“They … were taken. By two lions, the Marquess’s lions. She said their strength came from sleeping, but I didn’t understand … I guess I understand now.”
“Do you know where I learned my Art?” Mr. Map said nonchalantly, sipping a hot brandy, which seemed to materialize in his hand. September could swear she had not seen him pick up a snifter from his side table. “Ffitthiiit!” sighed Mr. Map slowly, smacking his lips. “I promise, I waste nothing in asking. Like a ship, I always come round again to where I started.”
“No, Mister. I don’t know.”
“In prison, my kit, my cub! Where one learns anything worth knowing. In prison there is nothing but time, time, time. Time goes on just positively forever. You could master Wrackglummer, or learn Sanskrit, or memorize every poem ever written about ravens (there are exactly seven thousand ninety-four at current count, but a no-talent rat down in the city keeps spoiling my count), and still you’d have so much time on your hands you’d be bored sleepless.”
“Why were you in prison?”
Mr. Map sipped his brandy again. He shut his eyes and shook his glossy curls. He offered his drink to September, who, having given up all pretense of carefulness, took a big gulp. It tasted like burnt walnuts and hot sugar, and she coughed.
“That’s what happens to the old guard, my pup. You can always count on it. We who serve, we who make the world run. When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can’t make it run the other way again.” Mr. Map opened his eyes. He smiled sadly. “Which is to say I once stood at the side of Queen Mallow, and loved her.”
“You were a soldier?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I stood at her side.” Mr. Map blushed. It looked like ink spreading under his skin. His wolfy ears flicked back and forth in embarrassment. “You’re young, little fawn, but surely you catch my meaning. Once, you might have called me ‘Sir’ and no one would have corrected you.”
“Oh!” breathed September.
“Fftthit!” spat Mr. Map. “All done now—and gone, gone to old songs and older wine. History. She’s just another in a list of Queens to be memorized now.”
“My friend the Wyverary … the Wyvern said some people think she’s still alive, down in the cellars, or wherever the Marquess keeps folk…”
Mr. Map glanced at her, and his eyes drooped sadly. He tried a smile, but it did not quite work out.
“I met a lady in prison,” he went on, as though September hadn’t spoken. “A Järlhopp. They keep their memories in a necklace and wear it always and forever. Since her memory is so safe, she never forgets anything she’s seen, and the Järlhopp—her name was Leef, and how furry and sleek were her long ears!—Leef taught me to copy out my own memories onto parchment, to paint a perfect path … a path back to the things I loved, the things I knew when I was young. That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home—someday, somehow. Leef kept hers in that jewel at her throat; I kept mine on paper, endless paper, endless time, until the Marquess had need of me, until she sent me away to the wilds of the Winter Treaty, where nothing happens, where I cannot possibly cause trouble, where no one lives. And where there are no kind Järlhoppes to comfort me, or folk who might need maps to find their way.”
September looked at her feet. At the elegant, glittering shoes. The brandy warmed her all over. “I … I need to find my way,” she said.
“I know, little cub. And I’m telling you your way. The way to the bottom of the world, to the Lonely Gaol, where the lions take all the souls the Marquess hates.” Mr. Map leaned forward, licked his pen until it was full of ink, and wedged a jeweler’s glass into his eye so that he could brush in tiny details on the little island map. “You see, September, Fairyland is an island, and the sea that borders it only flows one way. It has always been so, and must always be. The sea cannot be changed in its course. If the Gaol were but offshore from us here in this land, you could not get there by sailing straight. The current does not move that way. You can only reach it by circumnavigating Fairyland entirely, and that is not a small task.”
“You know my name.”
“I know quite a number of things, you’ll find.”
“But surely, there is some place from which it is a short distance! If one could only get on the right side of it.”
“Surely. But I will not take you there.”
“Why ever not?”
Mr. Map looked grieved again. “Ffitthit,” he said softly. “We all have our masters.”
September clenched her fists. She could not bear to think of her friends in a wet, dreary prison. “It’s not fair! I could have gotten her this wretched thing in seven days! She didn’t even give me a chance!”
