The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

CHAPTER XIII
ONLY THE DEAD DON’T ARGUE

In Which September Is Troubled by the Mechanics of Time and Fate, the Course of a Curse, the Unlikelihood of Visiting Pluto, and a Very Argumentative Donkey

September woke washed in light.

At first she thought she was back home and doused in a bubbling bath-light fizzed and frothed all around her, a shade of white that had great ambitions to grow up to be purple. Great tall viney stalks rose up all around, thick as trees and thicker. Balls of light clung to their sides like brussels sprouts, crackling and sizzling and popping. The white-violet brilliance turned everything brighter than day. Aroostook, battered but still sputtering, showed deep, shadowed claw marks in her doors. September had to squint; her skin looked like the slope of a lightbulb. Saturday’s face leaned down over her, his teeth blinding against his lightning-shadowed skin.

“Please be all right,” he whispered, and it did not take September’s heart long to catch up with her memory. He did not only mean that they’d had their heads knocked about by, presumably, a Yeti with a fist like a train car.

“It was you,” she said, rubbing her glowing, aching arm. “That was you, just now, just then.”

Beside her, Ell groaned. He shook his head from side to side like a bull, his black horns catching wisps of light and tossing them into the air like fireflies. The whole forest hummed and snapped. September winced before she even turned her head-how many times had he breathed his fire to protect them?

The Wyverary stood up. He stood a hand taller than Mr. Powell’s pregnant roan, his face perplexed and unhappy. He patted his own head with one wing.

“Is it bad?” he whispered. “Am I little?”

“No, no!” said September. “You’re a great big beast, just like always!” She crawled to her feet and went to him. She put her arms around his long neck with ease, and the easiness of it unsettled them both.

“Little begins with L, but I don’t want to be it,” the Wyverary said as quietly as he had ever said anything.

“It’s not so bad to be little, you know!” September smiled when she said it though she felt no more like smiling than like writing a composition with her mashed arm.

“Oh, it’s all right for you!” cried Ell. “You’re meant to be little! I like your littleness! It means I can hoist you up and make you feel big and show you all the things I can see from where I stand. But…but if I get much littler, who will be big, among the three of us? Wasn’t it my job to be big and stomp and carry you and look menacing if looking menacing was called for?” A-Through-L’s orange, feline eyes filled with turquoise tears. He whispered: “Who will hoist me up, if I am little?”

September shook her head helplessly. She did not know what to say to comfort him except to hold him tight, which is a language primates use to say: Everything will be all right somehow. Reptiles, however, prefer for everything to simply be all right, at once, and then they will feel comforted. Above them, a cluster of lightning-sprouts flashed a hot blanket of light like a summer storm and then quieted again. September listened for the thunder by instinct; none came. It felt very strange, this silent and thunderless storm.

“You have to try not to,” she begged the Wyverary. “We’ve ever so much farther to go.”

“Oh, September, if you tell me how I shall, I promise!” How awful it was to see fear swimming in those kind eyes!

But she could not tell him.

“He has it,” she whispered instead. “Ciderskin has the Stethoscope. We hardly made it out of Almanack before he took it-and I couldn’t do anything! We couldn’t! We were helpless. And now he can hear us!” September felt sick with failure. A simple box and she couldn’t keep it in her hands for a day.

“Maybe not,” Ell said miserably. “It’s a frightful mess when you listen to the Moon-maybe Ciderskin won’t be able to sort it out, either.”

“Did he come because I took the Stethoscope out of the box? Did he smell it? It was so fast! I should have left it where it was! I just needed to do something, I was crawling with it! I was so sure we’d hear the paw…”

September sank into a long quiet. Finally, she took out the troubling thing that would not leave her be and opened it up like a dark picnic between them.

“But it was you,” she said through her teeth. Saturday looked away from her. “And you were helping the Yeti!”

“Please remember that I am a Marid…”

“I know you are! And that was yourself from some day a long time from now, yourself older and another Saturday and I understand that but how could you be helping Ciderskin, even a hundred years from now?”

“I don’t know!” yelled Saturday. September jumped inside her skin. Her belly went cold. Saturday had never yelled. He had never spoken crossly to her. His voice had never hardened up along the edges like other people’s voices did; the light had never gone out of it the way it went out of anyone’s when the upset got too wet and heavy and snuffed it out. His first words to her at the circus drifted back: I’m glad I found you first.

