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“You should have seen old Tanaquill beg!” crowed Hawthorn. “She went white as a surrender flag when your old aunt Maggie came hippo-ing in! Olly olly oxen free! I could live on that memory like a pantry full of potatoes!”
“Don’t gloat so much, Hawthorn,” said his mother, whose name was Hysso
p, tugging on her own mossy hair. She actually thought gloating was devilish fun, but she had years of gentle scolding to catch up on.
Tamburlaine leaned forward. A new green wick peeked out of her cheek. “She’s the one who did it to them. Your aunt Margaret, can you imagine? She turned the Fairies into tools all those ages ago. Time just runs around with its trousers on its head around here! They call her Pearl here. She’s the one the Yeti told you about. The thaumaturge who punished the Fairies for using everyone so terribly by turning them into pitchforks and typewriters and signposts!”
September gawked at her aunt. She remembered the Yeti’s tale of the great thaumaturge Pearl who appeared from nowhere and taught the cruel Fairies her awful lesson. Margaret made a little mocking gawk-face back at her.
“Don’t you look at me like that, Missy. It’s not like you told me what you were up to, either! Anyway, I think Tanaquill makes a fine chair! She always wanted the throne. Now she is the throne. And you are the Wind. Green suits you, dear.”
“And you’ll stay?” September said. “You’ll stay. You see how lovely it is. You’ll stay and be happy here, with me. You’re not Ravished or Stumbled. You just came, because you were Needed.”
They would. They all would. If we win, you’ll stay.
“But … where’s Saturday?” September asked. “And what about you, Ell?”
“I shall be Chief Librarian. I am starting a new library. It will have only books I love like brothers and sisters in it, so it will be the best library in the world. I’ve only got one volume so far, but you only need one, in the beginning. Mabry said you would be back, he promised us, and I didn’t want to start till you got here, but two days is so long to wait. Now you’re home I shall go and see my grandfather, the Fairyland Municipal Library, at last, and get his blessing. Oh, and I think I am King? Because of Buss and me, you know.”
A-Through-L and Blunderbuss, being a Wyvern and a Wombat, had had to invent a new way of kissing. Love invents all kinds of things, and a new sort of kiss comes into the world whenever two people put their heads together. I think you’ll agree theirs was quite splendid. Buss spat a passionfruit into the air between them and Ell scorched it with his flame. They did it all the time, until their guests grew awfully annoyed. And they did it just now, splattering roasted passionfruit onto the ceiling.
The Wyverary smiled with all his whiskers and teeth. “King consort, anyway. But you don’t have to call me King! I’m your Ell. Perhaps Grandfather will like calling me King.”
“The Marid will be along, the sneaky little brigand,” said the woman in sunglasses. She puffed a smoke ring at them. “You’re only a little ways ahead of him.”
“Who are you?” said September—though she looked awfully familiar, really.
“You might not recognize me without my puffins,” said the old Blue Wind, who was hardly blue at all anymore, and certainly not a Wind. She was a young woman, pretty enough to be in the pictures, if she didn’t have such a petulant look around the eyes. She’d forgotten her real name years ago, after she’d stolen a pocket watch from an old man and turned into something quite different from a young woman, pretty or not. She seemed quite put out. “What is the point of life without puffins, I ask you? Your little boyfriend swiped one of my littlest puffins while I wasn’t looking. He snuck up on me in Mummery, the beastly thing! If there hadn’t been a battle on he’d never have gotten away with it. And now I’ve got civilian life ahead of me and who’s got a use for that? No one! And now your Saturday’s got all my things, and my job, and my house, and I hate him.”
“Hullo, Wind,” said a deep, salt-sea voice. September whirled round.
Saturday stood in the window of the Briary, leaning against the viny wall, one leg crossed casually over the other. He wore indigo trousers with as much silk to them as a skirt with ghostly pale blue stars peeking out from the folds. He had on turquoise gloves and sapphire-colored boots with crisscrossed icicle laces all the way to the knee. A long, beautiful sky-colored coat hung like a dress from a heavy silver belt at his waist, swirling with aquamarine stitching, trimmed in wild, woolly fur from some impossible, blueberry-colored sheep. His long, glossy black topknot coiled out its full length beneath a cobalt cap rimmed in the same blue shag. The cap had an ice-spike on top of it, like old pictures of the Kaiser. In his hand, the Blue Wind held a little baby puffin, cheeping cheekily at them all.
September remembered the old Green Wind telling her how new Winds were made: The Red Wind had to be defeated in single combat, the Golden Wind had to be beaten in a singing competition—and you had to steal something from the Blue Wind. She laughed. Saturday leapt down from the windowsill and swept her into his arms. They kissed, and it was a new kind of kiss as well, for between them blew all the winds of all the worlds. Green and blue forever.
CHAPTER XXIII
EXEUNT ON A LEOPARD
In Which Nothing Is Over
Once upon a time, a girl named Rebecca grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same green and blue soup bowls and matching saucers every day, slept under the same patchwork quilt, and played with the same large and surly cat. Because she had been born in July, and because she had a mole on her right earlobe, and because her feet were very small and graceful, the Green Wind took pity on her, and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday. She was dressed in a green smoking jacket, and a green carriage-driver’s cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. It is very cold above the clouds, in the shantytowns where the Six Winds live.
“You seem an ill-tempered and irascible enough child,” said September. “How would you like to come away with me and ride upon the Leopard of Little Breezes, and be delivered to the great sea that borders Fairyland? I shall take you safely all the way there, past a comet, over several stars, and through a very cluttered closet, whereupon I should be happy to deposit you upon the Perverse and Perilous Sea.”
“Oh yes!” breathed Rebecca.
