The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (Fairyland 4)

“But we don’t want to be restored!” Tamburlaine plead.

“No, Tam. It’ll be okay. We weren’t lost. We were never lost. We’ve lost plenty, but we aren’t going anywhere. We restored ourselves.”

They knelt, the four of them, round the purple egg. Blunderbuss couldn’t watch. Her yarny heart thundered in her armored chest. Scratch wound his crack gently and bent his bell over Tamburlaine:

A cherry when it’s blooming

It has no stone

A chicken when it’s piping

It has no bone

The story that I love you

It has no end…

The Night-Dodo tapped the top of the egg with her glossy beak. The cap of her egg shattered. Quietly, and after a long moment, an answering beak poked out of the cracks in the shell. A tiny Dodo, this one all black with a long white beak, shook off ropes of glowing yolk and burst up to the warm blue sky of the rum cellar. It let out a piercing cry and soared up into the rum barrel moons with their starry spigots. For a long moment they all watched it spiral up and up toward the distant glamoured ceiling they could not see.

One of those pale rum barrel moons shattered. Shards and slats rained down to the ground. A great pale creature leapt through the ruined ceiling and screamed as he fell—a creature in a long, white fur coat with terrible black runes scribbled all over it, with a huge bald head and a golden mouth. He hit the royal floor and sent Crunchcrab and September flying with one fist. Saturday and A-Through-L ran to the crumpled pair.

“I am Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth,” the giant bellowed, “King of Fairyland and All Her Nations, and I will eat you whole!”

/> “You’re not,” huffed Blunderbuss, scratching one haunch with her claws. “You’re a baseball.”

“Silence, rodent!” he roared again. “I am King!”

“I think that’s very unlikely,” said Hawthorn. “I’ve hit you with a bat ever so many times. I don’t think you’re meant to hit Kings with baseball bats.”

“Also it says Spalding on your back,” Tamburlaine added.

Goldmouth twisted round to get a look at his gigantic back, yanking his cloak up. Among the fell runes and occult seals and ancient, demonaic tongues written over every surface of him, was the unassuming word Spalding, in elegant, fey calligraphy.

Take me out to the ball game, Scratch played merrily, his brass legs skipping in the mud. Take me out to the crowd…

“Silence! Be silent! You will bow! You will crawl!” But they did not. They could not. They giggled helplessly, rolling in the brilliant, many-colored dirt of wherever they had got themselves to, afraid and exhausted and excited and at the mercy of Hawthorn’s baseball.

“Don’t be so cross,” Hawthorn laughed, holding his stomach—which was rather a larger stomach than he had carried about before. “If you’re good I’ll bat you again! As many times as you want!”

“Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!” Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth screamed. “I will never forget that, you little stump,” he snarled. “I’d have taken you with me, all of you, to be my seneschals in the Bonecask, my grand palace in the Brasspot Mountains. I may have been helpless, once, in the dread despairing swamp you call a washing machine, but there is a throne here that belongs to me and I will have it again. I’d have made you princes and princesses. I’d have thanked you for bringing me out of my miserable sportsman’s prison. You could have swum in emeralds and eaten swan’s eyes every night of your life until you died fat and ancient and drunk. I’d have let you watch while I ate every one of my enemies, a few of my friends, and whole countries of no-one-that-matters. And I’d have spared you. I’d have spared you, because without you I could never have come back to the country I own. But now you will have nothing—”

“What’s a seneschal?” Blunderbuss chirped, wiggling her purple nose. “Is it delicious?”

“A SENESCHAL GETS EATEN LAST!”

A second tornado split the seams of the Briary ceiling-sky, which was beginning to lose its grip on the glamour and flicker into dark stone. And then another. And another. The world was raining bodies like horrible comets. A tangle of iron and lovely limbs hit the Steppe grass with a screech and a crunch. A heap of snarling teeth and black plumage made landfall in the distance. More and more came hurtling down, and finally a black ball of fur and lace and silk and bright, bloody magenta curls slammed through the stone and the sky. Halfway through its fall, the ball stretched out and flexed its paws, as though it had only been napping all this while—which, of course, it had. Iago, the Panther of Rough Storms, yawned and arched his silky spine and flew down to the now-quite-crowded floor, bearing the Marquess and her son, Prince Myrrh, on his broad, dark back. She was still asleep, her hair mussed, skirts tangled. She had lines on her face, not unlike September’s, only these were from her bed linens, where she had lain dreaming for five long years. Prince Myrrh cradled his mother’s head protectively in his lap. He opened his mouth to protest at the abomination of being tossed like a playing-ball across the whole of Fairyland, but he did not get the chance, for it is very hard to talk over the whole world changing just below you.

Hawthorn and Tamburlaine could not hope to know who all these creatures might be. September knew one very well, of course. They were coming to, here and there, brushing the dust and bruises off—all the lost Kings and Queens that ever called Fairyland theirs and lost it, awake and alive and restored. Goldmouth, Madame Tanaquill, Titania, Hushnow the Raven Lord, Anise the Gnome Princess, dozens of them, already eyeing each other warily, searching in their clothes for weapons.

“Better climb on,” Blunderbuss said. “I know lions round the watering hole when I see them.”

King Charlie stumbled to his feet. His hands went to his head—and found nothing. The crown of Fairyland had rolled off his head and was at that moment, that awful moment full of yelling and thundering, full of fallen monarchs and history roaring back from the dead, spinning like a dropped coin, like a backgammon pip, toward Goldmouth. But September was coming awake herself. She moaned and swayed upward, her eyes blurred, touching her own head, her own hair. She touched her face—and there were no lines there any longer. No creak in her bones. But she could not quite stand. She went to one knee to steady herself—and the crown stopped. It rocked back and forth for a moment, as though it was looking at her.

“Don’t you dare,” hissed Goldmouth. “You’re mine, you’ve always been mine, you disloyal slattern of a piece of junk! Come here right this instant!”

But crowns rarely listen to the one that claims them loudest. It rocked forward, backward—and clasped September’s bent head in its circle of golden crab claws. The claws melted like old ice, and when the gold was gone, in its place a circlet of jeweled keys remained, glittering on her thick, curly dark hair, without a single strand of white.

“Oh, September,” cried A-Through-L, wrapping her up in his wings. “Say you’re all right!”