September wanted to talk about Saturday. She wanted to ignore everything but Ell. She wanted to snap at Abecedaria and tell her to leave them alone already. September took a deep breath, pushing her temper down like purple fire. Give over the box and no more demands on her but to sit with her friend and talk about everything, everything that had passed since they’d seen each other.
“A Blue Wind asked me to bring this to the Whelk of the Moon, but the Whelk couldn’t get it open, so I’m to bring it to you for lock-picking or smashing or however you can manage it.” With a sigh of relief, September put the long ivory casket into two long, sturdy locks of the Periwig’s hair that had shaped themselves into puffy, tightly curled hands.
“Ell, my love, fetch us The Manual of Safe-Cracking and Assorted Mechanickal Naughtiness. Spring Edition.”
A-Through-L rose up, flapping his long, bright wings. He glided toward the nearly empty side of the Library.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” said September, “you’ve got so much room on the one side, why have you packed everything in so close on the other?”
The Periwig turned the black rosettes of her eyes to heaven and the Wyverary. “That’s why it’s the Lopsided Library. The books, you know, they have opinions. Factions. Pitched battles. Right now, the Fictionals have the advantage—they’re the flashy ones, after all, and whatever they say in their pages goes, even if it doesn’t make a lick of sense and rhymes besides. Non-Fiction has to abide by the rules of what really is, and that is just exhausting. In retaliation, the Nons are gussying up with fanciful notions and fabricated histories written by the conquerors and grandstanding about with metaphors and parables and other unsavories. So they’ve got to be stacked with the Fiction, nothing to be done. They dash over to attend parties and be seen with the right popular novels. Give it a week and Non-Fiction will be on the up again. The Fictionals will fall all over one another to expunge their pretty prose and their tall tales and their impossible Physicks and elegant motifs. It’ll be a race to the realistic, mark my words. A dance to the dreary if you ask me, but you haven’t. Then it’ll lurch to the other side and at least we’ll have a chance to dust the shelves before they go hurtling back because a social history of changelings tried on a sonnet for size. You’d have to be a champion racer to outrun literary fashion.”
Ell returned, holding the volume gingerly in his claws. The Periwig began turning the pages furiously, chasing notations with her black velvet ribbons, marking her place with a fuzzy, powdery curl.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. It echoed in the Library. “Now just a minute! It’s no trouble at all. I should have guessed when you said a Blue Wind. Come on, Ell, get your eyeball up to the lock. You have to show it something blue and speak very sternly to it. Poor Almanack couldn’t stern a minnow.”
A-Through-L put his huge orange eye to the lock. He stared it down for several minutes, never blinking once. Finally, a great turquoise tear welled up in his eye and fell with a splash to the floor of the Library. He stood up and looked expectantly at Abecedaria—but September took a deep breath and stepped up to the lock herself. She squared her shoulders and frowned as deeply as she could. She had put on her sternness once today already, it ought to be warmed up and ready. September glared at the lock and hollered, “You open up RIGHT THIS INSTANT or I shall call your mother!”
The box popped open in a hurry.
Inside lay a stethoscope.
It gleamed blue, naturally. The stethoscope had a certain burliness to it: thick, strong rods and a tube like an elephant’s trunk—and all of sapphire. The cup would have engulfed September’s head. It seemed made for someone Ell’s size, or whatever creature could dwarf a Wyvern. Almanack itself, perhaps.
Abecedaria hissed and drew away.
“The Sapphire Stethoscope! No, no, I won’t take it! It’s yours, you brought it here, it’s none of my business!”
Sterness melted and flew away from September’s face like snowflakes after you’ve rushed inside out of the cold. “What are you talking about? The Whelk told me to bring it to you! I’m finished with it, my duty is discharged, and I mean to have a jolly time with my friend, thank you very much!”
“No! Take it! Take it back and hide it, please! I’m too little. He’ll crush me and braid me till I break. You’ve seen the Library, September. We can’t stand up to Ciderskin; we just can’t. The ceiling barely stays on as it is!”
“That’s the second time I’ve heard that name!” exclaimed September. “Who is Ciderskin?”
CHAPTER X
THE YETI’S PAW
In Which September Learns of the Foibles of Fairies, Shirks Her Work (but Only Briefly), and a Very Speedy Yeti Makes Trouble for Everyone
Abecedaria the Periwig drew herself up to her full height—which was not much higher than September’s hip. Her curls glossed up and shaped themselves into a very proud new face with shapely powdered horsehair cheeks. The Periwig was about to give a recitation.
“Ciderskin is the fastest Yeti on the Moon. Now, if you knew anything about Yetis, you would be very impressed. Yetis are so fast you almost never see one, only his footprints in the snow, and even the mightiest photograph can only catch a vague blur as they whizz by. They are even born fast! A Yeti grows from a little furry snowball to a shaggy monster with black ram’s horns and burning red eyes and hands that could crush wine out of boulders quicker than you can say, does that avalanche have teeth? They love the winter and they love the snow; they love the mountains and they love to eat—and all the things that go with eating: squashing and walloping and tearing and ripping and crunching and gnawing. They were here before the Fairies came—but so were many folk less inclined toward stomping on the ground just to see it flinch. In those long ago days when the Fairies built the road and danced on the Moon in their cackling thousands, they sought to learn the secret of fastness from the Yetis. Perhaps you know that about Fairies and perhaps you don’t—they were always on the lookout for the best of everyone else to take and use for themselves.”
