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The Plaited Plaza filled and filled and then overflowed. The Club shuddered at the crowds. It seemed many people meant to race who had never met a snifter in their lives, and the Club did not approve. September hadn’t seen half of them in the grand hall. Not Kings and Queens of days gone by, but fauns and bugbears and gnomes and spriggans who came with knapsacks full of ambition strapped on tight. But September didn’t see the racer she worried about. Perhaps she won’t come, September thought. Perhaps she’ll just lose interest and go learn to knit with the hamadryads.
Oh, September. They always come. No one in the history of the world has ever been so lucky as to escape confrontations forever. Though, I must admit: The Marquess actually overslept on the morning of the Cantankerous Derby. When you have slept for five years, one stacked on top of the other like mattresses, it’s very hard to convince your body that you’re allowed to wake up again. But I woke her. I crept into her room in the Briary and brushed a lock of her hair from her lips. The lock flushed blue and she sat straight up, gasping. You might think it wicked of me—why not let that awful lady sleep through to the end of time? But, darlings, I have many more stories than September’s to look after, and I cannot neglect even one of them.
The Marquess stepped out of nothing—she just opened a piece of air like it was a door with a nice sensible handle and stepped into the Plaza with her son Prince Myrrh close behind her. The Marquess smiled at September. Her hair faded from black to deep rose-pink. She gazed up at the statue of herself battling the clurichaun. Goldmouth, his golden teeth as sharp as vengeance, glared at her from across the square. Prince Myrrh waved shyly at September. He had come to see his mother off—and then dash away to his own schemes and trials, for the Marquess had told him when she woke that children should dream greater than their parents’ industries. Perhaps September and Myrrh might have found something to say to one another had the Green Wind not pounced upon another perfect moment and come sailing down out of the dazzling sky on the Leopard of Little Breezes—followed by Iago, carrying the Red Wind, her red coat flapping rakishly, her red pistols glittering. The Blue Wind came after, on her great giant puffin, and the Silver Wind on the Tiger of Wild Flurries, and the Black Wind, on the Lynx of Gentle Showers! And yet another Wind, the only one September had not yet met, the Golden Wind, riding the Jaguar of Soft Showers. A-Through-L roared in delight and flew red circles round them all.
“Green!” September cried, nearly beside herself. She jumped up and down as though no time at all had passed and she was still washing pink and yellow teacups in her parents’ sink and had only just now seen a man riding a flying Leopard for the first time. “Blue! Red! You came!”
“Well, of course we came, my sour little blueberry,” cried the Blue Wind, halfway between a sneer and a giggle. “How else am I going to steal a crown?”
“You’re racing?”
“Oh yes,” the Red Wind said. “Fairyland is far too important to leave it to the Unwindy. We’ve been lax. It’s not your fault—you’re stuck in one place. You can’t see anything but what you’ve already stepped in.”
“I can’t let one of them win,” said the Silver Wind, her fine gray hair wafting up round her head in a crown. She jutted her chin toward the other Winds. “Thieves and brawlers!”
“I’m not one of those,” the Black Wind snapped, wounded. “I’ll have you know I’m a perfectly respectable and responsible creature of the night.”
The Golden Wind said nothing. September and his Jaguar stared at one another.
“And you, too, Green?” September said at last. She did feel a little hurt. Didn’t he think she could manage a throne?
“Oh, I don’t want to lord it over anything much more than my breakfast, but I thought: Why not? Winds always race—it’s our nature!” The Green Wind landed softly. The Leopard of Little Breezes padded over to drink from the fountain.
“Hawthorn!” September waved, seeing him at last, marching in from the Great Foulard. “Blunderbuss! Tam! Over here!”
The Changelings rode high atop the scrap-yarn wombat. Blunderbuss wore her full armor, the very armor Tamburlaine had painted for her outside the Redcaps’ cellar. She had once been little and dense and fierce as any wombat—but Hawthorn and Tamburlaine had made her gigantic, stupendous, a first-rate combat wombat. Her armor bristled, all thorny Steppe-grass lashed together like fiery whips, winding round and round her in pumpkin-colored ropes, braided tight. The grasses had thatched up into bright greaves on her legs, a belly-breastplate on the underside of her tummy, a curling orange saddle on her back with long, wheat-sheaf stirrups handing down round her ribs, and a brilliant helmet over her head, with grassy nubs for wombat ears and several splendid spikes. Her fuzzy face was made quite fierce and triceratops-like by all her finery. She tossed her armored head at the sky and hurtled her thrill at the spires of Pandemonium.