“September, my calf, my chick, seven days were never seven. They were three, or eight, or one, or whatever she wished them to be. If she wants you at the Lonely Gaol, she has a reason, and you could never have gone anywhere else. And I suspect”—he looked at the copper wrench, twisting his mustache in one great hand—“that she has devised some work for you to do there, with your fell blade. Hello, old friend,” he greeted it, “how strange for us to meet again, like this, with the snow blowing so outside.”
“You know my … my wrench?”
“Of course I know it. It was not a wrench when we were last acquainted, but one’s friends may change clothes and still one knows them.”
“Why does she need me to go all the way to her horrid old Gaol? I have the sword! The lions could have taken it and left us alone!”
“September, these things have their rhythms, their ways. Once the sword is taken up, none but the hand that won it can brandish it true. She cannot touch the sword, not for all the power in both her hands. But you can. And both your hands called it forth, gave it shape, gave it life.”
“I’m really very tired, Mr. Map. Ever so much more tired than I thought I could be.”
Mr. Map signed his parchment with a flourish.
“Ffitthit, sweet kitten. So it always goes.”
September turned to go. Her feet felt heavy. She turned the knob of the great door and listened to the lock whir in the woods. When she opened it, no winter wood glittered outside, but a long shore and a bright sea. Gillybirds cried overhead, wrestling over bits of fish. The tide flowed out foamily from a silver beach, the very opposite from the one she had arrived on. Here, the sand was all manner of silver coins and crowns and sceptres and bars, filigreed diadems and long necklaces set with pearls, and chandeliers glittering with glass. The violet-green sea—the Perverse and Perilous Sea, she reminded herself—beat huge waves against the strand.
“What is a map,” said Mr. Map, “but a thing that gets you where you’re going?”
“The sword,” September whispered, her eyes all full of the sea. “Who had it before me?”
“I think you know. My Lady Mallow kept it.”
“And what was it, when she had it?”
Mr. Map cocked his head to one side. He drank off the last of his hot brandy.
“A needle,” he said softly.
September stepped out of the hut and onto the silver beach.
September could see the current Mr. Map had meant. The sea flowed just offshore, a deeper violet amid the violet waves, fast and cold and deep. She could see it—but she was still only September, and she could not swim all the way around Fairyland. The empty beach stretched far and long, and nowhere hulked a broken ship or raft for her to climb aboard. She had come so far, and for lack of a boat, her friends suffered in who knew what dark place. And Saturday, especially, had such a horror of being closed up and trapped. And Ell! Sweet, enormous Ell! At least, Gaol begins with G—or J, she was not exactly sure. What awful cell could they devise to contain her beast?
She could not leave them there to wait for the Marquess to get angry enough to deal with them. She did not think they would get cozy government posts in the winter wilds. She would simply have to think, and think quickly.
September began to walk through th
e jeweled, silver beach, searching desperately for real wood, something that might float. But, she thought suddenly, it was all wood once, on the other beach! Wood and flowers and chestnuts and acorns! It’s not really silver or gold at all! The wairwulf said it was Fairy gold! Like in stories when you wake up after selling your soul for a chest of pearls, and it’s all full of mud and sticks! September scrabbled in the flotsam and drew up a huge silver rod tipped in sapphire, something like her long-ago spent sceptre if it had been made by a giant’s hand. She tugged it down to the shoreline and tossed it onto the waves experimentally.
It floated, bobbing happily in the surf.
September yelped in victory and set about hauling several of the log-size sceptres together and lining them up side by side. By the time she had finished, the sun was very high, and she was all sweat from scalp to sole. But how shall I ever lash it together? she despaired. There was no silver rope or filigree wire to be had on all the beach. The distant dune grasses were short and sharp and furry and would never do. Oh, but I’ve just gotten it back, September thought. Surely I could use something else. As if to answer her, September’s hand fell upon the handles of a pair of silver scissors.
