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

CHAPTER VI
EERYTHING YOU HAVE

In Which September Loses Her Savings but Acquires Unusual Cargo, and, at Long Last, Hits the Gas and Lights Out for Fairyland, Whereupon She Is Alarmed by a Flower, Abandoned by a Wind, and Awed by the View from the Top of the World

The Blue Wind’s mouth twisted into a sneer-but then it untwisted, and unwound, and unfolded into a secret little smile. She walked around Aroostook’s rumbling front end and climbed into the passenger seat just as a person might who expected a nice Sunday drive. September’s heart banged and guttered all around her insides. Being stern was like being underwater-she could do it, but never for long, and how her whole body burned to come up for breath!

The Blue Wind put her hand out the window and crooked a finger. In half a sigh, the Wind who’d tried to sell them the planets in his coat appeared at September’s side.

“Now, miss. Now you’ll be wanting your Way,” he said firmly, soft and clear.

He opened his coat again and the mingled light of the planets poured out its rainbows. On the other side of the coat hung little books with silvery purple papers in them-magic ration books! But surely there was no need for them any longer.

“Collectibles, miss. Vintage. But that’s not your speed at all. You came to the Way Station. You need a Way.”

“But I haven’t lost my Way-I’m only beginning! I lost it once, but that was on purpose.”

“You haven’t met your Way yet. It hasn’t so much as kissed your hand. You haven’t even knocked at the door of the hall where your Way dances. But look here, look see, I’ve got them, I’ve caught them up just for you, a big bouquet of anywhere you want to go. Just pick a bloom, my girl, hold it to your pretty nose.”

“I want to go to Fairyland.”

The Blue Wind tapped the dashboard impatiently. “She’s very stubborn on that point, brother. Dense as a foot, this one. Personally, I detest Fairyland. Something is always brewing there, some frantic task that simply must be done, some despot who cannot be borne another moment, some bauble that demands fetching. It’s exhausting! Wouldn’t you rather have a nice race across Antarctica instead? Or a Grand Tour of the Gulf Stream? We could skip stones across the North Pole. Besides, no one ever asks me to go running off on a grand adventure. No one ever says: Blue, darling, wouldn’t you like to go away to Fairyland and skate on the clouds there? One does like to be asked.”

But the squat Wind had already plucked a silvery, iridescent moon from his coat, a crescent hanging from a fine chain. Ruby starlight caught in its horns.

“Fairyland’s on special tonight, as it happens,” he purred. “So cheap my little baby typhoons in Tokyo will have to go hungry. A bargain fit for a beggar.”

“How much?” ventured September.

The Wind smiled. His woolly, frozen eyebrows waggled. “Tonight only, my Midnight, Blue-Light, You-Heard-It-Right, Close-Out deal: All it costs is Everything You Have.”

September looked down at her jar of coins, nestled in her lap. “That’s not a proper price at all. How do you know how much I have? What if all I had was a shoelace and a spare button?”

The Wind’s smile got deeper and wider and bluer. “The point’s not what it costs; it’s what it costs you. Everything You Have. That’s my price, that’s my prize, that’s my ransom, and that’s my rune. The only price in the world that matters is the one that hurts to pay.” He let the Moon spin on its chain. “You want it; I have it. There’s no duel here. If you had a shoelace and a spare button, that’d be on the tag.”

September sighed. She had saved it all for this, she supposed, to be able to pay her way respectably. She held her jar, heavy as all the days she’d spent earning it. She was paying with Hours again, she realized, just as she had with the Goblin Glasswort Groof. The coins didn’t mean five or ten or twenty-five cents, they meant time. They meant half a day on the Powell farm or four letters for Mr. Killory or every morning getting rooster scratches on her arm just for trying to feed the Whitestone chickens.

All money is imaginary.

September lifted the jar up and handed it over.

The whispering Wind scoffed. “The rest, too, little holdout. I’m not your fool.”

September grimaced as she handed over the book of Valkyries and mistletoe and hairy god-legs and her last butterscotch. Being more or less an honest girl, she would have given him the hammer and nails as well, but when she offered them, the Wind hissed and recoiled, smelling their iron. He rose up into the air in a hurry and, turning slowly upside down, hung the Moon around her rearview mirror. It whirled and glimmered, cool and pale. But the Wind was not finished. He pulled something out of his coat-a huge, long, ornate box, perfectly white, with strange scrimshaw tangled up all over it: horns and crab claws and hearts and ears and stars and flowers and open, grasping hands. It was emphatically locked.

“What’s this?”

“I said it would cost you Everything You Have.” The Blue Wind in the passenger seat chuckled gleefully. “Take this to the Whelk of the Moon in Almanack-that’s a city. Ask anyone, they’ll point you. And no peeking.” The Wind waved his fingers at her. “You didn’t really think a jar of small change was all you had, did you? How sad.”

He closed up his coat and stepped lightly up and away, as if climbing invisible stairs. September looked at her own Blue Wind uncertainly.

