Ciderskin crouched down and put his great blue-black paw on a swirling patch of the red and rising dome where it met the cracked, chalky lunar earth, slabs of stone and peat bursting and buckling wretchedly. As September and Saturday watched, paralyzed by fear and a large and attentive dog, the Yeti moved his fingers in strange circles, each finger
tip tracing its own path. A wind picked up; the light of afternoon went out like a book snapping shut, gold to black in less than a gasp. Stars bustled quick and hurried over the arch of the sky. Gold returned and was gone again, whipping by like those little books where a little figure dances if you flip through the pages fast enough. September felt the terrible restlessness in her heart pick up speed and put on muscle. The Yeti glanced at them. His face rearranged itself into a craggy, weather-beaten smile. It looked out of place, like a volcano smiling.
“It works better when it’s attached,” he said with a bit of sheepishness hidden in his growl. He held up his good hand. “Better still if I had both, but I haven’t in a long while. You can beat time about the head with a hacked-off hunk of flesh, but my body is my own. No one can use it better than me. Time is no one’s friend—time has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw.” The stars slowed up above, and dark settled down over the open dust bowl of the Moon. “I was very young when I lost it. And I did lose it—I was careless. I know that now. I was meeting a mountain. I meant to kiss her in secret. I meant to wed her under the midnight dark. The prettiest mountain you ever saw, sparkling with snow in all the right places, rich with granite and tourmaline and silver, sturdy and sensible and weathered by the experience of eons. When she saw me, my mountain’s pine trees bristled and the wind in her heights whistled my name. When I saw her, I felt rivers break through the rock of my heart and carve me into a new shape.”
“Do all Yetis wed mountains?” asked Saturday softly.
Ciderskin smiled a private smile. “Only the lucky ones,” he said. “She agreed to meet me, to pick up her skirts and come to me away from her brothers and sisters who watched over each other with unclosing eyes. I came early. I was eager. I was young. I was lost in my dream of living quick and slow and quick and slow on her slopes, being near her every day, hearing the small mountain particulars of daily living: which foxes had kits and which had fallen off of cliff-faces, which avalanches wanted to come round for tea, what still meadows had business with alpine hypnodaisies, a thousand dropping pinecones. Some look at a mountain and see only the peak. I looked with a lover’s eyes and saw every tremble of every pebble. And so lost was I in contemplating the future happiness of my life with and on my mountain that I did not see the trap—the crude, stupid, idiot trap that would not have caught a bee-addled bear—until it crunched into my wrist. My mountain heard my screams of rage and pain and ran, the tremors of her going quaking me apart. I was angry at myself. A body is never so vicious as when it has only itself to blame for its trouble. And so much grief came bubbling up from my single thoughtless snap of a clock-hand.” Ciderskin pushed one of his fingers, as long and thick as a sapling, into the flesh of the blister with infinite slowness and patience. He dug inside like a lemur scratching for insects. A distant thundering, quivering sound bubbled up around them, from everywhere and nowhere. “Yetis are better than that. We have to be. We are the Moon’s children.”
“If you’re the Moon’s child,” September cried, “how can you hurt it so? What is that thing coming out of the ground? I should never crack my mother’s bones and shake her limbs the way you’ve done!”
As if to support her argument, the land gave a sickening lurch. Ciderskin scrabbled at the innards of the red dome. September nearly fell into the body of the black dog; she and Saturday clutched for each other as the moonquake tore through Patience.
Ciderskin laid his head to one side. “Do you know what the Moon is, little girl?”
“A Moon is a Moon. It orbits around an Earth.”
