“Still, about my syllabus…,” insisted Rubedo. Citrinitas elbowed him roughly.
September rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands—which had begun to grow a healthy bit of silver moss. “Fine,” she said shortly. “Fine. I shall go now, then, to the woods, and get this awful business over with before I turn into an elm.”
“I think you’re a bit more birch-y,” said Doctor Fallow contemplatively.
“Not helping!” snapped Ell. “You could help if you had some medicine for her in your weird, ugly tower.”
“Medicine’s not our business,” said Citrinitas helplessly. “And besides … change is the blessing of Autumn. She should feel lucky.”
Ell, as September had never seen him do before, spat a lick of fire at her. Not enough to scorch, but enough to singe her hair. Citrinitas yelped and leapt back, batting at her curls. The Wyverary curled closer around September.
“Well, you can’t go with her, so you might as well stop smothering,” huffed Doctor Fallow. “This is strictly a lone-knight situation.”
“Then she isn’t going! I shan’t let her go anywhere without something large and fire-breathing and double smart behind her! Since I don’t see a flaming burp between the three of you, I suggest you leave us alone!”
“Ell, if that’s how it’s done, you can’t bellow it into doing it differently,” sighed September. She stood up and disentangled herself from her friend. Blazing curls of her hair fluttered to the ground.
“I can try!” Ell insisted.
“No, I shall go alone. I always thought I would be going alone. I shall be back presently, I promise. Say you’ll wait for me, you and Saturday, that you won’t go anywhere without me, that when I come out of those woods I shall see a red face and a blue one smiling!”
Ell’s eyes filled with panicked turquoise tears. He promised, his wings jangling his chains fretfully.
Saturday did not say anything. He bent and tore the cuff from one leg of his trousers. The cuff was blue and ragged and not a bit muddy with velocipede-grease. The Marid tied it around September’s arm. His fingers trembled a bit. The green jacket introduced itself politely but coolly to the cuff. Just so long as the cuff knew who came first.
“What is this?” said September, confused.
“It’s … a favor,” answered Saturday. “My favor. In battle … knights oughtn’t be without one.”
September reached up and touched his face gently to thank him. Her fingers grazed his cheek. They had shriveled into thin, bare, dry branches, bundled together at the wrist.
As September walked through the starry, misty night, trying not to look at her ruined hand, she realized that she had not traveled alone in days. She missed Ell immediately, who would be telling her all sorts of things to keep her from being afraid, and Saturday, who would be quiet and steadfast and dear at her side.
She shivered and whispered to herself to keep from shivering: “Bathtub, Bathysphere, Barometer, Bear, Bliss, Bandit…”
Gradually, the trees turned from wood and leaf to something altogether stranger: tall black distaffs wound around with fuzzy silk and wool and fleeces September could not name. They were all colored as autumn woods are colored, red and gold and brown and pale white. They crowded close together, fat and full, shaped more or less like pine trees. She could just see the sharp distaff jutting out of the wispy top of one great red beast of a tree. This must be where they get the stuff to build Pandemonium! September thought suddenly. Instead of cutting down a forest, they weave it!
The moon peeked out of the clouds, too shy to show herself fully. September came, by and by, to a little clearing where several parchment-colored distaffs had left their fibers all over the forest floor like pine needles. In the corner of the clearing sat a lady. September brought her hand to her mouth, so surprised and shaken was she, forgetting that her fingers were only branches now.
The lady sat on a throne of mushrooms. Chanterelles and portobellos and oysters and wild crimson forest mushrooms piled up high around her, fanning out around her head—for the lady, too, was primarily made of mushrooms, lovely cream-yellow ones opening up like a dress collar around her brown face, lacy bits of fungus trailing from her every finger and toe. She looked off into the distance, her pale eyes a pair of tiny button mushrooms.
“Good evening, my lady,” said September, curtsying as best she knew how.
The mushroom queen said nothing. Her expression did not change.
“I have come for the casket in the wood.”
