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

September peered down into the other pond. She could see the owner of this voice, under her gold and wine striped balloon. It belonged to a thin, pearl-colored insect shaped like a wintry twig, delicate and coiling, but hard and brilliant. She peered over the side of her basket eagerly. Her antennae, chartreuse and much longer than her body, snapped like horsewhips. She crawled around the edge of her basket, her body softening and arching and inching along like a caterpillar. When she stopped to speak again, she hardened back into her branch-like posture.

“It does sting so to miss a person!” the insect cried, her tiny sapphire eyes blazing. “The only solution is to be doubly careful with one’s trajectories!” An identical door opened in the basket, and an identical cannon showed itself—but the head was a woman’s.

Candlestick cleared her throat. No cannonball burst from the twig-insect’s balloon.

“Good evening, Marigold,” the Buraq said. She turned to the first balloon, the first pond. “Tamarind. How lovely to see you getting along so well.”

Saturday frowned. “They’re shooting at each other!”

The tinny, thin, invisible voice floated up to them out of the depths. “Hold still, my darling! I’m going to kiss you right in the face!”

September, and Ell beside her, peered closer till their eyes felt like peeled grapes—and finally saw that the first duelist was a grasshopper, his wings iridescent, his great bulging eyes black as the water, sparks gleaming dully within. He was so nearly the color of the grass balloon-basket that he seemed no more than grass himself.

“Don’t mind them,” Candlestick said. “They’re Lunaticks.”

“Oh, that’s unkind!” yelled the grasshopper.

“Princess Lunatick to you, you old mule!” cried the wintry twig.

September sighed a little.

Marigold drew herself up to her full frosty height. “Don’t you sigh at me, young lady! I suppose you think Princessing is nothing more than dresses and blushing and dancing and the occasional side-job as a distressed damsel! Young people today, why, they’ve no more sense than a gumdrop!”

September winced—for that was precisely what she had been thinking. The Duke of Teatime had wanted to make her a Princess, and she’d felt then just as she felt now—that if one had to be in the kind of stories that had Princesses, it was much better not to be the Princess, for they were given very little to do other than weddings and distresses, neither of which offered much in the way of excitement or exercise.

“Where I come from, being a Princess is a job, young primate!” huffed Marigold. “A position in the civil service! We are Executive Branch, child! Why, I never wore a dress except on a dare! I wore a suit, like any government employee. And a fine suit, too, with a hat to match! I had more ties than a railroad! A Princess must be serious and calculating, she must learn Fiscal Magic and Severe Magic and Fan Magic, both Loud and Shy Magic as well as Parliamentary Procedure, Heraldry, and Constitutional Conjuring. I had a desk at the castle like all the other Princesses, and we ate packed lunches every day, I’ll have you know. Of course I had ten fingers then, it’s much easier to run a kingdom when you have fingers. I was an excellent Princess, one of the best. I loved my work! I personally negotiated the peace of Parthalia, despite the ogre-of-record eating the first, second, and ninth drafts. The Fairy Queen Tanaquill herself gave me my first double-breasted jacket. I don’t suppose she is queen anymore. But how proud I stood that day! She saw Princesses for what we are: the engine that fuels Politicks. No Devious Dragon or Knavish Knight would dare tower me up as long as I wore my suit of armor, my sharkskin shield! Ah, but then, but then!”

Tamarind’s wings buzzed. “Then we came to the Moon. We’d only just married, we were young and bald and had all our limbs! We wore our hearts on our sleeves!”

“That’s what you wear to your wedding if you’re a Lamia, which we are,” chirped Marigold. “To show that you mean it, to show you know that love means wearing your insides on your outside. And under the first waxing moon after the ceremony, you swap.”

Tamarind chittered. “You swallow your love’s heart, and they swallow yours. Then forever after, your heart is living inside your mate, and theirs lives inside you.”

“You’re not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You’re only playing.” Marigold gazed across the thin strip of raingrass between her black pond and her husband’s, and her gaze shone deep and warm.

“But you’re not a Lamia!” scoffed A-Through-L, who counted Lamiai safely within his alphabetical kingdom. “A Lamia is a beautiful person with long shining hair who has a snake’s tail and sharper teeth than you want to know about. They drink blood!”

Marigold snapped her antennae. “Don’t be superior. Everyone drinks blood. Blo

od is a word that means alive. You can do without almost anything: arms, legs, teeth, hope. But you can’t do without blood. Lose even a little and you grow slow and stupid and not yourself at all. We are all of us beautiful and complicated vessels for carrying blood the way a bottle carries wine. I suppose you think there’s no blood in your roast beef? Life eats life. Blood makes you move, makes you blush, makes the pulse pound in your brow when you see your love walking across a street toward you, makes your very thoughts fly through your brain. Blood is everything and everything is blood. That’s the law of the Lamiai.”

There must be blood, September thought, and rubbed her finger where she had pricked it, so long ago, and bled to open the doors of Fairyland.

“Don’t act like you’ve never eaten anyone’s heart,” Tamarind said.

“I haven’t!” cried September. Saturday opened his mouth, but thought better of it. He rubbed at the backs of his blue hands.

“Then I’m sorry for you,” the grasshopper sighed. “It’s a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.”

“But we couldn’t wait, you see,” Marigold whirred in her balloon. “We couldn’t wait for the waxing Moon. So we took the road all the way up—when you’re on the Moon, we reasoned, it’s all the Moons together, waxing, waning, new, old. We met here, with a little flask of fizzing whipwine, to devour each other’s hearts and begin our lives together. And just as we’d held our rite and Tam started back toward the Jungle, just as I’d called him husband and he called me wife, that Yeti, that terrible Yeti, came bawling and brawling out of the wood, clutching his bleeding wrist and caterwauling like the stars had gone out.”

“His foot came down and I was under it,” wept Tamarind, shaking his head.

“His next step took me, too,” whispered Marigold. “And the Yeti’s blood filled up his prints and caught us in their black cups. And here we stay, separated by a step. We cannot get from one pond to the other. We cannot even see each other properly. The balloons crashed down into the water during a Thaumaturgists’ duel some time later. The cannons are all that’s left of the duelists—they can break through, but we cannot. And now my heart’s living over there in that old grasshopper and what am I supposed to do?”

Tamarind went on. “We had no plans to live forever! But blood is everything; everything is blood. The Yeti’s blood got old, too. It’s not exactly blood now, though I suppose that’s obvious. It pickles us, preserves us, pumps through us and keeps us running like a couple of old clock towers. We live and live, but it doesn’t keep us young. We started shrinking and shifting and warping, the way anything does when it ages enough, turns to stone or dust or stories. Only we became—well, first I was an iguana, wasn’t I? You were a water dragon. Oh, wasn’t that nice! Halcyon days! Then I was a salamander and she was a rattlesnake, then she was a turtle and I was a boa, then for a long bit we were both frogs and it was like we were young together again, then I can’t remember, sometimes she was the male of the species and sometimes I was, sometimes I was female and sometimes she was, sometimes I had legs and sometimes I didn’t, sometimes she had a mouth and sometimes she had mandibles, and then on our anniversary we suddenly got wings and I was a butterfly, she was a dragonfly, I was a bat, she was a moth, I was a ladybug, she was a beetle, and so on and so forth and at the moment she’s an inchworm and I’m a grasshopper.”

“It never bothered me any, you being a grasshopper,” sighed Marigold. “Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you’re changing into a hundred other things, but you can’t let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he’s a rabbit, or a mouse while he’s still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he’s a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It’s harder than it sounds.”