“Well, yes, that’s true. Just as it’s true that a girl is a girl and orbits around a life. But the Moon is many things. Nothing is only itself. The Moon is the Moon, forever and always. But she is also alive. And like anything alive, she ages and grows and has rebellious years and takes up with passing planets and has her moods and her stubborn ways. It is only that her ways are so big they become our ways. She changes her face over the course of a month, well, who doesn’t? Who is the same creature on the first as on the thirty-first? Anything might happen, in such a space. But when the Moon changes, she keeps the time for the world below. She pulls the tides up like a blanket when she is cold and pushes them down again when she is too warm and thus rolls out the hours of the day and night. I will tell you the truth: The heart of the Moon is a month. She is an Engine, and as she turns she spins out month after month, like the pages of a book flying free. And down below, folk pack them up into a calendar and understand the rhythm of the world. Full Moon to full Moon and twelve of those make a year. I hope you understand: The Moon makes time. All Moons make time. And a Yeti, born on the Moon, fed of the rocks of the Moon and the water of her snows, is like a clock full of blood and bone that walks and talks and sings rhyming songs at eternity. When the Fairies took my hand—and it is a hand, you know. A hand and not a paw. A hand that uses tools and manipulates objects and touches the face of a beloved and counts off the years until joy.”
“A paw is not so useless as all that,” growled the black dog. It could speak—a rolling, rough, raveled voice.
“The Fairies called it a paw because they wanted to believe I was an animal—and not the sort of animal that discusses junkyard philosophy and enjoys Turkish coffee and knows Bone Magic and holds down a mortgage, no, the kind you can cut up for meat and only feel bad about it on Fridays. It’s easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.” Ciderskin’s mouth twisted; he rubbed his furry stump. “That is how Fairies think of everyone, you know. They used the world as a tool for their delight. We hated them so much and they could never see it. Our hate was a great red beast scraping the walls and they could not see it.”
September could not bear this further. “I have met Fairies and none of them were like that. They have helped me; they have been kind! How shall I believe a monster stabbing at the Moon over my own friends!”
Ciderskin shook his woolly head. “If you have known Fairies, you have known only those who heard of a Yeti’s Paw on the Moon and did not come. Who heard of a way to lash time to a sleigh and whip it till it bled, and did not wish to drive it. Rare creatures. There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from. And yet the Fairies sucked deep of us all.”
And September did remember that Calpurnia had a changeling girl, a child who could not have been her own child. And that Charlie Crunchcrab ruled Fairyland with a hand heavier than she could ever have thought.
“I will answer your question before you ask,” continued the Yeti, pulling his fingers out of the blister and bending to clear more slabs of white stone from its growing body. And September could see it swelling now, pulsing a little, even, as though it were taking a long, deep breath. “And the answer is: You are wrong. The Fairies are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy’s game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board.”
“What happened?” asked Saturday and September together.
“No one will tell us!” September went on alone, her fear outboxed by her curiosity. “The Fairies seem to think it is a secret, or else they do not know.”
The Yeti shrugged at the mounds of rubbish around them. “They are not gone,” he said again. “You are surrounded by Fairies. Pressed in on all sides and crushed by them. You have held them in your arms, I have no doubt, and carried them on your back. You have thought them precious, sought them, found them, lost them.” Ciderskin pulled from the depths of his impossibly thick fur the long blue length of the Sapphire Stethoscope. He put the knobs in his ears and the cup against the red blister. “I suppose you’ve noticed the Moon has no Queen, nor any K
ing, nor a Marquess nor a Prime Minister nor even so much as a hedgehog perched on a barstool with a paper hat. The Moon is anarchistic—she has her own mind and will not be told what to do by folk less long lived than she, which is no one. Some say the Moon hated the Fairies as much as anyone. That she did not take kindly to being ridden about by a bunch of overgrown dragonflies fueled by the elixir of thinking you’re in charge. I’ll tell you for nothing, that’s the worst sort of drunk you can get. When people tell it now, they say that the Moon wanted to shake off the gadflies on her haunches and so she whipped up a Thaumaturge. Just pushed her up out of the ground, made of the Moon’s own pearl and the cold breath of that eternal month ticking by inside the lunar depths. It’s true that she took after the Moon: long silver hair and stars dancing on her black skin. Her eyes were panther’s eyes, they whisper even though they never met her. In their slitted pupils, if you looked closely, you could see the soft boom of magic detonating within. She called herself the Pearl, no different than the stuff of the Moon. I suppose she had a school of magic, but who could guess what it was? Everyone tried to claim her later—Dry Magic, Severe Magic, No Magic, even the Quiet Physickists. But she, like the Moon, had no kind of heart for rules. The Fairies welcomed her and squabbled over whether the Seelie or the Unseelie ought to get to drive her mad by dancing or turn her head into a cockatiel’s. And all the while my poor hand had time draped over it like a cat’s cradle. When the Pearl first appeared she was young, but the Fairies kept her dancing and squawking in their parlors until she was a woman grown, who’d spent more of her days as a toy than a girl. And finally, the booming magic the Pearl kept tied down in her burst out. In the midst of Patience, she smiled. That was all. She stood next to my severed hand and leant into it like it was a throne made just for her. And she smiled. The Pearl went dark, like a lamp going out. All to silky black. Stars blazed briefly in her skin, like wishes falling. The Pearl smiled and the Fairies disappeared.”