A little wind picked up, ruffling the shiitakes at the lady’s feet.
“I do hope I’ve not offended, it’s only that I haven’t much time, and I seem to be coming all over tree.”
The lady’s jaw sagged open. Bits of dirt fell out.
“Don’t mind her,” came a tiny, breathy voice behind her. September whirled.
A tiny brown creature stood at her feet, barely a finger high. She was brown all over, the color of a nut-husk. Only her lips were red. Her hair was long, covering most of her body like bark. She seemed very young. She wore a smart acorn cap.
“She’s just for show,” breathed the wee thing.
“Who are you?”
“I am Death,” said the creature. “I thought that was obvious.”
“But you’re so small!”
“Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off—very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.”
“Then who is she?”
“She is…” Death turned her head, considering. “She is like a party dress I wear when I want to impress visiting dignitaries. Like your friend Betsy, I, too, am a Terrible Engine. I, too, have occasional need of awe. But between us, I think, there is no need for finery.”
“But if we are so far apart, why are you here?”
“Because Autumn is the beginning of my country. And because there is a small chance that you may die sooner than I anticipated, that I shall need to grow very fast very soon.”
Death looked meaningfully at September’s hand. Within the green jacket, her arm had now shrunk into one long, knobbed branch from shoulder to fingertip.
“Is that why the Worsted Wood is forbidden? Because Death lives here?”
“And also Hamadryads. They are very boring to listen to.”
“Then the Marquess sent me here to die.”
“I do not make such judgments, child. I only take what is offered me, in the dark, in the forest.”
September crumpled to the ground. She stared at the winter branches of her hand. A great orange tuft of her hair flew off—she was nearly bald now, only a few wisps of curls clinging to her head. She sniffed and cried—or tried to cry, but her eyes were dry as old seeds, and she could not.
“Death, I don’t know what to do.”
Death climbed up into her lap, sitting primly on her knee, which had already begun to darken and wither.
“It’s very brave of you to admit that. Most knightly folk I happen by bluster and force me to play chess with them. I don’t even like chess! For strategy Wrackglummer and even Go are much superior. And it’s the wrong metaphor entirely. Death is not a checkmate … it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.”
“I’ve only ever played chess with my mother. I wouldn’t feel right, playing with you.”
“I cheat, anyway. When their backs are turned, I move the pieces.”
Slowly, a hole opened up in September’s cheek, just a tiny one. She rubbed at it absently, and it widened. She felt it widening, stretching, and was so terribly afraid. She trembled, and her toes felt awfully cold in the mushroomy mud. Beneath her skin, twigs and leaves had begun to show. Death frowned.
“September, if you do not pay attention, you will never get out of this wood! You ar
e closer than you think, human girl. I guard the casket.” Death’s tiny eyes wrinkled kindly. “All caskets are within my power. Of course they are.”
September yawned. She didn’t mean to. She couldn’t help it. A twig in her cheek popped, turning to dust.
“Are you sleepy? That’s to be expected. In Autumn, trees sleep like bears. The whole world pulls on its nightclothes and snuggles in to sleep through all of winter. Except for me. I never sleep.”
Death climbed up onto her knee, looking up at her with hard acorny eyes. September tried very hard to listen to her Death, instead of the sound of her slowly opening cheek. “I have terrible nightmares, you know,” Death said confidentially. “Every night, when I come home from a long day’s dying, I take off my skin and lay it nicely on my armoire. I take off my bones and hang them up on the hat stand. I set my scythe to washing on the old stove. I eat a nice supper of mouse-and-myrrh soup. Some nights, I drink off a nice red wine. White does not agree with me. I lay myself down on a bed of lilies, and still, I cannot sleep.”
September did not want to know. The moon moved silently overhead, making gape-faces at them.
“I cannot sleep because I have nightmares. I dream all the things the dead wish they had done differently. It is dreadful! Do all creatures dream so?”
