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September shook her head. “No, no, Ell, you should go somewhere safe! You are not a combat Wyverary!”
The Wyverary nuzzled her with his red snout. “Are you suggesting that I would ever leave you, September? You might get squashed or roasted and if you get squashed I’ll be squashed and roasted right along with you because we go together like two chapters, small fey. Besides, if I go, there’s no telling which of those beasties will lock down my wings next. I can be very useful. It’s the best part of being big.”
September held up her arms and A-Through-L, half Wyvern, half Library, bent his neck low so she could climb up onto his back. Blunderbuss felt cheated for a moment. But she knew it was right and proper and she’d get to bite things anyhow. September lay flat against her Wyverary, feeling the heat of his huge heart booming away inside him. And now that she looked, really looked, she could see a history of balloon travel written on his wings, ever so faintly, in red ink on red skin.
They soared up into battle, gouting jets of indigo flame. Hawthorn and Tamburlaine snapped their heads up when the first tendrils of fire shot over their heads. It was the signal they’d been waiting for.
“September!” Hawthorn yelled up to her. He still wore his pirate’s tricorn—and his leather jacket trimmed in gold necklaces. He grinned as wide as a troll can grin when they know an unanswerable riddle, and that is wider than continents. “Watch this!”
The troll drew his pencil from his coat pocket, held it over his head, and snapped it in two.
Half the contenders for the crown went stock-still and staring, their eyes bulging—the half with their name tags still pinned primly to their chests. They all began saying the oddest things.
The mammoth trumpeted in frustration. She struggled against her own words. Finally, she lifted her long, furry trunk and cried out: “There Is No Such Thing as Magic!” And shivered back into the long-toothed lady once more. She pointed a terrible finger at Hawthorn, and clearly she meant for some awful thing to come out and set him on fire, but nothing did.
Curdleblood, the Dastard of Darkness, threw his head back so hard his black minstrel’s cap flew off and all his black hair came free. He screamed: “Go to Bed!” And fell down fast asleep.
The Knapper, whom September had not even seen, he’d busied himself so diligently with sneaking silently behind the Ice Cream Man in order to get his daggers into him, fell to his knees and wept: “Knives and Scissors Are Sharp, but Different from Swords, and You Can Only Use Them to Fight Cucumbers and Onions and Packages from the Postman!” He tried to make good on his sneaking, but his knives would not even pierce the Ice Cream Man’s butter pecan cloak.
The Ice Cream Man himself was whispering: “There Are No Such Things as Ancient Enemies from Beyond Time,” and as he repeated it, he melted slowly into the stones of Runnymede Square, being himself an Ancient Enemy from Beyond Time.
A giant by the name of the Ogre Underlord gritted his blue teeth and wailed helplessly: “I Am Not an Ogre! I Am Not an Ogre!” And then promptly disappeared.
The Happiest Princess looked up at Tamburlaine with a puzzled expression on her beautiful, cheerful face. “That Power Is Broken and All Go Free,” she said, and laughed like a school bell ringing for summer vacation. She ran out of Runnymede Square and out of the story, for no spell, not Ajax’s nor the Dodo’s nor the Headmistress’s long curse that would not let her grow up, nor even Hawthorn’s, held her any longer.
Reynaud the Fox God twisted his long red tail in his hands. But he smiled his foxy smile. He’d been tricked—finally, after all these thousands of years of trickstering, he’d been tricked himself. What an extraordinary feeling, he thought to himself as he howled: “Go Play Outside!” and winked out of Fairyland altogether—out of our world, too. He reappeared somewhere far from any place I have ever written about or ever will, Outside Story and Tale and Song. Someplace new, where everything smelled like ancient jokes that hadn’t yet been told, even once.
In the Outside, Reynaud began to run across hills beyond any rule of narrative.
But in Runnymede Square, Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth raked his claws down his own cheeks. His magenta eyes wept fire. He stared down at Hawthorn with a hatred beyond time and death and baseball. “I Am to Do as I Am Told,” he growled.