Well. If that’s the way of it, that’s the way of it.
She held out the length of her hair, heavy and thick and not red at all, not falling away bit by bit. She did not want to sniffle—what was a little hair? She had already lost it once after all. But that was magic, which could be undone, and this was scissors, which could not. And so, as the scissors sliced smoothly through her hair, she cried a little. Just a tear or two, rolling slowly down her cheek. Somehow, she had thought it would hurt, even though that was silly. She wiped her face clean. September braided her hair into many thin, strong ropes and knotted the sceptres together into a very serviceable raft. She wedged the witch’s Spoon into the center of it as a makeshift mast.
“Now, I really am terribly sorry, Smoking Jacket. You’ve been a loyal friend to me, but I’m afraid you’ll get quite wet, and I must ask you to excuse my using you so.” September sadly secured the mast with the long green sash, and stuffed the jacket into a gap where seawater might come in. The jacket did not mind. It had been wet before. And it liked very much being asked pardon.
Finally, it was all finished. September was quite proud of herself, and we may be proud of her, too, for certainly I have never made a boat so quickly, and I daresay only one or two of you have ever pulled off such a trick. All she lacked was a sail. September thought for a good while, considering what Lye, the soap golem, had said: “Even if you’ve taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It’s hard to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn’t being naked, not really. It’s just showing skin. And foxes and bears have skin, too, so I shan’t be ashamed if they’re not.”
“Well, I shan’t be! My dress, my sail!” cried September aloud, and wriggled out of her orange dress. She tied the sleeves to the top of the mast and the tips of the skirt to the bottom. The wind puffed it out obligingly. She took off the Marquess’s dreadful shoes and wedged them between the sceptres. There she stood, her newly shorn hair flying in every direction, naked and fierce, with the tide coming in. She shoved the raft out to sea and leapt on, nearly tipping the thing over, clutching her wrench and using it as a rudder to steer her way. She would not have known to call it a rudder, really, but she needed something to push on and direct herself, and the wrench was all she had left. The wind caught her little orange sail and the current caught the little ship, and soon enough, she was sweeping along the shoreline in a whipping breeze. Her skin pricked and she shivered, but she would bear it. With clenched teeth and goose bumps.
I did it! I figured it out myself, with no Fairy or spriggan or even a Wyverary to tell me how! Of course, she would have preferred to have a Wyverary to show her, to be a great red ship for her to whoop and ride upon. But he was not here, and she was hoisted on the bursting, splashing waves by a ship of her own making—her hair, her Spoon, her dress, and her loyal jacket, who rejoiced, quietly, with her—as the gillybirds shrieked and sang.
The moon rose slim and horned that night. All the stars flashed and wiggled in the sky, so many constellations September could not name. One looked a bit like a book, and she named it Ell’s Father. Another looked something like a spotted cat with big glowing red stars for eyes. She named that one My Leopard. Still, another looked like a rainstorm, and as she watched, falling stars twinkled through it, like real rain.
“And that’s Saturday’s Home,” September whispered to herself.
The night wind blew warm, and she stretched out beneath the orange sail, watching the distant, shadowy shore slowly slip by. She had not really considered the problem of food—silly girl, after all the trouble over it! And in the dark, she loosened seven or eight strands of hair from the raft and tied them to the wrench, hoping to catch a fish for her supper. Even September did not quite think this was going to work. She had some idea about fishing, since her mother and grandfather had taken her to catch minnows in the pond one summer or another. But they always cast for her, and baited the hook—ah, a hook. That was a bother. And no bait, either. Still, she had little enough choice, and sunk the length of hair into the lapping sea.
Despite everything, despite being terribly afraid for her friends and not having the first idea how far the Gaol might be, September had to admit that sailing at night by one’s lonesome was so awfully pleasant she could hardly bear it. That stirring, which had fluttered in her on first glimpsing the sea, that stirring landlocked children know so well—moved in her now, with the golden stars overhead and the green fireflies glinting on the wooded shore. She carefully unfolded the stirring that she had so tightly packed away. It billowed out like a sail, and she laughed, despite herself, despite hunger and hard things ahead.
