My darlings, I am quite as surprised as you! A narrator looks away from her charges for half a tale and returns to find they’ve gone wily and wild in her absence, and learned all manner of new magics she intended to teach them much later.
September straightened up and tugged on the (rather oversized now) long blue dress she’d worn when she was the Spinster and hatched her plots from the depths of a rum cellar. “This is where I’m to be coronated, is it? Well, Stoats, we’d best get it over with. Will you be all right on your own? I wouldn’t want you to get bored.”
“We have brought a magazine, and our pipes.” The two stoats, three cockerels, unicorn, Fairy, and human girl that made up the Stoat of Arms each produced handsome churchwarden pipes and waved them at September.
“Very well, then!” said the Queen with a deep breath, and stepped inside the great round door.
It shut behind her with a satisfied clunk. September calmed her hammering heart. She was not so wily or wild that it did not terrify her a little whenever she had to pull on haughtiness like a party dress and whirl about in it.
Within the Royal Closet, lamps bubbled to life all along the walls, glass goblets filled with liquid light of blue and gold, like cups of punch at a birthday party. September stared—the room yawned on forever. She could see neither ceiling nor walls. A beautiful velvet floor spread out before her so that her feet fell without the littlest sound. Everywhere she looked she saw splendid clothes hanging neatly, or displayed on dress forms, or laid out for mending, or soaking in laundry tubs. Hatboxes towered up into the shadows beyond the goblet-lamps. A sea of shoes lapped at the hems of the hanging gowns and suits and cloaks and trousers. Umbrella stands bristled with swords, canes, scepters, staves, wands, and the occasional umbrella. The ranks of shining clothes were only broken by mirrors here and there, mirrors taller than a Wyverary and framed in gold, in ice, in green flame or indigo, in ancient oak, in unicorn and narwhal horns, in ships’ ropes, in curious, blinking eyes, in gemstones September could not name, in pocket watches, in brocade, in lost love letters. In the center of the vast wardrobe stood a little podium with a large and beautiful book lying open on it, along with a pot of scarlet ink.
September could hear her footsteps echo wildly as she crossed the hall to peer at the book. At the top of each thick, parchment page, she read:
GUEST BOOK.
PLEASE SIGN IN.
And below that, a number of neat columns with titles like NAME, SPECIES, and TIME IN/TIME OUT, each one brimming with magnificent signatures. She ran her fingertips over the last two entries in the lovely ledger: The Marquess. Human. 2:15 p.m., April 2nd, the Year of the Yellow-Tongued Hobgoblin/Deposed via Ravished Girl, 10:58 p.m., May 24th, the Year of the Valiant Teacup. Charles Crunchcrab. Fairy. Midnight, August 9th, the Year of the Unhappy Hippogriff/Deposed via Dodo’s Egg, Teatime, March 15th, the Year of the Emerald Acrobat. September searched for a quill pen—under the edges of the book, on the ledge of the podium. She felt a little like the older kids who scratched their names—and other, bolder things—on the bathroom walls at school. Surely, someone would come along and scold her any moment now. But she found nothing.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” came a brisk, tidy voice, a voice like snug seams and straight hems. “How unprofessional of me! Wait just a moment.”
September whirled round. A creature clattered forward through the rows of wonderful clothes. Her slender limbs were made all of wrought iron, curling and twisting in lovely patterns like the ones in a fine old gate. The wrought-iron girl stood much taller than September, her long legs bent backward like a heron’s, her hair forged in a crown of leafy iron vines round her dark skull. As September stared, the lady opened her wrought-iron rib cage like the lid of a secretary desk. A sewing machine unfolded out of her, kept hidden where her heart might have been. She reached down and pulled a coil of plain linen from a scrap basket sandwiched between an Elizabethan gown and a motorcycle jacket and fed it through her machine heart. The needle moved up and down merrily and when the linen emerged, it had become a graceful quill pen with a sharp bronze nib. The quill was a real quill, too, a sturdy turkey feather with gold and red speckles.
September pulled it free and dipped the new pen into the scarlet inkwell. She bent down to the guest book, trying to make her face as brave and bold as the one she’d shown to the Stoat of Arms, and she only hesitated a moment before writing: September Bell. Human. A Bit After Teatime, March 15th, the Year of the Emerald Acrobat. She frowned at her handwriting—it looked rather plain next to the dashing flourishes above, the t’s crossed with rapiers and i’s dotted with alchemical sigils of the other “guests.”
“Most excellent. Now we can begin!” said the wrought-iron lady, folding up her black rib cage again. “I am the Archbishop of the Closet, the Sartorial Seneschal. You may call me Jacquard. Jack, if you are lazy and cannot manage two whole syllables. I’m here to help with your fitting.”
