The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (Fairyland 5)

Susan Jane looked at her sister as though she had never met the woman before. “Why you?”

Margaret smiled softly. A smile full of pride that didn’t want to seem proud. “I did Fairyland a favor once. I was rewarded.”

Aunt Margaret touched the ring on her right hand. It was an interlocking silver puzzle ring she’d brought back from Turkey when September was only little. It had four rings with ridges and engravings and patterns on them. If you turned and twisted them just right, they snapped together to become one single, complete ring.

“I promised I would believe you. I promised I would believe you.” Susan Jane said it a few more times, so that it would become true.

“Do you want to go to Fairyland, Susie? I should have asked you before, I know. Sisters oughtn’t keep secrets. Only it was such a good secret.”

“Oh yes,” breathed September’s mother.

CHAPTER V

THE CANTANKEROUS DERBY

In Which the Race Begins

Before anything else can happen, I must tell you a few things about Fairyland races. Fairylanders are simply mad for games and contests and races of all sorts, and thus, everyone knows the rules and nobody will bother much explaining them to one another. But I am rather kinder than most sportsmen and all referees, so I shall bring you up to speed while the early Thursday morning shadows and a few centaurs gather together all the things a healthy, happy race needs to grow up thrilling and swift.

Have you ever been to a racetrack? In the world where you and I keep our galoshes, they are very odd places. Someone fires a gun and a number of horses or cars or people run as fast as they can in a great long circle, and they go round and round and round and everyone cheers and cheers until another somebody waves a specially colored flag, and then whichever speedster barrels past the flag first wins. Folk dress in all manner of finery and wonderful hats to go

and watch the races, but only if it’s horses doing the barreling that day. This, at least, is understandable, for horses, in secret, love hats more than any other creature. It is a horse’s tragedy that they can never properly wear one.

To my mind, Fairyland races are much more sensible. The racetrack is the size of the world. Racers may barrel anywhere on any steed—over the Candelabra Desert or the Tattersall Tundra, across the Perverse and Perilous Sea, through the Worsted Wood, to the tops of the Pickapart Mountains or the Peppercorn Pyramids, down to the bottom of the Obstreperous Ocean where the Octopus Assassins lie in wait, even into Fairyland-Below or up to the Moon. And instead of racing a horse against a horse or a car against a car or a lady against a lady, Fairyland races ladies against chariots, centaurs against cheetahs, carriages against flying carpets, phoenixes against Dodos. You see, Fairyland long ago determined that Yetis were faster than anyone else and lost interest in races where the speediest always won. Now the race goes to the cleverest, the luckiest, the most reckless, and the most wanton. Nothing is banned, everything is allowed, and anyone with a crumb of wisdom to spare stays indoors until it is all over.

But wisdom is for owls and Oxford professors! Let us go to the races! You may wear your finest or your foulest, overalls or opulence. I believe I shall wear a hat, for I look splendid in them, but if they make your forehead itch, that’s perfectly all right. Picnicking is certainly allowed and I should never let you go hungry. Folk sit anywhere they please to sip their lemonades and catch a glimpse of the race as it goes by. Perhaps we will snag a seat in the Tulipbulb Amphitheatres of the Springtime Parish, or the beechwood bleachers of the Autumn Provinces. Perhaps we might gather with the gargoyles on the rooftops of Pandemonium, lay out a nice comfy lawn chair on the banks of the Barleybroom, or pitch a tent under a staircase in Asphodel. This is the first way in which Fairylanders love to gamble on a race. The racetrack covers every part of Fairyland, and so do the grandstands. Everyone hopes they have staked a claim on the very patch of glowerwheat on which something exciting will happen, but who can say? Where you and I keep our wallets, there is only one way to gamble on a race. Who shall win? Who shall lose? Give the nice man your money, and maybe you’ll get it back, but probably you won’t, because most things in any world are tricks, whether they are horse races, elections, or books about faraway and unrealistic places. But in Fairyland, gambling is an ancient and revered art. Fairy bookmakers won’t take gold or silver at all. They prefer something more personal.

Let us spread out a blanket at the starting line in Pandemonium. I’ve brought a great orange parasol so we don’t get sunburnt, and plenty of fizzy drinks and sandwiches for all. You see, every race begins in Pandemonium. Once, the ifrits tried to start a Firebreak (which is something like a marathon, if all of the runners could fly, travel back and forth in time, and were on fire) in their home of Flegethon City. All the runners stood ablaze at the starting line on Fervor Street, their volcano-batons in hand—but the city of Pandemonium moves according to the needs of narrative. It cannot stay in one place when it has caught the scent of a story. Just as the Firebreak was set to begin, Pandemonium arrived, rudely jostling Flegethon City right out of its pleasant spot on the shores of Braisebottom Lake to get a better seat.

