“It’s a terrible magic that everyone can do,” he said. “So do it. Breathe. Choose. Something, anything, whatever you want. Or don’t choose. Or choose and if you don’t like it later, it’ll be all right because when you were very young, you took a hammer and smashed your fate into a hundred pieces.”
September did not even look at the Saturday with kind wrinkles. She looked at her Saturday. The present she had to meet over and over. He was right. She lived out of order and upside down, a jumble of time and girl. He was right. September blushed. She blushed and she let herself blush. There was no losing in it, only feeling. Fairyland, she thought. Fairyland is what I have where a ship has ballast. In high seas it keeps me upright. And maybe growing up only means getting bigger. As big as Almanack, as a whelk on the moon who can hold a world inside it. September’s heart sat up inside her and spoke.
She leaned up and kissed her Marid and hoped it was the right thing. Her heart caught the bar and swung out, swung wild, over the lights and the gasps below, reaching for a pair of sure blue hands in the air and willing them to find hers.
When they separated, the older Saturday put his long blue arms around the child of himself. He beckoned to September and she went to him. He smelled of cold stones and the sea. It was a good smell. “Listen to me,” the older Saturday interrupted. His voice was Saturday’s voice, but deeper and roomier, with space inside to curl up in.
But he did not get to finish.
I have been many things in our time together. Sly and secret and full of tricks, cruel and heartless in my own way. But for now I shall be kind. Saturday, the Saturday who has seen how it all comes out, wanted to tell himself a thing, and September, too. You and I, as we get on in years together, will many times wish to take our past selves in our arms and stroke their hair and tell them how the world is, how it is made, what can be done about it. Saturday could not be allowed to do it, any more than we can, and that is why I caused the Moon to shudder just so. I do have some small privileges.
But I will tell you what he meant to say, because we are friends and the space before an epilogue is a sacred place, soft and full of possibilities.
Saturday wanted to say: Listen to me. Love is a Yeti. It is bigger than you and frightening and terrible. It makes loud and vicious noises. It is hungry all the time. It has horns and teeth and the fore of its fists is more than anyone can bear. It speeds up time and slows it down. And it has its own aims and missions that those who are lucky enough to see it cannot begin to guess. You might see a Yeti once in your life or never. You might live in a village of them. But in the end, no matter how fast you think you can go, the Yeti is always faster than you, and you can only choose how you say hello to it, and whether you shake its hand.
CHAPTER XX
EVER SO MUCH MORE TROUBLE
In Which Many Things Forgotten Are Recalled Rather Suddenly and With Alarming Effect
But Saturday said none of these things, and neither September nor his young self heard them.
Another quake shuddered out from the wound in the middle of Patience. It felt shallower, but it snaked sudden and sharp across the ground. September tottered and stumbled, falling into the two Saturdays. They both caught her, and for a moment all three of them held each other, clinging together with the stars like promises overhead. But then the quake sheared back the other way, a terrible aftershock, a terrible afterbirth, and September fell backward, away from the Marids who loved her.
As she fell, September saw the yawning black chasms shudder in the surface of the Moon. The cuts made by birth and the Bone Shears spat out their last blood and shivered toward closing, faster and faster as Ciderskin and the Black Cosmic Dog moved the heavens like a spinning ball and performed the only magic, the kind that heals all. Far off in the distance two bright balloons popped up out of the long, deep wounds, firing cannons as madly as fireworks in summer. The older Saturday winked out like a lantern, back into the open sea of timelines and flickering, turning fish.
September landed hard on her side against the metal edge of a typewriter dusty with lunar weeds. The keys mashed hard, whacking some incomprehensible word onto the roller. The impact jolted her teeth. She felt something break in her thigh and had time to think Oh no, no, I’ve broken my leg again before she began to bleed. Hot wetness soaked through the black silks of her trousers in a moment and seeped out onto the keys of the typewriter. Pain sparkled up along her hip. She put her hand against the wound gingerly—and it came away bright with color. But it was not quite the right color for a human wound. Some streaks of true red blood ran down her fingers, but they drowned in the hot fluid oozing dark orange over her hand,
thick, syrupy, the color of a campfire. It still bubbled a little.
