“It’s rude to discuss religion,” the Buraq sniffed. “But I don’t hold with Teatimers. I’m of the Midnight Snack school. You have tea because it’s three o’clock and that’s what’s done and yes, yes, it’s pleasant to have a nice cup and a sandwich with no crusts on, but pleasant is not enough for me! When you tuck into a Midnight Snack, it’s because you’re hungry in the dark. You want that bit of roast you couldn’t finish at supper and you want it now. Midnight Snackery is primal, like a wolf in the wood, hunkering down over her kill.”
Candlestick quivered her tail and stomped the ground. A sparkling cloud of round white-violet sparks as big as apples came sizzling through the wood with a willow-wood basket hefted on their backs. They set it down and nuzzled the Buraq excitedly while Saturday opened the basket. Inside lay drumsticks wrapped in wax paper, a flagon of brilliant, sparkling, glowing something, and a large clutch of lightning-grapes. When he opened one of the wax papers, she saw that the drumstick came from no chicken. A storm cloud flashed and rumbled around a stark white bone.
“Teatime can be nice,” A-Through-L said, nosing at the grapes, resigned. September was suddenly reminded of his shadow, deep down in Fairyland-Below, who had been friends with the Duke of Teatime and the Vicereine of Coffee, and let their children ride on his back and pull his ears. She shivered.
“Ell,” she asked quietly, as though if she said it soft enough it would be somehow as if they were alone together, as they had been once, in a field of little red flowers and trees that were rather like persimmon trees but not persimmons at all. “What made you cry, in the Lopsided Library, when we opened the box?”
The Wyverary clawed the thin charcoal soil of the Jungle with his scaly foot. His orange whiskers flicked once, twice, like a horse’s tail swatting a fly. A-Through-L wrapped his long crimson tail all the way around his body, as tightly as he could, as if to hold himself together.
“You mustn’t laugh at me. I am a large beast, and very fierce, and I’ve been alone plenty in my life. I can face alone and punch it in the nose.”
September nodded solemnly, though she wanted to smile very much at her dear lizard and his own fierce nose.
A-Through-L’s fiery eyes pierced the dark. “I thought of that day in the glowerwheat field. When you wished for us all to be whole and well and we woke up with the sun shining on us.”
“But that isn’t sad at all!”
“Oh, September,” the beast sighed. “We woke up and we were whole and well and the sun was so warm and you disappeared right in front of us like you’d never been there at all and it was years, it was three years of the world going on like you’d never been in it! And maybe you were dead or maybe you just didn’t feel like coming back or maybe it was even longer in your world and you’d gotten big and mated and forgot me and I missed you. And when we did find you at the other end of three years, dancing with the shadows in that green valley, well, you up and vanished again like vanishing was the thing you did best in the world! I didn’t get an hour of not missing you before you were gone again! Saturday took it hard, too, of course he did, but before we ever saw him you rode on my back and called me yours. Do you remember saying that? I remember it. I felt…as though I’d grown…I felt as though I’d grown forepaws. Like I wasn’t a Wyvern anymore but something just a little different because my forepaws were shaped like a little girl and with them I could grab up the whole of Fairyland and shake it till everything good fell out. But as soon as I had them they got cut off and I missed you which is a funny word and starts with M but you can’t blame it because it’s the right word. I missed you; you were missing from me. Like forepaws. Like flying.”
September put her hand on her chest. Her heart squeezed, clenching up, trying to hide within her and burst out of her at once. But she would not cry. She would not. Ell was very fierce, after all.
“Well then,” she said thickly, straightening her shoulders. See what you see and face up to it. “Let’s go.” The Wyverary and the Marid seemed to deflate like a red balloon and a blue one. They nodded a little, as if to say they had always known it should be this way, after all. It was, after all, September alone, in the end. It always had been and always would be.
“All of us,” September said gently, and held out her hands. “I know what you said, Miss Candlestick, but however you count it, our fates are stuck together and stitched up good.” She paused for a moment, looking down at her flowing black silks and her own small hands. “Closer than shadows, she finished.”
The Buraq, her wings and her tail flickering with the fitful lights of concealed lightning, cantered off. Ell ran to keep up with her, abandoning the midnight picnic without a thought, his heart bouncing boisterous in his chest, not left behind, not alone, but leaping through the stormgrowth, squashing the tangled floor of the Lightning Jungle underfoot. With every clawfall, he thought he would bellow fire, so great was his exhilaration—and with every clawfall he hiccuped, a purple bubble popping against the rows of his long teeth. The Wyverary could feel it rising up inside him, the rope of fire getting bigger and thicker and hotter and more inevitable, like a loaf of bread baking within his belly, but a loaf as heavy as an anchor. It was going to happen, he could feel it, and no matter how he tried to make it not happen, he could hardly breathe for the heat in his throat. A-Through-L surged ahead of his friends, of the Buraq. Some things are to be done in private, the donkey had said. He would not let them see or be scorched. Lightning cracked and spangled and knifed around the Wyverary as purple flame finally bloomed out of his snout, curling and writhing into th
e forest canopy.
