The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (Fairyland 3)

“I learned to make myself lighter,” Saturday laughed. “Seawater can be as light as spray and heavy as whales. And September, I did, I did find I was good at it. I practiced just the way I’d wanted to. Until then, the only thing…” he cleared his throat. It sounded like a wave breaking on sand. “…the only thing I’d practiced so much was what I’d say to you, when I saw you again.” The Marid hurried on. “Though in the end I am better at Dogearing than remembering speeches, no matter how many times I’ve said them to myself! And, well, the way you can look at a surging ocean and feel everything from deep sorrow to bubbling delight to a giggling urge to jump right in and splash about—when people look at me, they feel those things, and I practiced and practiced until I could change my smile by half a quirk and change one feeling to the other. When I am on the trapeze, in the air, people look at me and they see me, they really see me, and they cheer like I’ve done something specially for them.” The Marid looked up at the sparkling apparatus above them. “Up there, I am as far from a cage as it is possible to be.”

September’s eyes filled with tears. She remembered the first time she saw him, cramped and bent and broken in the Marquess’s cruel lobster cage, penned in and forgotten. She shook her head; her tears flew aside.

“I am happy for you,” she said as brightly as she could. And she was, it was not a lie. But even he, even poor beautiful Saturday knew what he could be and do in the world. Ell had his Library, the Sibyl had had her door, Ballast had her ships—and September, still, was only herself, in the audience watching Saturday moving and seeming. “Back home everyone is always asking ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ As if everyone is a Pooka and you can just change, from a girl or a boy into something else, a griffin or an armchair or a shark! But you have, you’ve changed into…into a flight of fancy, like the sign says. A circus man.” And it was the first time she had thought of the word man in connection to Saturday.

Saturday looked at her strangely. His dark eyes shone. “No, no, I haven’t. I’m still Saturday. A slightly more airborne Saturday is all! And I am going with you, of course I am going with you! That’s what understudies are for! September, I have waited and waited for you! If you say we must go and see about a Yeti, well, that is what I want most in the world.”

Valentine and Pentameter looked at each other. They grinned identical grins. Together, they leaned into Saturday and kissed him on each cheek, squeezed his arms, and dashed away as quickly as they’d come running over the ring to meet them. They scurried up the little footholds on the trapeze poles, nimble as cats. On one of Valentine’s bare feet the dedication My Dearest Pickle—flashed. One the other: My Own Boy—Pentameter’s heels announced joyfully: I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

When they reached their positions, the two of them nodded to each other, and then down to Saturday and September. They swung out on their bars and as they did, their bodies opened up—but not into paper airplanes this time. Triangles of paper opened and closed along their limbs so that when Valentine and Pentameter met, grasping wrists or ankles or under the shoulders, when they somersaulted together or dropped so fast even Saturday gasped, new words formed from the fragments of letters and sonnets printed upon their bodies. As Aeroposte danced above them, September read the message they acrobaticked into being:

He missed you

like a fish in a bowl

misses the open sea.

As Ell flew toward the mouth of Almanack, Saturday holding onto her waist and Ell humming beneath them, September opened her mouth to talk. Several times she stopped herself. She had gotten so used to not saying what was important that she could not quite get the habit going again. The words would not come out. Perhaps she did not even know the words she wanted. I missed you, too, seemed such a little name to put on the bigness of the feeling inside her.

Saturday squeezed her hand. Blushing furiously, her heart battering at her bones, September leaned over and kissed him. It was a quick kiss, as though speeding through to the other side of it would make other kisses easier. When she pulled away, the Marid’s eyes shone.

Ell laughed a big, rumbling, beastly laugh. He started to turn a loop-de-loop, so joyful was he. Remembering his passengers, he haroomed instead. “Next stop: Orrery, City of Lenses! Traveling by Wyverary cannot be beat!”

September suddenly realized something. “But Ell, Orrery begins with O! How can you know so much about it?”

The Wyverary soared high, his neck stretching into a long red ribbon, full of words and pies and relief and flying.

“I’m growing up!” he cried.

