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A-Through-L nodded vigorously. “Shrinking is the most dreadful thing,” he said from experience. “It feels like disappearing. You lose yourself, inch by inch. Don’t do it, Buss.”
“We’ll stay,” the scrap-yarn wombat said firmly. “You go paddle about in your supersecret lair of secretness and we’ll just lie out in the sun and discuss Agatha Christie and eat coconuts—ALL THE COCONUTS.”
“Are you certain you’ll be all right?” September said. “I don’t want to leave you! Awful things happen when we’re apart, Ell. What if one of the other racers comes and you have to duel?”
The wombat and the Wyverary leapt up into the sky together, circling, jostling, bonking their heads together, and tumbling back down laughing. The ground shook. “Look at us! We’d knock down the sun if it gave us the side-eye!” Blunderbuss rolled around in the sand, kicking her stubby feet into the air.
Ell shrugged down their traveling bag so that September could pack herself the royal supper, just in case. “Besides, you’re the racer, September. If Tanaquill or Crunchcrab come whinging by, we’ll just wave and have another coconut. If you’re not here, Meridian’s an unoccupied square.”
I have read a number of stories in which the hero strides boldly and bravely into the next adventure, never once turning to look back. September looked back several times. Over her shoulder, over the lip of the Bathysphere, once or twice turning completely around and opening her mouth to speak, to say that she’d thought of some way to cram them all in—but she hadn’t thought of it, and couldn’t say much of anything. This was their only lead. If they didn’t go to Mumkeep Reef, they might as well give up and go see what was playing at the cinema in Pandemonium.
“Please be here when we get back,” September whispered instead.
A-Through-L beamed at her, flaring his crimson wings in the sunshine.
“I am always here when you get back, small fey. Haven’t you learned anything?”
* * *
The Bathysphere picked up its clawfeet like a prancing stallion and clopped into the rippling water. It was quite roomy enough for September and Saturday to sit side by side. Each of them could reach the controls—a bank of bronze brush-handles, soap spigots, hot and cold taps, squeeze bulbs like the ones on old-fashioned bottles of perfume, and several dials showing depth, water pressure, distance to destination, and temperature.
Without thinking, September reached out and picked up two polished pearl soap dishes. She held one to her ear and spoke into the other:
“Mumkeep Reef, please.”
Then, she pushed the down-bubble-bath brush forward, slowly but confidently. The Bathysphere surged over the continental shelf of Fairyland and sank pleasantly into the free ocean.
“What are you doing?” cried Saturday. “I haven’t told you how to drive it yet! You could have grabbed the wrong nozzle! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to snap,” he said hurriedly, and caught her hand up in his. “You frightened me, is all! You were made for the sky and the grass and the open plain—the Sea can hurt you so much more than she can hurt me. How did you know what to do?”
September stared at him.
“The Bathysphere told me. Didn’t you hear?”
“I didn’t hear anything, Tem,” Saturday answered, and he did not like his answer one bit. His eyes filled up with worry like tide pools. September had always been so wonderfully bullheaded. She didn’t imagine things or make jokes at his expense. “Perhaps the Derby is too much, the pressure of it … perhaps we need to sleep.”
But September refused to nap. She stared hurtfully at him. The moment the glass dome had closed over their heads, a clear, bright voice had spoken and explained everything. It had. She wasn’t hearing things.
“Well, the Bathysphere wished us a good morning, told us to keep our hands and feet inside him at all times, and asked where we were off to this fine day. Also his name is Fizzwilliam. He comes from a large family in the P&P—that’s Perverse and Perilous, I’d guess. He’s the middle child, but he got quite a lot of love from all sides. He lost a sister in the mer-wars and thinks of her every year around this time. Oh, and he likes jellyfish for his suppers and his favorite color is yellow, but not that nasty sickly yellow some sea sponges have, the smashing bright yellow of bananafish.”
Saturday frowned deeply. “September, Bathyspheres don’t talk. Marids invented them—so we could invite friends to tea without killing them. Marids have a terrible habit of falling in love with dryhairs.” He blushed, a deeper blue.
“Sure they talk! Or this one does! Saturday, I sat down and Fizzwilliam piped up at once! And then I looked at the controls and it just made sense that the dishes were meant for talking back to him and the down-bubble-bath brush was the one on the left. You brake with the handle on the right and reverse with the one in the middle, and you steer with the hot and cold taps. Am I right? I am right. How would I know all that about Fizzwilliam’s family if he hadn’t told me?”
What did it matter, if they were speeding on ahead? If she was happy, and trying to win, trying to stay? But Saturday could not help arguing. Some people must always argue, or they don’t feel right in their skin. “You could have made it up. To tease me.”
September gave him a pointed look. “When have I ever fibbed to you, Mr. Suspicious? I even told you the truth about my First Kiss, and I didn’t have to do that at all. I always tell you the big, snagged-up truth.”
A cloud crept into Saturday’s eyes. “Your First Kiss? When was that?”
September punched his shoulder playfully. “Ha-ha. Your shadow kissed me without asking when I met
him in Fairyland-Below. You must remember. I gave you my Second Kiss right away. You got my Third Kiss, too. But you asked. You wrote on a little card in blue ink: I should like to kiss you if you want to be kissed, and you like me in a kissing kind of way, and not only in an adventuring way.”
“Yes, of course I remember,” Saturday murmured, and rubbed the tops of his arms, as he did whenever he got nervous. “I was very careful with my penmanship.” But he didn’t sound certain about it at all.
September sighed and looked out into the bubbling turquoise water, growing deeper and darker blue as they sank, streaming ahead toward Mumkeep Reef. “I do wish we could go faster! The Derby will go on without us up there and I’ll bet the Rex Tyrannosaur can run frightfully quick. Oh! Fizzwilliam says that if we look out the port side, we can see the county of Ys, which used to cozy up to the east coast of Fairyland, but got in a quarrel with the Pickapart Mountains and huffed off to have its own fun on the ocean floor.”
“Bathyspheres don’t talk,” Saturday repeated stubbornly.