But the trees did not burn. The Lightning Jungle seemed to drink up the flame like fresh water. After all, it was nothing but fire and light and surging itself. Baobabs full of firebolts flared even brighter, washing the air in clean flashes, crisp forks.
September and Saturday, having legs nothing like a donkey’s or a Wyvern’s, bounced along behind in Aroostook, who roared under branches and over blackened trunks, squall-vines whipping at the windshield. The whole of the Lightning Jungle sounded in September’s ears like static from the walnut wood radio in her living room at home. The throng of them hurtled toward the edge of the tree line, the last squat black trunks showing starkly like lowercase letters. Finally, with a last forked snaggle of light snaking out ahead of them, Aroostook burst clear, into a field of pale silver scrub, a meadow of tiny raindrops frozen in the act of splashing upward, growing from the ground like grass. Round, black lakes opened up in the ground, lightless and deep as blood, leading up into the mountains like a sentence without an ending…
CHAPTER XIV
NO
In Which September Meets a Pair of Lunaticks, a Peculiar Computational System, Several Fallacies, and Her Own Fate, Whereupon Our Heroine Performs a Drastic Deed
September followed the line of pure black ponds as far as she could with her wide eyes—they curved away into the mountains and disappeared long before she could spy an end to them. Each one perfectly round, each one depthless and darker than sleeping. The strange, growing crystal rain that covered the ground, frozen in up-slashes, made stark weeds and reeds and seedpods, as pale as the ponds were not, and crunched delicately under their feet, under Aroostook’s wheels, under Candlestick’s hooves. They stood between two large ponds with but a narrow wisp of pale grassy earth between them.
“We call it the Ellipsis,” the Buraq said. Her steely curls glittered with lightning-dew.
“Oh, Ell,” Saturday sighed. The Wyverary still stood taller than the Marid, but not by so terribly much now. He hung his head mournfully.
“It’s all right,” said September, stroking his long neck. “It’s not so bad. I always wanted to take you home to meet my mother. Now you could fit in our house! Don’t worry, oh, please, don’t be afraid! After all, little begins with L…”
A crashing, echoing, ear-skewering boom shot through the night. September’s hands flew up to her ears. Her eyes squeezed shut and her whole body stiffened—Ciderskin had come back for them, that terrible fist would sweep through the meadow and the ponds and this time she did not have Aroostook’s door to protect her, she would be crushed. Saturday leapt toward her with his new trapeze-man’s swift strength, covering her with his arms.
The boom rang out again, clapping sharp against the cold.
No paw followed, any more than thunder followed the lightning in the Lightning Jungle. September opened her eyes. A third rolling, smashing blast sounded, and what followed it was neither blows nor storms but laughter, tinny and thin. Through the ponds of the Ellipsis, a cannonball flew, beneath the water, the color of Jupiter, all cream and fire. The shot began in a pool some ways farther off from them and barreled through the waters, streaming bubbles behind it, disappearing when the little lake ended and reappearing once more in the next. Finally, in the dark circle nearest them, it found its target. The ball exploded against the grass basket of a great striped hot-air balloon suspended down beneath the rippling surface. The perspective made September feel a little sick; the balloon hung down deep into the water as though the water was the sky and they stood on some strange circus platform higher than the heavens, looking down on the creatures of the air. The balloon’s basket rocked back but did not break. A hissing blast mark blossomed on its woven grass, joining many other smoking star-shapes already there.
“Call that a love letter, do you, Marigold? Smells like a burnt bugbear’s least favorite beehive.” The tinny, thin laughter tittered out again. It came all the way up through the pool, softening and quieting and thinning out along the way. September peered down into the pond. The balloon’s stripes gleamed white and teal. Jets of bubbles burped out of its neck now and then, keeping it aloft, or submerged, however one ought to measure a thing that flew underwater. But she could not see anyone in the basket. Someone hid there, surely! A small door in the charred grass opened; the mouth of a cannon popped forward, silver so pure it looked like glass, blown into the shape of a man’s head, mouth wide to fire true, every curl of his hair a strand of silver butterflies. The body of the cannon, his arms, bound back and down into a hospital straitjacket. A second cannonball roared out of the man’s silverglass mouth, the color of Neptune, hot turquoise and boiling white.
But this one did not speed through all the ponds and up far off into the range of mountains beyond—another balloon bobbed into the dark of the second pool, turning on like a lightbulb where it had not been before. The second balloon was more nimble; the Neptunian shot careened off the basket’s bumpers, skipping up through the ponds like a stone, but never disturbing the surface. A second voice giggled, muffled, as if they had their ears against the bottom of a glass tumbler pressed up to a locked door.
“I know you miss me, Tamarind, but you miss me by so much I wonder if you love me at all!”