“Oh, September, I’ve seen him, of course I’ve seen him. All of them, not just that one. There and everywhere, and sometimes he talks to me and sometimes he doesn’t and I don’t know why he does what he does because I’m not him yet. Maybe he’s not even me yet! The me and the him cross over but we’re not the same and maybe he knows something I don’t or maybe I know something he doesn’t or maybe he’s just gone cold and wicked because of some dreadful thing that will have happened but hasn’t yet happened and maybe that thing will definitely have happened and maybe it will tentatively have happened or maybe he got put in a cage again and he just couldn’t bear it and now he’s got to do whatever he can to stay out of it or maybe he just doesn’t care about anything because he lost the girl he loved-I don’t know. I can think of a million million waves he could have ridden to get to where he is but I won’t find out till I’m drowning in them. No one understands this but a Marid-this is what it means to be a Marid. You see him and you think me and I knew if you saw him first you would be afraid because it is frightening! I’m frightened! I have to turn into him! He’s already been all the Saturdays it takes to be that Saturday, but whatever happened is still coming for me, I still have to stand up for the hurts and the grief that made him and I can’t not do it, but knowing I will is like looking at a hot stove and knowing you’re going to touch it, knowing you’re going to burn, and feeling the blisters and the peeling before you even reach out your hand. I have to feel it now, all the time, and I don’t even know what the stove is. You have to understand, September, you have to. I told you when we met, I told you and you liked me anyway.” His voice broke a little.

September tried to be stern. She didn’t like it. She didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed to say something deeply wrong that she could not quite put her hand to. It sat on the floor of her heart like a toy with a thousand working pieces that could not possibly be put together. But her sternness, which was after all only a very young thing, crumbled when Saturday’s voice cracked like a glass. She touched his shoulder, very gingerly, as if her hand might go through him.

“I can’t talk about this right now,” she whispered. “I would rather fight the Yeti. A Yeti is big and angry and you can’t deny it’s a Yeti. All that fur. All that snow. A Yeti is a Yeti and that’s very straightforward, which is admirable in its own way!”

“I do so love arguments,” came a raspy, silky, cottony voice behind them. All four of them jumped.

The voice belonged to a creature watching them, chewing an unripe lightning-sprout in her mouth like cud. She had the body of a white donkey, muscled and powerful, with electric hooves. But a magnificent peacock’s tail spread out from her rump, dark green-violet wings folded along her back, and where a long horse’s face ought to be, a human face beamed at them. She had dark hazelnut-colored skin and silver-black hair curling out from beneath a domed red cap festooned with copper stars and prongs. A crescent moon stuck out of the top on a slender spike. The creature was not young: wrinkles creased her skin like map-lines, little starbursts near her dark eyes, deep trenches on her brow. September realized she had not seen many old folk in Fairyland.

“You can call me Candlestick, if I can be in your argument,” she said, trotting closer. “I once argued with my fate until it clapped its hands over its ears and bellowed for peace-and that means I am very good at bickering. My fate behaved itself after that. It would tie itself up in a bow and walk to the sun barefoot if I looked at it crosswise, and that’s the sort of attitude you want in your fate if you ask me, which you should, because this is my jungle and you should defer to the sorts of people who run whole jungles.”

September’s head felt heavy and fuzzy. She had put so many things out of it to consider later. They crowded in at the edges, buzzing, insistent. But she would not let them in.

“Miss Candlestick, if you please, we do not mean to barge into your very nice jungle. We are on our way to Orrery. If there is a toll or something we might be able to pay it, but we must get through and on.” September twisted her hands.

Candlestick reared up, turned round, and trotted off, her peacock tail fanning darkly in the stormy light. For a moment September thought she had left them. But her thin, pointed face appeared again around the side of a lightning-yew.

“Come on then,” she said.

They followed the pale donkey through the winding paths of the Lightning Jungle. A-Through-L nudged Aroostook’s bumper with his snout, rolling her along behind September and Saturday, who felt it rude to drive while their host walked. Long shapes that might have been vines and might have been some brand of thundery snake coiled through the canopy overhead.

