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The Racemaster seemed to deflate like a hot air balloon. His silks drooped to the ground, suddenly empty. His crisp points started to come loose, his cheeks and eyebrows unfolding and untying until there was nothing left but a great pile of old flags on the patchwork cobblestones. But no—not only a pile of flags. From the depths of all that fine, painted fabric, they heard several snorts, a furious squeal, and an indignant roar. Then the loud, horrid rip of silk tearing in half, and then in half again. Something was trying to come out from inside the rags that had, only a moment ago, been Ajax Oddson, Blue Hen Island’s greatest student. September’s stomach went cold. She remembered Tanaquill’s dreadful horse, Hushnow’s gargantuan Roc, Curdleblood’s hideous shade of black.
“Get off!” snarled the silk-heap. “Get off me, you nasty old bedsheet! I’ll bite you stupid! THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED I HATE YOU AND I HOPE YOU COME APART IN THE WASH.”
An orange spike snagged through a flag showing a noble crest with polar bears rampant and a hobgoblin with spectacles on. Then another spike. Then a pair of chomping, gnashing, vicious teeth.
Wombat teeth.
Blunderbuss burst out of Ajax’s racing flags, shredding them to stitches and tatters.
“TA-DA!” she bellowed. “Did you hear those snobs calling me a steed?”
CHAPTER VII
EVERYTHING HAS A HEART
In Which No One Is a Steed, Cross-Referencing Proves Unhelpful, and A-Through-L Proves Himself a Librarian in Good Standing
September grabbed Saturday’s hand. Her whole body shook with the need to go, go, go, run, faster, get ahead of the pack, find a shortcut, pound the road. The Marid looked up and down the Barleybroom for a ferry, for the other racers, for anything the catapult might have dropped. But the scrap-yarn wombat was in no such hurry. Blunderbuss stomped up and down the shores of the windy river. She snatched at the chinstrap of her grass helmet and tore it off, kicking it along the sunny grass like a ball that had greatly disappointed her.
“A steed! Me! A mount! And this is the second time, too! That dull battle-ax Tanaquill put me in a stable, if you can believe it. A stable! As if I’m nothing but a pitchfork! Don’t I talk? Don’t I know my multiplication tables? Don’t I have my own tender ambitions? Don’t I bite with conviction? I busted on through an apartment wall into Fairyland just the same as anybody else. I am not a Chevrolet! I am a stupendous splendid fantastic amazing combat wombat. I am! I’ll steed them!”
A-Through-L stomped beside her, his orange eyes filled with sympathy. She was only somewhat smaller than the Wyverary—the ground trembled a little as they squashed it underfoot.
“My father was a Library,” Ell said comfortingly, “and when I was young my family all lived together among his strong, sturdy stacks. Back then, my brother T-Through-Z used to say the world is divided into the riders and the ridden, and I always thought he was being pompous and grim because those are his favorite things besides roasting romance novels, but I believe him now. Half of everyone thinks I’m September’s horse. As if I don’t know my multiplication tables! As if I wasn’t there when the Marquess fell! I know that I can be ridden, but I needn’t be. I could ride somebody, if that somebody was big enough. It’s not my fault I’m too heavy. It’s their fault they’re so little.”
Blunderbuss sniffed a little. She tore up a patch of Barleybroom grass and clover and flax flowers and chewed resentfully.
“We were gonna win,” she huffed. “Me and Hawthorn and Tam. We were gonna do a double flip and land on the Briary with all our feet planted and a crown for each of us. I wanted to see the look on Scratch’s bell! Now who’ve they got with them? Probably Sadie’s mangy dumb jackal with his face stuffed full of biscuits. And he’ll get to wear a crown while I get nothing! I never get anything!”
“We might win, you know,” said Saturday, who certainly felt their chances were better than a couple of Changelings fresh from Chicago, wherever that was. If they won, September would stay. It was all he could think. You couldn’t be a long-distance Queen. She would stay and he would never have to turn to say something to her and find no one there ever again.
