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“Now,” said the Marquess cheerfully, her hair brightening to gold. “I should very much like a drink.”
But as September watched her stare down the First Stone until he put a little sand in a cup and dropped it in front of her, she thought that the Marquess had no better idea than any of them. After all, she knew a little about pretending to be brave when the fear in you has eaten up half your heart.
* * *
September left the Once and Future Club exhausted, hardly able to stand in her mary janes. The Green Wind was not waiting to guide her to her bedroom, nor the Stoat of Arms nor Saturday nor A-Through-L nor even the stuffed wombat. She stood alone in the Briary. All she could hear was its quiet, steady blooming.
“Sleep, Briary,” she whispered. “Show me where I sleep.”
For a moment, the hallway remained a hallway, long and green and silent. Then, a slender row of pale silver flowers sprang up beneath her feet. It whirled forward, each blossom sprouting as September put her foot to it. She laughed and ran along the silver path, her tiredness all gone, racing the flowers down staircases and round pillars, under buttresses and through doors wide and small. Finally, the silver blossoms came up short in a wine cellar deep within the Briary, at the edge of a trapdoor with a bronze pull-ring bolted into it. September felt very uncertain that this was meant to be her bedroom, but the flowers seemed insistent, waving back and forth all round the door in the floor.
“All right, all right!” said September, and pulled up the ring. She saw nothing inside but a soft half-light. She thought, for a moment, of climbing through all the dark doors of Fairyland Below until she found a Minotaur. She thought of wriggling into the hole at the top of Moonkin Hill. September took a breath. “All of that turned out reasonably well, I suppose!” And she crawled down into the light, toes pointed like a dancing girl’s.
There was a moon in September’s bedroom. It shone down on a lush green valley full of long grass and glowing lacy mushrooms and more of those tiny silver flowers growing everywhere. The night sky soared overhead, black and full of stars like city lights, but somehow she knew she was not really outside. A little green hill on one side of the valley peeled back like covers of a delicious soft bed, inviting her to lie down. There was a stone well nearby; its pail sloshed with warm milk. Night birds whistled lullabies—lullabies she knew, involving biplanes of paper and ink. The air hung warm and sleepy all around her. This was Fairyland, some secret, loving heart of Fairyland where she was meant to sleep safely, where the strange wedding of a country and its Queen would take place.
September, though she did not feel at all sure about sleeping inside a hill, crawled into the grass and the silver flowers. She wished she were in the grand billiards room with Ell and Saturday and the rest. But she pulled up the hill over her shoulder. She did not feel squelchy mud on her toes and her knees, but soft, familiar sheets. September rested her head on a pillow of moss and slept the deepest sleep she had known since long before the Green Wind came to her window and showed her how to ride a Leopard.
INTERLUDE
SISTERS OUGHTN’T KEEP SECRETS
In Which Certain Ladies Make Their Own Way
Let us leave September to sleep for a litt
le while. She has earned it—it’s ever so tiring to be suddenly in charge of a story when you have become quite accustomed to the story happening to you, rather than you happening to it. And besides, Kings and Queens are the most trying of people. There are far too many of them about for anyone’s comfort and peace of mind. Why, we have hardly gotten to catch our breath! Let us sit down together for a moment, and I shall pour you a glass of whatever you like best. You may hold my hand if you wish, I don’t mind. I shouldn’t want you to feel alone.
Now that we have made ourselves quite comfortable, I must tell you—we have forgotten about something important. I’m sure you did not mean to, and I certainly did not. It is only that so many exciting things have happened that we did not notice. Let us peer beneath the sofa cushions and beneath the bed for it. Let us jostle the curtains and lift up the tablecloth. We shall get ourselves into trouble if we do not find it. For this tale began in Nebraska, and we have not so much as glanced Omaha-way in ever so long. It is hard to remember to go knocking at a farmhouse door when so many palace doors await—but a door is a door, and a door is always an adventure.
