The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland 1)

THE HOUSE WITHOUT WARNING

“What is this place?” breathed September, climbing down the Wyverary’s red flank. She was becoming quite agile at it.

A-Through-L shrugged. “Too many W’s,” he whispered. “If only my brother were here!”

“It is my mistress’s house,” came a thick, wet voice behind them.

September turned to see a most curious lady standing serenely on a patch of tile depicting a great blue rose. The woman stood in the precise center of the rose. A rich, clean perfume surrounded her in a light pinkish haze, for the woman was carved entirely from soap. Her face was a deep olivey-green castile, her hair a rich and oily Marseille, streaked with lime peels. Her body was patchwork: here strawberry soap with bits of red fruit showing through, there saffron and sandalwood, orange and brown. Her belt was a cord of hard, tallowy honey soap, her hands plain-blue bathing soap, and her fingernails smelled like daisies and lemons. Her eyes were two piercing, faceted slivers of soapstone. On her brow someone had written TRUTH in the kind of handwriting teachers always have: clear and curling and lovely.

“My name is Lye,” the soap-woman said. A few bubbles escaped her mouth. She was utterly still. No soapy muscle trembled. “It is my part to welcome you, to show you to the baths, to tend to you and to all weary travelers, until my mistress returns, which will not be long now, I’m sure.”

“Why does it say ‘truth’ on your forehead?” asked September shyly. She could be quite brave in the presence of a Wyverary, but tall and lovely ladies made her shy, even if they were made of soap.

“I am a golem, child,” answered Lye calmly. “My mistress wrote it there. She was marvelous clever and knew all kinds of secret things. One of the things she knew was how to gather up all the slips of soap the bath house patrons le

ft behind and arrange them into a girl shape and write ‘truth’ on her forehead and wake her up and give her a name and say to her: ‘Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad.’”

“Who was your mistress, Lye?” said A-Through-L, settling into the courtyard as best he could, his feet crunched up against a broken pillar. “She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”

Lye sighed—her bayberry soap shoulders rose and fell abruptly, as though no one had really taught her how to sigh before. “She was a beautiful young girl with hair like new soap and big green eyes and a mole on her left cheek and she was a Virgo and she liked a hot bath first and then a very cold one right after and she always went barefoot and I miss her. I am sure she did spend a lot of time in libraries, for she was always reading books, little ones she could hang from her belt and regular ones with garish covers and big ones, too, so big she’d lie on her stomach in their spines to read them. Her name was Mallow, and she has been gone for years and years, but I am still here, and I keep going, and I never stop because I don’t know how to stop because she said I’d never have to stop.”

“Mallow!” cried the Wyverary, his scaly red eyebrows shooting up. “Queen Mallow?”

“I am sure she could have been queen if she wanted to. She was marvelous clever, as I said.”

“Who is Queen Mallow?” asked September, who felt quite left out of the excitement. “You mentioned her before. And why is there a Marquess now if there was a Queen before? It seems to me that if you want to mess about with monarchy, you might, at least, get your traditions straight.”

“Oh, September, you don’t understand!” said Ell, curling his tail down around her. “Before the Marquess came with her lions and her great old panther with his ivory collar, Fairyland dwelt in the eternal summer of Good Queen Mallow, the Bright and the Bold. She loved us and governed with rhyming songs and cherries for all on Sundays. When she rode out on holidays, she wore a crown of red pearls the selkies gave her, and all the pookas did gymnastics just to make her laugh. Every table groaned with milk and wheat and sugar and hot chocolate. Every horse was fat. Every churn was full. Queen Mallow danced in circles of silver mushrooms to bring on the spring and apparently, before she became queen, ran a bath house.”

“But Mallow begins with M. How do you know so much about her?” asked September.

“Everyone knows about Good Queen Mallow,” replied the Wyverary, shocked that September did not.

“Master Wyvern, if you please, where has my mistress gone? It has been many years, and I have drawn many baths, but she has never come back to me, and I cannot sleep or eat because she didn’t teach me how to sleep or eat, and it is dark at night and bits of me slough off in the rain.”

“Oh, darling Lye,” cried the Wyverary. “How I wish I could bring you good news! But late in the golden reign of the Queen, the Marquess arrived and destroyed her. Or made her sit in a corner. Reports vary. And now there are complicated proclamations, and the lamentations of the hills and my wings are locked down to my skin, and no one has cocoa at all. Some of us hope that in the dungeons of the Briary, the Queen is still alive, and playing solitaire to pass the years, waiting for a knight to release her, to repeal the Marquess’s laws, and restore cocoa to Fairyland kettles.”

A single liquid tear melted the cheek of the soap golem. “I suspected,” she whispered thickly. “I suspected when the place began to break down and crumble and cry big dusty tears at night. I suspected, because I am not very good company. Why stay with a silly golem when you can be Queen? Even if she said I was her friend.”

“I’m sure she meant to come back,” said September, trying to comfort the great, kindhearted golem. “And we are going to Pandemonium to steal back a part of what the Marquess has taken away.”

“A girl with green eyes, perhaps?”

“Well, no, a Spoon.” September suddenly felt her lovely quest was a bit small and shabby. But it was hers. “Do you know how far it is from here to Pandemonium?”

“What an odd question,” said Lye.

“I’m not from these parts, you see,” September said demurely. She was beginning to feel she ought to have that stitched on her jacket.

“Wherever you are, child, the House Without Warning lies between you and Pandemonium. However you turn, you cannot get to the City without passing through the House, without being cleaned and prepared, without having the road washed from you and your feet made soft and your spirit thoroughly scrubbed. I thought all cities were like that. How could they bear to have a great lot of filthy, exhausted folk milling around inside them, grumpy and nervy and dingy?” The soap golem extended her long, stiff arm, her skin a spiral of buttery greens. September took it. “When you leave this place, human child, you will find Pandemonium. The two are tied together, like a ship and a pier. Like my mistress and I, once, years and years ago.”

The soap golem led them to the center of the House Without Warning, which was not really a house at all but many small rooms connected by long tiled halls and courtyards, which would once have been charming but were now covered in slime and green with age, falling apart, morose. Lye thoughtfully led A-Through-L to a great waterfall whose pool would accommodate him but drew September farther into the depths of the House. The soft smacking sounds of her soapy heels against the floor were pleasant, lulling. No one else seemed to be about. Everything was quiet—but not frighteningly so. The place seemed to be, well, napping. Finally, they entered the largest courtyard yet. In the midst of copper statues and fountains caked with verdigris rested three huge bathtubs. The floor showed two winged hippogriffs rampant in cobalt and emerald. The tubs covered their hooves like great horseshoes.

Lye pulled at September’s jacket and she wriggled out of it—but when the golem tugged at her orange dress as well, September quailed.

“What’s wrong?”

“I … don’t like to be naked. In front of strangers.”