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The huge red Wyvern cocked his head to one side and spoke slowly, as if reading from a book. “Hearts: hollow pumping organs that move blood throughout the body or any similar thing. The center of a body. The part of a creature that feels and fears and wants and swells with courage. The important bit—the heart of the matter. A suit in a deck of playing cards. The shape of a Valentine with two round parts and one pointy part.”
September grinned. “Cross-reference! Heart begins with H and Fairyland begins with F!”
A-Through-L scrunched up his snout. His long whiskers flicked and snapped. “The Dun Cow Café in Gingham Green serves a drink with melon chunks in it called the Heart of Fairyland. When Cutty Soames was King, he had a grand pirate ship built out of dryad bones and starlight and he called it the Heart of Fairyland. It’s also the name of Queen Mab’s sword, only it’s not really a sword so much as a spindle. Oh, and they used to call the Moon the Heart of Fairyland, in the days before astronomy was born.” The great Wyvern sighed. “September, my father was only a little local Library. Worlds don’t print their secrets in encyclopedias! I wish it were as easy as reading off the population of Pandemonium! I would have read the H’s more carefully if only I’d known.”
“Oh, Ell, don’t worry! You know I can’t bear to see you frown. Goodness, I wish I’d paid more attention to my lessons twice an hour!” She touched his scaly skin. It was so warm, as warm as Summer.
Blunderbuss gnawed at her own whiskers. “What’s that bit about the center of a body?” she said thoughtfully.
“Oh!” exclaimed September. “Could it be that easy? Ell, what’s the exact center of Fairyland? Where I come from, it’s somewhere off the coast of Africa, I think. What’s neither east nor west nor north nor south, but perfectly in the middle? Center begins with C!”
Ell did not even take a moment to consider it. “Why, Meridian, of course!” The Wyverary’s voice grew quiet and full of awe. “The Great Grand Library lives there. The biggest and widest and deepest and oldest Library in all of Fairyland. My great-great-great-greater-than-great-grandmother. She hatched all the other Libraries. Even the Fairyland Municipal Library. Even the Lopsided Library on the Moon. Even my father, Compleat. Fairyland has a Library in the center of it—maybe the Heart is there! Maybe the Grand Library is the Heart! But I suppose we would have a terrible time trying to carry the Grand Library to Runnymede Square. Still, even if the Library doesn’t have the Heart of Fairyland, surely someone, sometime, wrote something about it! A thing is hardly real if no one’s written about it. It’s the writing that makes a thing proper and solid and true in the first place.”
A-Through-L nodded firmly, agreeing with himself. Though the red lizard didn’t know it, he had just spilled the first law of Dry Magic. It is true in our world, too, and this is why the first thing we do when a child gets born is write down her name and her weight and everything else we know about her.
“Does anyone know where we are, exactly? I’ve been trying to pinpoint us, but I can’t tell,” Saturday said. He added quietly to himself: “I can’t smell the sea.” It is very frightening for a Marid when he cannot smell the sea, or hear it, or see it glimmering in the distance. If he cannot smell the sea, he cannot find his way home. “I think those are the Handhills—but then that bit of mist over there might be the Inksop Marshes, except they should be west of the hills…”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” chirped Ell cheerfully.
“Doesn’t it? I rather reckon it does, if we’re headed toward your gran,” groused Blunderbuss.
“But it doesn’t. I am a Librarian! Well, Assistant Librarian. And I haven’t worked a shift in ever so long. But that’s only because I was in prison! I wasn’t shirking. So I should still be a member of the Catalogue in Good Standing.”
“What does that mean?” asked September.
Ell beamed. “All Librarians are members of the Catalogue. That’s what you call a coven when it’s made up of Librarians instead of witches. Librarians have sorted and alphabetized all the magic that ever thought to put a rabbit and a hat together. Who do you think invented Special Collections? Severe Magic and Shy Magic, Dry Magic and Wet Magic, Umbrella Magic and Fan Magic and all the rest? Librarians, that’s who! And of course they learned a thing or two along the way. The Catalogue connects every Library to every other Library just the same as if they shared one long hallway. No one wants to wait for On the Criminology of Fairies to arrive by stagecoach when you could just pop out of the Municipal stacks and into the towering shelves of the Crowdleian Library and have it back in half a wing beat! It’s very necessary magic. I’m not meant to tell anyone—it’s one of the High Secrets of Circulation. The Catalogue would turn me into a bookmark if they knew! September? Is this right? Is this the way to win the Derby? Should I take us to Meridian? Or Wom? Or under the sea? Only I think Saturday would have to manage that.”
September squared her shoulders. She was the Queen of Fairyland, if only for a little while. She had better get used to deciding things, even if the idea of getting it wrong frightened her all over.
“Yes, Ell. Take us. We won’t tell anyone how you did it.”
