A high wall greeted them, the only object for miles. It did not look like the little wall September had tripped over when she entered Fairyland. It looked infinitely older, of a stone that probably remembered when the moon was just a baby. Weather and abuse had lashed the rocks and left them crumbling here, impenetrable there. As with any wall that has the gall to stand in the middle of nowhere with nobody guarding it, folk had written things on it, painted and chiseled their names or some little message, a thousand years of graffiti. Some were little more than signs and sigils, as old as writing itself. Some September could read, even if she didn’t understand most of them.
Philadelphia 9 Million Miles That-a-Way. Beware of Dog. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here. No Trespassing—This Means You. I Miss My Mother. Theseus Was Here. I Told You Not to Turn Around—You Never Listened to Me. No Parking Any Time. Never Let ’Em Take Your Necklace.
September ran her hands across the letters.
“Look here,” the Minotaur said imperiously, and September did not argue. In the midst of the wall she saw a hole, a crack in the stone. It looked as though someone had put their fist through the wall—its edges sheared off broken and ugly, covered in pale moss, sharp and ragged. Up above it someone had written in childlike handwriting, “Why Did the Chicken Cross Fairyland?”
“Is that the way to the Prince?” she asked. “Will I look through and see him?”
The Minotaur said nothing, only continued to point. When September still hesitated, the beast put her hand on the girl’s neck, hard and unignorable, rough and hot. She pushed her down before the hole in the wall. September stumbled to her knees and peered through it. This is what she saw: A field of warm, rich grain, still tinged with green, a May field, and a sweet little house at one end of it—why, it was her own house! And the lights were on! And there! Could those be the shadows of her mother and her dog moving behind the distant curtains? It looked like early evening, only a few minutes after she’d left. September laughed and tried to wave to her mother through the hole in the world. The Minotaur stayed her hand.
“No one can see or hear you—yet. There is no wall on the other side of the wall. Only a world. You will not believe me, but that is a part of Fairyland-Above, in the far, far west of the land.”
“But that’s my house! I can see it! There, in the yard, that’s my bicycle with the basket! There’s the milkman’s empty bottles!”
“It is what Fairyland-Above is becoming, without her shadows, without her magic,” said Left softly. “More and more ordinary, more and more usual, more and more like your world, where you cannot plant poems or turn into a Wyvern or build cities out of bread. Very soon now Fairyland will be little more than another part of your world. Maybe a pretty one, but it will have lost all that made it different. You might say it will have lost its Queerness. Belinda Cabbage would say so. Without the shadows and their sorceries and their wildness, the borders are disappearing, and soon enough this wall itself will just fade away into nothing but a nice May field full of waving grass.”
September tried to imagine Fairyland stuck into her world like a pushpin. A place that would seem like it had always been there, wedged between Kansas and Colorado, perhaps. Another one of the Dakotas. A magicless new prairie stretching on forever.
The Minotaur went on. “And the people of Fairyland, well—perhaps you will remember that the tall, skinny farmer is really a Spriggan, or the short, fat fish-seller was once a Goblin girl, or that the bicycle leaning against your house used to ride wild with her brothers on the high plain. But no one else will know.” Left paused, her hand softening. She stroked September’s hair instead of pressing her cheek against the stone. She looked back over her immense shoulder at the shadow of the Marquess and played her trump card. “Her desires will come to pass, in an odd and slantwise way—no child will go between earth and Fairyland, because there will no longer be any Fairyland to go to.”
September shook her head. “I would never let this happen—I mean, Halloween wouldn’t. She’s still me. I’m part of her, I am her. She’d never want a thing like this, because I’d never want it!”
