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

Ell stretched his neck forward, straining after Errata in his own way, calling for her to stay even as his eyes darkened to nothingness. The little Wyverary shook his head from side to side wretchedly. He had already started to hiccup.

“Oh no, no, Ell, you must try not to! Hold your breath or try to swallow it…”

But A-Through-L’s fire burst forth in a long, glowing stream of longing and she could feel him wither up in her arms.

The Tyguerrotype closed his paw around his squeezebulb. “We can’t wait any longer. You came for Patience and you got what there was to get.”

“Wait!” cried September. Her cheek yawned inky wetness, flushing down over her chin even as she spoke. “Don’t! Couldn’t we somehow come out here, here, in Patience, the place in this photograph, and not in Azimuth? Couldn’t we punch through this very film here and now, and come out on the other side of the Moon? If you don’t take the picture, if you don’t finish taking it, we could go some other way?”

“I don’t see how,” said the Tyguerrotype.

“I do,” whispered Ell miserably. “After all, photographs are only light and light is only fire.”

“Ell, you can’t.” September clutched at him. He fit into the palm of her hand. All of him. His red snout, his whipping orange whiskers, his long scarlet tail, his broad chest the color of old peaches. Like a newborn kitten, his tail snaking over her thumb. How much smaller could he bear to get?

As A-Through-L shut his eyes, blackness swallowed up his snout.

“No,” September said, and her voice was deathly hard. She put her hand over his mouth and stopped him.

Instead, she pulled her hammer from her pocket once more. It was iron. Nothing in Fairyland could bear iron.

She turned to Saturday. His face diffused into darkness. She felt herself fading, fading, hardly able to stand.

September raised the hammer, teeth first, and brought it shredding down into the image of Patience. Slowly, sickeningly, the photographed city melted around them. The Tyguerrotype fell backward through crisping and peeling layers of Country, batting them out and scowling. A picture of a fire brigade bristling with ladders shuffled through the prints.

“Where are you going?” came a voice behind them.

September turned. Flickering and popping in silver and black stood the Marquess as she had seen her long ago, in a newsreel, her velvet and silk and flowered and jeweled hat tilting to one side.

“You wicked little thief,” she said slowly, her mouth forming the words as though she were swallowing cream.

The picture of Patience swallowed them up before September could answer.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE HEART OF THE MOON

IS A MONTH

In Which Much Is Revealed

The edges of the world sizzled silver, then black, and then vanished. September’s eyes burned; suddenly everything had color again and depth, too. The Moon seemed so much brighter and harsher. Afternoon spilled out over the bowl-curve of the inside edge of the Moon, turning the pale soil to gold dust. She felt her face, her throat, her chest, her hands—all whole, all full of color. In her lap, A-Through-L sat shivering, tiny, helpless. September held him close. She did not know what to say—so she ripped a scrap of fabric from her blouse and another from the long leg of her trousers, knotting them into a necklace with a black silk basket for him to ride in. A-Through-L climbed in, his eyes round and frightened, hardly knowing his own body, coiling his tail up through the cord and gripping the rim of the pouch in his claws.

“See? I will hoist you up, when you are little,” she whispered. Ell put out his red paw. September lay her finger inside it, and his claws closed round.

Aroostook struck the edge of a rise in the land and sprayed earth before them like a splash of seawater. Saturday gripped the dash as they crashed through the moongrass and down into a long valley. His blue fingers clutched the rough loops of a vivid tangerine-colored scrimshaw that had taken over the whole of the dashboard, the sort of carving old whalers once did on the long baleen teeth of their catches. They nearly crashed before they saw the creature who had been waiting for them, looking up from a lunar sandbar with piercing, intelligent eyes.

A broad, polished, black and white checkered crab.

“Spoke!” cried September.

“That’s me,” the Taxicrab chuckled amiably.

“But you’re so far from Almanack! What are you doing out here?” September asked.

“Didn’t I tell you? Almanack takes care of all your needs before you know you have them.”

“But I’m not one of Almanack’s folk,” September protested.