How we would like to argue with September, and tell her that in the waiting lies the pleasure! That we here in the world of sensible folk know how to wait without twisted-up bellies and tapping feet and wishing for the sun to hurry up and rise and set. That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. But though I am sly, I am a trickster, I am even cruel—I cannot lie.
Abecedaria furrowed her crimped eyebrow-curls. “Oh, fine and fat for a Fairy! Fairies live forever! There’s no such thing as a withered old Fairy coughing up regret in her sickbed! They could speed up time all they liked and lose nothing! But the Moon was in her springtime then and teeming with folk neither Fairy nor Yeti! Harpies and Banshees and Kappa and Kitsunes and Chimeras and Hreinn and Qilin and Satyrs! Yet once Patience became a city in full swing, the Fairies down in Fairyland raced up the road to join their brothers and sisters in the sky. They say it was like a rainbow emptying out onto the Moon, so many came and so fast—and another pouring away from it, as folk fled, outrunning the terror of time run mad. Even I cannot deny the lure of having everything you want the minute you want it. And so it went. The Fairies knuckled away even the boring old minutes between falling asleep and waking up. The rest? You could only call it burglary. They didn’t toss the time off like a dress—they lost it. It bled right out of them. They grew older, faster. Oh, a night here and there wouldn’t have hurt—unless it’s your day or night and you only have so many saved up against death’s accounts! But you have no idea how easily a Fairy gets bored. They Yetied away weeks and months if that’s how long it took for the shepherdess’s suitors to grow a thick pelt ready to be sheared for the wedding day. They were so hungry never to waste time ever again that they wasted the rest of us away. Half the Moon died of old age before anyone could fix it.”
“And how was it fixed?” September asked. “Who fixed it?”
The Periwig shrugged her delicate puffball shoulders. “It was long ago and my books don’t know. There were battles, of course—savage and ferocious battles—but the Fairies only bit their paws and skipped to the end of the battle, to the end of the war. They stood over the field still fresh and laughing while the Moonfolk lay gasping and exhausted and bent over with arthritis. The loyalists had nothing to slow down time—the Queer Physickists say no one can do that. But Periwigs came to the Moon afterward, when the Fairies had disappeared and accounts had to be balanced, a mess cleaned up, judgments made, cases argued. Only the very youngest of the Harpies and Satyrs and Hreinn and their kin remained. No one would speak of it, and they pulled down the Yeti’s paw in Patience with ropes and cheering.”
“But what has Ciderskin to do with it, if all is well now?”
A-Through-L spoke this time, his dear, round nostrils flaring. “Ciderskin wants to be King of the Moon, September. He wants us all to clear off on the double and leave him to be alone in the cold and the snow. After all, the Yetis shrunk up and grew old, too. I have seen a painting in the Inconstant Museum of a city filled with ancient Yetis all bending down to die before their own paw. And all because one of them, just once, was caught! The paw disappeared and the Moonfolk agreed between themselves not to look for it which I think shows nobleness, don’t you? But I suppose someone could find it and use it. But really, Ciderskin just hates us and he shakes the Moon to shake us off. All he wants is to crouch up on top of the Splendid Dress and munch on the stones and lord over nothing. And he can do it, too! He is letting himself be seen! In the city of Mochi over the sea, the Harpies say he drove a pair of bone shears as tall as a tower into a meadow that hadn’t done a thing to him, all the way up to the handles. The Moon quaked and cracked for a week! He is so much faster than we are, September. And he has his paws! At any time he, and not us, could spool up time like thread again and leave us all with our whole lives leaking away. People have already started to leave. You don’t know, you haven’t seen the Moon when it’s full! Almanack is half empty; only grasshoppers live in Tithonus, all but a few prospectors and ballerinas have fled Sepharial now. But what if he shakes the Moon all to pieces? The shards will come raining down on Fairyland and a fat lot of good leaving will have done.”