Hawthorn the troll giggled maniacally. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you idiots not to tell anybody your true name?” For he had written out all their name tags, their full and true names, on the backs of strips of paper torn out of Inspector Balloon, his beloved notebook. And the rules for human living he’d written out so that he could try to understand the strange world of school and his parents’ apartment and Chicago that were still written in his powerful pencil on the other side of each one. Some more complete than others, true, but they’d done their work and bound these impossibly powerful Kings and Queens as surely as rope. It had worked even better than he’d thought. He hoped September saw it. She’d couldn’t help but be impressed. It’d been ever so long since he’d gotten a good grade on something.
Hawthorn opened his mouth for his master stroke. He opened his mouth to tell his old baseball to
drop dead. Goldmouth would have to Do as He Was Told. But Madame Tanaquill was faster. She brushed a shimmering pale lock of hair out of her face and said sweetly and clearly and quite calmly:
“All right, Goldmouth, kill them both.”
The clurichaun was pleased as punch to do as he was told. He seized Tamburlaine in one colossal fist and brought her close to his burning eyes, baring his golden teeth.
“Tam!” Hawthorn shrieked. “No, Tam! Goldmouth, let her go! You Are to Do as You Are Told!”
But he was already Doing as He Was Told. He grinned at the wooden girl, the Fetch who had grown up fighting not to listen to the Changeling voice inside her that said she was made for causing trouble, for burning down human lives, for wrecking and ruining and never feeling bad about it. She’d loved her mother and her father, her flowers and his books, and because she loved them she’d strapped that voice down to the floor of her heart and never done a single bad thing.
“I broke your leg once,” rumbled Goldmouth. He ran his hand over her head and snapped off every one of her plum blossom branches, letting them fall in splinters to the ground at Hawthorn’s feet. “And now I’m going to eat your heart. Are you ready? You are the first meal of my new reign. And I am going to reign forever.”
“Tam!” Hawthorn screamed, weeping and stabbing at Goldmouth’s calves with Cutty Soames’s cutlass. The clurichaun didn’t pay him the slightest attention. “You can’t, you can’t, she’s my Tam, I need her…”
“Hawthorn,” Tamburlaine called down. “Hawthorn! Tom! Thomas!” She called him by his old human name. “It’s all right, Tom. Remember?” She turned her eyes to his, grinning like a fool who has finally thought of a way to make the King laugh. “I like to wreck things. Nothing feels as good as the moment right before you break something.”
Goldmouth shoved his tattooed fingers into her mouth, just as he had done to Hawthorn the day he dragged them into Fairyland. Just as he had done to countless folk when he ruled these kingdoms, reaching into her, searching for the tiny, hard nut of her soul, his favorite food, his only food. Tamburlaine’s jaw cracked sickeningly, stretching as he scrabbled in her for the core of herself. Just a little farther, she thought as all the timbers of her body groaned and cracked. Just a little farther, you ugly, useless baseball.
Goldmouth moaned in ecstasy as his fingernails scraped against the blue match head in Tamburlaine’s chest, the little talisman of her life his magic could distill out of a person if he could get his fingers far enough into them. He never knew what it would be, the surprise of it was half the point. Tamburlaine sighed and relaxed. She relaxed that part of her that had always struggled against her desire to wreck and ruin and burn and tear apart everything she touched. She gave in to it and it felt like eating a whole cake when she’d only had plain crackers since the day she was born.
Tamburlaine exploded. She went up in blue-gold flames that turned quickly to angry, bloody red. The flames of her engulfed the clurichaun, boiling away his tattoos, his scarlet thread, even the SPALDING on his back sizzled away.
Blunderbuss roared in depthless marsupial grief and bounded to Hawthorn’s side. But together, Tamburlaine and Goldmouth burned to the ground, and when it was over all that remained was a blackened slab of wood shaped like a girl.