September smiled broadly. “You didn’t call me Your Majesty or Your Grace or Your Highness.”
Jacquard shrugged. Her eyes were the only part of her that wasn’t smelted out of iron, but delicately etched silver with warm sunstone irises. They glittered like real eyes when she blinked. “Oh, I don’t trouble myself with that sort of thing. I’ve seen so many of you under my tape it would be like bowing to a buttonhole. But I can try to remember if you’d prefer.”
September sighed with relief. “I wouldn’t, at all! Really, I don’t see why anyone does! I didn’t ask them to! Anyway, it see
ms to me that whenever a person says: Your Majesty, they mean: I would rather drink a glass of gasoline than spend another moment with you.”
Jacquard grinned. Her lips had ribbons carved into them, all tied in smart bows. “Good girl. Perhaps you’ll last longer than the soup course in your supper tonight.”
“I don’t want to last at all. I don’t want to be Queen. I keep telling people that, but no one listens to me. I just want to be left alone.”
Jacquard chuckled. She produced a measuring tape from her metal arm the way a lady might produce a handkerchief from her sleeve. “Young miss, if you didn’t want to be Queen, perhaps you shouldn’t have kept whacking every monarch you met with quite such a large and pointy stick. The trouble with upsetting the applecart is that you’ve got to clean up the fruit when you’re done.”
“How do you know what I’ve done?”
Jacquard wrapped the tape round September’s waist. “If you had to mend the trousers of Fairyland’s masters, you’d learn the name September quick as a stitch, my humble hellion. I’ve heard your name along with the most dreadfully impolite language—you’d blush if I repeated it. I’ve heard it hissed, hollered, snarled, cursed, and flung against the wall. You’re quite famous, I’m afraid. Public menace number one. I’m just fiendishly pleased to meet you! I would shake your hand, but Fairylanders are quite allergic to me. Now, we have a great heaping basket of decisions to make and not much time, so why don’t we buckle down to our task?”
“Why don’t we have much time? If I’m Queen, surely I can take as long as I like to decide whatever it is that needs deciding.”
“The Cantankerous Derby begins in three days’ time. Unless you are much faster and cleverer than you look, your reign will go down in my book as precisely seventy-two hours long. Not the shortest—that honor goes to the Blessed Bonk, a hobgoblin who lasted all of fifteen minutes before falling down a flight of stairs, hitting his head on a china cabinet, and drowning in a mud puddle. The mud puddle turned out to be the very river nymph who succeeded him. But three days is not quite long enough to stretch out in. No, you must choose your regalia quickly. You must get ready for the Race. If the Queen stood at the starting line in her street clothes, I would die of shame.”
“My regalia?” September had to admit her Spinster dress no longer fit her. It was too long in the arm and the hem. But regalia did not sound like the sort of thing you could ride a Wyverary in.
“Oh yes!” cried Jacquard. “A ruler must have regalia, just as a businessman must have his suit and briefcase, just as a soldier must have his rifle and his cap, just as a flying ace must have her aeroplane. How will anyone take you seriously as a Queen if you do not look like one? It is the dearest duty of the Archbishop of the Closet to assist you in choosing all the tools of your trade.” The wrought-iron girl spread her long arms to indicate the vast reaches of the Royal Closet. “Your name, your scepter, your costume, your shoes, and your steed. You have your crown already.” September touched the circle of jeweled keys on her head. She hardly felt its weight anymore.
Jacquard led September to a row of drawers with glass tops, like a jeweler’s case where engagement rings might be kept. Inside lay ribbons of every color and fabric, olive lace and copper silk and crimson damask and orchid rope. Each one had tiny words woven into them, winding round and round the ribbon like lengths of black thread. “Firstly, you must choose a name.”
“My name is September.”
“No, no, you misunderstand, my dear! You must choose a dynastic name. You can be anything you like—a Queen, a Sultana, a Caesar, a Marquess, an Empress, a Baroness—any sort of Ess you can think of.” Jack opened the drawers and pulled out a length of ribbon for each title. “You could even be a King, if you liked—Fairyland is wonderfully modern on that point. If you don’t care for old-fashioned courtly ranks, you could be the Sheriff or the Cannoneer or the Dark Horse, the Alewife or the Tobacconist or the Hydronaut—oh, we haven’t had a Hydronaut in centuries! And it needn’t be so plain as one word. You might be the Princess of Pluto or Lady Ironbones or Count Fortune or the Wintry Warlord. The choice is yours—your first choice. Your name goes before you—it tells everyone what you’re about. Names are awfully old magic, older than the monarchy, older than me. Your name is the armor you wear in the Battle of Everyday. Hardly anyone gets to pick their own. It is one of the privileges of your position. When your parents choose your name, they make a little wish for your future and fold it up inside your heart forever. When you choose your own, you make your own wish.”