The black dog picked up a long silver scythe from the wreckage of the city. Grinning wolfishly around it, he shook it in his jaw like a bone.
“Oh!” cried September, understanding in an awful instant.
“They used us as tools,” whispered the Yeti, though his whisper was the shout of a human child. “So the Pearl made them tools for the use of all. There is poetry to thaumaturgy, or else what fun would it be? You’ve met half the fey nation. The Sapphire Stethoscope was the Mayor of Patience, Barnabus Broom, if I remember the color of his jacket correctly. The Bone Shears were his wife Monkshood. I believe old Tanaquill turned into a wrench. Her sons clattered to the ground as wooden spoons. There were more Fairies than flowers in the fields, and they all became what they always were—” Ciderskin’s voice darkened with old, creaking rage. “Junk. Useful junk, but junk all the same. I am quite sure you’ve used a Fairy to do a job. They can never break or wear out, the Pearl made sure of it. Of course, not every instrument has a hideous history, but there are so many, so many.”
“My wrench?” said September with a sick heaviness in her stomach. “The Witches’ Spoon…”
“But are they awake?” squeaked Ell suddenly from the basket round September’s neck. “Are they awake inside their wrenches and their spoons?”
September put her hand to her mouth. “The Pitchfork said no,” she gasped. “In the giants’ country, in Parthalia. In Parthalia, a Pitchfork said no. That’s why King Charlie decreed that Tools Have Rights. Of course they do—Tools are his cousins and friends and aunts and uncles! But then, but then, something must be happening, that they’re waking up, that the Fairies are stirring. And Mr. Yeti, if you pressed me on the subject, I might say it’s you, wrecking the Moon for no good reason but your own hurt! If the Moon made the Pearl, then breaking the Moon would break the spell. Maybe. It feels like logic, even if it sounds like nonsense.”
The Yeti laughed. He laughed so long and so hard that September had to clap her hands over her ears. She tried to turn her chest inward to protect little Ell. But even then, his laughter did not stop. It kept rolling and pealing and battering the towers and the night air and finally the rolling and the battering was not just his laughing but the whole of the Moon, quavering in torment, whining and wheezing erupting from the surface like icebergs grinding away from each other. Chasms opened up into long black. A Fairy church all of dried bittersweet vines and frost tumbled into a yawning canyon without a sound save a little sad, resigned rustling. The blister suddenly ballooned higher and wider than ever before. The shaking went on and on, only surging harder. September crouched to the ground, holding her balance as best she could. Finally, mercifully, the moonquake ebbed away.
“You are not as I thought you would be,” snapped September, her nerves a-jangle. “You talk like a good and kind beast, but you break things just by laughing!”
“Why do you think I am causing this, lowlander?” roared the Yeti.
“You’ve stabbed the Moon with the Bone Shears!” September yelled right back. “You slapped Aroostook across a plain like she was nothing! You laugh and the world shatters! You’re so big, bigger than anything but a mountain, and your eyes are red and angry and your hand is cruel and I am afraid of you—I shall not be ashamed to be afraid when I am about to be crushed along with my friends. If I should draw a picture of a villain, I daresay it would look a great deal like you!”