“How did you make your fate talk to you?” Saturday asked Candlestick. His voice sounded low and bruised. “I suspect a Marid’s fate is a very obstinate thing, and not at all social.”

Candlestick shook her gray hair. “In my younger days, I was the most cantankerous Buraq you should ever like to meet. If the sun came out in the summertime, when it had every right, I raged at it because I wanted snow. If the stars shone bright, I let forth with a diatribe on the virtues of darkness. My mother and father thought me wretched; my cousins said I was the most unhappy creature to walk the Moon and could, the next time I wanted to harangue them on the subject of their faults and their choices, go and soak my head. They did not understand me! Though it is true that no one understands other people. Other people are the puzzle that will not be solved, the argument that cannot be won, the safe that cannot be cracked. They just could imagine the truth: I was happiest when I was arguing! When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist-could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it. They saw a jennet red in the face-they could not see me red in the heart, so full of knowing that I had to make them know it, too. Until I changed my mind, of course. There’s no fun in arguing if you never get shown up. Who plays a game if there’s no chance they’ll lose? I do so crave to be proven wrong. It is as sweet as proving yourself right, when done properly. The trouble is, most people only argue with their friends and their family, which a real sportsman knows is no way to practice. If no one you know can prove you wrong, you’re in peril and that’s the truth. Well, I do go on-the devil of a thesis is digression! When my herd could no longer get a word in edgewise-and that’s the best way to get a word in, where no one can see it coming-I flew off to find the Sajada, where all the things worth knowing are kept. There, someone would best me, I was sure. After all, growing up is nothing but an argument with your parents on the topic of whether or not you are grown. You scream am so am so am so from the moment you’re born, and they fire back are not are not are not from the moment they’ve got you, and on it goes until you can say it loudest. I won my argument by lighting out for parts unknown-it’s a good rejoinder, but a last resort.”

Is that what I’ve done? September thought. Lit out?

Candlestick pawed the brilliant earth and went on. “You know what a fate looks like, don’t you? It’s just a little toy version of yourself, made out of alabaster and emerald and a little bit of lapis lazuli and ambition and coincidence and regret and everyone else’s expectations and laziness and hope and where you’re born and who to and everything you’re afraid of plus everything that’s afraid of you. They’re all kept in the Sajada. And I went all the way to Pluto to find out where they keep the Sajada!”

“There’s a Pluto here? We have a Pluto in my world!” September exclaimed.

“Oh, every place has a Pluto! It’s where a universe keeps the polar bears and last year’s pickled entropy and the spare gravity. You need a Pluto or you’re hardly a universe at all. Plutos teach lessons. A lesson is like a time-traveling argument. Because, you see, you can’t argue until you’ve had the lesson or else you’re just squabbling with your own ignorance. But a lesson is really just the result of arguments other people had ages ago! You have to sit still and pay attention and pantomime their arguments over again until you’re so sick of their prattle that you pipe up to have your own. You can’t learn anything without arguing.”

“What does Fairyland’s Pluto teach?”

“That’s for it to teach and me not to step on its toes. I could tell you, but you won’t learn it, because you haven’t been to Pluto and you haven’t fought the ice-ostriches and you haven’t even ridden the Undercamel until he collapses in a heap of his own dreamsweat so it’ll be just words to you. They’ll only mean themselves.”

“But who knows if I’ll ever get to Pluto?” September countered. “I’d bet the state of Nebraska it’ll never happen in my world, and I don’t get much choosing in where I go in Fairyland!”

Candlestick stopped in her tracks, her hooves squishing into a crackling electric mud.

“That’s a fair point, girl. But it doesn’t sit right. The Undercamel would spit in my eye and I’d never stop weeping. I shall give you half of it-the other half you’ll have to race down proper. Very well! Here is the great lesson of Pluto: What others call you, you become.” The Buraq’s eyes danced with mirth. “Very helpful indeed! I hope you feel edified.”

They continued on through the trees. September thought on this as hard as she could, but without an ice-ostrich, she supposed, it was rather hopeless.

“You do love to distract me!” said Candlestick. “I was saying that I went to Pluto to find the Sajada, which is a secret place known only to that very Undercamel, an extremely ill-tempered individual with great heaps of black fur and frozen humps and eyes like a slot machine and big hooves made all of terrible iron nails that bleed him even though a fellow can hardly get away from his own feet. Also he spits. And not like you spit or I do. He spits sorrow. One glob and you’ll never get off your knees again. You’ll weep until there’s no water left in you, just another mummy blowing around the plains of Pluto like a tumbleweed.”