“We are safe in the shell,” whispered Abecedaria. “But with the Sapphire Stethoscope, he could hear anyone, anywhere on the Moon. Even our dreams. We couldn’t hide or plan; he’d know in a moment what might scare us the most. I don’t know what sort of vicious, biting wind would have sent it here—here, where he could just snatch it away at any time! But you cannot keep it here; it’s out of the question.”
A-Through-L rocked from one ruby foot to the other. “You’ve no idea how many strange objects the Moon keeps tucked away. It’s like a bank vault up here, only folk stick their spare magic up here for safekeeping and interest-earning. Such a mess. I do wish they’d cleaned up after themselves when they went.”
“Who?” wondered September.
“September, who else? The Fairies. Who else would even want a glittery blue thing that let you hear every whisper? A Wyvern prefers his privacy! Ciderskin went scaring up whatever he could find a little ways ago. He’s got a great shaggy dog that goes about with him, a dog who can find anything. He dug up those bone shears out of a cave under the Sea of One Fish—and when One Fish tried to tell him to mind his own, the dog bit her tail and lassoed her round his head three times. He tossed One Fish like a ball halfway down to Fairyland. It took poor One a month to swim back upstream, bleeding moonstones all the way.”
“He means to do something dreadful, mark me,” said the Periwig. “Once he’s got all the bits of Fairy junk he wants.”
“Then all anyone has to do is keep him from finding any more, surely…” said September.
“You be our guest and try, little lady,” sighed Abecedaria. “A Yeti’s mind is made of water—runs so fast and so deep no one can follow it, let alone splash around and have a look at the bottom. But that’s all appendices and introductions—the body of the work is I won’t take your filthy spying Stethoscope when the Yeti wants it. I won’t let him wear me on his nasty ice-liced head, no ma’am!”
“I daresay your Library would last longer than I would against a Yeti.”
September’s heart lay down and rolled over and growled at itself. It found her bones and worried them. She wanted only to run off with A-Through-L and swim in the scarlet sea and gaze up at the stars. This wasn’t her Moon. She wanted to get into Aroostook and drive right back down to Fairyland where at least she felt as though she knew something about anything at all. She wanted to eat pumpkin pie in the Autumn Provinces again. She wanted to skip to the easy part, the part that sparkled and sang. She didn’t want to be a Fairy Knight or a Fairy Bishop. She just wanted to be a Fairy and live only in the moments she liked best. But the other part of her wanted to go tromping after a Moon-Yeti and give him what for. To save the strange and beautiful Moon from shaking apart and crashing down to Fairyland. To stand up to Ciderskin and stare him in the eyes the way she had the Marquess and her shadow. That is the trouble with standing up to people, of course. Once you start doing it, you can hardly stop.
If a wig can narrow its eyes, the Periwig did. Her black rosettes squinted shut; the white mustaches of her mouth pursed. September looked down at her black silks. Everyone saw her as a Criminal. They did it because of how she looked. But that was the whole purpose of clothes, she supposed. Clothes are a story you choose to tell about yourself, a different one every day. Even folk who wore plain overalls every day and didn’t comb their hair and knew more about cattle breeds than fashion were telling a story: I am a person who doesn’t know or care about fashion because those aren’t things worth knowing or caring about. September had not chosen this story. She had not even chosen her clothes—but hadn’t she? She could have kicked and screamed and refused to put them on. She could have spit in the face of the Blue Wind—and probably the Blue Wind would have liked it! But even if she hadn’t chosen it then, she could choose it now, if the choosing was the important thing. Septemb
er felt very much that it was.
“I think I shall have to go and see the Yeti,” she said with as much loudness as she could muster. It was also important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them. “I am a Professional Revolutionary, after all.”
“I rather think you’re a shirker of high degree, September,” the Periwig said archly. “If I read your silks right, and I always do, for I have read every volume on heraldry and royal codes in my catalogue, you are a Criminal.”