“Well?” she snapped. “On your Way, then. Hoof it, or wheel it, or however your personal phraseology would handle the fantastical notion of getting a move on.”

September gave Aroostook a little gas. The engine boomed; the rods shivered. The little moon hanging from the rearview began to swell up like a balloon filling with water. It got bigger and bigger, and brighter and brighter, and more and more silver, and the engine boomed again and again, each boom shaking September’s bones until she thought they would come apart.

Then the Model A careened forward and Mercator, suburb of Westerly, slammed shut around them like a door.

A howl of fine cold powder sprayed up and over the windshield like an ocean wave. It whipped across September’s lips, sharp, vicious-and sweet.

It was snowing sugar in Fairyland.

September and the Blue Wind found themselves driving along a high mountain road. Jagged violet peaks shot up into the night, dark silver cliffs dropped dizzyingly away on either side of the path, and if we are honest, the Model A was not designed with such conditions in mind. They shuddered and jiggered and teetered, and the journey would certainly have been cut dramatically short if the car were not somehow, valiantly, driving itself. We may be very grateful for this, as young girls who learn to drive upon the great plains are no more designed for wintry mountain roads than convertible automobiles for snow, and it is in our interest and September’s that novels last longer than their beginnings.

Stars clotted the sky above, peeking out from behind gusts of confectioner’s snow. It streamed down in blazing ribbons of white and blue and green that made the Milky Way-or whatever Fairies might call the wild cord of starlight tying up the heavens-look rather like a scrap of old newspaper. And far below, where any fall from the high passes would abruptly end, roared a sea of cold turquoise fire, biting at the mountain’s feet and throwing little meteors of sugar-ice against the battered cliffs.

The Blue Wind sang out in joy. She put back her head and howled and it was just the same sound as the awful winter wind screeching all around them. They were still rushing up, up, up, the speed incredible, the sugar-snow lashing September’s face with electric prickling pain. Sugar is not nearly so soft as snow and not nearly so nice as dessert. Every crystal bit into her skin and having found warmth in the wound, melted there with a tiny sting. September, once more, wanted to cry out in joy, to shout, nothing in particular, but the wordless hooray of relief and delight when one finally gets what one has looked forward to for so long. But when she opened her mouth to crow, the sugar-snow flew in and choked her.

“Isn’t there anywhere we might get out of the storm?” September yelled over a shearing updraft that nearly upended the lot of them. A few spare puffins scrabbled against the blizzard, paddling their feet for purchase on the dark backseat.

“Out?” hooted the Blue Wind, laughing. Her laugh sounded like icicles breaking all in a row. “Why would we want to get out? This is my favorite vacation destination! The most splendid spot in all of Fairyland! The balmy beaches! The luxurious yurts! The mashed-rice cocktails! How I have longed to lay out on the slopes of Mount Chiaroscuro and Moon-tan!”

The Blue Wind hopped up on the seat, hardly able to contain herself. In one grand sweep of her arms, all of her lovely warm clothes vanished: her ice skates, her brocade coat, her spiked cap. She now wore a spangled cerulean bathing costume and a pair of large silver sunglasses-which September supposed were called moonglasses, if the Blue Wind meant to Moon-tan while wearing them. The Blue Wind flashed a dazzling robin’s-egg smile.

“That’s better! Your bauble whisked you to a dreamy, exclusive spot, September! Ever so much better than a nasty old beach lousy with witches.” The Blue Wind flicked the silver Moon still hanging from Aroostook’s mirror. It rocked back and forth listlessly. Whatever it had done, it had done it and would now like very much to be left alone.

A lump of sugar-ice rocketed out of the sea below and landed in September’s lap with a hard crackle and thump. September thought the witches were rather brilliant, and how she would have liked to have seen the wairwulf again, and tell him how she’d got on in the capital. She opened her mouth to say so-and could only cough in a cloud of stormsugar.

“Oh, VERY WELL! No one appreciates a good squall anymore.” The Blue Wind turned up her face to the sky. “Shut it!” she hollered.

And the sky did.

The snow laid down on the ground like an obedient dog. The wind went suddenly, utterly silent. The cold fire sea still crashed and pounded below, but it only made a distant, hushing sound like radio-static. The Model A rounded a rill and rolled out onto the wide, flat table of the summit, a glassy dark shard of land mounded up with sweet, crystalline slush on all sides. September pushed her driving goggles up onto the black Criminal’s cap like an aviator. They had fogged and frozen so quickly she’d hardly been able to see until now-and now that she could, two extraordinary things showed themselves immediately.

The first extraordinary thing was this: Without any warning at all, without any reason at all, the steering wheel of the Model A-of Aroostook-had turned into a bright green sunflower. The petals felt hard and sturdy under September’s hands. The green of them shone with oily swoops of purple. Aroostook’s body was no different than it had always been. The same peeling dark paint, the same cracked headlamps, the same piebald tires. Even the same half-deflated squeeze bulb of the horn still sported its pink rubber patch. It all still smelled of gasoline and rust. But inside, the green flower of the steering wheel glinted undeniably as it caught the light of the second extraordinary thing.