“That’s dreadful!” cried Saturday.

“That’s sort of the point of an Undercamel,” agreed the Buraq. Her peacock tail shimmered in the stormlight. “Well, I’m sworn not to tell you the trick of doing it but you have to ride him till he breaks. Only then will he spit out his secret. I’m hardly equipped for dressage, having no arms and far too many legs, but I drove him seven times around Pluto, pole to pole, chasing his miserable tufted tail and dodging his bubbling green spit until he fell down half-dead. And I bent down to his slavering undermouth and he told me this: The Sajada is a planet, too, all covered with a mosaic of every possible color and a few that got kicked out of the family for being too wild and unruly. The mosaic makes the most radiant pictures, so many you can never see them all. The Sajada rises up from the tiles, a thousand thousand domes stuck over with stars like pincushions. And under every little pebble of the mosaic is somebody’s fate. No place more holy in the heavens. And do you know what I did then?”

“No,” breathed A-Through-L, who had quite forgotten his own trouble in the Buraq’s tale.

“I laughed. I laughed like the whole world was a joke and I was the punchline. And the Undercamel did not appreciate my sense of humor, I can tell you. I laughed because I knew just where it was. I knew a planet with a mosaic exactly like that.”

“Where?” asked the Wyverary eagerly.

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it,” Candlestick said, “but here.”

They stumbled out into a clearing in the Lightning Jungle. The sharp whip of ozone snapped at their noses. Lightning sprouts buzzed and tingled all in a ring round a thousand thousand domes like a pincushion-and quite the size of a pincushion, too. The Sajada spread out before them, the domes gorgeous and ornate and no bigger than toadstools. Crescent moons pronged up from their tips just like the one on Candlestick’s diadem. Little courtyards and fountains and walkways dotted the meadow between the domes. The fountains made a tiny trickling sound like the lightest rain. The domes flashed in cascading patterns, flickering pale colors, bright and dark, bright and dark.

Candlestick looked over it with pride. “I grew up on the Moon. If I don’t know my own mother I don’t know anything.” She kicked at a tuft of charcoal sod with her pale hoof, digging deep into it, pushing down and in and scrabbling against the soil. It popped and steamed like boiling cake. The Buraq finally flipped up the divot-and underneath it gleamed a mosaic pattern of gems. “Oh, it’s thin here. You’d have to dig down ages most everywhere else. Scientists used to come up here all the time trying to suss out the secrets of the Moon, but I kept them away. The Fairies never cared. Fairies don’t have fates, you know. I’ve heard it told that they stripped them off, eons and eons ago, like winter jackets. No one tells a Fairy what to do! Held a bonfire in the place that became Pandemonium, and if you looked too close at the pyre, you could catch one of them, one of the fey fates. What a dangerous day that was! A glow worm became Queen of Fairyland, though she died within the week, poor, short-lived creatures. One of the hillside towns caught the reflection of the flames in the windows of their houses and their baths and their chocolate shops and their water mills and their museums and the buildings revolted, hauling off to the long plains to live together and love each other and dance at the full moon with their foundations hitched up like skirts and have heaps of little baby amphitheaters and post offices. But everyone else, everybody else’s fates are here, under the skin of the Moon.”

September stared at the mosaic. Is mine in there? What does everybody mean, in Fairyland? Candlestick noted her gaze.

“In the old days it used to take the patience of a planet to find your own. Most everyone gave right up. But not me. I’m stubborn as the last word. When I found my fate, under the smoky stone eyeball of a caladrius posing rampant near the equator, we sat down for a long jaw, the longest I’ve ever had. I sweat so much I soaked right through to my bones. Finally, when that little Candlestick had had enough, well, we agreed to disagree, and I returned triumphant. No, I would not die young quarreling with the heart of Fairyland! What a load of bunk! Dying is a very poor way to end a conversation. No sportsmanship at all. Instead, I went on a Grand Rhetorical Tour, had a foal or two, wrangled with the Woodwoses’s anxieties, mediated the theologicals between the Manticore and the Ant-Lion, and galloped for a decade in the Centaur Rodeo-before coming home and here. To mind the storms and to mind the Sajada. Lightning is the only thing quick enough to trip me up. Such clean, brilliant logic a lightning-tree has! Reveals folly in a flash. It was just crumbling, no one to look after it but the Weathercock Elks, and if their arrows are in a tizzy there’s no getting them on task. So I rinsed the place with static electricity and soaped it up with hailstone lather and hung it up to dry with the sheet lightning. Now it shines. The Sajada is how the Moon remembers all those thousands and millions of fates. It is a sacred place. It keeps a record. Every dome you see is a catalogue, every sparkling crescent a Dewy Destiny System, organizing our fortunes so that one, out of all, can be called up and hollered at.”

