She set the Pooka down. And the child bolted to her mother, shivering fully into a pup midway across the ferry deck. The two jackals licked each other’s faces and whined. The Glashtyn held out his hand to Charlie Crunchcrab. The Fairy unbuckled an ugly, rusted, serrated knife from his belt and passed it over.
September had time to think, Oh, this will hurt, before the Glashtyn seized her, spun her around, and sawed the knife back and forth along her spine. She felt cold and faint. The knife made noises like shredding silk and grinding bone. She thought she might topple over, the pain was so terrible, running up and down her back. Still, she refused to cry. Finally, there was a sickening crack, and the Glashtyn pulled away with a scrap of something in his hand. A single drop of September’s blood dripped from the knife to the bleached wood of the deck.
The Glashtyn set the scrap of something down before him. It pooled darkly, shining a little, and then stood up in the shape of a girl just September’s height, with just September’s eyes and hair, all of black smoke and shadow. Slowly, the shadow-September smiled and pirouetted on one foot. It was not a gentle smile or a kind one. The shadow extended her hand to the Glashtyn, who took it, smiling himself.
“We shall take her below and love her and put her at the head of our parades,” he said. “For she was not taken but given—and thus our only true possession.”
The shadow curtsied. To September, the curtsy seemed somewhat vicious, if a curtsy could be vicious. September was unsure that she had done the right thing now—surely, she would miss her shadow, and surely, the Glashtyn meant to make mischief with it of some sort or another. But it was too late: The Glashtyn leapt overboard as one, with the shadow-September riding on the leader’s shoulders. The Fairy throng stared at her, amazed. No one would speak to her. A-through-L finally strode across the deck to gather her up. He smelled so good and familiar, and his skin was so warm. She hugged his knee.
“Did I do the right thing, Charlie?” September asked the ferryman softly.
He shook his mad gray head. “Right or blight, done is dusted.”
September looked across the water at the gleaming City rising up, all towers and shine. Then she looked down into the Barleybroom.
Six dark horse heads glided through the water at the head of the ferry, bits clamped in their teeth. Over their backs, a shadow girl leapt and danced, her ghostly laughter all but eaten up by the waves.
INTERLUDE
THE KEY AND ITS TRAVELS
In Which We Turn Our Attention to a Long-Forgotten and Much-Suffering Jeweled Key
Being careful and clever readers, you must now wonder if your woolgathering narrator has completely forgotten the jeweled key that so loyally followed September into Fairyland. Not so! But a key’s adventuring is of necessity a quieter thing than a girl’s, more single-minded and also more fraught with loneliness.
For the Key slipped between Latitude and Longitude and tumbled briefly—oh so briefly!—through the starry dark behind the screen of the world. It landed unceremoniously on the shimmering jacket of a hobgoblin in transit from Brocéliande to Atlantis. The Key blended into the other glittery bits of folly that bedecked the jacket and went unquestioned by Betsy Basilstalk or Rupert the Gargoyle.
Good-naturedly illiterate, the Key had no wish to visit the blue-crystal universities of Atlantis and unhooked its clasp just in time to tumble through the rooty, moldy, wormy passage to Fairyland. It caught an updraft of sea air and soared over the fleecy clouds, playing tag with the blue-necked gillybirds.
It passed over the witches and narrowly avoided a sucking vortex of the events of next week that threatened to pull it down into the cauldron.
It flew over the f
ield full of little red flowers, but no Wyverary—or even a Wyvern—appeared to accompany it or explain how anything worked or was in the days before today.
The Key, too, found the House Without Warning, long after a nicely scrubbed September had passed through. Under Lye’s gentle eye, the Key primly dropped into a tiny tub and soaked until it gleamed.
The Key missed the ferry September rode into Pandemonium and was forced to sleep on the grassy shore, where it was picked up by a delighted banshee child. The girl squealed piercingly and pinned the Key to her little green-gold breast. Her mother admonished her not to pick up strange treasures that surely were not hers, but no one can listen to a banshee shriek in indignation for long without giving in. So it was that the Key boarded the ferry and passed into Pandemonium, three days after September had left the city behind.
The Key cursed its slowness. It wept an orange tear, slightly rusted.
The Key remembered being part of a green smoking jacket. It remembered wanting to please. It remembered, a little, being born out of a lapel, the sudden rush of air over facets and gold. It recalled with sorrow being torn from its mother, the jacket, and the taste of a young girl’s blood under its needle. It shuddered at the memory of her blood, at night.
What the Key knew was that it was connected to September, that the purpose of its whole being was to be with her, just to rest near her skin. The Key had been created to make her smile. It could not stop wanting to make her smile, any more than you can stop walking on two legs or start breathing with your liver instead of your lungs. What if September needed the Key? What if the world became dark and frightening and it was not there to comfort her? The Key knew it must fly faster.
It was only that the girl kept running, so far and so fast, almost as if she didn’t know that the Key was trying as hard as it could to keep up.
CHAPTER VII
FAIRY REELS
In Which September Enters Pandemonium at Last and Is Discovered by the Marquess While A-Through-L Enjoys a Lemon Ice
“Go on,” said the Wyverary, nudging the girl in the orange dress with his great red nose. “Ask.”
September squinted dubiously. The brass face before her did not move.
In fact, it was a brass face hoisted up on a tower of tangled brass hands that seemed to be frozen in the acts of pleading, praying, beseeching, orating, pointing, prodding. They wound around each other until five of them fanned out in a kind of finger-fringed flower that held the face aloft. The burnished face had swollen, puffy cheeks, a pursed mouth, and eyes squeezed tightly shut. Its ears flared enormous, larger than its head. Behind the post rose a huge, bustling, and walled city. The sounds from within rumbled indistinctly, as bustle will do. The wall did not look terribly sturdy—it was patchwork, motley-colored, a dozen kinds of brocade and stiff silk and satin and broadcloth, all sewn together with gnarled, ropy yarn the color of squash, thicker than tree trunks.