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Far beneath the surface of the Obstreperous Ocean, purple fireworks erupted into a shower of flame, spelling out:
Everyone Loves A Duel!
CHAPTER XII
A SCHOOL OF SATURDAYS
In Which September Turns into a Bear, Saturday Swims Up the Time Stream, a Pirate Loses His Temper, and an Army of Undead Princesses Is Summoned
The shadow sea horse drew closer. Its warlike snout pierced the water. Its spine curved down like the neck of a violin. It was made for battle. It was sure and easy and vicious.
And it was not a sea horse.
When its bony black tail ran aground on a crag of Mumkeep Reef, sending a school of scarlet fish scattering in all directions, September saw right through into the soul of the sea horse, which contained a small man with a lumpy face and a glorious cravat. The sea horse’s eyes were not eyes, but two glass bubbles. Its snout was not a snout but a cruel cannon. Its tail was not a tail, but a rudder. Cutty Soames, Captain of the Coblynows, spun the wheel of a submarine made of shadows, and he looked quite beside himself with wrath.
A porthole opened up in the water just above them, growing slowly like a soap bubble until it popped—leaving a bolted ring of brass hanging in the sea. A pane of glass separated the Obstreperous Ocean from the Dueling Officiant: a grinning young lady all in blue, wearing silken indigo trousers and turquoise opera gloves and sapphire-colored boots with crisscrossed icicle laces all the way to the knee. She smirked at September and buttoned her long, beautiful sky-colored coat, trimmed in wild, woolly fur from some impossible, blueberry-colored sheep. Her long, azure hair lay over her shoulders in a serene, glossy style, topped off with a furry cobalt cap with an ice-spike like old pictures of the Kaiser. She chomped on the end of her churchwarden pipe, and blew a great pyramid of smoke into their faces, only it blew apart when it hit the porthole glass, so it did not quite pull off the devil-may-care effect the Blue Wind had hoped for.
“Girl, ho!” the Blue Wind called.
“Wind, ho!” September answered happily. She did not trust the Blue Wind any further than a rabbit trusts an owl, but she had missed her, all the same.
“HALT!” screamed Hugger-Muggery. Many more than four Pieces of Eight fired themselves out of their glass jars all over Mumkeep Reef. The water churned as its tentacled army took flight. “Yes, you! You, Cutty Soames! Cutty Crudheart! Soames, the Slime of the Sea! Captain of the Courageless Cockroaches of Snotropolis!”
The Blue Wind and Sepia Siphuncle broke into wild applause. The Blue Wind whistled through her teeth.
“Top-shelf stuff!” the cuttlefish hollered. “No one really straps a good insult on these days, it shocks the matinee crowds! Brava!”
“Shut up!” snarled Cutty Soames from within his submarine sea horse that wasn’t a sea horse—or a submarine, either. It was, in fact, Curdleblood, the Dastard of Darkness’s steed—a fiendishly clever shade of black. Cutty had nearly set fire to the Barleybroom when he found his prize galleon replaced with a miserable puddle of paint. But when he tried to stab it with his trusty cutlass, the Captain of the Coblynows discovered that a clever bit of black has a thousand and four more uses than a galleon. The Night Wagon, for Curdleblood had given it that name when he found the poor thing hiding in an art gallery, bored out of its wits, had learned to roll itself out into any kind of transportation the Dastard of Darkness wanted, so long as it did not have too many moving parts. The Night Wagon could do you a burnt-black horse as quick as turning the downstairs lights out. A charcoal carriage? An ebony velocipede? A shadow-fueled hot air balloon? Too easy. Once Curdleblood had fancied a coal-souled locomotive to take him in style to visit his mistress, who lived in the Bootbat Forest. This was the Night Wagon’s favorite, up until the sea horse submarine. A locomotive engine has more parts than a horse or a balloon. It almost gave up when it got to the steam pipes and piston rods. But it did love Curdleblood, Dastardly though he was. The Night Wagon longed to please. When it rocketed through the countryside, it felt so black it could burst.
Cutty Soames, suddenly shipless, had needed the Night Wagon’s help. It listened to the pirate king’s many, many complaints, which he beefed up with plenty of curse words and just plain curses, and rolled itself out into something useful and splendid and deeply, profoundly, magnificently black. Together they had already dueled both Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, and the Knapper. They’d won handily, both times, for the Night Wagon always took care to brush in a few fire-spewing extras when it did itself up for the evening.
“Shut up!” Cutty Soames spat again. September rubbed her sleeve on the eye of the black sea horse to get a better look.
