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She walked over to Aroostook and put her hand on its hood. “What adventures you must have had!” September said, and was very glad the Model A had come through without a dent or a prick in her windshield. The engine warmed under her hand with recognition and tired happiness.
And then September heard Aroostook’s voice in her head, just as she had heard Fizzwilliam the Bathysphere’s voice and Mrs. Frittershank the gas oven’s. It told her all about how it had escaped from Madame Tanaquill’s impound garage and gone wildly wandering through Fairyland, changing whenever some old part of it felt wrong in this new place. It wanted stripes and scales and tangerine scrimshaw and a sunflower steering wheel and great gryphon feet so very badly. It had always had those things, Aroostook told her, even when Mr. Albert first bought it from the lot, it was only that no one else could see them. When September drove it through to Fairyland, it woke up, just as September did the first time she soared across the worlds. It would wake anyone up! And the more the Model A wandered, the more it yearned, the more it began to look on the outside as it had always known it should. Aroostook was a Terrible, Wonderful, Splendid Engine now! It fought a valkyrie and won! That was her helmet, there, in the desert-stone backseat! Be proud of me, September, be proud of your Splendid Engine. Lift my hood and look at what I’ve made of myself! And tell Mr. Albert I’m sorry but I shan’t ever be coming back, ever, ever.
September popped the clasp on the Model A’s hood and raised it up. Inside lay an engine all of glass and wildflowers and stalactites and bright sapphire cogs wrapped round with striped fur, all turning gracefully and sipping from the fuel tank still brimming with Ballast Downbound’s sunshine-gas. It was a cave of wonders. And she understood it, just as she understood how to drive Fizzwilliam and fix Mrs. Frittershank. She understood Aroostook’s workings top to bottom, and so she knew that if she lifted that ring of toadstools there, she would find what Ballast Downbound, the stalwart Klabautermann who had helped her to the Moon, said lay inside ships and people and everything alive: ballast. Anything that ever fascinated the ship, made it sail true, patched it or broke it, anything the ship loved or longed for, anything it could use, B.D. had said. It all just sort of sinks down and jumbles up together into something hot and heavy inside you, and the weight of everything you ever wanted in the world will keep you steady even when the worst winds blow.
She lifted the ring of toadstools and moss and there it was. Small, because Aroostook was only a baby, really. But it lay nestled in the deep of her Splendid Engine—a little tight jumble of lunar rock and strands of Almanack, the Whelk of the Moon’s hair, scraps of September’s black criminal’s silks, a stump of a candle from the Candelabra Desert where they’d been taken captive, a few chicken feathers from Mr. Albert’s prize rooster, all wrapped around her carburetor, beating away like nothing so much as a heart.
CHAPTER XX
THE HEART OF FAIRYLAND
In Which Many Plans Find Their Ends
September stepped out of the House Without Warning and into a clanging, bonging, crashing, blinding riot of color and chaos.
Saturday giggled and swooped out behind her, soaring up to meet the madness, his blue limbs disappearing into the throng.
“I think we’re late,” A-Through-L said, his orange eyes widening to take it all in.
A twisted silver sign arched between two blazing juggler’s torches, its letters spangling in bright, fogless sun:
RUNNYMEDE SQUARE
Below it hung a long silk banner painted red:
WELCOME RACERS!
Pinecrack, the Moose-Khan, antlers and all, rocketed through the air and slammed through the sign, sending pieces of RUNNY and MEDE showering down to the square below, onto the heads of a furious throng of would-be Kings and Queens. Curdleblood, the Dastard of Darkness, fired his onyx flintlocks at Horace the Overbear’s roaring ivory-armored face. A woman with long, terrible teeth put her hands to her sides, screamed up to the heavens, and shivered into an enraged woolly mammoth, charging the Happiest Princess, tossing her tusks like a bull in the ring. Penny Farthing fenced the Ice Cream Man, whose pistachio epaulets hung in bloody tatters round his shoulders. Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, darted in and out of the mob, pecking at heads and eyes and the od
d fallen jewel he wanted for his new nest. Queen Mab chased Hushnow through the air in her hazelnut chariot, wrested back from poor Sadie Spleenwort who’d gotten it in the lottery. Sadie had only lost one finger to Mab’s wrath, which both ladies considered fair. Sadie shot her sourbolt crossbow at Madame Tanaquill, but they only shattered into green smoke against the Fairy Prime Minister’s back. Horace the Overbear had already bitten the Knapper six or seven times, but it didn’t seem to slow the assassin-king down much. Half of them, comically, still wore the name tags they’d been assigned in the Briary grand hall. Winds of every color spun and sprang through the spires of Mummery on catback, whooping, hollering, blowing war-horns, shouting: Behind you! Down below! Incoming emperor!
And in the midst of it, Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth bellowed his fury at a troll, a wooden girl, and a gramophone. Scratch sang defiantly back at the clurichaun King in the voice of the Siren who once sang the greens:
Huff, puff, and howl, but I ain’t afraid
Can’t make a girl cower and a bird can’t be swayed
Go on, turn out the sun, slap the moon up in chains
I’ll just sit on my rock in the sea and the rain
Singin’ these greens till the dawn comes again
Ajax Oddson danced above it all, the points of his racing silks bouncing from racer to racer to juggling club to torch to card-house to jester’s cap to his own broad banner.
“Welcome, one and all, to The End!” he cried in his radioman’s voice. “As none of you followed instructions and brought me the Heart of Fairyland, you’ll just have to fight it out between you! It’s one for the ages, yes sir, a Battle Royale to end them all! I, for one, can’t wait to see how it shakes out!”
“I’ll take the elephant if you knock Curdleblood into a primary color,” said Mallow. She wore her old black dress and petticoats and splendid stockings, but not her hat. Never again.
September turned to her. “I didn’t think you’d come. You didn’t have to. I didn’t ask.”
“Do you see that red stitching over Goldmouth’s shoulder? That’s where I cut off his arm. You need me. You’ve come a long way, Susie One-Shoe, but I don’t think you’re the arm-severing type. This is my last fight. I wanted it to be a good one.” Mallow winked at her and ran her hands through her short blond hair. It curled and thickened and lengthened and went black with electric blue ends once more. “I fought a cuttlefish for this hair! It’s mine, fair and square.” She mounted Iago and rode off into the fray.
“Up you go!” cried Blunderbuss, butting into September from behind and wrestling her up onto the scrap-yarn wombat’s back. “Ready to bust heads?”
“I wish there were another way,” September said with a sigh.
“There isn’t!” Buss assured her. “Good thing you’ve got a combat wombat and a fire-breathing Library on your side!”
