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“If we’re going to talk about Grown-Up things like monarchies and Yetis and Big Kids, we ought to make friends properly. And there’s nothing like a game for making friends out of nothing at all,” he said. His long black topknot slipped over his shoulder. “Do you know how to play brownie backgammon? We’ve…well. We’ve been down here for a little longer than we planned, and you never play a game so hard as when you’re in jail. We should know, Ell and I.” He knocked his head cheerfully against the red beast’s great flank. Ell and Blunderbuss were sniffing at one another curiously, being nearly the same size. They took turns raising eyebrows and stomping feet in the wordless greetings of very gigantic creatures.
“I do,” Hawthorn said, and once he had said it, he was sure of it. He did know. He had played it! He remembered his mother’s troll-hands on his, showing him how to move the pieces. He remembered how she smelled—like limestone and snow. It wasn’t much. But he seized hold of the memory for dear life. The Spinster opened the red box into a board and set out the pieces along the points.
“The trouble with Yetis is how abominably quick they are,” she mused, tossing a round glass die and pushing one of her copper pips across the board, where it promptly turned into a djinn’s lamp. “They can move time around like checkers on a board, just by waving a paw. I suppose you could say I was queened before my time. But I get ahead of myself.” She nodded her head gracefully. A lock of white hair tumbled down her cheek and for a moment she did look every inch a teenage girl with a wonderful, rich, gossipy tale to tell out of class. “My name is September. I’m a human girl. This is Saturday, who is a Marid, and A-Through-L, who is a Wyverary—that means half Wyvern and half Library. You’ve met Sir Sanguine, and this beautiful Dodo is Aubergine.”
Hawthorn rolled two dice in his turn—it wasn’t a good roll, but not embarrassing. He slid one of his bone pips toward September. It shimmied, flipped over, turned into a tiny brontosaurus, and stood on its head.
“I’m Tamburlaine. This is Scratch, he’s a gramophone, though I guess that’s not really a species name.”
“I’m Blunderbuss!” roared the combat wombat who had not quite yet learned to keep her new voice down.
“You begin with B!” crowed A-Through-L, who decided at that moment she was quite all right in his book.
“I do! With gusto!”
September smiled at her friends. She rolled her dice and before he could hiccup, Hawthorn was a raccoon. He rubbed his nose and thumped his striped tail. What was it you were meant to do to get out of raccoon? He couldn’t remember.
September sipped her rum. “I am a professional troublemaker. Actually, my official title is Professional Revolutionary, Criminal, and Royal Scofflaw, but that’s rather a lot to hold in the mouth all at once. I don’t mean to, really, I don’t, but I just go face-first into mischief the minute I wake up for breakfast in the morning. A year or two ago I was Up to No Good (as the Fairies would have it) on the Moon. The Moon was having a baby, you see, only nobody knew that, they just knew there was a Yeti prowling around and terrific moonquakes and one thing lead to another and we ended up spending a bit too much time with that Yeti while he was midwifing the new Moon.” Hawthorn rolled high this time. He pushed his pip with his tiny bandit hands. The pip spun on its side, faster and faster until it looked like a moon itself. The tiny brontosaurus jumped up and squashed the djinn’s lamp underfoot. It burst—and Hawthorn the raccoon went up in a bristle of fur, leaving him all troll once more. Tamburlaine clapped her hands. But September didn’t pick up the dice. She was looking down at her weathered hands. Her voice was very quiet. “Far, far too much time, really. I didn’t think about it then. There was only the Moon and the other Moon and a big black dog and a monster and blood and soda pop everywhere and I tripped and fell—that’s all I did, tripped and fell, and I brought the Fairies back. One of them had me in her hand like a little fly she meant to pull the wings off of. She kept me anchored, pinned in place when I was meant to go home, back to Omaha and my mother and father and a lot of washing up to do. I think she really meant to kill me—but then she saw. The Yeti ran off and she saw what had happened to me.”
“Darling,” Saturday said softly, and put his hand against her face. “It’s not so bad. It’s not.” September went on. “I’d been standing right next to the Yeti while he moved time along so the little Moon could get big enough to live on its own. And time moved along for me, too, and all of the sudden I was forty and not fifteen. The Fairy laughed—it is a good joke by their standards—and dropped me onto Fairyland’s belly again. Ever so much funnier.” She covered her face in her hands for a moment. “But I don’t feel any different! I’m still September, I’ve still only barely learned to drive. It’s only that one day I was somebody else in the mirror and there was no getting it back!”
Oh, September. My best girl. I shall tell you an awful, wonderful, unhappy, joyful secret: It is like that for everyone. One day you wake up and you are grown. And on the inside, you are no older than the last time you thought Wouldn’t it be lovely to be all Grown-Up right this second?
September sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, and tossed her dice. She pushed three pieces forward all at once. They flapped copper wings and became three angry condors. “But the Fairies knew about me. All about me. And they figured it was safer to lock me up with a Redcap in full armor than to let me wander around tripping and falling into trouble. I’ve faced down two monarchs—they don’t like their chances with me around.”
A-Through-L leaned his great scarlet head down to their level. His eyes danced orange and winsome before them—but worried, too. “That’s why they have their little parties,” he confessed mournfully. “With the Changeling children. See, there’s a Law. And though Laws begin with L, they’re not really anyone’s friends. It’s not a Law like Don’t Steal, but a Law like for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Law says Every Story Begins with Someone comes to town. Sometimes it’s a Something rather than a Someone, but if Something and Someones and Septembers and Hawth
orns and Tamburlaines and Blunderbusses and Scratches and Ells and Saturdays and Gleams and Aubergines didn’t keep turning up in new places, everything would go along as it’s always done. But the Changelings have to keep coming; that’s a Law too.” Saturday nodded. Scratch had settled in at the Marid’s side. It liked him very much. To the gramophone, Saturday looked like music, if music were blue. “The mass of Fairyland must remain the same. So when a human comes here, somebody from here must go there. Changelings keep Fairyland level. But they bring so much trouble. They bring stories. Fairies only like the stories they get to tell. So they…bleed all the Changing out of them. Make them turn into a thousand things until there’s not much left in them to go changing Fairyland. It’s dreadful. They love it.”
“We saw it,” Hawthorn whispered. He clutched the dice in his hand but he’d forgotten the game. “Penny and Thomas. We saw them.”
September winced. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you did. The Fairies put me here, along with a good number of my friends, and trapped my car in a junkyard, so we wouldn’t fix them and make them go back to being pots and pans—because just whacking me a good one on the head would most certainly start a new story that they couldn’t control.” The Spinster smiled. A long, slow, glorious smile. A smile she’d been making since a day long ago, the day she saw a leopard for the first time. Tamburlaine loved that smile. She wanted to learn to make one of her own. “Only all they did was give me a lot of time to figure out Laws and Theorems and try to understand just exactly how Fairyland works, the way my mother understands an engine. Oh, Sir Sanguine wanted to eat me at first. But I drive a hard bargain. It was ages ago now that I made my promise: Just as soon as I finish my equations you can eat me all up. Yes, Sir Sanguine?”
“I have the braising pot ready, Miss September.”
September’s eyes sparkled. “Science first, supper second! See? We’re quite good friends. We’ve got a poker game going and we’re working on a war-quilt together.”
Tamburlaine took a long while to work her thought from her heart to her mouth, so long that it had fallen behind September’s story by quite a way. “You’re a Changeling,” she said. “Just like us. Only you got swapped with yourself.”
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.