Ballast Downbound’s orange fizz had shattered in her pocket. The sunlight of ancient days, of giant ferns and dimetrodons and werewhales and memory, remembering everything it ever had been and longing to return to being it once more. It spread out hungrily, crimson and thick and shining, dripping into the guts of the typewriter, splashing onto the carriage.
September laughed with relief—and then winced, for the shards of glass still stuck in her thigh. She rolled off of the soaked typewriter only to splash into a river of the Moon’s own blood, still oozing from a canyon not quite yet stitched shut. She was not careful enough—September tried to keep her leg out of the warm planetary fluids and leaned too far over, crunching again against the typewriter, soaking it in orange fizz, in impossibly ancient light.
The typewriter began to smoke.
September thought at first that it was on fire. The deep orange stuff bubbled and oozed over the keys, spotted like a leopard’s skin with September’s own blood. It sizzled and sparked, beams of sunshine ribboning out and spooling back again, the sunlight of some long-vanished day when Fairies were young, stealing their first wings, when werewhales and dimetrodons and apples of immortality and cyclopses soaked up the heat and warmth of it into their skins. Sunlight that wanted only to make things bigger, to make them what they had been long ago, bigger ferns and more dimetrodons and orchards covering all the hungry earth like armies. Ballast’s fountain-drink melted into the keys, its sugar and sirop dissolving the letters. It smelled like deep goodness, growing and living and working and ripeness. But beneath it the typewriter was coming apart, shrinking and surging at once until it erupted like a well-loved mountain.
And then, the typewriter turned into a girl.
She was enormous, so much taller and stronger than any Fairy September had seen or imagined. Her wings unfolded into vast prisms of fire-colors, their glassy membranes glinting green-red in the light of the still-wheeling stars, the still-flashing dawns flicking by like cards shuffling. Overhead, the small red Moon had grown broad and wide, wide enough for lakes and seas to crash into foam on its face, wide enough for snowy peaks already catching the light of the new Moon’s mother below. The Fairy’s hair streamed out around her head like a crown, twisted with green vines and fronds and roses bursting like stars going nova. Vermillion jewels covered her copper-colored body from throat to toe.
The Fairy looked down at September. Her eyes were black, as black as the beginning of the world. And they were filled with white, burning stars.
The Fairy seized September in her great hands like a doll. And she began to laugh.
September looked down, her head spinning. Saturday was climbing onto Ell’s back to come after her. Ciderskin had sunk to his knees, his ruby eyes full of terrible tears. She wanted to cry out to them but could not. Her throat would not move. Aroostook glittered and shone in her new glassy skin and long stripes. September reeled in the Fairy’s hand. The searing, living, growing, bright, and earthy smell of the Fairy made her dizzy. What happened to you, Aroostook, while I was smashing and yelling and running after Yetis? Suddenly it seemed important as September drifted in the fog of perfume and laughter and thin, thin air. I will find out, I promise, we’ll have a sit down, just like the Blue Wind said. But she could not make her lips and lungs work together to say that, either.
And then September felt a pulling in her, a hook in the heart, and she knew the feeling, she knew it but it was too soon, she had been in Fairyland but a moment, only a moment! Over the Fairy’s terrible shoulder, she could see the Blue Wind coming, as the Green Wind had come for her twice now, sailing over the edge of the world to snatch her out of it and send her home.
“I only had a day!” September whispered, her voice strangled in the Fairy’s endless gaze. “Don’t make me go!”
Dawns popped and spun over her face at once as the Yeti went about his childrearing, moving time to give the little red Moon a chance to grow. Her skin felt hot, tight, too small for her, as though some hideous hand pulled at her hair and her feet to stretch her as far as she could go. September screamed.
The invisible hook in September hauled at her and the Fairy laughed her booming, wild, savage laugh, and Saturday reached for her and A-Through-L roared in panic—
September fell out of Fairyland like a drop of spilled blood.