September remembered what Charlie Crunchcrab himself had once said to her: Fairies started out as frogs. Amphibianderous, right? Well, being frogs was no kind of fun, so we went about and stole better bits—wings from dragonflies and faces from people and hearts from birds and horns from various goats and antelope-ish things and souls from ifrits and tails from cows and we evolved, over a million million minutes, just like you.
“I thought everyone wanted the Fairies to come back!” she said. September certainly did. But the lobster and the jackals seemed to have no use for them at all.
The Periwig snorted. Two delicate clouds of powder blossomed from her curly nose. “Oh, life then was a whirlwind of magic and a kettle of fun—if you were a Fairy. It’s clear a Yeti is not a Fairy, I think you’ll agree. They hunted the wild beasts through the Silver Mallet Mountains and up the dizzying slopes of the Splendid Dress, whose frozen peak you can see from outside the shell, up the trunk of the Tallest Tree, a palm that stretches so high a comet once spent three days’ vacation on its fronds, sucking the blue coconuts dry. But you cannot catch a Yeti. You can only be where she is going to be or where she has been. Finally, a Fairy’s jungle trap clapped shut on a Yeti’s paw—by chance, mere chance and bad luck. Bellowing in rage and pa
in, the poor hulk chewed it off at the wrist and dashed away, dripping Yeti blood across the snow. You can still see them: a row of round black ponds leading into the lunar wilds. Well, that was the end of it, for the Fairies found that a Yeti’s fastness lay in his paw. They used it so much they couldn’t stop using it—who wants to wait for the pot to boil or Spring to come or for parted lovers to be joined or for a spell to brew or a plan you’ve hatched to come ripe? They built a city called Patience around the Yeti’s paw, because a Fairy’s humor is as subtle as a bullwhip. In Patience, they sped everything up so that they never had to wait. Tea was always on the second you were thirsty, Fairy tricks were schemed in one breath and played the next, festivals were always happening the moment after someone thought up the idea. You never had to pine or yearn, if you fell in love with a selkie down in Fairyland, why, he’d be at your side in a flutter of your wings. You could defeat boredom for all and for good—just skip to the part where a Fairy and her pack have ganged up upon an unsuspecting shepherdess and turned her sheep into suitors! Why should a young Fairy wait around to grow up while everyone lectures her and gets supper first and makes her go to bed at dawn when she is sleepy at eight o’clock and wants her bed? She can bite the paw and be a wicked Fairy adventuress with strength in her toes before she gets done wiping the taste of Yeti out of her mouth. A Fairy could touch milk and curdle it, touch beer and spoil it, touch wine and make it vinegar. And they did it, for delight and for flummoxing dairy maids and for the peculiar relish of spoiling and breaking and knocking things apart.”
September looked at Ell, his wonderful red presence beside her, listening loudly—for a Wyvern breathes noisily, having so much breath to huff. She thought the Fairies had it right. She would have given anything for a Yeti’s paw back home. To somehow fold up the year and skip the part that lay between her and Fairyland, rub it out with her pencil’s eraser so that she didn’t have to sit through it, full of longing, while it took its dawdling time going by. Show September a paw in the middle of Omaha to bite and she would be there, bright and early, with her teeth brushed.
How we would like to argue with September, and tell her that in the waiting lies the pleasure! That we here in the world of sensible folk know how to wait without twisted-up bellies and tapping feet and wishing for the sun to hurry up and rise and set. That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. But though I am sly, I am a trickster, I am even cruel—I cannot lie.
Abecedaria furrowed her crimped eyebrow-curls. “Oh, fine and fat for a Fairy! Fairies live forever! There’s no such thing as a withered old Fairy coughing up regret in her sickbed! They could speed up time all they liked and lose nothing! But the Moon was in her springtime then and teeming with folk neither Fairy nor Yeti! Harpies and Banshees and Kappa and Kitsunes and Chimeras and Hreinn and Qilin and Satyrs! Yet once Patience became a city in full swing, the Fairies down in Fairyland raced up the road to join their brothers and sisters in the sky. They say it was like a rainbow emptying out onto the Moon, so many came and so fast—and another pouring away from it, as folk fled, outrunning the terror of time run mad. Even I cannot deny the lure of having everything you want the minute you want it. And so it went. The Fairies knuckled away even the boring old minutes between falling asleep and waking up. The rest? You could only call it burglary. They didn’t toss the time off like a dress—they lost it. It bled right out of them. They grew older, faster. Oh, a night here and there wouldn’t have hurt—unless it’s your day or night and you only have so many saved up against death’s accounts! But you have no idea how easily a Fairy gets bored. They Yetied away weeks and months if that’s how long it took for the shepherdess’s suitors to grow a thick pelt ready to be sheared for the wedding day. They were so hungry never to waste time ever again that they wasted the rest of us away. Half the Moon died of old age before anyone could fix it.”
“And how was it fixed?” September asked. “Who fixed it?”