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

k—don’t you think a Yeti, even a blurry one, might want to be near the paw we’re after? Like a magnet, they might be attracted, even if they were so out of focus they couldn’t think sharp.”

September tore off from her pack, dragging Saturday by the hand, bashing back through heavy frames and cellophane films of Ifrits firing meteors through thin silk zeppelins, straining toward the great white blur staining the Country of Photography like spilled ink. Finally, a sound like a shutter cracked, not in her ear but in her mind, in her bones. And September, Saturday, the Wyverary, and Turing the Tyguerrotype all tumbled forward, pitching into a silver-white photograph.

Eleven white blurs ringed a city of blooming, vine-tangled, thorny, lush spires. A gentle curve of land held towers of twisted white wood and black blossoms, boulevards of long gray lawn, pools like mirrors sunk into the streets. In the midst of it all lay a broad pavilion ringed with toadstools, and there, out of a tiered pedestal, rose a vast, withered, ancient, crooked paw, the great dark hand of an abominable snowman.

They had found Patience.

Fairies poured out of every house and turret and garret and hall. They, too, were too fast for a camera to catch—shimmering blurs whipping around the paw like veils in a strange dance, misty, sparkling. Only one had enough focus to show on the film: a young girl, something like the Fairies September had known, like Belinda and Calpurnia and Charlie, wings unfolded and full of prisms, smiling and strong, stretching up on tip-toe to bite the leathery skin of the paw. Her hair was bound up with rowan-berries and six knives hung from her willow-belt.

“Is this all?” asked September urgently. “The only picture of Patience?”

The Tyguerrotype scrabbled at the air again. And suddenly, awfully, the eleven blurs howled. It was the selfsame bawl they had heard on the plain before Ciderskin came to batter them. It was muffled; if a sound could blur, this one did. But it sounded all the same. Several Patiences stripped away like birch bark. The Fairies’ blurs only thickened into a creamy stain that blotted out half the city. The light of them was so bright September shaded her eyes.

And then the blurs were gone. The paw was gone. Turing pulled up a Patience as crisp and clear as ever—and empty. The image settled around them, lines and shapes opening out to let them walk through. September dashed to the pavilion, but nothing remained of the paw or the Fairy girl about to bite it. A thin wind whistled through the gently growing and roughly abandoned place. Across the lawn-roads and toadstools and brambly, rooty palaces, nothing remained but rubbish, useless belongings left where they lay, as if a whole city’s pockets had been turned out onto the ground.

“That’s it?” September cried. “Where did it go?”

“We are all at the whimsy of those who observe us,” said the Tyguerrotype kindly. “We can never know what will move someone in your world to photograph something. Why was it worthy, and not this other thing? Folk choose what to observe, and what they observe, at last, becomes all there is.”

The eleven blurs bawled again, all together. Saturday shuddered. September shook her head. She opened and closed her hands.

“I don’t know what to do now,” she said helplessly. “I was so sure I was right, that the answer was here.” September put her hand on her cheek. Her skin felt hot—and somehow sour, if skin can feel sour. She pulled her hand away. Black paint smeared her palm, inky and bubbling. But it was not paint—it was her palm, dropping away into a burn of nothing. She looked at Saturday—his chest was a lightless bruise of nothingness. Ell’s tail splotched with dark holes.

Turing’s stripes wriggled in distress. “I did say. I did say it was dangerous for you. I couldn’t vouch for your safety. I was very clear! You aren’t meant to stay so long in Country—you aren’t meant to stay more than a second, half of a second, half of a half of a half of a second! I think…I think you’re overdeveloping.”

She felt something tug at her sleeve, but her mind was too busy trying to right itself, to find a new grip on the whole of it.

“What happened to the Fairies,” she whispered, “happened here. We just saw it happen—one moment here, the next gone. Abecedaria said that the Fairies came to the Moon by the thousands—it must have happened to them here. In Patience.” The tug came again. “And if it happened here, then no one could know where the paw is, because there’s no one left to know.”

September yanked her sleeve away in irritation.

And looked down into her own eyes.

CHAPTER XVII

LAST SEPTEMBER

In Which Two Septembers and Two Wyverns Reveal Two Paths Forward

September stared up at herself.

September stared down at herself.

Only it was not herself, quite. The small, flat, silver-faced September tugging at her sleeve was exactly five years old, wearing a puffy dress with lace on the skirt that she remembered very clearly had belonged to an older cousin and had a tear under the sash. It was meant to be a sunny Easter yellow. The sash had been light green. She remembered it because the edges of the tear scratched her skin when she had to sit still for a portrait with her mother and father at Christmastime. Now, the dress, all black and white like the photo that still sat on their mantle at home, had a black and white girl in it and the girl in it was looking up at her expectantly.

“Hello!” said little September.

The bigger September did not know what to say.

“Don’t we look just alike?” her younger self said. “I saw you running—you run very fast! If you don’t slow down you’ll fall!”

Ell looked at the child with delight. “Wherever did you come from?” he asked. “I see you have both shoes. Well done, you!”

Little September pointed back over her shoulder—through several gauzy layers of photos, September saw her parents as if through glass, her father’s arm around her mother, her mother’s hand outstretched to rest upon her daughter’s hair just as it did in the portrait at home in its brass frame on the mantle. She wanted to go to them, to run to them and tell them everything that had happened, to show them her silks and—and to have them see her, really see her, as she was when she was in Fairyland. Not a child in school. A Professional Revolutionary with a hammer on her hip and plans in her pocket.

“Come play with me!” the child cried. “Come away with me to my room and we’ll play robbers. I’m a very good robber.”

At this, September smiled faintly. But she did not feel at all well. Speaking with oneself causes awful headaches.