“What do you say to all this?” hollered the combat wombat. “Pretty flash for a game of tag!”
Hawthorn and Tamburlaine looked guilty—guilty and beautiful. Hawthorn wore the long-tailed cap Gwendolyn, his human mother, had knitted for him with polar bears and kangaroos on it and his father Nicholas’s old leather jacket with Gwen’s gold jewelry sewn all over it. He would never give those up if he lived to be as old as the alphabet. But underneath it all he wore the outfit he’d found laid out for him in their room when he woke up that morning: a fine troll’s tunic woven out of obsidian and granite and shale (for trolls can weave stone into cloth stronger than marble and softer than a child’s cheek—though it’s very hard work and bruises the weavers all over). On his feet he wore the great and powerful Golden Galoshes, only they really were Golden, and embroidered with very probably some sort of enchantments. His hands were sheathed in the rare and precious Carnivorous Mittens, only they really were tigerskin now instead of scratchy orange and black wool, complete with hard silver claws. And over his tunic, the formidable Houndstoo
th Suit, which really was made of fierce hounds’ teeth, thatched together like a coat of mail.
Tamburlaine’s walnut-wood skin looked as though it had been polished over and over—she shone like something burned inside her. Her hair was in full bloom, purple and crimson flowers cascading down her back like a highwayman’s cape. She, too, wore what the Briary had given her: a dress of thick canvas, belted with a length of green knives from the knife tree in her own forest. She’d fastened lionbone greaves to her legs and wore bear’s claw rings on her fingers. On her back Tam carried a quiver of paintbrushes, and across her chest two bandoliers of paint-pots.
“Where’s Scratch?” asked Saturday, looking for the gramophone.
Blunderbuss pawed the Plaza stones ruefully. “He’s such a fragile little fellow, don’t you know. He could snap a leg or a handle as easy as flipping his record. We snuck out while he was snoozing away, snoring out torch songs. He’ll be safer in the Briary. The wilds are no place for delicate technology.”
Tamburlaine frowned wretchedly, already missing her friend.
“We’re sorry, September,” Tam began. “It’s only that we’re Changelings. If only Changelings were in charge, nobody else would ever have to get kidnapped just to make the math work out. We think you’d be a lovely Queen, but we can’t trust anyone who hasn’t had to grow up in the human world.”
“I grew up in the human world,” September said crossly.
“It’s not the same.” Hawthorn sighed. “You don’t know what it’s like to always, always feel that you don’t belong, to your family, to your city, or your school, knowing there’s something different about you, something off, that you’re not like the others, that you’re an alien all alone.”
September crossed her arms. “Hawthorn. Everyone feels like that.”
But the troll shook his head. “You were human. You matched. You don’t know what it’s like to be stuck in your own body like a trap.”
Oh, but Hawthorn, my best and dearest boy. Listen to September, who knows a thing or two about living in a strange body. Max could tell you, too, and Thomas Rood and Penny Farthing and even the boy named Humphrey who carved his name in your desk. You could tell him, and so could I. No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.
“We have to try,” Tamburlaine said gently. “And we’re not the only ones! That’s Sadie Spleenwort over there, with the mushrooms in her hair.” A girl with auburn braids was kissing a giant jackal on the nose and reaching up on her tiptoes to scratch his ears. “She’ll probably beat us, actually. She’s stubborn and sour and stupendous. And Penny Farthing, on the velocipede!”
September looked and saw the little girl she had met on the back of a wild velocipede the first time she came to Pandemonium. Penny was quite grown now, whooping and laughing on top of her steed while her mother, Calpurnia, sipped a coffee and grinned with pride.
“Ladies and Gentlemen and Everyone Else!” bellowed the Stoat of Arms. Several invisible horns sounded, shattering the merry noise into a hundred million pieces, leaving only quiet behind. “Welcome to the Cantankerous Derby! Let us all get this over with as soon as possible for I am already bored with every single one of you! Please behave yourselves while Mrs. Grandiloquent Cockscomb, the Royal Bookmaker, commences the Reading of the Odds!”