Blunderbuss gave him a pitying look. “No offense, but your girl doesn’t even want to boss Fairyland about. You can’t win without a want boiling in your belly. Besides, my kids have magic leaking out of their ears. None of this would have happened without them.”
“Oh yes,” said September slyly. “Thank you, Hawthorn and Tamburlaine, for bringing Goldmouth back to life. A king so wicked there’s a statue of him dying in the capital for everyone to wash their stockings in. I’m sure we’re all terribly grateful.”
“I wouldn’t go talking about bringing ornery things back to life, Miss Egg. It doesn’t look too good on you.”
September laughed. She knew the wombat meant to sting her, so she laughed instead of blushing or sputtering, which never got a girl anything but rolled right over. It was a fair point, anyhow. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. The wind pushed it right back, hot and sweet and full of the best sorts of city smells. She took a breath and said the thing that had spent the last three days pacing all the rooms of her mind. “Maybe I don’t want to be Queen, exactly. But if we don’t win, then someone dreadful might. We’ve got to win, because we can’t count on the Marquess or Tanaquill or Goldmouth losing. And … and I’d be a good Queen, I think. I wouldn’t be bad, anyway. Maybe I could be the opposite of a tyrant, an un-tyrant, and Fairyland would be, well, like a story in a book.”
And if I were Queen, I could stay, she added silently. I could stay in Fairyland. I could be good at Fairyland, the way the Sibyl was good at guarding the entrance to the underworld and the Calcatrix was good at the magic of money. A terrible longing for her mother pressed on her chest. Her mother would tell her that if there was ever a chance to do something extraordinary, it ought to be snatched immediately. Only, if I stay, will I ever get
to hear her tell me a single thing again? Perhaps … perhaps I could bring my parents through the Closet Between the Worlds and we could all be together here. Halloween brought my father to Fairyland-Below, and she’s only my shadow. You’re allowed to do that sort of thing when you’re Queen.
Darling September! That is why anyone wants to rule. Oh, they would never admit it. But at the bottom of their hearts, anyone who longs for power longs to have everyone and everything they love safe and happy forever in one place, no matter the cost. It’s only what happens to those they do not love that makes it all go wrong-headed and hard.
Saturday stared out over the river, into the dry hills beyond. He could not quite tell where Pandemonium had settled herself. They had to get moving. If they won, she would stay. He whispered it over again in his mind like a song. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to figure something out before the opossum’s bubble pops and we’re surrounded by the worst family reunion that’s ever packed itself a picnic.”
“I shall be honest,” began September, pulling her emerald smoking jacket tight round her. “I haven’t any little idea what the Heart of Fairyland is or where to find it. I had hoped someone else might.”
Saturday, Ell, and Blunderbuss exchanged guilty looks. “We’ve been whipping our brains against it for days,” the scrap-yarn wombat said. “I’ve only just got to Fairyland so don’t look at me. I hardly know where the broom closet is! But if you ask me, anything important is in the Land of Wom, and if it’s not in the Land of Wom, it’s not awfully important.”
“I don’t know,” said Saturday. “But I know where I would hide something, if I needed to. I would hide it way down deep at the bottom of the sea, snug under the weight of water and safe from all those silly toy monarchs who can only breathe air.”
“Hearts begin with H, Ell,” September said to the Wyverary. “I thought you might know where we ought to go. Where Fairyland hides its heart. Because Saturday’s right. It’s got to be hidden, or else the Derby would be over in a minute and a half.”
The Wyverary fretted and clawed the earth. He wanted so to be useful. “But, September, everything has a heart! Well, mostly everything. I can tell you all about Wyvern hearts, if you want. Or Periwig hearts or Fairy hearts or Marid hearts or even a little about human hearts. But you can’t leave it all up to me! I thought you would know! It sounds like the sort of secret a Queen would learn on the occasion of her coronation, doesn’t it?”
“Just try, Ell,” coaxed Saturday.
