The Buraq nodded sympathy. “It’s Yeti’s blood, you see. Time speeds down there like it’s racing against the world. For them, it’s been thousands of years. More. Thousands of thousands. They’ve gone a bit mad, started firing broadsides and counting obsessively—which is how they’re useful to me.”
“Are we going fishing?” cried the inchworm with delight.
“If you’re not too tired after your cannonades.”
“Never!” buzzed Tamarind.
Candlestick beckoned September forward. The Buraq instructed her to put her hand down into the ponds, one after the other. When September did as she was told, her fingers disappeared as though they had been severed. The cold black pond drew closed over her wrist like a curtain. Tamarind and Marigold’s antennae quivered and snapped in their private pools. Then without warning, the balloons shot out twin clouds of blue-white bubbles, collapsed down into scraps of cloth, and disappeared wholly.
“The mosaic covers the whole of the Moon,” Candlestick explained, her peacock tail waving in the starlight. “Even with the records in the Sajada, it would take months to find the little pebble that hides your fate. But once I met the Lunaticks, I discovered they’d counted everything on the Moon, every tile of the mosaic and every root and every fish. The pools have seeped down and down and down until they run all over the insides of the Moon like veins, and they’ve had so long to look for some little place where their waters might meet. When I want a fate, I send my lightning-sprouts through the Sajada to find the record and light it up—for the Sajada has veins, too, and roots as well. But if I want it faster, I send the old kids fishing—they get a taste of you, a smell of you, and race down through the Moon to find the lit-up tile that tastes and smells like you and bring it back fast as thinking.”
Sure enough, Tamarind’s balloon bounced back up underwater like a lightbulb coming on. Marigold’s appeared a moment later.
“I win!” the grasshopper cried. “That’s three in a row! You’re losing your touch, dear!”
“It was in your hemisphere, that hardly counts,” huffed the inchworm, and crossed two of her wintry, spindly arms. Her cannon slid out from the grassy basket and fired as sharp as a retort. Her Jovian ball blasted through the inky water, arcing beautifully, like a comet—and landed squarely, precisely, in Tamarind’s own basket. It smoked and rolled, gleaming. And it had knocked something free: something small and glinting, rising up through the pond toward them.
“Oh,” sighed the grasshopper, “oh, it’s still warm where you loaded it into the cannon. It still smells of your perfume.” Tamarind laid down upon the cannonball and closed his wings around his green body.
September knelt and caught the small, glinting thing as it bobbed up out of the black—though it was not so small after all, almost as long as her own arm. Saturday got down into the grass to help her haul it out and get it upright on the shore.
It was a Leopard.
It was her Leopard. Imogen, the Leopard of Little Breezes, the cat who had borne her to Fairyland that first day. September would know those whiskers and those spots anywhere. Yes, she was smaller than she had been and entirely still and silent, but all the same it was her. September cried out and threw her arms around that dear, wooly neck.
But it was not the Leopard of Little Breezes. It was not a living Leopard at all. September’s arms found no wool on that neck, but cool brass, pocked with onyxes, a statue of her Leopard, with a flat, stony gaze.
“I thought you said it would be a little toy version of myself,” said September, a little embarrassed. “I am not a Leopard or a Little Breeze.”
“I…I don’t know why it isn’t!” Candlestick’s face creased in confusion. “Perhaps it’s on account of you being human. I’ve never dredged up a human fate before. That will teach me to make assumptions! Assumptions are the enemy of logic!”
September looked the Leopard over. It did not seem to be in the least alive and she had no notion of how it might talk to her, let alone argue.
“Hullo, Leopard,” she said shyly.
At the sound of her voice and the tiny gust of her breath on the brassy muzzle, the Leopard’s eyes soften
ed and turned toward September.
“Hullo, Tem,” the beast growled, but it was not an unpleasant growl, nor loud, but cozy as a purr.
September startled as though she had been struck. Her mother and father called her Tem, years and years ago, when she was tiny. They never did anymore, she was too big for small names, her father always said.
Saturday squeezed her hand comfortingly. A-Though-L pressed his red forehead into her shoulder just exactly like a cat. And then both of them took a few steps away and turned their backs. It was her fate. They would not leave her, but they would give her privacy. Candlestick followed their example, though she thought not a one of them ought to have come along in the first place. Only Aroostook watched September and her fate, her headlamps illuminating the glittering Leopard’s spots.
Neither girl nor cat said anything else for a long while. September stared. Everything she could ever be or know was inside this brass creature. What could she possibly say to it?
“Try the Appeal to Probability,” Candlestick called over her shoulder without looking. “It’s a good opening gambit with fates. It’s a fallacy, of course, but what isn’t? Such and such will probably happen, wouldn’t you agree, Leopard? That sort of thing.”
But September could not stop staring. She thought of the older Saturday, standing in front of her car, blocking her way. She thought of the Blue Wind laughing at her. She thought of the Fairies, speeding through time so that they never, ever had to wait to find out what happened next, never, ever had to long for anything before they had it in hand.
Candlestick cleared her throat. “I do like the Fallacy of Many Questions as well, mind you. Loaded questions, leading questions, lying questions…”
The Leopard stared back at her. September thought of the Sibyl, how surely she had known what her life would look like all along and all through. She thought of Saturday in the circus, how gorgeously he’d flown. She thought of Ell in his Library, shelving romances. And she thought, she could not help thinking, of the awful night when she wrestled Saturday on the Gears of the World, and burnt his back with iron, and how when it was done they had looked up and seen someone. September had seen a little girl with blue skin and a mole on her left cheek—but of all the things she had tried not to think of since she first knew about Fairyland, she had tried hardest not to think about that. She didn’t like it. She didn’t know what to do with it. It sat on the floor of her heart like a toy with a thousand working pieces that could not possibly be put together. Their daughter, Saturday had said, as out of time and out of order as any true Marid.
Slowly, September said: “A Yeti is frightening. Frightening and strong and so much bigger than me. But not half as frightening as thinking your whole life has already happened and you don’t have any choice in it.”
The brass Leopard curled and uncurled her tail. “I didn’t think we frightened so easily,” she purred. “Aren’t we ill-tempered and irascible? Isn’t that us?”