The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland 1)

September remembered Charlie Crunchcrab, the ferryman. “Evolution, I guess.”

“Well, we guess, too.”

“But don’t you have stories? About yourself. About why the world is the way it is.”

“You mean folklore?”

September shrugged uncertainly.

Not/Nor scratched her chin. “I think we had a folklore once. I seem to remember. We locked it up in a vault to keep it safe. Or a library. Terribly similar. But bandits, you know. Bandits, bandits, always about! Wearing masks and carrying sacks. I’m afraid there was a break-in. They left a few crumbs—bandits are slovenly. I think I recall something about ‘Cosmic Scissors,’ and ‘Entropy,’ and ‘Where Love Comes From.’ But no one remembers more, and the police don’t visit the hinterlands much.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“And I for yours! I was born half, but to lose yourself in the prime of life! What a trauma!”

“Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it much. It hurt while the Glashtyn cut it away, but I’m not sick or anything.”

“What do you suppose your shadow is doing without you? She might be ill with pining!”

September thought back to her shadow’s vicious smile, dancing on the shoulders of the horse-headed Glashtyn. “I don’t think so,” she said and, for the first time, felt it had been a bit shabby of her to have cast off her shadow so quickly and not to have written to it or asked after it at all.

“I have to go to work now, little girl. Not’s shift is already done, and I’m keeping her from roast fish and nap.”

“What sort of shift do you have?” said September curiously. “And mightn’t there be some water there?” She knew about shifts, of course, because her mother had them. Shifts were the suns and moons of her old world, dividing everything into times when her mother was there and when she was not.

“I work at the shoe factory, girl! We all do; it’s what we do. Why, before the Marquess came, we just lay about on beaches and ate mangoes and drank coconut milk and knew nothing about industry whatever! How gladsome we are, now that she has shown us our laziness! Now we know the satisfaction of a full day’s labor, of punchcards and taxable income.”

September bit her lip. She wondered if the Marquess had happened by around the time their fo

lklore had been stolen. “I like mangoes,” she said glumly.

“We make the changelings’ shoes,” continued Not/Nor, striding toward the silver half-palace that September now understood was a factory.

“That’s all? No shoes for anyone else?”

“Well, there are rather a lot of changelings. Bandits, again. Always about. Besides, it’s quite hard, to make the sorts of shoes changelings wear.”

September waited. She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.

“It’s why we’re best suited, you know. Being this far southerly. It’s all magnetized, see. If we didn’t make the shoes, why, changelings would just float away back to their own world, and where would that leave all the honest folk who stole them fair and square?”

“I haven’t floated away.”

“You’re not a changeling! There’s no poppet or goblin in your bed, taking your place at supper. There’s more than one way between your world and ours. There’s the changeling road, and there’s Ravishing, and there’s those that Stumble through a gap in the hedgerows or a mushroom ring or a tornado or a wardrobe full of winter coats. It’s all dangerous, but changelings are terrible hard to keep track of. Someone’s always trying to capture them back or pull them off their horses during dress parade. The shoes, though, the shoes keep them here. Otherwise they’d just … fwoop! Like balloons. I make right-foot shoes. With iron in the soles. Iron won’t go through, see. Fairyland’s allergic. So am I, of course, but I take my pills like the Marquess taught us.”

“What about the Ravished? How do they get home?” September realized that she was considering how to get home for the first time.

Not/Nor grinned. She had sharp, wolfish teeth. “Can’t say, can I? Or won’t say, won’t I? But it’s better to Stumble, really, if you’ve a heart set on home.”

At the factory door, Not/Nor gathered up a great deal of leather into the crook of her arm. She pointed with her eyebrows at a communal well just outside the gate. September fell upon a copper ladle and drank deep. As she slurped, the Nasnas scratched her chin again. “I might could make you a pair that works the other way,” she said finally. “Reverse engineering, and all? A pair that would take you home.”

“Really? You could do that?”

“Shoes are funny beasts. You think they’re just clothes, but really, they’re alive. They want things. Fancy ones with gems want to go to balls, big boots want to go to work, slippers want to dance. Or sleep. Shoes make the path you’re on. Change your shoes, change the path.” Not/Nor looked meaningfully at the Marquess’s dandied black shoes. September wished she’d gone barefoot. “Changeling shoes want to stay here. I wager I can make a pair who want to go to the place you come from. Bit of old mud on the heel, bit of devil’s salt in the buckle, bit of growing up hammered in. You’ll wake up, as if it were a dream. It will have been a dream. No worries, no faults, no blame. Off to school with you and your peanut-butter sandwich, too!”

September squeezed back tears. She suddenly missed her mother, and she’d lost her shadow and her hair, and salt creaked in her elbows, and she was so awfully tired, and really, she hadn’t counted on adventures being so exhausting. She was hungry, still, and she missed her Wyverary so! And how could she know how much farther there was to go? September still did not think herself terribly brave, and she trembled when she thought of the thirst of the sea and the possibility—even probability—of sharks and other terrible things. When the stars were out and the night warm and Mr. Map’s brandy had been hot in her belly, it had been all right, even wonderful. But now her knees hurt—and her fingers—and she was lonely. September shivered in her wet, salt-crusted dress. And she hated her cursed shoes, hated them wholly and utterly.

“I can’t,” she squeaked finally. “I can’t. My friends are not dreams. They need me.” And she remembered the awful dream and little Saturday chained up again on the floor of that dark cell. “Who else will come for them if I don’t?”