I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so that everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins, and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two.
Autumn in Fairyland is all of that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland forest or the morbidity of the Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland.
And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring highwheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gone gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.
September’s orange dress seemed suddenly drab; the Wyverary’s scarlet skin looked a bit brown and dull. They could not compete—but they laughed all the same, as leaves drifted slowly from trees and fell into their hair. Penny balanced expertly on her highwheel seat and reached up to catch them out of the air, whooping and giggling.
“Ah, Penny, we’ll not go in, though,” sighed Calpurnia Farthing, raising her goggles to drink in the colors of the forest ahead of them, its shady paths, its mournful brown birds.
“Oh, why not, Cal? They’re sure to have flapjacks! I’m hungry!”
“We have to bring in the herd, love. The highwheels’ home is off farther toward the sea, in the oil tides and the nickel pools. We’ll camp, and I’ll sing you ‘The Nobell Lay of the Unicycle and the One-Legged Gyrl’—you like that one! The rest of the velos will catch up, and we’ll take them down to the water’s edge, and I’ll let you have a puff of my pipe.”
“Can’t we just stay one night?” Penny pleaded, pulling her pigtails.
Calpurnia shuddered. “It’s best … not to go in if you don’t have doings there. Autumn has a hungry heart—September is the beginning of death.” The Fairy looked at the earnest girl in the orange dress and laughed shortly, realizing what she had said. “Well … Pan forgives all puns. Be glad autumn is brief, Penny, in our familiars. As for you, September, I feel a powerful urge to tell you to be careful, but I think you’ve lead ears for such advice. Just remember that autumn is also called fall, and some falling places are so deep there’s no climbing out.”
“Good-bye, dragon!” chirped Penny, and A-Through-L, still panting from his great exertion across the plains—three days’ running with barely a break for napping—did not argue with her but tolerated her smacking a kiss on his toes. “Good-bye, Saturday!”
Calpurnia Farthing brusquely extended her hand to Saturday, but when he moved to shake it, she grabbed it up and kissed his fingers like a lord kissing a lady’s hand. She crouched down to look the boy in the eye. “I have a thing to tell you, Marid.”
Saturday waited patiently.
“We’re not kin, but fey to fey, you’ll hark?”
He nodded. She leaned in to whisper in his ear so that September could not hear.
But we have special privileges. I shall tell you what Calpurnia Farthing said. “The riddle of the Ravished,” she whispered, “is that they must always go down into the black naked and lonesome. But they cannot come back up into the light alone.”
The light in the Autumn Provinces is always late afternoon light, the golden, perfect kind that slants and sighs, that casts gentle shadows on the earth.
Of course, September had no shadow.
But the shadows of the others walked long and thin through the forest of bloody-bright trees. They were disturbed by their missing compatriot, and pulled away from the place where September’s shadow was not. Shadows have a kind of camaraderie. As folk become friends and have adventures, so, too, do their shadows frolick and quaver in fear and emerge triumphant from battles with enemies’ shadows, all unknown to us, who think we are the movers of our tales. And so the shadow of the Wyverary mourned the loss of his companion, and the shadow of the Marid caught its black mood.
And yet, none among them could keep from delight as many paths opened up wide and even before them, a bed of crisp brown leaves blowing up in little dervishes and settling again. A few mournful birds sang out. The wind smelled of smoke, and baking bread, and apples. Saturday closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth like a cat to take it all in. A-Through-L fairly skipped.
“Truly, Autumn is my season,” the scarlet beast chortled. “Spring and Summer and Winter all begin with such late letters! But Autumn and Fall, I have loved best, because they are best to love.”
The three of them might have taken any path through the forest and come upon little but toadstools and acorns. However, on account of the tendencies of Fairy towns to get quite firmly in one’s way, they did not. They found themselves striding into the herald’s square of a place called Mercurio before they could discuss whether it was nightingales or sparrows that sang so prettily in the woods. That September’s shoes were dark and crafty and most certainly knew their way around the world can have had nothing to do with it, I am sure.
I wonder if every city in Fairyland is made of some strange thing? thought September. For some mad baker had built the town of Mercurio from loaves of thick, moist bread shingled with sugar and mortared with butter. Heavy eaves of brown crust shaded sweet little dinner-bun doors. Many of the houses were small. September could reach up her hand and tear off a piece of their roofs to eat if she had had a mind. But many more were enormous, towering up high, cakes piled upon cakes, baked dark and fragrant, up past the tops of the trees. The cobbles of the square were muffin-tops, and all the fountains gushed fresh, sweet milk. It was as though the witch who built the gingerbread house in the story had a great number of f
riends and had decided to start up a collective.
In the center of the square stood a statue of a lady September knew well by now, patted together from cream-colored crumpets. Below her benevolent gaze, a long table groaned with food: apple dumplings and apple tartlets and candied apples and apple chutney in big crystal bowls, huge roasted geese glistening brown and gold, giant potatoes and turnips split and steaming, rum cakes and blackberry pies, sheafs of toffee bundled together like wheat, squash soup in tureens shaped like stars, golden pancakes, slabs of gingerbread, piles of hazelnuts and walnuts, butter domes carved like pine cones, a stupendous broiled boar with a pear in his mouth and parsley in his hoofs. And pumpkin, pumpkin everywhere: orange pumpkin soup bubbling in hollowed-out gourds, pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, frothy pumpkin milk, pumpkin trifles piled up with whipped cream, pumpkin-stuffed quail, and pumpkin pies of every size cooling on the clean tablecloth.
No one ate at the table or guarded the feast. The Wyverary, the Marid, and the human stared in naked hunger, having had nothing but tire-jerky and axle-whiskey for days. Ell stepped forward but hesitated.
“Surely, it belongs to someone,” he fretted.
“Surely,” agreed Saturday.
“I oughtn’t to have any, anyway,” said September mournfully. “A feast out of nowhere and no one here who might have cooked it or had it cooked for them? That’s Fairy food to be sure.”
A little man stepped deftly out from behind the pig, as if he had been there all along, though surely they had seen no feet under the table. His nose curved down: long, skinny, hooked like a bird’s beak, the kind meant for fishing beetles out of logs. A pair of square spectacles perched on it, showing large, orange, red-rimmed eyes, as if tired from too much reading. He rubbed his little hands together—they each had only two fingers and a thumb, long and hooked like his nose. His skin was all over deep, baked brown, like good bread. Most odd of all, however, were his clothes: He wore a tweed jacket with velvet elbow patches; a caramel-colored waistcoat; toast-brown plaid trousers; and an oak-leaf ascot, fading from green to brown, full of wispy holes, pinned with an acorn button. Over all this, a white laboratory jacket, gone yellow with age, draped over his hunched shoulders.
“Of course it’s Fairy food,” he chuckled. “Where do you think you are?”