Our September has learned a thing or two while we’ve been away.
“You’re here” the King cried when he saw them all. “I knew you wouldn’t forget your old Charlie, who helped you across the water when you were just a little thing.”
September shook her head. A-Through-L growled in his throat, and if there was to be a good growling, Blunderbuss would not be left out. Their rumblings harmonized nicely. “Is that all you can think about, Charlie?” the Spinster sighed. “When Fairyland is shaking itself apart? You’re King! Can’t you feel it in your kneecaps?”
“I’m six hundred years old, I feel everything in my kneecaps!”
“A King feels thermo-narrative mass disturbances in his kneecaps,” snapped Saturday. “We have a whole diagram in the Rum Cellar that shows where a monarch feels the twitches and bellyaches of Fairyland. Maybe you ought to take a look sometime!”
September dragged the King of the Fairies out of the glass dice-hand. He brushed himself off, sheepishly, a child who knows he’s broken a cup and there’s a lecture coming he can’t get out of. “The Gears of the World are coming apart! And all you can think about is quitting your job and settling into some cozy hole in the Summer Country. It took me months, months, but I’ve finally figured it out. It’s all mass. Two Changelings came back, and the mass of Fairyland is greater than the mass of the human world. It’s wobbling. And if you listened to your kneecaps instead of your own moaning, you’d know that!”
“So we’ll send them back,” groused the King.
“No!” cried Hawthorn and Tamburlaine together. “We only just got here. This is where we belong. It’s not fair,” Hawthorn finished for the both of them.
“You can’t make us,” Blunderbuss whispered, though her whisper wasn’t soft or small anymore. “I’m not supposed to live in an Apartment #7. I’m supposed to run and bite and fly. You can’t make me be a pillow anymore. I’m bigger than you. I don’t have to do what you say.”
Scratch spun his crank, warbling out:
Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack
I don’t care if we ever get back!
“Nothing’s fair,” September said softly.
“I won’t do it,” the troll insisted. “I’ll run, I’ll fight, I’ll bite, but I won’t go back.”
Blunderbuss blinked back wombat-tears. The Wyverary lifted her woolly chin with his long red tail.
“Me neither,” said Tamburlaine softly.
A great Quiet filled the air. Hawthorn and Tamburlaine would never have thought a Quiet could be so loud and strong, but so this one was.
“Er,” said Hawthorn. “There’s a dodo behind you. Has there always been a dodo behind you?”
A quite large and bright purple dodo, in fact. She stared at the Changelings with Quiet eyes and nudged September with her round beak.
“Aubergine!” September’s face opened into a map of joy. “I didn’t hear you come in!”
“That’s the idea,” the Night-Dodo demurred in a whispery, feathery voice. “I was thinking. I was thinking because I know something, something you don’t know, but I couldn’t decide whether I wanted you to know it, because I don’t want anyone to know it, but I think you need to know it.”
“It’s all right, Aubergine,” Ell crooned Quietly. “We’ll take good care of it, whatever it is.”
The Dodo bent her head and worried at her feathers. Gingerly, she pulled out a steely-bluish violet ball whose skin swirled like oil. She laid it at the Spinster’s feet, and the feet of the King, and the feet of four other people she didn’t know at all, which made her feathers fluff with nervousness.
“I never told you what a Dodo’s egg does,” she clucked. “Why everyone wanted them. So when Dodos roamed wild over Fairyland. Wanted them enough to drive us to the end of the world just to hide and have our chicks in peace.”
“Well, I do.” King Charlie was staring hungrily at the egg. “I know. I just didn’t know there were any left. It restores what’s lost.”
Aubergine glared at him. “Only for the person who cracks it. And it rarely goes to plan. But yes. Don’t you touch it, Chuck.”
Hawthorn remembered how carefully he’d written his notes. And he’d still gotten kidnapped by his baseball. The egg lay in the middle of the rum cellar like an unexploded bomb. No one went near it. Tamburlaine squeezed his hand.
September wanted awfully to open it right then, to grab it and hold it tight and open it for herself. She would be herself again. She would restore what was lost and be fifteen, with school in the morning and her mother making oatmeal and her silly dog yelping at the sunrise and her father, her poor father, just waking up and looking for his glasses. She could deal with the wobbling of Fairyland in some other way. She had earned this. Hadn’t she?
But September’s heart had got quite Grown-Up (and at least a little bit Yeti) and it moved faster than her hands.
“Together,” she said. “The Changelings and Charlie and me. All together.” The Dodo began to protest, but September knew she was right. “Don’t you see? It won’t work for all of Fairyland if the King doesn’t do it, too. If his kneecaps aren’t connected to his country and the egg. He won’t tell. He doesn’t ever want to tell anything again.”