The Coblynow had a rather handsome face, though it was all eyebrows and cheekbones, and much bigger than a face ought to be, considering he hardly came up to September’s waist. He’d slicked his hair down with good red mud and put a few ancient coins in it for that touch of flash for which all pirates have a weakness. He wore a salamander-skin cravat, too, pinned with a polished musket ball—and the name tag Hawthorn had given him, still stuck to his grand coat. “If there’s anything I hate more than an octopus it’s having to talk to one! Yes, yes, I’m a terrible naughty wicked gob of mud and everyone hates me. Good! Fine! I am a pirate. I liked doing pirate things when I was alive the first time and I like it now. I never wanted taxes or treaties! I want to steal your gold and potatoes! I don’t want to dance at the fashionable balls! I want to do that thing where you cut the rigging in just the right spot and shoot up to the crow’s nest! I don’t want to be loved by my subjects! I want them to build barricades and enchant their street lamps into angry giants with candles in their hair so that when I sack their ports, it’s at least a bit of a challenge! That’s the trouble, of course, once you’re King, nobody conjures up gaslight giants when they see your sails on the horizon anymore. They just try to scrape together half of their everything down to their dinner rolls and hand it over with stoic fortitude. Barnacles and bunions! It’s enough to depress the sunshine out of Spring.”
September scoffed at him. “Good grief, then why bother racing in
the Derby? I’m sure we’d all rather you stayed home and whittled a plank or something. If I end up Queen when all this is over, I shan’t steal anyone’s potatoes or sack their ports! Cutty Crudheart, indeed!”
Cutty Soames straightened his cravat and dropped his sea-weathered hand onto the hilt of his cutlass—his only true friend, until he’d gotten hitched to the Night Wagon. “Girls must girl and pirates must pirate. If they held an election, I’d spend it down the pub burning it to the ground. But let me win something, let me beat someone else to it, let me swipe it when everyone else has gone to sleep? I can’t help myself any more than a kid can stop wanting the gun-toting dolly in the window.”
“The Derby? Are you running in the Cantankerous Derby?” Hugger-Muggery said. Her voice changed in the tiniest way. A tremble crept in, like a mouse balancing on the handle of a spoon.
“Yes,” Saturday said slowly, caught out. They couldn’t hide it now. EVERYONE LOVES A DUEL still hung in the dark water like burning birthday candles. “We didn’t want to say. Grandmother doesn’t like anyone putting on airs. This is September. She’s the Engineer. The Queen. Ruler of Fairyland and All Her Kingdoms.”
Hugger-Muggery, Sepia Siphuncle, and Brother Tinpan tried to scrub the shock off their faces, but they’d gotten far too used to life in Mumkeep Reef, where they never had to worry about what half-cocked expression hung around on their faces, to manage it.
“I formally apologize for my behavior earlier, Madam Engineer,” the High Assassin of the Pieces of Eight said stiffly. “You, of course, have every right to visit any benighted corner of your kingdom, from the Hourglass Waste to Mumkeep Reef and anywhere else. You may cut off my tentacles now.”
September’s copper mask made her look severe and unmoved. Very like a Queen, though she couldn’t know it. Inside the mask, her real face wrinkled up in horror. “I will absolutely not cut off your tentacles! What a gruesome idea! Please don’t let anyone else do it, either! I’m not really Queen yet. It’s only been a few days and if I don’t win the Derby, no one will remember that I wore the crown at all.”
“But if I keep my tentacles, I will one day forget how shamefully I insulted the Queen—I mean, the Engineer! I will do it again! I must be reminded!” wailed the Octopus Assassin.
“Good! Wonderful!” September cried. “Insult away!” She felt very silly all of the sudden. Her cheeks burned. All their subterfuge and careful creeping and they could just have told everyone she was the Queen and had their pick of Mumkeep’s plunder! Now she had a tattoo and might possibly be married when all she had to say was I’m the Queen, give me what I want.
That’s all right, my girl. Don’t fret. Power is a coat that’s always too small. It takes time to wear it in, to feel like it’s really yours, to fill up the pockets with your own lint and house keys and slips of right and wrong with cat’s fur hanging off them. And for people with hearts as quick and raw and hungry as September’s, that coat will never fit quite right.
“If you’ll excuse me,” said the Blue Wind, tapping a wrist with no watch on it. “I’m rather busy with a rabid cloudicorn just now, so if we could speed things along, that’d be swell, thanks. Another heist or two and I’ll have the Heart in my hands.”