CHAPTER XII

NEXT SATURDAY

In Which September and Her Friends Contract a Serious Case of Restlessness, Get Bashed About by an Invisible Fist, and Meet Someone Again for the First Time

Night washed over the Moon. The scarlet sea glimmered blackly on one side of the peculiar troupe; high mountains creased and folded into sharp shadows on the other. A Wyverary walked happily alongside a weatherbeaten Model A Ford driven by a girl all in black—as much as you could call it driving when the Ford seemed happy to trundle along on its own. A blue-skinned boy rode in the passenger seat, marveling at the sounds of the engine, the feel of the cracked dash, the cracks in the mirrors.

September said nothing in particular to Aroostook on the subject of her new horn. Nor her throttle lever, which was no longer rusty and bent but a twisted, shining ebony branch ending in a small hand carved out of gold, its palm facing upward in a friendly fashion. Tiny china mushrooms clung to the gnarls of the branch. She did not understand what the car was about. How could September possibly figure out her trouble? And was it trouble at all? She simply would not discuss it until the Model A stopped this gussying up and settled into whatever she was going to be. A-Through-L and Saturday, having never seen a car, assumed they all had sunflower-wheels and big striped phonograph horns and golden hands on their levers and were simply delighted with the noise of his engine. No use in yelling at something till it makes sense. It doesn’t work with me, after all.

Besides, September felt shivery and strange, quite as though her skin meant to jump off and run away howling into the mountains. She fairly trembled; she wanted to run, not drive, or dive into the sea, or just see how far into the air she could jump. At the moment she felt certain she would fly off like a firework. She wanted to drive faster—the sooner they got over the ridge of the Moon the better, that was definitely right, why was Aroostook so damnably slow?

Ell looked in the window at her, grinning. His eyes danced. A little ripple ran along his spine.

“It’s the Sea of Restlessness,” he said. “Fills you up with go go go, like you’re a bowl full of reaching and wanting but you don’t know what you’re reaching and wanting for.”

“When we first came to the Moon, we nearly turned around and ran off again,” Saturday said. “It just lights you, like a candle.”

“But Almanack seems so peaceful! Shouldn’t everyone there be itching to leave? Shouldn’t Almanack feel like this? Just…boiling up with off we go?”

Saturday laughed a little. “I think it does, really. I think maybe that’s what a Restless Whelk looks like.”

A-Through-L just whipped his tail up toward the stars. “Inside the shell, we’re safe!”

September felt as though her heart were a kettle boiling on a stove, that screaming whistle just nearly bubbling out. She looked up toward the tip of Ell’s tail, snapping like a lick of fire at the night sky. And there—there, suddenly—was Fairyland. September gaped. She brought her hand to her mouth. It hung in the sky like an emerald, huge and green and streaked with blue, rose, gold. But it was nothing like she ever imagined a planet could look like when she daydreamed during Mrs. Henderson’s astronomy club talks. Tufts of creamy, popsicle-colored clouds drifted around the globe and out into the black like a wheel of birds. And Fairyland had rings! Like Saturn, rings like great glittering wedding bands looped round at a rakish angle, breaking through the clouds. But the rings were not just rocks and ice, they were train tracks. Jeweled and empty, with no engine in sight, but tracks all the same, with switches and trestles glowing softly. September could not even say it was beautiful. It was ever so much bigger and grander than beautiful. She had a feeling stuck in her and she could not name it. It bobbed up and down in her heart like a crystal bottle with a message inside—but she could not get out the stopper.

Many years later, folk whose names you and I studied in school went up to the roof of our world and looked down. Perhaps they could name the feeling for her. It’s something like suddenly stepping out of your own skin and seeing yourself from the outside, seeing the body you live in the way it looks to the stars and the sun and the sky and everyone who knows you, without mirrors or photographs or reflections in shop windows. You look at that silly old place you’ve been walking around in and forgetting to brush your teeth or braid your hair neatly and it is nothing like you thought, but somehow, someway, better than you ever hoped it could be.

If you want to know a secret—and I do love to tell you secrets when no one else can hear—you cannot grow up at all until you’ve done it, not if you are a little girl nor a whole species.