“Green!” September cried, and dashed across the copper and jade floor to throw herself into his arms. “I thought you’d got lost forever!”
“A Wind never gets lost. Only distracted,” he answered, and squeezed her tight. “You mad little thing. I leave you alone for one minute and you go and make friends with a wombat!”
CHAPTER III
AN AUDIENCE WITH THE QUEEN
In Which September Has Her Supper, Learns a Number of Rules (One Involving a Kraken), Beds Down in a Wyvern’s Nest, and Receives an Unusual Invitation
“Now,” said the Green Wind, when he and September and the Leopard of Little Breezes had turned thirteen corners, run down six blind hallways that led nowhere, and opened three doors onto scenes they certainly ought not to have witnessed, and come at last to a curtained archway in the viny walls, “there are important rules in governing Fairyland, rules which cannot be broken, jostled, or teased. Oh, I suppose you will break them, being yourself and not another. And in fact, if you want to win the Derby, you should probably get to breaking them sooner rather than later. But I gave the Stoat of Arms the night off on the condition that I would look at you very sternly and shake my finger most emphatically whilst laying it all out. We have always been aces at rules, that girl and I, I told him. While you are mainly aces grumbling. So let us pretend for a moment that you, September, cannot break these rules, even though you have never met anything so small as a leg nor so large as a moon that you could not break in two.”
Two Zinnias guarded the archway, their flowered helmets shading steely, determined eyes.
“Tell me the rules,” said September, laughing as she leaned her head against the Leopard of Little Breezes’s spotted fur. She felt she would never stop laughing now the Green Wind had come back. Nothing could go too terribly awry when he was about.
“Firstly, dinner is served promptly at six o’clock in the evening in the Moonwort Pavilion,” answered the Green Wind, and drew aside the rich curtain onto a vast and lovely room that looked as though it had been waiting all its life for a motley gang of Changelings alongside a Marid, a gramophone, an outsized red reptile, a Queen, and a woven wombat the size of an overambitious elephant. A great cheer went up from all of them when they saw September, who gasped as Saturday and Ell barreled toward her across the bright floor.
Saturday called: “September! I thought we’d never find you in this place!”
“The Scuttler said you’d come,” trumpeted A-Through-L. “Do you know, he’s a Taxicrab! Our Taxicrab! Do you remember Taxicrabs? I don’t suppose there was much work on t
he Moon after we finished with it. Oh! You’ve got your jacket back!”
The place felt like the common room of a particularly unhinged college or a particularly well-behaved madhouse. September supposed it had once been a billiards room. Someone had stacked six colorful feather mattresses on a stately old pool table to make a kind of nest—a nest considerately furnished with river rushes, silk batting, and old bones. Just the thing for a Wyvern’s nap. Beneath a bank of green glass windows stood a marvelous brass soaking tub big enough for ten or twelve dolphins and a few of their friends, filled invitingly to the brim with salty ocean water, cold enough for a Marid who had not seen the sea in ever so long. A round, dark table stood in the center of the room, set for one. One plate, one goblet for water and one for wine, one knife, one fork.
“Dinner is served promptly at six o’clock in the Moonwort Pavilion,” said the Green Wind again. “Though we’ll make an exception, just for tonight.”
Saturday held her tight.
Chessboards and checkerboards and brownie backgammon and pooka poker lay on twisted, tangled tables fashioned out of ivy and willow whips and marigolds and fig flowers. And there lay Blunderbuss, the combat wombat, rolling and snorting in a huge tangled burrow along the east wall. Raspberry vines and old eucalyptus leaves and banksia flowers like orange ice cream cones thatched together over a patch of rich, dark dirt as thick as a Persian carpet.
“Oh! Oh!” cried the scrap-yarn wombat, scrabbling in the dirt with both front paws. “I never thought I’d get to dig again! I thought I’d got so big I’d never again know the joy of hiding underneath the brush and waiting for someone startleable to come wandering by! Don’t bother me, darling dimwits! I washed up to go exploring, but now that’s done, I’m gonna get good and dirty again. How’s Queening? Is it marvelous? Do you like it? Have you spat out any good laws yet?”