“What an extraordinary life!” September breathed, and Saturday stared at the luminous ground.

“And more yet to wrestle,” neighed Candlestick.

“I… I think I should like that,” said September. “To dash about and do a hundred things, to do anything one might call Grand.”

“Then you ought to pick a bone with your fate. Nothing like it for the constitution.” The Buraq brandished her donkey’s chest: broad and strong and thick. Had she a fist, September felt sure she would have thumped it. “I could take you. I took a fine gentleman once-longest beard you ever saw.”

“I fear I haven’t time for a journey-”

“A pilgrimage. That’s the word, dear.”

“A pilgrimage. But you see I’m already journeying! We’re heading to the other side of the Moon to find the Yeti Ciderskin.”

Candlestick’s wrinkled face wrinkled further. “Oh, isn’t he just the sourest old ape? My poor lightning-larches lose their tempers when he shakes the place and it takes weeks to quiet them. They go darting off to dally with delinquent thunderheads, cruising the canyons for masts and crowns and turrets and golf clubs.”

Saturday said, “We mean to get him to stop all that.”

Candlestick laughed. It was a nice laugh, a grandmotherly laugh, a laugh that said: Isn’t it sweet when the little ones try to reach the tallest shelf?

“You’ll be sure to come back and tell me how that went, won’t you? As best you can with your heads rearranged and your torsos on backwards.”

Ell puffed out his scarlet chest-but his heart did not seem to be in it. It was so strange for him to have no one to tower over! “We’ve managed Feats before, I’ll have you know! They begin with F and they are our speciality!”

The Buraq considered for a moment. “I should very much like to argue with a Yeti! A first in the histories, and that’s what I call a thing worth doing.”

September ducked as a lightning-sprout streaked through the air. “If you’d like to come…”

“Oh, no, no, child, that’s not at all right! Don’t just let me muscle in because I feel like it! Tell me to stick to my own business! I could be anyone! I could be an agent of destruction, and a slowpoke besides. Resist! Resistance is the beginning of the truth.”

September fretted. “I would like to, ma’am, because I know you like it frightfully, but you’re much older than I am and you’ve done many more things, so I expect if you think you’d like to come along then who am I to argue?”

“Who are you to argue?” The Buraq flexed her tail in astonishment. “Who are you to argue? Why, you are yourself! You are…” She drifted off expectantly, not having been introduced.

“September.”

“You are September!” Candlestick roared. “And whoever that is, it is somebody! Who are you? You are the person with something to say! Only the dead don’t argue. And even then there are exceptions. Didn’t anyone tell you? Respect your elders is just a secret weapon, and like most secret weapons, it’s a cheap trick. It shuts everyone else up for free, without having to break a sweat. And she who shuts up first loses.”

“But,” said September with a grin, “I don’t want to argue. The more we have with us the better, for even standing on our shoulders we couldn’t look a Yeti in the eye. Just because you tell me I should argue with you doesn’t mean I should, if I get what I want without it! If you wanted to quarrel, you shouldn’t have offered the best outcome right out of the gate! The object is to be the one who’s right, and I’m right when I say what I want, because who could know that better than me?”

Candlestick opened her green wings-lightning-sprouts flew from all over the jungle, tiny and burning and bright, to huddle up near her skin. She folded her wings down over her charges. The jungle darkened and seemed to sigh around them.