A-Through-L stretched out his long crimson wings to gather them all close in. Blunderbuss snagged a bit of her yarn on his talon. September tucked it back into place without a word, and at that moment, the wombat began to love her a little. Hawthorn would have fretted over it something awful, but September simply fixed her up without a fuss. The truth was, Blunderbuss hated to be re
minded that she was made of yarn while everyone else was more or less made of meat or meatlike stuffs. September peeked under his wing at the deep, rolling Barleybroom. She remembered the first time she saw it, how wide and wonderful it seemed—until the Glashtyn came roaring out of it. What lived beneath now, she wondered?
The Wyverary danced from foot to foot. His orange eyes blazed with glee. He carefully laid one long black claw against his snout and whispered:
“SHHHHHH!”
And all four of them disappeared with a sound like a date-stamp clonking down, leaving behind a puff of dust that smelled strongly of dictionaries, first editions, and the complete works of everyone ever.
CHAPTER VIII
GREENWICH MEAN TIME
In Which September Visits the Great Grand Library, Is Threatened by Numerous Bears, and Consults the Reference Desk
It is true that everything has a heart. The hearts of towns and villages and cities do not look very much like the heart of a person, but they have hearts all the same. Sometimes it looks like a train depot, sometimes it looks like a university, sometimes it looks like a castle, sometimes it looks like a river, sometimes it looks like a factory. A town must dream or it will die, and a town’s dreams come from its depot or its university or its castle or its river or its factory. It longs for marvelous folk to come through the village center on a shining train and stay. It longs to make steel so strong it can build the whole of the rest of the world, or to see its river filled with great ships trading one thing for another until no one lacks any longer. It yearns to protect its villagers from the rampages of time and economics. It wants to make wisdom so bright it can keep the lights on for the whole of the rest of the world. If you look at the center of any city, you can see what it wants to be when it grows up.
The Great Grand Library did not know Meridian was the exact center of Fairyland when she settled there. She did not even know it was called Meridian, for it was not called anything at all yet. She was but a young and reckless hut whose owners had abandoned her during the first Fairyland Ice Age, which was caused by Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, biting off chunks of the sun for his children to gobble up. This is why ravens are wiser and wilier than most other birds and some people, though it also covered Fairyland in green glass glaciers. But without the glaciers, there would have been no ice wyrms, so on the whole, it all comes out reasonably even. The sun sulked and moaned for a thousand years or so and then got over it. But the Great Grand Library knew only that the family of were-mammoths whom she loved and sheltered had run off at the first sign of wyrms and left her alone with nothing more to her name than a candlestick with no candles, a porridge bowl with no porridge, and a single book without a bookshelf to keep it safe from the storms.
The Great Grand Library picked up her studs and her door frame and high-tailed it south, looking for a better life. Now, a hut, no matter how good-hearted and sturdy-souled, has little use for candlesticks (all houses, huts, shacks, and bungalows can see perfectly well in the dark, though mansions have a terrible fear of it). Nor does she need much in the way of porridge bowls. A house eats only evening hours, the smells of baking things, and wood polish. And even if she did decide to give food a go, she would not start with porridge, which is horrid. This left the Great Grand Library, neither great nor grand nor a library quite yet, with her single solitary book. She sat down to read it in a patch of poor raven-chewed sunshine, and when she finished, she read it all over again. By the time she had finished her fourth reading, the hut looked up and realized that a gnome had wandered into it and lain down to sleep. When the gnome awoke, it unpacked its belongings, which included two more books. When the gnome left for an exciting business opportunity in the brand-new baby city of Pandemonium, the hut hid all three books from him and kept them for herself.
And so it went. The hut prowled all over Fairyland, enticing Fairies and spriggans and hobgoblins and wights to move in and move out, and each time, the hut stole their books, and her collection grew. She read every last book and then started over from the first one, the were-mammoths’ book, again and again. Finally, she got so heavy with the weight of her books that she could not prowl any longer, and the place where she plopped down at last is the place where she still sits.
The heart of Meridian is a hut that wanted to be a library when it grew up.
And that is just what September and her friends saw when they appeared, rather suddenly and with a loud chuh-chunk stamping sound, in the middle of the Great Grand Library. They landed in the Mystery section, which had once been a tiny kitchen where were-mammoth children had laughed and refused to eat their greens and gotten porridge all over their antlers. Now it had a ceiling like an overgrown cathedral, tangled up in flying buttresses and skylights and study desks zooming and darting to and fro like warplanes. But there were still a number of sinks and china cabinets and sideboards and tables with dinner plates laid out, though they had no beef or cheese on them, only more books, piled forty volumes high. The Mystery section is also the theatre district—for all of the town of Meridian is contained within the Great Grand Library, safe and sound and snug behind a wall of bookshelves, just as a medieval village bunkers down within a wall of bricks.
