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

CHAPTER XX
EVER SO MUCH MORE TROUBLE

In Which Many Things Forgotten Are Recalled Rather Suddenly and With Alarming Effect

But Saturday said none of these things, and neither September nor his young self heard them.

Another quake shuddered out from the wound in the middle of Patience. It felt shallower, but it snaked sudden and sharp across the ground. September tottered and stumbled, falling into the two Saturdays. They both caught her, and for a moment all three of them held each other, clinging together with the stars like promises overhead. But then the quake sheared back the other way, a terrible aftershock, a terrible afterbirth, and September fell backward, away from the Marids who loved her.

As she fell, September saw the yawning black chasms shudder in the surface of the Moon. The cuts made by birth and the Bone Shears spat out their last blood and shivered toward closing, faster and faster as Ciderskin and the Black Cosmic Dog moved the heavens like a spinning ball and performed the only magic, the kind that heals all. Far off in the distance two bright balloons popped up out of the long, deep wounds, firing cannons as madly as fireworks in summer. The older Saturday winked out like a lantern, back into the open sea of timelines and flickering, turning fish.

September landed hard on her side against the metal edge of a typewriter dusty with lunar weeds. The keys mashed hard, whacking some incomprehensible word onto the roller. The impact jolted her teeth. She felt something break in her thigh and had time to think Oh no, no, I’ve broken my leg again before she began to bleed. Hot wetness soaked through the black silks of her trousers in a moment and seeped out onto the keys of the typewriter. Pain sparkled up along her hip. She put her hand against the wound gingerly-and it came away bright with color. But it was not quite the right color for a human wound. Some streaks of true red blood ran down her fingers, but they drowned in the hot fluid oozing dark orange over her hand, thick, syrupy, the color of a campfire. It still bubbled a little.

Ballast Downbound’s orange fizz had shattered in her pocket. The sunlight of ancient days, of giant ferns and dimetrodons and werewhales and memory, remembering everything it ever had been and longing to return to being it once more. It spread out hungrily, crimson and thick and shining, dripping into the guts of the typewriter, splashing onto the carriage.

September laughed with relief-and then winced, for the shards of glass still stuck in her thigh. She rolled off of the soaked typewriter only to splash into a river of the Moon’s own blood, still oozing from a canyon not quite yet stitched shut. She was not careful enough-September tried to keep her leg out of the warm planetary fluids and leaned too far over, crunching again against the typewriter, soaking it in orange fizz, in impossibly ancient light.

The typewriter began to smoke.

September thought at first that it was on fire. The deep orange stuff bubbled and oozed over the keys, spotted like a leopard’s skin with September’s own blood. It sizzled and sparked, beams of sunshine ribboning out and spooling back again, the sunlight of some long-vanished day when Fairies were young, stealing their first wings, when werewhales and dimetrodons and apples of immortality and cyclopses soaked up the heat and warmth of it into their skins. Sunlight that wanted only to make things bigger, to make them what they had been long ago, bigger ferns and more dimetrodons and orchards covering all the hungry earth like armies. Ballast’s fountain-drink melted into the keys, its sugar and sirop dissolving the letters. It smelled like deep goodness, growing and living and working and ripeness. But beneath it the typewriter was coming apart, shrinking and surging at once until it erupted like a well-loved mountain.

And then, the typewriter turned into a girl.

She was enormous, so much taller and stronger than any Fairy September had seen or imagined. Her wings unfolded into vast prisms of fire-colors, their glassy membranes glinting green-red in the light of the still-wheeling stars, the still-flashing dawns flicking by like cards shuffling. Overhead, the small red Moon had grown broad and wide, wide enough for lakes and seas to crash into foam on its face, wide enough for snowy peaks already catching the light of the new Moon’s mother below. The Fairy’s hair streamed out around her head like a crown, twisted with green vines and fronds and roses bursting like stars going nova. Vermillion jewels covered her copper-colored body from throat to toe.

The Fairy looked down at September. Her eyes were black, as black as the beginning of the world. And they were filled with white, burning stars.

The Fairy seized September in her great hands like a doll. And she began to laugh.

September looked down, her head spinning. Saturday was climbing onto Ell’s back to come after her. Ciderskin had sunk to his knees, his ruby eyes full of terrible tears. She wanted to cry out to them but could not. Her throat would not move. Aroostook glittered and shone in her new glassy skin and long stripes. September reeled in the Fairy’s hand. The searing, living, growing, bright, and earthy smell of the Fairy made her dizzy. What happened to you, Aroostook, while I was smashing and yelling and running after Yetis? Suddenly it seemed important as September drifted in the fog of perfume and laughter and thin, thin air. I will find out, I promise, we’ll have a sit down, just like the Blue Wind said. But she could not make her lips and lungs work together to say that, either.

And then September felt a pulling in her, a hook in the heart, and she knew the feeling, she knew it but it was too soon, she had been in Fairyland but a moment, only a moment! Over the Fairy’s terrible shoulder, she could see the Blue Wind coming, as the Green Wind had come for her twice now, sailing over the edge of the world to snatch her out of it and send her home.

“I only had a day!” September whispered, her voice strangled in the Fairy’s endless gaze. “Don’t make me go!”

Dawns popped and spun over her face at once as the Yeti went about his childrearing, moving time to give the little red Moon a chance to grow. Her skin felt hot, tight, too small for her, as though some hideous hand pulled at her hair and her feet to stretch her as far as she could go. September screamed.

The invisible hook in September hauled at her and the Fairy laughed her booming, wild, savage laugh, and Saturday reached for her and A-Through-L roared in panic-

September fell out of Fairyland like a drop of spilled blood.

And fell back in again.

She felt it, she felt Fairyland push her out, away from Saturday, away from Ell, away from Aroostook, away from everything.

But the Fairy held her fast, and kept laughing, higher and louder until it became thunder, until it became a squall, and even Ciderskin quailed. The Blue Wind, her puffin vast beneath her, her shaggy blueberry-colored coat flapping in the lunar winds, flew merrily around the Yeti’s head, grinning like Christmas morning. She rested her brocade elbows on the puffin’s glossy dark head and rested her chin in her hands.

“You can cause ever so much more trouble by taking folk seriously,” she crowed, her blue eyes dancing. “And doing just as they ask.”

September was stuck fast in Fairyland, like a nail driven home.