“Well done,” the Buraq said with a wink. “We’ll make a brawler of you yet. But that is what we call a Fallacy. No one knows themselves very well. Who has the time these days? Have you been formally introduced to yourself? Made the effort to get to know your faults and your strengths, sit yourself down to tea and listen to all your troubles, answered the call when yourself falters? Then how can you say you know yourself in the least? You must be so careful with Fallacies. They’re contagious, you know. Pustulant. I call an end to this argument at once on the grounds that I am no longer entertained and would rather harangue the sheet lightning as it comes out of its nap. You have lost! Don’t feel bad. You’re bound to, in the beginning. And in the end. And the middle, too. I’ve no doubt you’re capable of Feats, and that getting on your way is most important! But it’s when you’re dead set on your way that you most need a pilgrimage. Going straight in a line to anyplace is the saddest path. Come now, wouldn’t you like to have a word with your destiny? Skip to the end and have a peek at how it all works out? Maybe your fate has written an academic paper on How to Defeat a Yeti, you never know. And I’ve streamlined the process-very modern now! I keep records, coordinates, cross-references! I can find you quick as a rod draws a bolt in a rainstorm.”

September glanced at Saturday. If she went, if it was as quick as Candlestick said, then they might be even. She might be able to understand him a little, if she saw her own life the way he saw his. She could make it better between them. Make it straightforward. And after all, hadn’t she been trying to grow up? Wouldn’t it be a relief to know what she had done in the end, what she had turned out to be good at, who she would be when she grew up, a griffin or an armchair or a shark? Wouldn’t it be easier to know how she’d solved the trouble of the Yeti before she tried to do the solving? Or know it just wasn’t solvable, not her fault, no shame in it, nothing to be done? She had only just gotten to the Moon. She had time. She had to have time, September reasoned, or else Almanack would have hefted its shell and run back down the road to Fairyland. It would never let its folk come to harm, even if a thousand Yetis rained down their fists on its prongs.

But then September saw her Wyverary watching her uncertainly, ever so much smaller than he had been when he met, ever so much more uncertain. Saturday lifted his eyes to hers and she saw the same plea there: Don’t leave us. We’ve only just found each other again.

“Don’t you worry about them,” Candlestick crooned comfortingly. “A girl’s fate is her only possession, her unflappable friend, her truest mate. When everyone else has gone, her fate remains. Closer than a shadow, kinder than a death. Some things are to be done in private, such as weeping, praying, embezzlement, and the writing of novels. I’ll set them up with a nice spread and they can watch the storms come in from their shifts.”

“I suppose it’s far too late for afternoon tea,” sighed A-Through-L. September did not feel particularly hungry for once, but a Wyvern’s belly has many rooms, and it is impossible to fill them all at once.

“It’s rude to discuss religion,” the Buraq sniffed. “But I don’t hold with Teatimers. I’m of the Midnight Snack school. You have tea because it’s three o’clock and that’s what’s done and yes, yes, it’s pleasant to have a nice cup and a sandwich with no crusts on, but pleasant is not enough for me! When you tuck into a Midnight Snack, it’s because you’re hungry in the dark. You want that bit of roast you couldn’t finish at supper and you want it now. Midnight Snackery is primal, like a wolf in the wood, hunkering down over her kill.”

Candlestick quivered her tail and stomped the ground. A sparkling cloud of round white-violet sparks as big as apples came sizzling through the wood with a willow-wood basket hefted on their backs. They set it down and nuzzled the Buraq excitedly while Saturday opened the basket. Inside lay drumsticks wrapped in wax paper, a flagon of brilliant, sparkling, glowing something, and a large clutch of lightning-grapes. When he opened one of the wax papers, she saw that the drumstick came from no chicken. A storm cloud flashed and rumbled around a stark white bone.

“Teatime can be nice,” A-Through-L said, nosing at the grapes, resigned. September was suddenly reminded of his shadow, deep down in Fairyland-Below, who had been friends with the Duke of Teatime and the Vicereine of Coffee, and let their children ride on his back and pull his ears. She shivered.

“Ell,” she asked quietly, as though if she said it soft enough it would be somehow as if they were alone together, as they had been once, in a field of little red flowers and trees that were rather like persimmon trees but not persimmons at all. “What made you cry, in the Lopsided Library, when we opened the box?”

The Wyverary clawed the thin charcoal soil of the Jungle with his scaly foot. His orange whiskers flicked once, twice, like a horse’s tail swatting a fly. A-Through-L wrapped his long crimson tail all the way around his body, as tightly as he could, as if to hold himself together.