“I don’t think so … I dream sometimes that my father has come home, or that I have done well on my math exams, or that my mother’s hair is all made of candy canes and we live on a river of cocoa on a marshmallow island. My mother sings me to sleep, and only once in a while do I dream of awful things.”
“Perhaps it is because I have no one to sing me to sleep. I am so tired. All the world earns its sleep but me.”
September felt sure that she was meant to do something. That, like Latitude and Longitude, the Worsted Wood was a kind of puzzle, and if she only knew how the pieces were shaped, she could manage the whole thing handily. Lost in thought and terror at her own nightmares, September’s Death curled, small and feral, on her knee, her cloak of barkish hair wrapping her like a blanket. With her good hand—a relative thing, really, since it was blackened and rough as a hawthorn branch already, and showing sap under the fingernails, September gathered up her Death and laid it in the crook of her arm. She did not quite know what to do. September had never had a brother or a sister to rock to sleep. She could only remember how her mother had sung to her. She felt as though she were in a dream. But she brushed Death’s hair gently from her face and sang from memory, softly, hoarsely, for her throat had gone rough and dry:
Go to sleep, little skylark,
Fly up to the moon
In a biplane of paper and ink.
Your wings creak and croon,
borne aloft by balloons,
And your engine is singing for you.
Go to sleep, little skylark, do.
Go to sleep, little skylark,
Fly up past the stars
In a biplane of sunshine and ice,
Past comets and cars, past Neptune and Mars
Still your engine is singing for you.
Go to sleep, little skylark, do.
Go to sleep, little skylark,
Drift down through the night
In your biplane of silver and sighs,
Slip under the light,
come down from the heights
For your mother is singing for you.
Go to sleep, little skylark, do.
September reached the end of the song and began again, for Death’s eyes were sliding just the littlest bit closed. Her mother had sung that song, not since she was small, but since her father had left. When she sang it, she curled September in her arms just as September now curled Death and sang it close to her ear so that her long black hair fell over September’s brow just as the remains of September’s hair now fell on Death’s brow. She remembered her mother’s smell, the comfort of it, even though she mainly smelled of diesel oil. She loved that smell. Had learned to love it and settle into it like a blanket. When September got to the part about Neptune and Mars again, Death relaxed in her arms, her bark-brown hair falling delicately over September’s elbow. She kept singing, though it hurt her, her throat was so shriveled and sore. And as she sang, an extraordinary thing happened:
Death grew.
Death stretched and lengthened and got heavier and heavier. Her hair curled and spread, and her arms grew to the size of September’s own arms, and her legs grew to the size of September’s own legs, and in no time at all, Death was the size of a real child, and September held her still in her arms, slumped, sleeping, still.
Oh no! thought September. What have I done? If my Death has grown so big surely I am doomed!
But Death moaned in her sleep, and September saw, glinting in her mouth, something bright and hard. Death opened her mouth, yawning in her sleep. Be bold, September told herself. An irascible child should be bold. Gently, she put her blackened, sappy fingers into Death’s mouth.
“No!” cried Death dreaming. September snatched her hand back. “She loved you all those years; it was only that you couldn’t see it!”
September tried again, just grazing the thing with her fingertips.
“No!” cried Death, dreaming. September snapped back. “If you had gone right instead of left, you would have met an old man in overalls, and he would have taught you blacksmithing!”
September tried one more time, sneaking her fingers past Death’s teeth.
“No!” cried Death, dreaming. September recoiled. “If you had only given your son pencils instead of swords!”
September stopped. She felt hot all over, and the hole in her cheek itched, as though there were leaves crinkling in at its edges. She breathed deeply. September smoothed Death’s hair with her ruined hand, which was sprouting new branches even now. She bent and kissed Death’s burning brow. And then she began to sing again, softly:
“Go to sleep, little skylark…” She caught the edge of the thing.
“Fly up to the moon…” It was slippery and sharp, like glass.
“In a biplane of paper and ink…” September pulled. Death groaned. Birds flew up from the night forest, spooked.
