far away from Chicago, just over the prairie and down the rivers, another mother and another father sat in another living room. They rubbed their eyes and squeezed each other’s hands and made toast, because we’ve all got to eat something. The dusk glowed so very pink and red that strange night in Omaha, round Owen and Susan Jane’s wooden table. The shadows played in every corner. The moon was already out, in a hurry to get on the scene.
Once September’s father had fallen asleep on the sofa under his plaid blanket, their small dog curled up on his chest, Margaret drew her sister aside. They stood together in the kitchen, so very alike, as they had always been, even as children. The same dark hair and dark eyes and fierce set of their jaws. September’s eyes and hair and jaw, too. Margaret touched her sister’s cheek gently. She smiled, a smile that startled and teased and danced.
“Listen to me, Susie,” Aunt Margaret whispered, so that only they two could hear. “I know where September is. And I can take you there.”
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