“No, you haven’t. You’ve seen a little polka-dotted cap or an oystery bit of fungusy lace. What a mushroom is, what it really looks like, is a whole mad tangle of stuff spreading underground for miles and miles, tendrils and whorls and loops of stem and mold and spore. Well, Fairyland-Below isn’t separate from Fairyland at all. It is our cap. Underneath, we grow forever secretly outward, tangling in complicated loops, while what you see in the forest is really little more than a nose poking out.”
Somehow, a thought squeezed through the radiant shriek of flight in September’s veins. She stopped short in the air, pumping away with her fat saffron feet, four claws clutching at the night.
“Why didn’t you have to use a magic ration? Why can you do this? Ell can’t do this—he would have, if he could have. We had to walk so far! Tell me you have been studying hard and have gotten a diploma from a Turning-Girls-into-Things school. Tell me I have not tasted something wicked by letting you change me—I do not want it to be wicked! I want to feel like this always!”
A-Through-L’s face made a complicated expression. It looked shamed, then thought better of it and looked proud, then cunning, then filled up with so much love that all the other quirks of his mouth and angles of his brow smoothed together into one beaming, jubilant frown.
“We’re the mushroom, September. Why would we ever need to ration magic down here? Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun. Fairyland-Below is the shadow of Fairyland, and this is where magic gets born and grows up and sows its oats before coming out into the world. The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming. Before Halloween, we lived in the upper world, where the light makes us insubstantial, thin, scraps of thought and shade. We weren’t unhappy—we made good magic for the world, sportsmanlike stuff. We reflected our bodies’ deeds, and when our brothers and sisters went to sleep, we had our own pretty lives, our shadow loves, our shadow markets, our shadow races. But we had no idea, no idea how it could be under the world with our Hollow Queen. And now we shall never go back. The more shadows join us in the deep, the more our cities get soaked in magic, just sopping with it, and you don’t even need a book of spells or a wand or a fancy hat. Just want something bad enough, and run toward it fast enough. The rations are for Above-Grounders. They can’t have it without us, and they’ve been drinking from our hands for far too long.”
September’s huge jaw hung open. Her red whiskers floated beautifully on the cave-winds. And in a moment, as fast as it had happened, her Wyvern-body vanished. She fell, tumbling through the sky—only to land softly on A-Through-L’s broad belly. He held her gently with his hind legs. September cried out miserably—her body had gotten small again, like a dress that has shrunk in the laundry. Her skin felt so tight she would surely die of tininess. Her bones groaned with loss, with longing to fly once more.
“It doesn’t last long,” Ell admitted. “Not yet.”
After a long while of feeling sorry for herself and worrying over what the Wyverary had said, September whispered, “If Fairyland-Below is Fairyland’s shadow, what is the shadow of Fairyland-Below? What’s under the underworld?”
Ell laughed like thunder rolling somewhere far off. “I’m afraid it’s underworlds all the way down, my dearest, darling flying ace.”
Now, just as there are important Rules in Fairyland, there are Rules in Fairyland-Below, and I feel I must take a moment to curtsy in their direction. These are not the sorts of Rules that get posted in front of courthouses or municipal pools. For example, underworlds, on the whole, encourage roughhousing, speeding faster than twenty-five miles per hour, splashing and diving. Unattended children, dogs, cats, and other familiars are quite welcome. And if September had come underground at any other time, she might have seen handsome, clearly lettered signs at every crossroad and major landmark kindly letting visitors know how they ought to behave. But she came underground at just the exact time that she did, and Halloween had had all those friendly, black-and-violet-colored signs knocked down and burned up in a great fire, which she danced around, giggling and singing. Halloween felt it quite logical that if you destroy the rule-posting, you destroy the rules. The Hollow Queen hated rules, and wanted to bite them all over.
But some Rules are immutable. That is an old word, and it means this cannot be changed.
Thus, both September and Halloween did not know something on the day our heroine entered Fairyland-Below. September did not know the Rules, and Halloween did not know that the Rules still ran on like a motor left idling, just waiting to roar into motion.
I am a sly narrator, and I shall not give up the secret.