“Your wings creak and croon, borne up by balloons…” There was a terrible creaking, crooning sound as the thing in Death’s throat came free. Death’s mouth opened horribly wide, bending back and back and back, and her whole body folded strangely back around itself as the thing emerged, so that just as September pulled it out entirely, Death vanished with a little sound like the snapping of a twig.
“And your engine is singing for you,” September finished quietly, almost whispering. In her arms, she cradled a smoky glass casket, just the size of a child. It was hung with red silk ropes and bells, and on its face was a little gold plaque. It read,
WILL HILT TO HAND YET BE RESTORED?
TAKE ME UP, THY MOTHER’S SWORD.
September ran her hands over it. She did not understand. But given a magical box, no child will leave it shut. She fumbled with the knots and rang the bells a great many times with her twiggy hands, but finally, under all that blood-colored silk was a little glass latch. September wedged her woody thumb underneath it, and all the forest echoed as it popped free.
One by one, the mushrooms that made up the Lady’s face began to peel off and float away, until September was surrounded by a gentle whirlwind of delicate, lacy mushrooms and the last curls of her own hair, gone red as knots of silk. She lifted the casket lid.
Inside was a long, sturdy wrench.
CHAPTER XIII
AUTUMN IS THE KINGDOM WHERE EVERYTHING CHANGES
In Which Our Heroine Succumbs to Autumn, Saturday and the Wyverary are Abducted, and September Has a Rather Odd Dream
September ran.
The sky behind her had gone an icy, lemony-cream color, pushing the deep blue night aside. Dew and frost sparkled on the Worsted Wood, clinging to the silken puffs like stitched diamonds. Her breath fogged. Leaves crushed and rustled beneath her feet. Sh
e ran so fast, so terribly fast—but she feared not fast enough. With every step, she could feel her legs getting skinnier and harder, like the trunks of saplings. With every step, she thought they might break. In the Marquess’s shoes, her toes rasped and cracked. She had no hair left, and though she could not see it, she knew her skull was turning into a thatch of bare, autumnal branches. Like Death’s skull. She had so little time.
When they are in a great hurry, little girls rarely look behind them. Especially those who are even a little heartless, though we may be quite certain by now that September’s heart had grown heavier than she’d expected when she climbed out of her window that long-ago morning. Because she did not look behind, September did not see the smoky-glass casket close itself primly up again. She did not see it bend in half until it cracked and Death hop up again, quite well, quite awake, and quite small once more. She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.
Up ahead of her, September could see Mercurio, the spriggans’ village, nestled in the flaming orange trees, loaf chimneys smoking cozily, the smell of breakfast, pumpkin flapjacks, and chestnut tea floating over the forest to her shriveled nose. September tried to call out. Red leaves burst from her mouth in a scarlet puff and drifted away. She gasped, something between a sob and an exhausted wracking cough. I’ve lost my voice after all, she thought. She clutched the wrench to her chest, hooking it through her twiggy elbow, which had grown soft sticky buds, like rosehips. The wrench gleamed in the dawn, burnished copper, its head shaped and carved into a graceful hand, ready to clutch a bolt in its grip. Everything shimmered with morning wetness.
A-Through-L yawned in the town square, his huge neck shining as he stretched it up and out. As September burst into the square, she saw the Wyverary playing some kind of checkers with Saturday, using raisiny cupcakes for pieces. Doctor Fallow sat back in a rich, padded chair, smoking a churchwarden pipe with satisfaction. They looked up joyfully to greet her. She tried to smile and open up her arms to hug them. But September could not fault them for the shock and dismay on their faces as they saw her ruined body stumble onto the bread bricks. She wondered if she still had her eyes left. If they were still brown and warm or dried up seedpods. September could hardly breathe. Branches poked and stabbed at her as she gasped after her breath. The green smoking jacket despaired. If it had hands, it would have wrung them; if a mouth, it would have wept. It cinched itself closer to her waist—only a cluster of maple branches now—trying to stay close to her.