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

With a singing snap, a silver arrow pierced Gleam’s papery skin, and she dropped to the floor in mid-sentence. September whirled in the saddle. The Marquess tucked her iceleaf bow behind her back, where it disappeared like vapor, the thorny branch of it still quivering slightly as it dissolved.

“Old folk are so terribly annoying, don’t you agree? Always trying to spoil our fun with their incessant babbling about bygone days!”

Before September could protest, Iago leapt into the air, soaring up into the towers of the Lonely Gaol, leaving the ruin of a paper lantern behind them.

A pale-green hand crept out of the top of the lantern, covered with blood. After a while, it was still.

Everywhere she looked, September was surrounded by clocks. In a tiny room at the top of a bulbous tower, the Marquess, Iago, and September crowded in, nearly squeezed out by the volume of clocks: grandfather clocks and bedside alarm clocks and dear little Swiss cuckoo clocks with golden birds in them, pocket watches and pendulum clocks and water clocks and sundials. The ticking went on and on, like heartbeats. Under each clock was a little brass plaque, and on each plaque was a name. September did not recognize any of them.

“This is a very secret place, September. And a very sad one. Each of these clocks belongs to a child who has come to Fairyland. When it chimes midnight, the child is sent home—all in a huff, whether she asked to go or not! Some clocks run fast, so fast a boy might dwell in Fairyland for no more than an hour. He wakes up, and what a lovely dream he had! Some run slow, and a girl might spend her whole life in Fairyland, years upon years, until she is snapped horribly back home to mourn her loss for the rest of her days. You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run—and always faster than you think.”

The Marquess leaned forward, her hair shining redder than any apple. She smoothed th

e dust from a plaque under a particular clock: a milky pink-gold one, cut out of a whole, enormous pearl. Its hands stood golden and motionless at ten minutes to midnight.

The plaque beneath the clock read, SEPTEMBER.

“You see?” crooned the Marquess. “You have so little time left. Just enough to fly down to the seaside with Iago and do as I ask. Or else you will be snatched back, and your friends stuck here with me. I promise, I will take out my frustration upon them. Don’t be stubborn! Just a little turn of your Wrench, and all will be well. You can eat lemon ices and ride highwheels to your heart’s content, and your boys safe beside you.”

September touched the face of the pearly clock. She picked it up, marveling at it. She was so tired. All she wanted was to sleep, and wake up to steaming cocoa, then sleep again. If Saturday and Ell were safe, she could sleep. She tried not to think about Gleam. It would be wonderful, really, to live in Fairyland forever. Isn’t that what anyone would wish for? Isn’t that what she herself had wished for, so often? To fly and leap and know magic and eat Gagana’s Eggs and meet Fairies? September closed her eyes: She saw her mother there, on the backs of her eyelids. Crying on the edge of her bed. Because September had not left a note. Had not even waved good-bye.

When she opened them again, her eyes fell on the little brass plaque: SEPTEMBER. Furtively, so that the Marquess might miss her doing it, she glanced at the other plaques. They said things like, GREGORY ANTONIO BELLANCA and HARRIET MARIE SEAGRAVES and DIANA PENELOPE KINCAID. But hers just said, SEPTEMBER. And didn’t it look a little tacked on? Was there—possibly—just the shadow of something else behind it? September bent her head and picked at the bottom corner of the plaque with her thumb.

“What are you doing?” the Marquess said sharply.

September ignored her. The plaque gave a little—she pried it out with her fingernails. It clattered to the floor. Behind it was a much older plaque, gone green with verdigris. It read,

MAUD ELIZABETH SMYTHE.

“True names,” said September wonderingly. “These are all true names. Like, when your parents call you to dinner and you don’t come, and they call again but you still don’t come, and they call you by all your names together, and then, of course, you have to come, and right quick. Because true names have power, like Lye said. But I never told anyone my true name. The Green Wind told me not to. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I do now.” September looked up. Iago watched her with his round, calm eyes. He flicked his gaze toward the Marquess, and all of the sudden September knew; she knew it, though she could not say, not exactly, how she could possibly have known. “This is your clock!” she cried, brandishing it. “And it’s stopped!”

The Marquess’s hair went black with rage. Her face flushed and Iago growled under his breath. But finally, she gave out a long sigh and simply took off her hat. She lay it gently on the gable of a cuckoo clock. She ran her hands through her hair—it faded to a plain, dull blond. She ran her hands over her dress—it became a gray farmer’s daughter’s dress with old yellow lace at the collar.

“I dreamed about you!” cried September.