Hawthorn the troll grinned at his friend. He was sitting on a pistachio flower stool beside a handsome cinnamon-wood desk, which he knew was meant for him, as it said HUMPHREY! in a fancy cursive hand on the left-hand corner. He touched the edges of a stack of fresh notebooks and the points of nine pencils sticking out of an old-fashioned inkwell. He kept pulling them out and smelling them when he thought no one was looking, the wonderful scent of anything freshly sharpened.
“The Zinnias wouldn’t let us leave once they stowed us here,” explained Tamburlaine, who lay dreamily on her back before a sweetstone fireplace of every color, plus two the Briary had invented just for its own use. It took up the whole west wall of the room. “They’re being very strict with everyone—I suppose they don’t want anybody getting strangled in the hallways with all these old devils creeping about.”
Fire roared cheerfully in the hearth and the silver wood-rack groaned with glittering fresh logs brought all the way from the Glass Forest. Beside the fireplace rested a glorious golden cabinet filled to bursting with records of every size and sort. Scratch hopped and clattered like a newborn horse, using his needle to flip through albums with a thrill only a gramophone can know. Tamburlaine laughed, but not cruelly. Her hair was blooming brighter and thicker than it ever had in the human world, not only plum blossoms now but pomegranate and wild lobelia, too. The Leopard of Little Breezes stretched out beside her to soak up the fire.
“Hey! What’s yours, Tam?” Hawthorn asked suddenly. “The old house put out presents for everyone like it’s making up for a hundred Christmases. But I don’t see any paints or books for you. I didn’t even think.”
“It’s the fireplace,” Tamburlaine said softly, sinking to her walnut-wood knees beside the hearth. “Of course, I would like paints and brushes, but the Briary knows what I am. I’m a Fetch. My heart is a little burning coal. I tried to tell you that once, but I don’t think it came out right. Fire calls to me and I call to fire. It was all I could do not to burn the house down when I was little. Not because I didn’t love my house, but because I’m built to burn, and to love things that burn.” She tore her eyes from the blazing glass logs and laughed a little, wiping her eyes. “You all got the sort of things an auntie would give you, if she were specially rich—but me? The Briary’s telling my secrets. Naughty thing!”
Several pots of paint and long pearl-handled brushes appeared guiltily out of the top of a blackberry-bramble sideboard.
Down below the wide windows, September could see the lights of Pandemonium swirling. She could see Groangyre Tower and the Janglynow Flats and even the movie theatre where she and A-Through-L had eaten lemon ices together. Suddenly, glasses and plates rose up out of the table-for-one in the center of the room like apples bobbing up out of a pail of water: a glass of golden-colored milk, a snifter of bright green liquor with emeralds floating in it, and a stack of magenta cakes with coppery butter melting on top.
The Green Wind quirked one green eyebrow. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to eat breakfast and dinner, as Mr. Crunchcrab had a very busy day being deposed and forgot his flapjacks.”
September smiled at all of them, safe and happy and in one place for once. She looked up at the Green Wind. “Why should I have to eat Charlie’s breakfast? I’m sure it’s gone cold by now.”
“You are the Queen of Fairyland. Everything you do echoes in Fairyland, one way or another. If you do not have the milk of a dun cow, a snifter of liegelime cordial, and a shortstack of magnamillet flapjacks each morning, the Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern will wake from her thousand-year slumber. I only hope we’re not too late!”
September sat down. Pandemonium floated up to her on one side, in smells and in the sounds of a million voices, belonging to a million people she had never met. On the other side crowded round the faces she knew best in all the world, save her own mother and father. Ell seemed very curious about the flapjacks. She sipped the liegelime cordial; she cut into the magnamillet flapjacks. It all tasted like limes and pancakes ought to, and she said so. Certainly nothing tasted like the defeat of a Greatvole.
The Green Wind went on. “And every night for dinner, you must dine upon roast legislamb cutlets, gruffragette salad, and wash it down with hot regicider, or the Wickedest Whale will rise from the deeps and swallow us coast-first. This is the Second Munificent Mystery—as Queen, even your snacks are a spell.”
“Are all the rules about what I’m meant to eat?” asked September between mouthfuls. The moment she finished her milk, the plate before her vanished and another appeared, piled high with glistening blue-black meat, something that looked a bit like eggplant and a bit like eggs, and a wooden mug of steaming cider that smelt of apples and anxious dreams.