Somewhere toward dawn, September fell asleep, her wrench curled tightly against her, her hair still trailing in the surf, catching no fish at all.
INTERLUDE
In Which We Return to the Jeweled Key and Its Progress
Now, what, you have every right to ask, has happened to our erstwhile friend the jeweled Key all this while as such awful and marvelous events have befallen September?
I shall tell you. I live to please.
The Key finally entered Pandemonium and immediately knew the city to be beautiful, rich, delicious—and empty of a little girl named September. It drooped despondently and peeked through organdy alleys—abandoned, but not hopeless. It did not follow her scent, but her memory, which left a curling green trail visible only to lonely animated objects and a certain ophthalmologist’s patients, which doctor it would be poor form to mention here. Finally, the wreckage of Saturday’s lobster cage informed the Key in a breathy, splintered voice that the whole troupe had left for the Autumn Provinces some time back. The Key’s little jeweled breast swelled with renewed purpose, and it flew out over the Barleybroom and across the Meadowflats as fast as it could, a little blur of orange in the air, no more than a marigold petal.
It saw the dust cloud of the velocipedes running but could not catch them. The Key wheezed and cried sorrow to the heavens, but Keys have a certain upper speed limit, and even in love our gentle-hearted brooch could not exceed it. Calpurnia Farthing glimpsed the rushing Key on her return from the borders of Autumn and thought it curious. Penny squealed and begged to catch and keep it, but Calpurnia would not allow it, pets being a nuisance to traveling folk. Calpurnia squinted through her goggles and thought to herself, That is a Key. Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.
The Key entered the Autumn Provinces far too late but followed the trail of September’s memory into the Worsted Wood. There, it met with the Death of Keys, which is a thing I may not describe to you. It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.
Much shaken, the Key retu
rned to see the ruined September, her wracked body all branches and leaves and buds, being carried by Citrinitas in three long strides so far from itself that the Key fell to the forest floor and did not move for a long while.
But move, at last, it did. What if September came upon a lock and was lost without her Key? What if she were imprisoned? What if she were lonely, with all her friends snatched away? No. The Key would not abandon her. It set out, after her curling, spiraling green trail, all the way to the hut of Mr. Map, who gave it a cup of fortifying tea and showed it the way to the sea, placing a gentle kiss upon the Key’s clasp before it went.
The Key blushed and set out over the Perverse and Perilous Sea, full of purpose, sure that soon—oh, so very soon!—September would be near.
CHAPTER XV
THE ISLAND OF THE NASNAS
In Which September Runs Aground, Learns of the Vulnerabilities of Folklore, and Is Half Tempted
It was not so much that September came upon an island as that she had a bit of an accident with an island. She cannot be entirely blamed. The current ran right into the little isle, and even if she had been awake and at the tiller, she might not have been able to avoid it. As things stood, September awoke with her ship tangled in a bramble of lilies and seagrass and spiky cream-colored flowers she could not name. It was not the collision that had woken her, but all the perfume of that thin beach, drifting out with the tide. Her mouth was thick and dry, her belly empty, and the sun beat at her head. The violet salt of the sea caked her arms and cheeks. She looked, in fact, entirely a mess.
If there are folk here, I ought to make myself fit for company, September thought, and she set about taking down her sail, which was by now quite sodden with seawater and not at all nice to wear. She shook out her green smoking jacket and tied it on, and lastly, with much frowning, slid the Marquess’s shoes back on her feet, though she did not like doing so. But roses have thorns and girls have feet, and the two do not get along. September still felt wet and sore, but she thought she might be more or less respectable-looking. She bent in the flowery shore and searched for berries, any sort that might make a breakfast. She found a few round hard pinkish things that tasted a bit of salt and grapefruit rind. Can’t ask them all to taste of blueberry cream and be knocked off a tree by a Wyverary for me, she thought, and with the thought of Ell, slumped.