Reluctantly, September and Saturday laid out their supper under the hundred million stars of Meridian. They congratulated themselves on their practical planning as they set out the plates, the salt and pepper, the bowls and the cups. They’d packed a blanket as well, so that nothing got damp or dirty. For A-Through-L they had a basket of good bitter radishes and a number of lemons, alongside a cold joint of mutton swiped from the Briary stores. Saturday helped himself to a luckfig bun and a parrot pie from the Plaited Plaza carts. September dug through their satchels until she came up with some oranges, arugula, and cinnamon biscuits for Blunderbuss, who also helped herself to most of the clover and nodding little bluebells growing round their picnic blanket.
But for the Queen of Fairyland, for the Engineer, there was only roast legislamb cutlets, gruffragette salad, and somewhat lukewarm regicider. In the early hours before the Derby began, September had filled a hamper with her royal suppers and breakfasts, each wrapped carefully in wax paper or poured into small, sturdy flagons that would not leak. She still wore the crown—she hardly even felt it anymore. But as long as it stayed on her head, she had to make certain the Greatvole and the Wickedest Whale kept dreaming away and not doing whatever dreadful things they waited so eagerly to accomplish. If those meals had ever tasted nice, they certainly did not once they’d gone cold and traveled a thousand miles by Library Catalogue. September sighed and chewed on her rather tough, rubbery cutlets.
“Is your thumb all right, Saturday?” September did not want him to see her worry, for when she was afraid, he got afraid, which made her more afraid still, until they both had to go and sit down in the sun for a while so they did not egg each other on so much.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” the Marid said, and neither did he show a wick of worry on his face. “It doesn’t hurt. It was only one bear, after all. I expect I’ll suffer no worse than a stray exclamation point dangling off my name. Saturday! Sounds rather bombastic, doesn’t it?” But it did hurt. It burned in the dark.
Blunderbuss rolled one of her oranges between her paws playfully, wriggling her haunches. She lobbed it over to Ell, who nudged it back bashfully. “So Fairyland has a broken heart. Poor poppet. But what does that mean for us? Is the Heart in pieces, then? Off crying in different corners, playing sad saxophone music and writing poems? Two pieces? More?”
September sipped her regicider and made a face. It tasted thin and sour. “I think it might mean just that, Blunderbuss. If it means anything.”
Saturday sat up, rubbing his bare blue arms with his hands. “But there has to be a solution—there has to be a Heart to find. Ajax Oddson would never cheat. I’ll believe trickery of anything in Fairyland, but Oddson wouldn’t put his hand in if there wasn’t a way to win. And I had an idea, while I was reading that story in the Library. An idea about where to go next. Only—” The Marid’s shoulders slumped in the starry shadows. The Wolf’s Egg rose over his beautiful shoulders. “Only it’s a little bit selfish. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just want to go home. I can’t tell if I’m on to something or I’m just homesick. We haven’t got much time for mistakes.”
“Home?” asked Ell.
“In the story, one of Fairyland’s friends was the Sea. The Moon danced with the Sea and whispered in her ear, remember? And I thought perhaps … perhaps the Sea knows where Fairyland’s hid her broken heart. Perhaps Fairyland hid her heart down there. Because you can hide anything under the ocean. The Sea knows more secrets than any of us will keep if we lived to be as old as longing. And the Sea’s mysteries aren’t just words or books or locks of hair tied with a ribbon. They’re a place. Mumkeep Reef, down deep in the dark blue barrens of the Obstreperous Ocean. Whenever the Sea finds something she likes, in a pirate ship or a hurricane or a nereid’s hideaway, she makes off with it immediately and stashes it in Mumkeep Reef. I’ve never spoken of it to a … a dryhair. That’s what we call people who don’t have the good sense to live in the ocean. Or the good gills. Mumkeep Reef is the kind of secret that secrets hope to be when they grow up. You can’t ever tell anyone I told you. Even if we don’t give it another thought between us. You can’t even say the word Mumkeep to a dog.”
“We would never!” cried Ell, quite offended at the idea.
“When I was a child, my mother took me to see it. She let me stay and play there for days and days. In the turtleshell vaults and the captains’ chests and the safes with the hexacoral locks. The crabs and the starfish and the shipwrecks and the leviathans whispered with me until I fell asleep and my mother carried me home. What I mean to say is, we could go there. I could take you there. It’s the best place to keep a secret. Meridian is not so far from the ocean. I can hear it. I can smell it. The waves are laughing. But I could be wrong! I could be wrong and we could end up so far behind and the Marquess probably has the Heart by now anyway. I don’t want to be wrong. Not when it’s this important.”
September watched Saturday talk. She loved to watch him talk—the way his eyebrows moved when he meant something sincerely, the way his mouth twitched when he knew something he wouldn’t say, the way he tugged on his topknot when he felt too shy to interrupt but so badly wanted to interrupt that he felt his thoughts coming out of the top of his head. Once, he could hardly get through a sentence without apologizing for it. But you can’t stay bashful once you’ve joined the circus, and he’d learned his voice on the high trapeze.
