“It’s slavery when you can’t say no,” said September, quite sure she was right.
“It’s still very far away,” insisted the Wyverary. “And we haven’t any more time than we did a moment ago, indeed, a fair bit less.”
“Why do you keep speaking as if you are coming, Ell? You’re here, in Pandemonium! You ought to go to your grandfather and be happy and learned and careful of your fiery breath!”
“Don’t be silly, September. I am coming. How could I face my grandfather if he knew I had let a small one go off into dangerous places alone?”
“Not alone,” whispered Saturday.
“How much more lovely would it be to enter the Library with laurels, having accomplished a great deed involving a sword? My grandfather must have hundreds of books praising the deeds of such knights. And we shall all be knights, all three of us! And not punished at all!”
September looked dubiously at him. She neatly tucked her long dark hair behind her ears.
“Please, small friend. Now that I’m here, so close I can smell the glue of his bindings, I am not sure. I am afraid he will not love me. I should feel much better if I had a dashing story to tell him. I should feel much better if I knew you were safe and not crowning the topiaries in the Marquess’s garden. I should feel much better if no one could call me a coward. I don’t want to be a coward. It is not a nice thing to be.”
September reached up, and the Wyverary dropped his long, curved snout into her hands. She kissed it gently.
“I shall be ever so much more glad if you are with me, Ell.”
Saturday looked away from them, to give them privacy. You could not ask for a more polite Marid, even then, when he was so feral he could only remember to breathe every third breath, polite, and eager to be helpful.
“You’re right, of course, the velocipedes are running,” he said meekly, as though someone else had suggested it. He was still too shy to suggest anything without wrapping it up tight to keep it safe.
“What a funny, old-fashioned word!” said September, placing her hand on the hilt of the Spoon stuck into her belt. She felt stronger just holding onto it.
“I’m sure you know it means bicycle.” Saturday shifted from one foot to another. September had not thought to find someone more unsure of the world than she. “I didn’t mean to say you didn’t know.”
“Oh!” cried Ell. “Bicycle! Yes, well, now we’re in my section of the alphabet! It’s high summer, September! That means the running of the bicycles, and that means Lickety-Split Transportation!”
September looked uncertainly at her denuded sceptre, hanging sadly from Ell’s bronze chain. “I don’t think I’ve anything like enough rubies left to buy bicycles for both of us.”
“Pish! We don’t buy; we catch! September, the bicycle herds, well, I suppose they’re called voleries, not herds, right, Saturday? Voleries. Anyhow, their migration path runs though the Meadowflats just east of the City, and if we are lucky and have a bit of rope with us, we can hitch on with them all the way to the Provinces. Or nearly all the way. It’s difficult: They’re wild beasts, you know. And if I run just as hard as I can, I shall be able to keep up with you, and no one’s bones need be smashed or jangled. It goes without saying, I think, that it would be a bit ridiculous for me to ride a highwheel, even a big, brawny bull. Let us go now, right away! I shouldn’t want to miss it; we would feel much chagrined, and stuck.”
“September,” pleaded Saturday, his blue eyes growing even wider and darker. “I have to eat. If I don’t eat, I will fall, soon, and not ever get up.”
“Oh, how rude of me!” September had forgotten her own hunger with all the excitement, but now it was back, and all the more insistent. And so, quite without thinking about it, September spent the last of her chipped rubies at a public house called the Toad and the Tabernacle, where the tables and chairs and walls were a deep-black widow’s weeds, and the milky yellow light from the silken candelabra made Saturday’s skin appear just as black as the ceiling.
“Salt,” whispered the boy regretfully. “I need salt and stone.”
“Is that what you eat?” September wrinkled her nose.
Saturday drooped in shame. “It’s what the sea eats. When I have been starved, no other food will sustain me. When I am well, I shall have goosefoot tarts and hawthorn custard with you, I’m sure.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings! Please, you mustn’t slump so! Besides, I’m not certain I can eat anything here. It’s all sure to be Fairy food, and I think I’ve been reasonable enough about that so far—and safe—but surely eating in a Fairy public house is right out.”
A-Through-L’s lips quirked, as if he knew a bit about both Fairies and Food, beginning as they both did with F. But he said nothing. September sat politely and drank a glass of clear water, which was not food in the least and so obviously innocent. She tried to bargain with her stomach not to growl as A-Through-L demolished three plates of radishes and a flagon of genuine Morrowmoss well-water. Saturday gnawed a slab of blue sea-stone and daintily licked a joint of salt. He offered some to her uncertainly, and she demurred politely.
“I have a delicate digestion,” she said. “I don’t think it would bear much stone.”
A platter of painted duck eggs, sweet dense bread, and marshmallow fondue passed by, hoisted on the shoulders of a waiter who might well have been a dwarf. September drank her water vigorously, trying not to look at it. And when all was done and swallowed and September was still hungry but pleased with herself for avoiding temptation, the last of the sceptre went into the toll chest of a much smaller, less splendid ferry. Without incident, its paddle wheel splashed through the other side of the Barleybroom. It took the three of them away from the soft, gleaming spires of Pandemonium and deposited them on a grassy, empty shore.
“It seems so sad to leave,” September remarked mournfully, as she stepped onto the muddy shore, “when we have only just arrived. How I wish I could get to know Pandemonium a little better!”
September tucked the green smoking jacket under the Wyverary’s bronze chain, knotting the sleeves together. The jacket mourned, crying out in silent, emerald-colored consternation. Alas, the ears of folk with legs and noses and eyebrows are not made t
o hearken to the weeping of those with inseams and buttonholes and lapels. Already, September could hear a kind of thunder in the distance. The Meadowflats stretched long and far around them as they walked: even, well-tempered grass, without tree or welcoming shade or the smallest white flower. If the grass were not so rich and green, she would have called it desolate.
“Remember, they are fast and tall and vicious! Many have perished or, at least, been roundly dumped off and bruised in the attempt to travel by wild bicycle.” A-Through-L fretted and stamped his great feet in the grass. The thunder grew closer.