“We are alike, I said. It would break your heart, September, how alike we are. This is what I looked like when I was twelve and lived on my father’s farm. We grew more tomatoes than any other farm in Ontario. Just acres of them. But we weren’t rich. My father drank most anything we earned. My mother was a seamstress—she took in all the mending from the neighbors. She died when I was eight, and I took up the mending after that, so that I could eat some and have a Sunday dress after the harvest was in and the whiskey house closed down. I always smelled like tomatoes. And then one day, when I couldn’t bear the mules and the chores and the horrid, horrid tomatoes any longer, I hid in the attic until my father gave up looking for me and went to work the fields with his hands. I had a splendid day up there, rooting around among all the old things my mother had left behind, and her mother before that. Of course, you can imagine what happened. There was an old armoire, covered in a drop cloth. I pulled down the cloth, and when I opened the door of the armoire, it was so deep and dark in there that I couldn’t see a thing. So I climbed inside. And the door closed so fast behind me. And I kept walking, until somehow the sun was shining again and I was standing in a field of the greenest grass and the prettiest red flowers you ever saw. And right there in front of me was a Leopard, as big as life.” The Marquess’s eyes filled with tears. “I Stumbled, September, into Fairyland. I didn’t know what I’d done, only that it was so beautiful, and the wind was so sweet, and there were no tomatoes anywhere. I certainly didn’t know I had a clock. I had such adventures, oh, so many! I grew up a bit and was so glad to grow up a bit and not be small and gray any longer. I learned such things—I met a young sorcerer with funny old wolf ears, and he let me read all of his books. Can you imagine? A farmer’s daughter, being allowed to sit and read all day with no one to bother her? I thought I would die with the pleasure of it. And every day, the sorcerer would ask my name, but I was ashamed to tell him. Maud is so ugly and plain, and everyone here was named something marvelous. But one day, we were working the garden. The sorcerer was showing me how to harvest a particular root to make a kind of candy that might—if you boiled it just right—turn your hair all manner of colors.” The Marquess looked up at September, tears streaking her face. She spread out her hands, trembling. “I took his hand in mine, and I said, ‘You can call me Mallow.’”

September’s mouth dropped open.

“The days went by like dreams, September. Before I knew it, I had a sword and I’d faced down King Goldmouth and his army of clouds, and I was Queen. I ruled long and well and wisely. Anyone will tell you. I married my sorcerer. We were happy. Fairyland prospered, and I could hardly remember what a tomato was anymore. My Leopard played at my side. I discovered, by and by, that I was with child. I had not told my sorcerer yet. I was enjoying my secret, lying on the broad lawn outside my palace and drifting off into sleep, my head propped up on my Leopard’s flank.

“I think, well, when I remember it now, I think I can remember the tick. The last tick of my clock. With one awful ticking, I was swept out of Fairyland as though I had never been there. I woke up in my father’s house, curled up inside the armoire, as though no time at all had passed. No Leopard. No sorcerer. No child. I was twelve again and hungry, and my father was just getting home from his day’s work. He bellowed up to me, his voice thick with liquor. But oh, how I remembered it all! I remembered it fiercely, my whole life in Fairyland, taken away in an instant! Because a clock ran out! September, surely, you can feel in your bones the unfairness of it! The loss! I screamed in the armoire. I kicked the wooden walls in, trying to get back. I cried as though I were dying. My father found me and gave me a good thrashing for sneaking around where I oughtn’t. I tasted blood in my mouth.”

The Marquess sank to her knees. Iago pressed his silky black head against her cheek.

“How … how did you get back?” September said softly.

“I clawed my way back, September. I would have broken the world open to crawl back in. I searched every scrap of furniture in that attic for another way. But the armoire was just an armoire, and the closet just a closet, and the jewelry box just a jewelry box. I read newspapers ravenously, looking for missing children, begging my father to take me to the places where they’d vanished. He refused. He got a new wife, and she sent me away to school, to be rid of me. I didn’t care—I was glad to be rid of them! My new school was old and creaky, with dusty corners and drafty halls. Just the sort of place that might conceal a door to Fairyland in a story. And one morning, just walking to geometry class, I took one step on those dirty cobblestones and took the next one in a broad golden field full of glowerwheat. It was a hard passage—blood shot out of my nose, and I think I probably fainted. We aren’t meant to come that way, so harshly. But it was the only way.”

“What was?” September was almost afraid to know.

“The clock, September. The

clock is all. It is the only arbiter. What I needed was a man on the inside. Someone in Fairyland, a friend. Not a husband or a Leopard. Someone whose loyalty and love for me was greater than any law, any boundary, stronger than blood or reason or cat or man. Someone I had made with my own hands, who loved only me, who could not bear to be parted from me.”

“Lye!”

“Yes, Lye, my poor golem. She risked her whole being to come here, where the water is relentless and wore so much of her away. She battled the guards, who in those days were bear-wights, and gained entrance to this little room. She set my clock going backward and pulled me back into this world by the scruff of my neck. I didn’t know that then. It was only later, when I came here myself, that I discovered her tracks. Standing in her soapy footprints, I stopped my clock, so that it could never snatch me back out of my own life again. I was a child once more, but I was home. Time is a mystery here. Only a year back home, and everyone I knew here in my life as Mallow had grown old or died. No one remembered what I looked like as a child. I told them I’d killed her. I tore down her banners and broke her throne. And so I had my revenge.”