Still, it was easy to forget that Saturday was not simply a human boy with blue skin. That he had never seen a blackboard or a snowplow or an office building, just as she had never seen a shipwreck or a leviathan or a reef. He was far stranger even than Ell or Blunderbuss. For Marids lived in every direction at once, like the currents and eddies of the sea. A Marid might meet his future or his past walking down any street on any morning, whether or not he had had his coffee yet. They had met his older self on the Moon once, and September had felt as though she might shake apart at the sight of Saturday standing beside himself as though nothing at all could be the matter. They were almost the same age, but even when she had been the Spinster, Saturday had always seemed so much older and so much younger than she.
“Your home is near Meridian?” she said softly.
“Well, if you mean the place where I was born, no. Not even a little. Do you know when we got closest? It’s funny. When the Marquess locked Ell and me into the Lonely Gaol, I could hear the seals barking in my old neighborhood. But look—can’t you see? The silver light where the land meets the sky. That’s the ocean. It’s only a few miles. And if we can get to the shore without too much trouble, I can summon a Bathysphere in two clicks of a dolphin’s tongue. But if I’m wrong, it could cost you the Derby and you’ll never be Queen and you’ll vanish again, like all the li
ghts going off.”
Saturday put his blue hand over his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say all that. But he wasn’t sorry he had. So he smiled, to show he was glad of having told the truth.
“I’m just sure I’m wrong all the time,” September said softly, and she put her hand on his knee. “But I always do it anyway. It’s a good plan.”
Death herself could not say no when Saturday smiled.
* * *
Meridian lies in the warm, wafty lands below the Tropic of Scorpio. Winter snow only comes once every five years, and when it visits, you cannot imagine a more cheerful, polite guest. It brings gifts of ice and Christmas pudding, tidies up after itself without having to be asked, and never overstays its welcome. The moment anyone begins bellyaching about shoveling the walk, Winter has already fetched its hat and coat from the rack in the hall. So the beach that Saturday sought was not a stony, gray, and frozen bluff, though that would have been very romantic in a certain sort of way. They flew through the night, rather than lose time walking over the miles of berry brambles, mango forests, and chartreuse sand dunes. September clung to Ell’s back while Saturday gripped Blunderbuss’s woolly flanks with his knees, and everyone felt very clear on the point that none of this made anyone a steed, it just made them sensible with their resources and admirably efficient people.
The morning sea rolled in, blue and violet with little sharp eddies of pink and green sizzling along through the breakers. Waves crashed and rippled onto a beach that had only once felt cold, in a nightmare when it was young. Coconut trees bent low with fruit. Thirsthorn thickets crowned high dunes like unkempt golden hair, their fruit sloshing with fresh water. Crystal floatberry bushes grew as close as they could to the surf. The first floatberries grew in the rich cumulus fields of Cloud Cuckoo Land, carefully tended by clockwork falcons. The rest of them are always trying to get back home, twisting and curling drifting up into the air, joyfully drinking up the sea mist. The black sand beneath September’s and Saturday’s toes crumbled so soft and fine it felt like walking on top of a chocolate cake. September could not help reaching down and running her fingers through it.
Saturday bolted into the waves, leaping up in the air, spinning round twice, and plunging into the foam and the tide. He stayed down for ages and ages, far longer than September could, even on her best day at her best swim meet. When he finally came up again, he looked quite different. September realized that in all the time she had known the Marid, she had never once seen him at ease. Not really. Now that he had his ocean around him, every tiny part of him relaxed. He matched the ocean world like one shining button in an endless, flowing blue coat.
“Watch this!” Saturday grinned. He crouched down, balancing on the pads of his bare blue feet. He made a little coaxing, shushing, trilling noise in the back of his throat. “Come on, then,” he said gently, sweetly, as though calling a kitten stuck up in a tree.
The Marid stroked the sand softly—and seashells sprang up under his fingers. Hot-pink scallop shells shone wetly against the jet-black sand. Turquoise cockleshells rose up, too, and lemony-bright hermit crab shells, spiny tangerine conches, little spiraling brindled snail shells, spotted cowrie shells, and big bronze geoduck shells. (A geoduck is a terrifyingly large and opinionated clam that lives both in Fairyland and, curiously, in the part of the world where your intrepid narrator was a child.) Saturday clapped his hands, pleased with himself, for he had felt just the teensiest bit uncertain that it would work. He hadn’t done it in so long.
Saturday pressed his fingertips against the shells like the keys of a very odd piano. His hands flew over them, tapping in some sort of order that September could not guess at. Each shell yelped when he touched it, but their yelps sounded like whale songs and buoy bells bonging away together. When he finished, the waves began to churn and froth and bubble. Something glassy broke the surface, and kept on breaking until it broke free.
“What did I tell you? A Bathysphere, scrubbed up and ready, just for us.”
It was a bathtub.
A burly, walloping bathtub, bronze and deep and wide, with fierce claw feet. The back of the thing rose high up so that you could rest against it, and a curving glass dome closed in the Bathysphere so that dryhairs like September could ride inside and not drown.
“We won’t fit in there,” Blunderbuss said doubtfully. “And anyway I’m made of wool. If I go swimming, I’ll shrink. And I like being big! I’ve gotten used to it already because it is the best and I am also the best so I ought to be big.”