He opened his coat again and the mingled light of the planets poured out its rainbows. On the other side of the coat hung little books with silvery purple papers in them—magic ration books! But surely there was no need for them any longer.
“Collectibles, miss. Vintage. But that’s not your speed at all. You came to the Way Station. You need a Way.”
“But I haven’t lost my Way—I’m only beginning! I lost it once, but that was on purpose.”
“You haven’t met your Way yet. It hasn’t so much as kissed your hand. You haven’t even knocked at the door of the hall where your Way dances. But look here, look see, I’ve got them, I’ve caught them up just for you, a big bouquet of anywhere you want to go. Just pick a bloom, my girl, hold it to your pretty nose.”
“I want to go to Fairyland.”
The Blue Wind tapped the dashboard impatiently. “She’s very stubborn on that point, brother. Dense as a foot, this one. Personally, I detest Fairyland. Something is always brewing there, some frantic task that simply must be done, some despot who cannot be borne another moment, some bauble that demands fetching. It’s exhausting! Wouldn’t you rather have a nice race across Antarctica instead? Or a Grand Tour of the Gulf Stream? We could skip stones across the North Pole. Besides, no one ever asks me to go running off on a grand adventure. No one ever says: Blue, darling, wouldn’t you like to go away to Fairyland and skate on the clouds there? One does like to be asked.”
But the squat Wind had already plucked a silvery, iridescent moon from his coat, a crescent hanging from a fine chain. Ruby starlight caught in its horns.
“Fairyland’s on special tonight, as it happens,” he purred. “So cheap my little baby typhoons in Tokyo will have to go hungry. A bargain fit for a beggar.”
“How much?” ventured September.
The Wind smiled. His woolly, frozen eyebrows waggled. “Tonight only, my Midnight, Blue-Light, You-Heard-It-Right, Close-Out deal: All it costs is Everything You Have.”
September looked down at her jar of coins, nestled in her lap. “That’s not a proper price at all. How do you know how much I have? What if all I had was a shoelace and a spare button?”
The Wind’s smile got deeper and wider and bluer. “The point’s not what it costs; it’s what it costs you. Everything You Have. That’s my price, that’s my prize, that’s my ransom, and that’s my rune. The only price in the world that matters is the one that hurts to pay.” He let the Moon spin on its chain. “You want it; I have it. There’s no duel here. If you had a shoelace and a spare button, that’d be on the tag.”
September sighed. She had saved it all for this, she supposed, to be able to pay her way respectably. She held her jar, heavy as all the days she’d spent earning it. She was paying with Hours again, she realized, just as she had with the Goblin Glasswort Groof. The coins didn’t mean five or ten or twenty-five cents, they meant time. They meant half a day on the Powell farm or four letters for Mr. Killory or every morning getting rooster scratches on her arm just for trying to feed the Whitestone chickens.
All money is imaginary.
September lifted the jar up and handed it over.
The whispering Wind scoffed. “The rest, too, little holdout. I’m not your fool.”
September grimaced as she handed over the book of Valkyries and mistletoe and hairy god-legs and her last butterscotch. Being more or less an honest girl, she would have given him the hammer and nails as well, but when she offered them,
the Wind hissed and recoiled, smelling their iron. He rose up into the air in a hurry and, turning slowly upside down, hung the Moon around her rearview mirror. It whirled and glimmered, cool and pale. But the Wind was not finished. He pulled something out of his coat—a huge, long, ornate box, perfectly white, with strange scrimshaw tangled up all over it: horns and crab claws and hearts and ears and stars and flowers and open, grasping hands. It was emphatically locked.
“What’s this?”
“I said it would cost you Everything You Have.” The Blue Wind in the passenger seat chuckled gleefully. “Take this to the Whelk of the Moon in Almanack—that’s a city. Ask anyone, they’ll point you. And no peeking.” The Wind waved his fingers at her. “You didn’t really think a jar of small change was all you had, did you? How sad.”
He closed up his coat and stepped lightly up and away, as if climbing invisible stairs. September looked at her own Blue Wind uncertainly.
“Well?” she snapped. “On your Way, then. Hoof it, or wheel it, or however your personal phraseology would handle the fantastical notion of getting a move on.”
September gave Aroostook a little gas. The engine boomed; the rods shivered. The little moon hanging from the rearview began to swell up like a balloon filling with water. It got bigger and bigger, and brighter and brighter, and more and more silver, and the engine boomed again and again, each boom shaking September’s bones until she thought they would come apart.
Then the Model A careened forward and Mercator, suburb of Westerly, slammed shut around them like a door.
A howl of fine cold powder sprayed up and over the windshield like an ocean wave. It whipped across September’s lips, sharp, vicious—and sweet.
It was snowing sugar in Fairyland.
September and the Blue Wind found themselves driving along a high mountain road. Jagged violet peaks shot up into the night, dark silver cliffs dropped dizzyingly away on either side of the path, and if we are honest, the Model A was not designed with such conditions in mind. They shuddered and jiggered and teetered, and the journey would certainly have been cut dramatically short if the car were not somehow, valiantly, driving itself. We may be very grateful for this, as young girls who learn to drive upon the great plains are no more designed for wintry mountain roads than convertible automobiles for snow, and it is in our interest and September’s that novels last longer than their beginnings.
Stars clotted the sky above, peeking out from behind gusts of confectioner’s snow. It streamed down in blazing ribbons of white and blue and green that made the Milky Way—or whatever Fairies might call the wild cord of starlight tying up the heavens—look rather like a scrap of old newspaper. And far below, where any fall from the high passes would abruptly end, roared a sea of cold turquoise fire, biting at the mountain’s feet and throwing little meteors of sugar-ice against the battered cliffs.
The Blue Wind sang out in joy. She put back her head and howled and it was just the same sound as the awful winter wind screeching all around them. They were still rushing up, up, up, the speed incredible, the sugar-snow lashing September’s face with electric prickling pain. Sugar is not nearly so soft as snow and not nearly so nice as dessert. Every crystal bit into her skin and having found warmth in the wound, melted there with a tiny sting. September, once more, wanted to cry out in joy, to shout, nothing in particular, but the wordless hooray of relief and delight when one finally gets what one has looked forward to for so long. But when she opened her mouth to crow, the sugar-snow flew in and choked her.
“Isn’t there anywhere we might get out of the storm?” September yelled over a shearing updraft that nearly upended the lot of them. A few spare puffins scrabbled against the blizzard, paddling their feet for purchase on the dark backseat.