A great road ran up out of the mountain. It began on the summit, its passage flanked by two silver streetlamps as tall as elm trees. On either side curled bony rails like briars, canted and corkscrewed at strange angles. Here and there on the bone briars, clusters of cool green berries bobbed and swung, glowing as brightly as lightbulbs. It ran so far and so high September got dizzy just trying to follow it-for the road did not run straight, either, but looped and spiraled and doubled back on itself, a long snarl of silk yarn thrown up into the sky. Ice glittered on the rails and the long lanes-and so did moonlight. For the road led far and high indeed, all the way up to the Moon, which hung above them in the sky, distant and beautiful, a giant crescent the size of a world. The last of the puffins bounced up out of the backseat and rose to meet the Moon, honking softly all the way.

“What happened to Aroostook?” September stared at the improbable sunflower which should not, should not be there. Of course all manner of improbable things happened in Fairyland, but September herself had never changed. Her clothes stayed the same, her face, her hair, her shoes, whether she came wearing one or two.

This was different.

If September knew anything, she knew what happened to you when you jumped or ran or swam or fell or flew into Fairyland. She and the girl who had crawled out of the kitchen window two years ago were one and the same, that was certain. Yet she could not explain the sunflower. She felt her own skin with her hands; she seemed quite herself. Her essential September-ness had not turned into a strange flower.

The Blue Wind ignored her quiet distress. She had somehow pulled a spyglass out of her bathing costume. It glittered, hollowed out of an icicle. Through it, she peered up at the road to the Moon. September followed that icy gaze with her own naked eye. She remembered what her friend Taiga, the reindeer-girl, had said in the glass forest: that the Moon was a rich and fertille place where all manner of folk lived. The road to the Moon dazzled her eyes and all the rest of her, too.

The last time she’d come to Fairyland, she had seen trouble right away and no mistaking. From the moment her foot landed everything was wrong and required mending. And in that glass forest, the wrongness came from her own fault and by her own hand. Until this moment September had not realized how wound up her heart had got, how prepared she had been to see some other wretched consequence of her adventure come to bite her in the dark. But she was simply here, and could go somewhere, see something marvelous. She could spin around three times and dash off in whatever direction she faced, if she wanted to! And deliver the long, tooth-colored box, yes. But that was quickly done and quickly forgotten. Hand it off and find A-Through-L and Saturday and then-Anything Magic. Possible Magic. And how many other sorts she could not think of right now, in the delicious moment when it was all still in front of her and not in the midst nor behind. Boomer was wrong. What gladness dwelt in prepositions!

September drank in the starry sky with a longing and a tugging and a sigh. All the way up, to that enormous crescent in the black.

“You can see the prongs of Almanack from here. And the Sea of Restlessness all couched in dragonfly beaches! I shall have to remember to make off with a few of those marvelous cabanas come my next Moon twister.” She retracted her icy spyglass with a snap. “Well,” the Blue Wind said cheerfully, “that’s me then!”

“You’re not coming?”

When the Green Wind had taken September away, he had not been allowed to come with her. The Marquess had banned Harsh Airs from Fairyland. But no longer-the ban had vanished with the old regime. September had planned to ask the Blue Wind along. One does so like to be asked, she’d said. September wanted to be the kind of girl that would invite her, even if the Wind had been nasty to her and she still felt sore on it. The best way to be the kind of girl you want to be is to do what that girl would do. Truthfully, September had been looking forward to showing off how gallant and gracious she could be.

“I’m very busy,” sneered the Wind, who wore a sneer beautifully, dashingly, better than September ever could. She tossed her long blue hair as if it mattered not at all. “I’ve baskets of hail to deliver to Broceliande and a truly spectacular bout of thunder-snow overdue in Maine. And you! You’ve got work to do, my little postal service! You be sure to go straight to Almanack, now. No dawdling or stopping for strawberries on the side of the road. You’re on the clock.”

“But I don’t know how to get there!”

“Look, you sour gimlet of a girl. I think I’ve done more than my part. I don’t know why the other Winds make such a to-do over this hauling-off business. It seems very unsatisfying to me. And if it’s unsatisfying at the start, it’s sure to be unsatisfying at the stop. I don’t think we’d be the best of traveling companions, anyhow. I am certainly intrepid and splendid and sordid and strong; I can see why you’d want me! But I’m afraid I’ve left the kettle on or whatever it is people say when they’re bored.” The Blue Wind pushed her moonglasses up onto her head and winked one dazzling dark eye. “And while they do make a smashing cocktail, the Moon really is awfully provincial if you ask me, but you didn’t, so I do hope you all fall off of it. Ta!”

The Blue Wind put her fingers in her mouth and whistled as high and sharp as metal tearing. A great puffin, bigger than any of the others but encased in the icy, thorny Spanish armor, soared into view. The black comet of his body hurtled down to the Wind’s side. She gave a little pirouette on the ice of the summit, leapt into the air, turned a double flip, and landed on the puffin’s back. In half a moment they had become no more than another blue star against the black.