All races begin in Pandemonium, even if they do not want to, for Pandemonium quite refuses to miss one single second of excitement.

Come with me. We shall get to the race grounds first, before even the maddest racing fan has thought to put the kettle on and start looking for her lucky socks. We shall kick off our shoes and stretch out our legs on the outskirts of the city, on Gingham Green, right on the lawns of all the rich and famous—they can’t stop us. Narrators may go where they please. We’ve got an excellent view of the Great Foulard, the winding, twisting, curlicuing avenue that connects every street and avenue and boulevard and humble chiffon alley in Pandemonium. Just past the Ghostloom Gate, the Great Foulard dives into the Barleybroom and comes up on the other bank clean and sparkling and called Gadabout Road instead. But from where we sit, we can see everything: the gownstone houses of Herringbone Heights, the glittering Angora Aqueduct, the silk balloon of Groangyre Tower. We can smell the bakeries of Calico Common as they heap pastries and bread and cakes and pies onto carts and wheel their wares into the Plaited Plaza, where they will sell every last cheese pastry and luckfig tart and wish they had baked more. And we can hear folk less industrious than we starting to arrive at the Plaza, yawning, shaking the dew off their wings, taking their morning constitutionals: changing into six or seven animals just to get the blood going. In the center of the Plaited Plaza, a fountain bubbles away happily in blue marble, silver, and watered silk. The great splashing statues depict Good Queen Mallow piercing the heart of Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth with her trusty needle while her sensible knit scarf flutters behind her. Already, a family of dryads have gathered to sit on the fountain’s rim, kicking their cedar-bark legs into the air. They wave us over—plenty of room for all. But we’ve already snatched up the best spot for ourselves. From a narrator’s picnic blanket, there’s nothing you can’t see.

* * *

The day of the Cantankerous Derby woke up with gold dust in its eyes and three lumps of sunshine in its tea. Garlands of lavender and rowan branches and great bright paper lanterns hung from the noses of all the gargoyles peering down into the Plaited Plaza. The Stoat of Arms paced back and forth nervously, reciting the rules of the race to itself and hoping it had not forgotten anything important, like its racing silks or the finish line. Bakers, spectators, souvenir sellers and bookmakers crowded in from the side alleys and streets and the Great Foulard as it emptied its morning traffic out onto the flame-colored patchwork cobbles.

September, Saturday, and A-Through-L arrived first. September had felt that it might look tawdry if the Queen came dawdling in when everyone else already had their shoes tied and their various engines purring. She’d set the moon in her bedchamber to wake her long before dawn and crept out of the Briary before even the Zinnias had stopped snoring. Ell soared up into the air and gave a few mighty flaps of his scarlet wings the way a runner stretches on the grass by the racetrack. She wore her Watchful Dress and her emerald smoking jacket as though they were ermine and veils of gold. Saturday wore his best sturgeon-skin trousers and a little blue-white stone on a lash of leather round his neck. September had asked many times why he wore that funny old opal, but he would never say. The Marid’s blue chest and all his marvelous tattoos shone darkly in the sun. Saturday and September, having become rather practical on the subject of adventuring over the last many years, filled a small suitcase with various trifles and pies and samosas and profiteroles from the carts. A pieman with round, friendly cheeks and round, friendly serpents where her hair ought to be insisted on slipping in a little almond-wood barrel of cider.

“The Queen shouldn’t thirst while I’m on my fourth cup,” crowed the pieman.

Next came the Once and Future Club, sauntering, swaggering, and staggering, for few of them had anything polite to say to a good night’s sleep. Each of them came well equipped for racing: Madame Tanaquill led the way, riding a magnificent horse with eight legs, a mane of rainbow light, and two vicious, glowing red coals where a usual horse’s kind dark eyes would be. Pinecrack followed by himself, as he felt quite capable of achieving top moose-speeds on his own four legs. The Knight Quotidian drove a sensible four-wing family dragon. Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, flew an enormous Roc named Wenceslas down from the Herringbone Heights into the Plaited Plaza. A Roc is a great enormous carnivorous bird, bigger than a humpback whale and the color of the sun. Now, you might think a Roc flies faster than a raven, and that was why Hushnow chose one for his mount. But it is not so—Rocs are quite slow as fliers go, somewhere between a bit of dandelion fluff and a paper airplane of middling quality. Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, was really and truly fabulously demented, much more demented than ancient, and he thought the Roc was a wonderful plan.

