The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two(7)

“Of course,” said September, who had not realized that at all.

“I’m not from Fairyland. Never been there. But I’ve seen it through the shop window, you know? I go between, and I mind the Line. There was a bad break here a while back—a while back by my clock, not yours. And by here I don’t mean your farm or Nebraska, really. Just here. Here summed up by Pluto and inchworms and balloons that rise because of helium. People have been coming and going like they got shot out of a circus cannon. I do not like it, no ma’am. The Line’ll always be weak in these parts. Structural flaw. But it almost wore through completely last year—I think I’ve got that right. Time zones are my bedevilment and no lie. Last year we almost lost it, and now I’ve got to tend to the sag.”

“Last year! I was in Fairyland then! And my shadow was stealing magic! A minotaur told me the borders would have just melted into nothing if she’d had her way.”

“You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality. The Line was all in tatters. It got so bad you could just trip over a wall and end up who knows where? And when the works go that wrong, you get bandits. Worse than mice. If you see one it’s too late. Beatrice does his best to rustle them good, but what can he do? It’s a foundational fact of the universe that everything leaks. What comes out when it springs, that’s the only question.” Boomer spat. A stream of red lightning glittered out of her mouth.

September looked down at her shoes. “Am I a bandit? I’ve been crossing the Line. Twice. Four times if you count the return trip.”

Boomer looked at her meaningfully. September stuck her hands in her pockets. But she looked up again and held the Lineman’s gaze. She wasn’t sorry. She wouldn’t pretend she was sorry. She supposed that made her a bandit for sure.

Beatrice’s eyes flashed like lightbulbs. He began to howl: a long, whistling, hollow note, just exactly like a steam engine.

“Here they come,” snarled Boomer, and heaved up, her metal body unfolding like a puzzle.

“Who?”

The prairie stood quiet and green, except for a loose and fitful wind blowing the long grain and the dark green tips of the birches.

“Weren’t you after a Wind? I hate Winds. Criminals and fugitives and psychopomps the whole stupid gasbagging lot of them. But for the Winds I could have retired with a nice spread out beyond the edge of time by now. Up, Beatrice! Speak!”

The greyhound rose up on his great haunches and barked once, twice, three times. His voice was no longer a steam engine but a terrible tolling bell. September clapped her hands over her ears—and a good thing, too. The wind whipped itself up so fierce and fast all the grain could do was stand straight up, stretched and taut almost to breaking. The air seemed to tip and totter and finally fall over, spilling out a throng of hollering, ululating, laughing, whooping creatures.

Puffins.

One by one they rolled up into fluffy cannonballs, flapped their tiny wings once or twice, and thudded back down onto their plump bellies, tumbling over one another like a wave breaking. Their round beaks gleamed bright orange and gold. Some were tiny, no bigger than jacks. Some were much bigger, the size of hunting hounds. Their eyes sparkled black and green and red and purple as they tumbled nearer—and at least some of those were not at all the right colors for birds’ eyes as far as September knew. One by one they heaved up into the air again, paddling their wide webbed feet against the sky like they were scrambling up a mountainside.

And dancing on top of them, leaping from puffin to puffin, twirled a grinning young lady all in blue. She wore indigo trousers with as much silk to them as a skirt, and when they rustled, ghostly pale blue stars peeked out from the folds. She had on turquoise opera gloves and sapphire-colored boots with crisscrossed icicle laces all the way to the knee. A long, beautiful sky-colored coat spun out like a dress from a heavy silver belt at her waist, swirling with aquamarine stitching, trimmed in wild, woolly fur from some impossible, blueberry-colored sheep. Her long, azure hair flew every which way under a cobalt cap rimmed in the same blue shag. The cap had an ice-spike on top of it, like old pictures of the Kaiser. She smoked a blue churchwarden pipe, blowing great squares and triangles and rhombuses of blue smoke for her puffins to dip and dive through.

A long honk broke up the caterwauling puffin songs. In the center of the flock, half bouncing on the ground and half hoisted, shoved, carried, and jostled by the birds, came Mr. Albert’s Model A Ford.

“But that’s my car!” September corrected herself, but she was quite indignant that someone else—even if they were puffins—was driving it. “I mean it’s Mr. Albert’s car! What are they doing with it? They’re going to break it to pieces, that’s what!”

“Horse thieves!” Boomer said with disgust. She brandished her hook like an ax. Beatrice growled. It sounded like the turning of gears deep in the earth.

The woman in blue sighted September. Her grin grew wider; her black eyes glittered. They barreled toward the fence. The air wriggled around the Lineman and her Cap, so hot it turned the back of September’s legs painfully red. She stood her ground.

“Girl, Ho!” the blue bandit yelled, in the manner of sailors sighting land. She saluted smartly.

September saluted back. A smile broke open on her face like a firecracker. Who could this be but the Blue Wind, a little late, but come for her at last? September forgave her immediately for her tardiness. Her heart hammered around inside her like it meant to get free.