The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two(9)

Just the sorts of buildings where wind howls hardest, whistles loudest, screams highest.

Up ahead, a great pearly-violet mountain range opened up like an infinite library. A stormcloud of squawking birds tumbled and danced toward those hills. Automobile exhaust puffed and sputtered out behind them.

September wanted to jump up and down on the road and shout at the molten-colored heavens. She wanted to turn a somersault, a real, proper somersault. She wanted to exult and sing nonsense at the clouds and kiss anyone who happened to be by, which was no one, but never you mind. But she did none of those things. September raised her hands to her mouth and wiggled in place like a dog wagging her tail. Her face turned red from the keeping in of all the noise and movement her body longed to make. At this moment, her head spoke louder, and what her head wanted was to be as cool and collected as a Wind. To be knowing and canny as they were. When you wear all your insides on your outside, people look at you very strangely. No one had ever told her that exulting and dancing and singing nonsense were childish things, but she felt sure that they were, somehow.

Shall I tell her? Shall I be a kind and merciful narrator and take our girl aside? Shall I touch her new, red heart and make her understand that she is no longer one of the tribe of heartless children, nor even the owner of the wild and infant heart of thirteen-year-old girls and boys? Oh, September! Hearts, once you have them locked up in your chest, are a fantastic heap of tender and terrible wonders—but they must be trained. Beatrice could have told her all about it. A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they’ve got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don’t have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. Shall I give fair warning, as neither you nor I was given?

By now, my dear friends, you know me better.

And so September tried to put an expression of a very proud, noble, solemn adultish sort of wonder on her face, because it was a trick she felt she ought to learn. But that is a lot to contain in two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and she really only managed her own unhidable leaping, fizzing joy—yet this time the joy was a silent one. It jangled inside her but did not boil over. To be back in Fairyland. To be near magic and thrillingness again. To be in a place where she did not have to lie about the things she wanted most of all—because they were here, and she could touch them and talk with them and wrestle with them and ride upon them.

But there was no one to praise September for her restraint.

And where was here? It looked so terribly familiar, but September could be quite sure she had never run down a road of vellum or called up to the tip-tops of scroll-towers before. And run she did, to catch the puffins and the Blue Wind and Mr. Albert’s poor car who hadn’t asked to be bothered with any of this trouble! Her jar of coins rattled and jingled loudly in the canyon of pillars. But hadn’t she heard the wind whistling like that before? Hadn’t she smelled that dry, sweet smell on the breeze?

Fortunately, now that they’d jumped the Line, the flock of puffins didn’t seem to be in any great hurry. The glossy throng of them burst apart, save those hoisting up the stolen automobile on their ice-armored backs. A few shot ahead up toward the sun, cannonballs with orange beaks. Little birdy bullets of pearl and ink fired and spun out to land upon whatever they could find in that wild place. As September bolted up over a rise in the papery road, she found what they found: a little shantytown laid out among the pillars, every rooftop and chimney colonized by the squat, chattering birds.

The road ran smoothly, straight into the village, whose back bunched up against the mountains. The peaks beyond flowed up to impossible heights, traceries of text and compasses and old, old ink disappearing into the distance. A boardwalk ran from the main avenue into the town proper, each slat on the path the fold of a long, thick, heavy map, hanging the way they did in libraries, draped over strong bars so as not to crease or wrinkle. The slats showed the blue of strange oceans, every one. September scrambled to a stop before a ramp up onto the boardwalk: an atlas the size of a boat, open to its frontispiece, which read:

MERCATOR, TOWN OF.

FIRST EDITION PUBLISHED 1203.

EDITOR: KING CRUNCHCRAB I.

LAYOUT AND DESIGN: CADASTRAL CROSSHATCH, ESQ.

ALL PERSONS, EVENTS, CRIMES AND CRIMINALS, MAGIC, MAYHEM, AND THREATS OF BODILY HARM USED BY PERMISSION.

VISITORS OF LOW REPUTATION REPORT TO THE WAY STATION IMMEDIATELY.

ALL OTHERS KEEP OUT.

“Well, I don’t think I have a low reputation!” opined September, catching her breath.

A wild, bouncing laugh prevented her from further defending her character. September startled: Up above her, crouching on the rim of a spindly, spirally chimney, the Blue Wind pointed at her and kept on laughing.

“Oh, my little sour blueberry, you are just adorable when you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

The Blue Wind sprang out from the chimney like a bat. She spread her arms for the briefest moment, then pirouetted down to the ground before September. She clapped her blue hands.

“Even if you hadn’t entirely deposed (and possibly killed) not one but two governments and destabilized all sorts of political regions you couldn’t even pronounce, let alone draft up constitutional monarchies for, even if you’d been far more careful about leaving your toys strewn about everywhere when you tire yourself out with anarchy and run on home, I’d say you really are the lowest sort.” The Blue Wind grinned wickedly. Her purple lips shone. “A hitchhiker.”