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The tyrannosaurus looked a little shamefaced—but only a little, for dinosaurs would rather drown in tar than admit they’re wrong. That unfortunate attitude played a key role in their extinction. Naturally, they have steadfastly refused to own up to it, so I cannot tell you where it all went reptiles-up.
“A Heart is meat,” Thrum said stubbornly. “No one knows more about food than wombats. They might know. You don’t know anything!”
September laughed in his face. “Wow, you really have no ideas, do you? And I thought we were bungling the whole thing!”
Ajax Oddson’s voice filled the air above Nightgown. “My, oh my! What have I got in my sights? A couple of brawlers raring to fight! Let’s all get our napkins for…”
“See what you’ve done now?” September sighed. She had had enough of dueling, and dueling a dinosaur was just ridiculous. Absurd! Her sense of sensibility would not accept it. But the green and violet fireworks burst into the sky once more, showering the Night-Barn with sparks that reflected in the deep sky of its beams. They spelled out the words:
The Duel du Jour!
“A duel?” said Conker. “In Nightgown?”
“Like a boxing match or with swords and that?” asked Meatpie. “Or a joust?”
“Who cares?” Tugboat yelled. “Looks like my shop’s got the best seats! I’ve got corncakes and pepper pies for all! And a jug of sunshine!” Sunshine is what wombats call their local home brew. It would knock all of our grandfathers clean over with one sip.
Conker and Bluestocking hurried back to their own porch. The Nightgown mob rushed to safe cover—so long as the safe cover offered a good view.
“We’ve got prime front-row rump-space!” Bluestocking called out in her best hawking voice. “Sunshine and sausages! A cup for sevenpenny, a link for two Tugbits!”
The familiar judge’s frame shimmered into the air a few feet above the dusty road. Wreathed grasses and gooseberries braided up into a ring around a terrible pale face covered in tattoos. Vicious magenta eyes glowed with hate. Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth opened his mouth and screamed wretchedly at them. His gold teeth, his gold tongue, his gold lips reflected the black night-boards of the town.
“Well, hello, you old worn-out baseball!” chuffed Blunderbuss. She turned to the stands confidentially. “He got turned into a baseball and sixth graders hit him with sticks. It was excellent.” Tugboat and Conker tittered on their porches. “How are things? Horrible? Good, good. We’ve got a drawer we can forget you in if you’re feeling homesick!”
“Is it time for physical education?” he thundered at them, and his voice held none of the uncertainty and fear it had when he asked Hawthorn and Tamburlaine that question in the moments after he’d dragged them all into Fairyland. Now it was simply his own brutish joke. “I choose now, yes? You have to pay attention to me now. You have to do what I say. You can’t just stand around sniffing your own rot and pretending to ignore me! You will obey me, and I will eat up your obedience, because after all these years I am starving for it, you whining, breakable nothings.”
September felt her stomach give up stomaching and crawl into her toes to die. For the first time, she thought she might have gotten lucky, only having to deal with the Marquess when she first came. What awful had that creature done when he ruled? Who could ever have defeated him?
“It’s a duel, not a lecture, Goldmouth,” the Rex Tyrannosaur growled. “We ignored you because you always do this—you drone on about yourself for hours and then start eating people. I eat people, too, I’m not saying I don’t! But I have manners. I don’t dominate the conversation with my own problems. I listen. I let them talk about their lives, their fears, their new poems, their clever little ways of organizing their desks at home, and then I eat them. And that? That there? That’s what you call class, King Baseball.”
But September could see Thrum’s massive legs tremble a little, his long tail twitch. Even he was afraid of Goldmouth, the great dinosaur lord. But if he showed his terror, that would mean admitting he was weak, and that was far too much like admitting he was wrong to be borne.
Goldmouth flushed with rage. He lunged forward, trying to break out of the doppelgänger’s frame and into the Land of Wom by sheer force of will and weight of skull. But he could not. “I am going to set you on fire, lizard. Once you kill that tiny girl. I am going to set you on fire in Runnymede Square and all the mammals will cheer.” The clurichaun turned his monstrous head to September. His voice grew so low and grinding that she could feel her bones bending under it. “For weapons, weakling, I choose Biting. Eating. Gnashing.” September looked at the tyrannosaurus rex standing across from her on the road. He grinned, showing teeth like jagged arrowheads. Goldmouth laughed and the laugh of Gratchling Goldmouth sounded like the death of hope. Then his laugh died and he spoke just like all the insipid gym teachers he’d had to suffer through during the years of his imprisonment in the school bag of Thomas Rood, the Changeling boy who now called himself Hawthorn the troll. “Good luck, try your best, and don’t forget to have fun!”
September shook her head. The sheer unfairness of it prickled her skin into goose bumps, ever so much worse than a silly Latin verb. She ran her tongue over her small, flat teeth. They wouldn’t even leave a mark in Thrum’s hide.
“I’ll roast him!” Ell offered.
“No,” said September feebly. “We can only use the chosen weapons—I don’t even know if your fire would work on the dueling ground. Magic gets all turned around in here.”
The Wyverary took a deep breath and tried a gout of flame—but nothing came. Ajax had given much thought to armoring his dear, treasured rules.
“Just run,” begged Saturday, though he knew she wouldn’t, that she barely knew how anymore. If he didn’t know much, he knew that. If we win, she will … what was it?
September looked up at the sun, the bright clouds, the night-sky shops of Wom, the blue tongue berries growing on the hillsides, her wonderful, beautiful Wyverary, her beloved Saturday. She looked at all the round, sweet faces of the watching wombat mob.
“I’ll only go home if I lose,” she told herself. “Oddson said. Back to wherever I came from. It’s just the most painful bus ticket home you can imagine, that’s all.” She drew the Greatvole’s crystal whisker from its sheath and tested its sharpness.
“I don’t want you to go home,” Ell said miserably, brushing her cheek with his scarlet muzzle. “I want this to be home. I want us to be home.”
The Rex Tyrannosaur clawed the earth with his razor-tipped feet. Saliva dripped from his teeth. “You’ll be old again. You only got young when the Dodo’s Egg broke and when you lose, everything goes back into the shell. Everything. You’ll go home and you won’t be able to come back and you’ll be old and used up and no one will even know your face.”
His words hit her heart and snapped against it. And somehow, her fear snapped in half, too. The dinosaur towered over her. He could swallow her in one bite. His claws could rip her apart without so much as a wink and a wave. And all he could think of to threaten her with was getting old in her own home.
September laughed at the tyrannosaurus. She saw him flinch. Her laughter was as good as a weapon, sometimes. She could hold it in front of her and it would stop even the lizard king. “Forty’s not the worst thing to happen to anyone,” she said, pointing her whisker at his eye. “And if I turn forty again today, then that makes today my birthday, and on my birthday, I get whatever I want.”
She turned and kissed Saturday’s lips, Ell’s nose, Saturday again. And again. The tattoos along her arm felt hot and alive.