Cutty Soames strutted in in a captain’s tricorn hat, seven gold earrings in each ear, and the polished wooden wheel of his ship, the H.M.S. Chimbley’s Revenge. She waited at anchor on the Barleybroom docks. The Headmistress sat in a prim chair perched atop a magnificent brass school bell that bounced up and down on its clapper. She whacked her bell smartly with a riding crop. It whinnied, a little fearful trill of a ring. Charlie Crunchcrab rode in on a sea-goat with frightful horns like ships’ anchors. He glared furiously at September and refused to speak to her. More came, thick and fast, on horses and gryphons and giant platypi, in carriages that blinked out in one place and reappeared in another, in complicated machines September did not think anyone could get out of without a team of engineers or possibly doctors. And then came the heavyweights, riding nothing because nothing could carry them: Thrum, the Rex Tyrannosaur, the First Stone, and Goldmouth the Clurichaun, his tattoos gleaming black in the sun, his magenta eyes burning with fury that he should have to lower himself to a footrace with the rest of them.

A sharp pain snaked up through September’s right foot. She lifted her shoe; a tiny creature glared up at her with hatred, no bigger than a stone in a ring. She sat atop a hazelnut carriage roofed in grasshopper wings, whose wheel-spokes were long, slender spiders’ legs. Whatever drew the carriage was so small September could not see them at all—the harnesses floated free, as thin as cobwebs, strung between empty collars made of bright, pale moonbeams. The carriage-driver was a lady caught halfway between beautiful and terrifying—her face so gaunt, her hair so wild, and her eyes so huge that she looked like an electrified dragonfly who had once asked to be made into a human girl for Christmas and almost, almost gotten her wish. She snapped a whip made of cricket’s bone; its filmy lash cracked against nothing, yet the hazelnut flew forward. It barreled toward Madame Tanaquill, who was feeding her horse a lump of fire and making what she considered an extremely fine joke to Curdleblood, the Dastard of Darkness, who simply refused to understand it. He forced a smile and patted his mount, which appeared to be a long streak of the color black and nothing more. But when Tanaquill saw the little nut-coach and its fierce-faced driver, she went quite pale. Her hand fluttered to her iron necklace and the welt beneath it. Tears filled her eyes. And the Prime Minister of all of Fairyland dropped to one knee. She bowed her head, and then covered her face with her hands, letting the other knee fall to the ground, until she was simply crying on her knees like a little child.

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sp; “Queen Mab,” she whispered.

September suddenly felt very self-conscious, standing on her own two feet. She knew that she oughtn’t bow herself, being Queen, at least for the next little while. But she felt terribly cold and uncertain to see Madame Tanaquill shiver as she extended her long finger for Queen Mab to whip mercilessly. The Prime Minister shuddered; September shuddered herself.

She should have thought to bring a steed. Surely, the Briary had heaps of them. But Ell and Saturday had always been everything she needed. She could hardly run like Pinecrack or whip a bell into fighting shape. Ell could fly, but so could half the other racers—and it’s very hard to balance on a Wyverary’s back when he dashes through the clouds. But September needn’t have worried. I would never abandon her so. I have been waiting for ages and ages to give her my coronation present—and here it comes, huff-puffing across the patchwork cobblestones with a burlap sack that reads AROOSTOOK POTATO COMPANY over its spare wheel.

Aroostook the Model A Ford sped blithely toward September and Saturday, almost preening in the sunshine. Mr. Albert would never have recognized his old farm car now—Aroostook’s windows had all turned to stained glass, its wheel to a hard, bright green sunflower, its dash to tangerine scrimshaw, its levers to thin golden arms ending in cuff links and balled fists, its squeeze horn to a cobalt-and-white-striped phonograph bell. Since September had seen it last, the Model A had become even wilder. Not a trace of its old greenish-black paint remained. Now Aroostook’s doors and wheel wells were covered in brilliant feathers and striped pelts. Its wheels had outgrown the need for tires and wrapped themselves up in storm clouds—all except for the spare, which, beneath the old burlap sack, was a long, thick cat’s tail, curled up around itself in satisfaction.

September and Saturday ran to their old friend, patting its engine, asking after its gas tank, exclaiming over its new body. Both tried to hug Aroostook, but it did not come out quite right, for you cannot get your arms around a windshield or a fender, and besides, all Fords are somewhat embarrassed by public displays of affection.