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

“I didn’t say that. I said I stood at her side.” Mr. Map blushed. It looked like ink spreading under his skin. His wolfy ears flicked back and forth in embarrassment. “You’re young, little fawn, but surely you catch my meaning. Once, you might have called me ‘Sir’ and no one would have corrected you.”

“Oh!” breathed September.

“Fftthit!” spat Mr. Map. “All done now—and gone, gone to old songs and older wine. History. She’s just another in a list of Queens to be memorized now.”

“My friend the Wyverary … the Wyvern said some people think she’s still alive, down in the cellars, or wherever the Marquess keeps folk…”

Mr. Map glanced at her, and his eyes drooped sadly. He tried a smile, but it did not quite work out.

“I met a lady in prison,” he went on, as though September hadn’t spoken. “A Järlhopp. They keep their memories in a necklace and wear it always and forever. Since her memory is so safe, she never forgets anything she’s seen, and the Järlhopp—her name was Leef, and how furry and sleek were her long ears!—Leef taught me to copy out my own memories onto parchment, to paint a perfect path … a path back to the things I loved, the things I knew when I was young. That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home—someday, somehow. Leef kept hers in that jewel at her throat; I kept mine on paper, endless paper, endless time, until the Marquess had need of me, until she sent me away to the wilds of the Winter Treaty, where nothing happens, where I cannot possibly cause trouble, where no one lives. And where there are no kind Järlhoppes to comfort me, or folk who might need maps to find their way.”

September looked at her feet. At the elegant, glittering shoes. The brandy warmed her all over. “I … I need to find my way,” she said.

“I know, little cub. And I’m telling you your way. The way to the bottom of the world, to the Lonely Gaol, where the lions take all the souls the Marquess hates.” Mr. Map leaned forward, licked his pen until it was full of ink, and wedged a jeweler’s glass into his eye so that he could brush in tiny details on the little island map. “You see, September, Fairyland is an island, and the sea that borders it only flows one way. It has always been so, and must always be. The sea cannot be changed in its course. If the Gaol were but offshore from us here in this land, you could not get there by sailing straight. The current does not move that way. You can only reach it by circumnavigating Fairyland entirely, and that is not a small task.”

“You know my name.”

“I know quite a number of things, you’ll find.”

“But surely, there is some place from which it is a short distance! If one could only get on the right side of it.”

“Surely. But I will not take you there.”

“Why ever not?”

Mr. Map looked grieved again. “Ffitthit,” he said softly. “We all have our masters.”

September clenched her fists. She could not bear to think of her friends in a wet, dreary prison. “It’s not fair! I could have gotten her this wretched thing in seven days! She didn’t even give me a chance!”

“September, my calf, my chick, seven days were never seven. They were three, or eight, or one, or whatever she wished them to be. If she wants you at the Lonely Gaol, she has a reason, and you could never have gone anywhere else. And I suspect”—he looked at the copper wrench, twisting his mustache in one great hand—“that she has devised some work for you to do there, with your fell blade. Hello, old friend,” he greeted it, “how strange for us to meet again, like this, with the snow blowing so outside.”

“You know my … my wrench?”

“Of course I know it. It was not a wrench when we were last acquainted, but one’s friends may change clothes and still one knows them.”

“Why does she need me to go all the way to her horrid old Gaol? I have the sword! The lions could have taken it and left us alone!”

“September, these things have their rhythms, their ways. Once the sword is taken up, none but the hand that won it can brandish it true. She cannot touch the sword, not for all the power in both her hands. But you can. And both your hands called it forth, gave it shape, gave it life.”

“I’m really very tired, Mr. Map. Ever so much more tired than I thought I could be.”

Mr. Map signed his parchment with a flourish.

“Ffitthit, sweet kitten. So it always goes.”

September turned to go. Her feet felt heavy. She turned the knob of the great door and listened to the lock whir in the woods. When she opened it, no winter wood glittered outside, but a long shore and a bright sea. Gillybirds cried overhead, wrestling over bits of fish. The tide flowed out foamily from a silver beach, the very opposite from the one she had arrived on. Here, the sand was all manner of silver coins and crowns and sceptres and bars, filigreed diadems and long necklaces set with pearls, and chandeliers glittering with glass. The violet-green sea—the Perverse and Perilous Sea, she reminded herself—beat huge waves against the strand.

“What is a map,” said Mr. Map, “but a thing that gets you where you’re going?”

“The sword,” September whispered, her eyes all full of the sea. “Who had it before me?”

“I think you know. My Lady Mallow kept it.”

“And what was it, when she had it?”

Mr. Map cocked his head to one side. He drank off the last of his hot brandy.

“A needle,” he said softly.