CHAPTER VI
THE ELEPHANT’S FIERY HEART
In Which September Is Introduced to High Society, Is Granted a Certain Rank, Finds a Friend Somewhat Different Than She Remembered, and Has a Spot of Tea
A-Through-L’s gleaming shadow set September down on a broad brown lawn. It was not a nasty, unkept, dying sort of brown, but the very rich and beautiful shade of good dark coffee or expensive ch
ocolate or perhaps a deeply steeped tea. The wired stars and the great artificial moon shone down on little brown leaves and little brown buds and little brown flowers. Cinnamon-colored peapods rattled; russety weeds puffed clouds of toast-colored fluff into the twilit air. The blades of brown grass rippled in the myrrh-scented underworld breeze, all bending in one direction, toward an extraordinary house in the center of the field.
The house stood tall and gleaming, a sort of elaborate pear-shaped silver pot crowned in a flourish of golden branches bearing copper flowers and long, slender bronze leaves. The pot stood on four golden claw-feet. It had four golden spigots arching gracefully around its big, curved belly. Ribbons of a red metal September had never seen before curlicued all round the polished crown of flowers, and in the loops of ribbon several pretty silver teacups peeked out. One of them puffed friendly chimney smoke. On account of the chimney, September knew it must be a house—and one with someone at home in it!
As she and Ell’s shadow walked closer to it, September could see a delicate porcelain porch and porcelain stairs leading up to it. A thin line traced a round door in the belly of the pot, so thin she wouldn’t have noticed it if the crystal moon hadn’t shone just so.
“Where have you brought me, Ell?” she asked.
“Oh, oh, I am so bad at keeping secrets and making surprises! They begin with S’s! Two of them!” Ell could hardly contain his excitement, hopping from one blue-black foot to another in the long chocolatey grass. “It so happens, this place begins with S, too. But I come here a great deal, whenever I want something to pick me up and make my heart shake the rain off. So I know all about it. It’s called the Samovar—that’s a nice old word for a teakettle. The Duke and the Vicereine live here.”
September wondered quietly whether a Duke was very much like a Marquess and what in the world a Vicereine was to begin with. This Ell wouldn’t take her to a wicked Duke in a wicked house, would he? She simply could not be sure.
The whipping violet whiskers on Ell’s dark muzzle quivered with delight. “No, I mustn’t spoil it for you! The other Ell wouldn’t; he’d wink and wait, because that’s how you make a surprise, and so I shall, too.” A-Through-L winked one great, hopeful black eye at her and sped up his chicken-like gait. Quite soon they had reached the porch. September could hear a bubbling mix of murmuring and laughing and clinking inside.
Ell knocked his shadowy head gaily against the door of the Samovar, exactly like the other Ell had once knocked into the trunk of a persimmon tree to shake down breakfast. From within a rich, musical voice trilled, “Recite the Periodic Table of Teatime, in correct order, with Elemental Symbols, please.”
A-Through-L sat back on his handsome black haunches, shut his eyes, and said: “Hot Tea (H), Herbal Tea (He), Lingonberry Scones (Li), Berry Jam (Be), Butter (B), Cream (C), Napoleons (N), Orange Marmalade (O), Frosting (F), Nettle Tea (Ne)…”
“Well enough, well enough!” The voice laughed. A lock and bolt slid open with a merry ring and the door to the Samovar swung open to admit them.
A plume of fragrant steam whistled out of the silver doorway. Out of the mist emerged a handsome, round, brown-cheeked face framed in curling brown and green leaves. The leaves gathered together into fat rolls and a little ponytail tied with linen string like an old-fashioned wig. His eyes shone warm and amber and liquid; he wore a fabulous suit of hundreds and hundreds of tiny white flowers. Two crisp, sweet-smelling teabag epaulets told September that this was most likely the Duke. He beamed down at her.
A-Through-L did a Wyvernish curtsy and introduced her. “May I present my friend September of Nebraska? September, the Duke of Teatime, and his wife, the Vicereine of Coffee.”
As the tea steam cleared, the Vicereine seemed to appear out of mist beside the Duke, though of course she had been there all along. Her dark brown hair piled up in a complicated crown not unlike the golden bouquet on the roof of the Samovar. Red berries and green, unripe coffee beans, studded her curls like gems. She wore a shimmering hoopskirt of a creamy, swirling caramel color, with a single black bean at her beautiful brown throat. All around their feet scampered children with the same rosy brown cheeks and berries or leaves in their hair. Behind them all the great belly of the Samovar opened up before September’s eyes as a curtain of steam wafted toward the ceiling and the chimney.