In this particular farmhouse, which I expect you know nearly as well as I do by now, two women were standing in the kitchen. They looked terribly alike, as they always had, even as children. The same dark hair and dark eyes and fierce set of their jaws, just the same as September’s eyes and hair and jaw. Their names were Susan Jane and Margaret. They were sisters. And one of them had just said something very odd indeed. 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.”
“How could you? Why wouldn’t you tell me at once?” said Susan Jane.
“Listen to me very carefully. Whatever I say, you must believe me, even if it sounds like the most ridiculous thing a person has said in the whole history of the world. Do you promise?”
“Yes,” said September’s mother.
Margaret found herself suddenly very afraid. There were words she had never said aloud to her sister before, or even to anyone in the state of Nebraska or the country of America. Words she knew weren’t safe to say, words more powerful than thunder. Aunt Margaret had led a life filled with secrets, and that is a very hard habit to break, even if you badly want to break it. So for a good while she said nothing, because she could not make herself say the thing she had kept hidden at the bottom of her heart for so long. Finally, she let a long breath out through her nose and wrestled her secret out into the little midnight kitchen.
“September is in a place called Fairyland. It’s very far away, farther away than any place you can think of, and then farther away still. It’s a storybook place. A place that’s met magic and shaken its hand. Now, I know this because … because I’ve been to Fairyland, too. All those times I said I was going to Paris or Turkey or Morocco or Mongolia? I’ve been lying up, down, and all around, Susie. Where would a woman like me get the money to visit Paris? No. I’ve never been to France. Never been to much of anywhere. Except this place. And I think you remember. I think you remember when I was little and I would run off into the woods and you couldn’t find me all day and into the night, even though you knew I’d run into the woods and the woods weren’t all that terribly big to begin with. I think you remember green shadows under the kitchen window, and the sound of a cat far bigger than ours purring at the door.”
“Fairyland. A real place called Fairyland.” And it seemed to Susan Jane that she did remember, a little. She did remember her sister whispering in the dark, chasing butterflies that weren’t butterflies at all, the shape of a man at the window in green jodhpurs and green snowshoes …
“Very, very real. The realest. The first time I went I was nine years old. A man all in green flew up to the second-story window in our old house on a flying leopard and said: You seem like a mad and mischievous enough child, how would you like to come away with me on the Leopard of Little Breezes and be delivered to the Tattersall Tundra that lies near the pole of Fairyland? And once he said it, I did feel mad and mischievous, and I did want to see what a Tattersall Tundra was, and I jumped out of that window as fast as you can say your own name.”
“Weren’t you afraid of a strange man at the window?”
“Well, I reasoned later that anyone who can win the love of a flying leopard has to be mostly all right. And he was. I rode on the back of a great arctic fox and wore trousers and fell in with the Tobogganeers, a band of snowy Stregas who keep their freezers stocked with magic. I learned to change myself into a polar bear and a manticore and a snow-scarab. And that was only the first time. I know it sounds mad but you promised to believe me. Time’s got its hat on funny over there, so I could play in Fairyland for months and still come home for dinner with new ribbons in my hair. Only it wasn’t play, exactly. I have another name when I’m there. I have a little house in the mountains. I’ve … done terrible things and I’ve done things so grand I wish I could throw a parade down Farnam Street in my own honor.”
“Has September done terrible things?”
“Oh, I’d imagine she has. And wonderful things. Fairyland has a weakness for the dramatic. I don’t know exactly; we’ve never been there at the same time. But I’ve heard her name whispered and hollered. I suspect she’s been there a few times by now. I know the look in her eye. It’s the look in my eye.”
“And is that why? Is that why September’s gone to this Fairyland, because you went? Did you take her there?”
“Oh no, Susie. That’s not how it works. Fairyland comes to you. I didn’t have a thing to do with it. It just happened that way. There’s … there’s a weak place in the world, I think. Near here. More people go through than you think. I used to always worry you’d stumble in somehow and I’d have to share. Oh, that’s terrible of me, I know, but all little girls are terrible, sometimes. Anyway, I always came back. September’s always come back, too, because you have to come back. Humans don’t much get to stay. They don’t even get to say when they come and go. Except me.”
