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

“Is there a way to defeat Ciderskin?” September whispered, and once she had asked one question the rest tumbled out after. “What will I be when I am grown-up? Will my father ever really be well? Is the war really going to end? Will the Marquess wake up? Am I going to have that daughter no matter what, no matter how, no matter which way I go? Will I like the version of myself I will be if I have her? Is everything done, done and decided and all there is for me is to wait for it to happen to me? The Green Wind said I chose myself. Please say he wasn’t lying. I do know winds lie, I do know it, but please let that have been true, of all the things he said.”

“Dodgy attribution,” the Buraq coughed. “Quoting from a biased and frankly fanciful source.”

The brass Leopard said nothing. She lifted her paw and pressed it into her spotted breast. A little door came open, a patch of brass fur and jewels with a darkness inside it, and empty space.

Within that empty space lay a book.

The book was a very deep and very vivid red, with curling gold shapes stamped in the corners. It had a lock upon it and many, many pages clapped up within. It glowed in her fate’s chest like a heart.

September reached inside and took out the red book. It was heavy. A girl’s face graced the cover, finely embossed, but it was turned away, gazing at some unseen thing. Perhaps it was her own face, perhaps not. A miniature version of herself, after all. Was it an answer? Was it everything already written?

“You can’t argue with something that’s written down,” she said, stroking the red locks of hair on the cover. “If the heart of my fate is a book, there’s nothing for it. Once it’s written, it’s done. All those ancient books always say ‘so it is written’ and that means it’s finished and tidied and you can’t say a thing against it.”

Oh, but September, it isn’t so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written—but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.

Has she heard me? Have I tilted my hand? I cannot tell. Look close—she is not moving. Well, my powers are not infinite.

September held the red book of the Leopard’s heart tightly. Her fingertips turned white. She looked past it, not to the grass but to her black silks, flowing around her body, clinging and warming her and announcing its own purposes to everyone she met. I chose myself, she thought furiously. I did choose. Some distant night-bird called. She did not know if she could do it. Candlestick called this place holy. What would that make her? This was no way to win an argument, certainly. The lesson of Pluto sounded in her heart, heavier even than a brass Leopard. Perhaps she was, in the end, a Criminal. A breaker of laws. A vandal.

September lay the red book on the raingrass. Blades shivered and broke beneath. You cannot argue with fate, whatever Candlestick says, she thought. You can only defy it.

“You can only say no,” she said aloud. “No is how you know something’s alive.”

Out of the pocket of her silks she drew her last possession, the one thing the Wind would not take when he demanded Everything She Had. Her iron hammer.

With a great deep breath and a choked cry, September lifted the hammer high and brought it singing down onto the red, red body of her fate.

The book shattered.

A roaring, rumbling, blossoming sound shook the world—a moonquake, splitting the ground and shaking like nothing would stop it.

What others call you, you become.

INTERLUDE

THE BLACK COSMIC DOG

In the city on the inside of the Moon, the Black Cosmic Dog has found something.

It is a very large something.

In fact, the Black Cosmic Dog has occupied himself with nothing but digging it up for some time now. It is a big job. When the Dog furiously claws at the soft lunar soil, bits of glittering stardust show under his fur like burrs. He uses both his front and back legs. When he sleeps, he sleeps curled up against the steep curve of his prize.

A scarlet boil, hot and painful, has grown on the waxing slope of the Moon, in the place where a city used to bustle and thrive. The red of it glows against the night and the Black Cosmic Dog. He pants all the while he digs around it, exposing it to the air and the wind. The Moon is so white and the boil is so red it looks as though the whole world is bleeding. The Black Cosmic Dog grins his cosmic grin and goes about his work. He is happiest when he is digging.

The red boil grows day by day as he scrabbles at it, moving great heaps of Moon-dirt like drifts of snow.

In the end, even the Dog cannot say how big it will be before it bursts.

CHAPTER XV

THE TYGUERROTYPE

In Which September and Her Friends Enter the City of Orrery, Meet a Gentleman Tiger, and Perform a Spectacular Optical Trick

The Moon owns many mountains. Some are so tiny you and I would step over them without a thought—yet on their infinitesimal slopes, wee invisible sheep chew lumps of microscopic snow. Some line the rim of the Moon like a spectacular fence, and there you will find frog-footed rams stripping painted bark from twisted tapestry trees. The highest and most fearsome of these mountains is the Splendid Dress, which opens up from its snowy bright peak like a skirt, flowing in stripes and swirls and patterns and tiers all the way down to the plains. I will share a secret with you: once, a girl really did wear this mountain like a dress. She was a very serious young strega and stregas are not to be meddled with, for they can hex as easy as they can tie their shoes. She wore glasses and her hair hung very straight. She had a highly developed sense of humor, which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice. She would not like it much if I told you how she got so big, so I will hold my peace and keep my hat.

At the foot of the Splendid Dress many brass rings and tracks circle the stony frills and ruffles of the Underskirt, the crags and cliffs that announce: A mountain is about to put on its heights, so hitch up your pride and get climbing. Here and there on the tracks, bright glassy bulbs as big as battleships open up like lotus-flowers whose petals have only just begun to yawn and open up to the day. Inside the many-colored flowers you can find anything a town might like to have for its very own. The tracks click and move every so often, but it’s done smoothly, and only a few people fall down, the way you and I will when riding a tram in a new city where we do not know the stops and starts. This is the place the Ellipsis leads to, the very last, small black pools and ponds no bigger than rabbit-holes.