“You mustn’t laugh at me. I am a large beast, and very fierce, and I’ve been alone plenty in my life. I can face alone and punch it in the nose.”

September nodded solemnly, though she wanted to smile very much at her dear lizard and his own fierce nose.

A-Through-L’s fiery eyes pierced the dark. “I thought of that day in the glowerwheat field. When you wished for us all to be whole and well and we woke up with the sun shining on us.”

“But that isn’t sad at all!”

“Oh, September,” the beast sighed. “We woke up and we were whole and well and the sun was so warm and you disappeared right in front of us like you’d never been there at all and it was years, it was three years of the world going on like you’d never been in it! And maybe you were dead or maybe you just didn’t feel like coming back or maybe it was even longer in your world and you’d gotten big and mated and forgot me and I missed you. And when we did find you at the other end of three years, dancing with the shadows in that green valley, well, you up and vanished again like vanishing was the thing you did best in the world! I didn’t get an hour of not missing you before you were gone again! Saturday took it hard, too, of course he did, but before we ever saw him you rode on my back and called me yours. Do you remember saying that? I remember it. I felt…as though I’d grown… I felt as though I’d grown forepaws. Like I wasn’t a Wyvern anymore but something just a little different because my forepaws were shaped like a little girl and with them I could grab up the whole of Fairyland and shake it till everything good fell out. But as soon as I had them they got cut off and I missed you which is a funny word and starts with M but you can’t blame it because it’s the right word. I missed you; you were missing from me. Like forepaws. Like flying.”

September put her hand on her chest. Her heart squeezed, clenching up, trying to hide within her and burst out of her at once. But she would not cry. She would not. Ell was very fierce, after all.

“Well then,” she said thickly, straightening her shoulders. See what you see and face up to it. “Let’s go.” The Wyverary and the Marid seemed to deflate like a red balloon and a blue one. They nodded a little, as if to say they had always known it should be this way, after all. It was, after all, September alone, in the end. It always had been and always would be.

“All of us,” September said gently, and held out her hands. “I know what you said, Miss Candlestick, but however you count it, our fates are stuck together and stitched up good.” She paused for a moment, looking down at her flowing black silks and her own small hands. “Closer than shadows, she finished.”

The Buraq, her wings and her tail flickering with the fitful lights of concealed lightning, cantered off. Ell ran to keep up with her, abandoning the midnight picnic without a thought, his heart bouncing boisterous in his chest, not left behind, not alone, but leaping through the stormgrowth, squashing the tangled floor of the Lightning Jungle underfoot. With every clawfall, he thought he would bellow fire, so great was his exhilaration-and with every clawfall he hiccuped, a purple bubble popping against the rows of his long teeth. The Wyverary could feel it rising up inside him, the rope of fire getting bigger and thicker and hotter and more inevitable, like a loaf of bread baking within his belly, but a loaf as heavy as an anchor. It was going to happen, he could feel it, and no matter how he tried to make it not happen, he could hardly breathe for the heat in his throat. A-Through-L surged ahead of his friends, of the Buraq. Some things are to be done in private, the donkey had said. He would not let them see or be scorched. Lightning cracked and spangled and knifed around the Wyverary as purple flame finally bloomed out of his snout, curling and writhing into the forest canopy.

But the trees did not burn. The Lightning Jungle seemed to drink up the flame like fresh water. After all, it was nothing but fire and light and surging itself. Baobabs full of firebolts flared even brighter, washing the air in clean flashes, crisp forks.

September and Saturday, having legs nothing like a donkey’s or a Wyvern’s, bounced along behind in Aroostook, who roared under branches and over blackened trunks, squall-vines whipping at the windshield. The whole of the Lightning Jungle sounded in September’s ears like static from the walnut wood radio in her living room at home. The throng of them hurtled toward the edge of the tree line, the last squat black trunks showing starkly like lowercase letters. Finally, with a last forked snaggle of light snaking out ahead of them, Aroostook burst clear, into a field of pale silver scrub, a meadow of tiny raindrops frozen in the act of splashing upward, growing from the ground like grass. Round, black lakes opened up in the ground, lightless and deep as blood, leading up into the mountains like a sentence without an ending…