“I love you,” Saturday whispered after September and Ell and his own small, miserable self, and vanished.
CHAPTER XIII
ONLY THE DEAD DON’T ARGUE
In Which September Is Troubled by the Mechanics of Time and Fate, the Course of a Curse, the Unlikelihood of Visiting Pluto, and a Very Argumentative Donkey
September woke washed in light.
At first she thought she was back home and doused in a bubbling bath—light fizzed and frothed all around her, a shade of white that had great ambitions to grow up to be purple. Great tall viney stalks rose up all around, thick as trees and thicker. Balls of light clung to their sides like brussels sprouts, crackling and sizzling and popping. The white-violet brilliance turned everything brighter than day. Aroostook, battered but still sputtering, showed deep, shadowed claw marks in her doors. September had to squint; her skin looked like the slope of a lightbulb. Saturday’s face leaned down over her, his teeth blinding against his lightning-shadowed skin.
“Please be all right,” he whispered, and it did not take September’s heart long to catch up with her memory. He did not only mean that they’d had their heads knocked about by, presumably, a Yeti with a fist like a train car.
“It was you,” she said, rubbing her glowing, aching arm. “That was you, just now, just then.”
Beside her, Ell groaned. He shook his head from side to side like a bull, his black horns catching wisps of light and tossing them into the air like fireflies. The whole forest hummed and snapped. September winced before she even turned her head—how many times had he breathed his fire to protect them?
The Wyverary stood up. He stood a hand taller than Mr. Powell’s pregnant roan, his face perplexed and unhappy. He patted his own head with one wing.
“Is it bad?” he whispered. “Am I little?”
“No, no!” said September. “You’re a great big beast, just like always!” She crawled to her feet and went to him. She put her arms around his long neck with ease, and the easiness of it unsettled them both.
“Little begins with L, but I don’t want to be it,” the Wyverary said as quietly as he had ever said anything.
“It’s not so bad to be little, you know!” September smiled when she said it though she felt no more like smiling than like writing a composition with her mashed arm.
“Oh, it’s all right for you!” cried Ell. “You’re meant to be little! I like your littleness! It means I can hoist you up and make you feel big and show you all the things I can see from where I stand. But…but if I get much littler, who will be big, among the three of us? Wasn’t it my job to be big and stomp and carry you and look menacing if looking menacing was called for?” A-Through-L’s orange, feline eyes filled with turquoise tears. He whispered: “Who will hoist me up, if I am little?”
September shook her head helplessly. She did not know what to say to comfort him except to hold him tight, which is a language primates use to say: Everything will be all right somehow. Reptiles, however, prefer for everything to simply be all right, at once, and then they will feel comforted. Above them, a cluster of lightning-sprouts flashed a hot blanket of light like a summer storm and then quieted again. September listened for the thunder by instinct; none came. It felt very strange, this silent and thunderless storm.
“You have to try not to,” she begged the Wyverary. “We’ve ever so much farther to go.”
“Oh, September, if you tell me how I shall, I promise!” How awful it was to see fear swimming in those kind eyes!
But she could not tell him.
“He has it,” she whispered instead. “Ciderskin has the Stethoscope. We hardly made it out of Almanack before he took it—and I couldn’t do anything! We couldn’t! We were helpless. And now he can hear us!” September felt sick with failure. A simple box and she couldn’t keep it in her hands for a day.
“Maybe not,” Ell said miserably. “It’s a frightful mess when you listen to the Moon—maybe Ciderskin won’t be able to sort it out, either.”
“Did he come because I took the Stethoscope out of the box? Did he smell it? It was so fast! I should have left it where it was! I just needed to do something, I was crawling with it! I was so sure we’d hear the paw…”
September sank into a long quiet. Finally, she took out the troubling thing that would not leave her be and opened it up like a dark picnic between them.
“But it was you,” she said through her teeth. Saturday looked away from her. “And you were helping the Yeti!”
“Please remember that I am a Marid…”
“I know you are! And that was yourself from some day a long time from now, yourself older and another Saturday and I understand that but how could you be helping Ciderskin, even a hundred years from now?”
“I don’t know!” yelled Saturday. September jumped inside her skin. Her belly went cold. Saturday had never yelled. He had never spoken crossly to her. His voice had never hardened up along the edges like other people’s voices did; the light had never gone out of it the way it went out of anyone’s when the upset got too wet and heavy and snuffed it out. His first words to her at the circus drifted back: I’m glad I found you first.
“Oh, September, I’ve seen him, of course I’ve seen him. All of them, not just that one. There and everywhere, and sometimes he talks to me and sometimes he doesn’t and I don’t know why he does what he does because I’m not him yet. Maybe he’s not even me yet! The me and the him cross over but we’re not the same and maybe he knows something I don’t or maybe I know something he doesn’t or maybe he’s just gone cold and wicked because of some dreadful thing that will have happened but hasn’t yet happened and maybe that thing will definitely have happened and maybe it will tentatively have happened or maybe he got put in a cage again and he just couldn’t bear it and now he’s got to do whatever he can to stay out of it or maybe he just doesn’t care about anything because he lost the girl he loved—I don’t know. I can think of a million million waves he could have ridden to get to where he is but I won’t find out till I’m drowning in them. No one understands this but a Marid—this is what it means to be a Marid. You see him and you think me and I knew if you saw him first you would be afraid because it is frightening! I’m frightened! I have to turn into him! He’s already been all the Saturdays it takes to be that Saturday, but whatever happened is still coming for me, I still have to stand up for the hurts and the grief that made him and I can’t not do it, but knowing I will is like looking at a hot stove and knowing you’re going to touch it, knowing you’re going to burn, and feeling the blisters and the peeling before you even reach out your hand. I have to feel it now, all the time, and I don’t even know what the stove is. You have to understand, September, you have to. I told you when we met, I told you and you liked me
anyway.” His voice broke a little.
September tried to be stern. She didn’t like it. She didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed to say something deeply wrong that she could not quite put her hand to. It sat on the floor of her heart like a toy with a thousand working pieces that could not possibly be put together. But her sternness, which was after all only a very young thing, crumbled when Saturday’s voice cracked like a glass. She touched his shoulder, very gingerly, as if her hand might go through him.