The Minotaur sighed. “She is so full of Want and Need that the magic of it fills her up like a jar packed with fireflies. She is your shadow, after all. She is you, if you had never learned that sometimes you don’t get what you want. If you had never learned about consequences. Halloween thinks Fairyland-Below will be safe. She thinks if she can pull enough shadows down, we’ll stay put down here while the rest floats off. We’ll anchor ourselves, the sheer weight of all of us. She doesn’t care a bit for the rest, only for her people—an admirable trait in a Queen, really. Not all have it. Oh, and perhaps we will stay, for a little while. But Fairyland-Above is so terribly heavy. Eventually it will drag us through, too. We’ll become beetles and worms and moles, moving in the dark under the mundane world.”
The shadow of the Marquess looked troubled, blue storms moving across her face. Iago nudged her with his broad dark head. “No more fairies making mischief, spoiling beer and cream, stealing children, eating souls. No more humans meddling with Fairyland, mucking up its politics and tracking mud all over the floor.” Grief quivered in her voice, real grief. “Why does that hurt me so? It made me feel so happy once. So safe and warm.”
“I thought you would come to me knowing this,” said Left. “I thought we would battle, as a Minotaur likes to do. Then you would show yourself worthy (perhaps I would even let you win a little), and I would have given you a helmet to wear, to show my favor.”
September threw off the Minotaur’s hand. Her eyes blazed. The hot and furious thing sizzled in her once more. Why did everyone keep assuming she couldn’t do anything for herself? “If you want to fight, I will fight you. I am not strong or tall, and it would be completely unfair, but nothing is fair, ever, and I have already wrestled a Marid nearly to death, so I’ll take you if that’s how I keep this from happening.”
The Rivet Gun stirred at her hip. Its pneumatic tube snaked around her waist and snuffled like a little puppy, searching for something. It crawled up her chest and found the Järlhopp’s Clutch. The end of the tube smacked gleefully and widened like a serpent’s mouth to engulf the pendant. September drew the gun. Her hand barely shook at all as she aimed it at the Minotaur—but she could not aim for her heart as she thought she probably ought to. At the last moment, her own heart quailed: We could talk it out! This will only make her angry! You can’t just shoot people—that’s not fair fighting! But September had already pulled the trigger. If she was to fight, the hard, strange, new part of her meant to win.
A bubbling boom erupted from the mouth of the Rivet Gun. A creamy orange cannonball made of all the things that had ever happened to September exploded into the Minotaur’s muscled thigh.
The Minotaur studied her for a long while. Blood streamed down her leg, but she didn’t seem to notice it. “Good girl,” she said finally.
September shook a little with the force of having had to do such a thing when she didn’t really want to fight anyone at all. She made fists with her hands, and then let go, covering her face with them instead. All that she had done to keep Fairyland whole, to keep it connected to her own world—and now her shadow would finish the job.
The hole in the Minotaur’s leg stopped bleeding. The creamy orange light of September’s memories spread all around her great leg. The wound grew wider and wider and taller and taller until the Minotaur had vanished, and all that was left was the hole the Rivet Gun had made, rimmed in creamy orange fire.
On the other side, September could see nothing at all.
CHAPTER XVIII
EVERYONE’S HOUSE
In Which an Unopenable Box Is Opened, an Unbreakable Bier Is Broken, a Tapir Gloats Rather More Than Is Polite, and a Thing Lost Is Found
When September stepped through the fiery wound, she squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself for something to leap out and fight her for real and true.
Nothing happened. She ope
ned her eyes. Still nothing.
Maud and Iago still stood near her, just behind, as a shadow will, which September did not like in the least. The Minotaur had gone. The rushing wind and the smell of hardy, tangly moor-flowers had gone, too. Instead, all around them stood a silent, dark house. Shadows—the usual, flat, soft kind that can’t talk—hung everywhere. September reached blindly and found the bannister to a flight of stairs which she seemed to be coming down. She stepped out into the front room of the house, where a big, threadbare couch sat invitingly. A tall, walnut-wood radio stood quiet and dark in the corner.
“Why, it’s my house!” September cried. Her voice sounded very loud in the empty place. “There’s our old radio—and look! The sink is still full of pink-and-yellow teacups!”