“I like Professional Revolutionary better. After all, if a Revolution comes off, it’s not a crime.”
The Periwig leaned close in. She smelled like lavender and talcum powder. “I see! Your cap has the anarchical charcoal-on-pitch chevron pattern. As clear as yelling.”
Ell fretted, rocking from claw to claw. “It won’t be like before, September! The Marquess was at least roughly your size…”
But Abecedaria would not let him finish. “Ciderskin wants to be King of a Lonely Moon and he oughtn’t! You’re quite right! It is your job to go and…well, I expect you know your work better than I do. Array the instruments of your craft and, well, craft it. He lives on the inner edge of the Moon. I can tell you the quickest path over the mountains, though it will make me an accessory. I suppose I’ll risk it. A Librarian must be stalwart and bold; she must give information when it is asked for!”
“Well then,” said September with what she hoped was devil-may-care cheer, “can’t you tell me how a girl roughly my size would go about meddling with a Yeti?”
The Periwig wriggled all over, her bluish-white curls fattening and shrinking, unplaiting and plaiting up again. After a moment, September understood this to be how a Periwig performs the sort of frowning humans do when they are thinking very hard.
“I suppose you’ll have to find that old Yeti’s paw,” she sighed, spooling up her locks tight and firm. “You could never hope to catch him otherwise. It’d be like a duckling racing a champion dodo.”
“You said it was lost! And big enough to get pulled down with ropes, which means far too big to carry. And I’m not sure I feel quite right about using a nasty mummified paw against the very sort of beast the Fairies stole it from. If you defeat an opponent, that’s one thing, but if you beat him about the head with his grandfather’s cut-off hand, that’s just cruel!”
“It is lost, it is—if it weren’t I expect we’d know it by how old we got before teatime.” The Periwig’s ribbons twisted and untwisted. “As for the bigness of it, I’m sure you’d only need a thumbnail or some such—too much and you’ll go speeding through time right with him. But none of my books have an opinion as to where it wound up, which is unusual, since books have opinions on everything.”
September noticed that the Librarian ignored the question of cruelty against Yetis.
A-Through-L smiled a toothy smile, his orange eyes glittering. “Orrery, Abby! She has to go to Orrery! And I shall take her!”
The Periwig shook her puffy poms. “What a brilliant beast I hired! I am terribly impressed with my past self. She was naive about the relationship between Wyverns and fire, but what a lovely present she has made our present!”
The Wyverary practically danced with the joy of explaining a thing to September, for explaining things was what he liked best after alphabetizing, and September knew so little she always needed explaining.
“Orrery is the city on the slopes of the Splendid Dress, which is a frightful big and lovely mountain. The Glasshobs built it to keep an eye on the stars, who have a tendency to run off on adventures and forget about how much we down-below folks need to navigate and cast horoscopes and meet lovers on balconies. A Glasshob is a kind of lantern fish with goat-legs, and they carry their breathing parts in silver censers that swing from their fins. And they weep glass! It just comes pouring hot and orange and molten out of their eyes. How sad they must have been to make Orrery! It’s a city all of lenses, September! Telescopes and oikeoscopes and microscopes and kinetoscopes and chromoscopes and cameras and spectacles and detectives’ glasses and binoculars and mirrors! You can turn the shingle of a roof and see Pandemonium through it. And it’s near the Tipping Edge, where the outside of the Moon turns into the inside. Of course, the Splendid Dress blocks the way, but I can fly us over it. We’ll spy out the paw in Orrery. I just know it.”
September thought of Almanack and its enormous love for the city inside it. She thought of Ballast Downbound sailing up and down the road patching up wrecks because she heard their ruin in her heart. She thought of the strange Blue Wind with his coat of planets grinning darkly at her. Everything you have. You do your job and you mind your work.
September stood up and wiped her hands on her black trousers. “Well, what is the good of being a Criminal and a Revolutionary if you don’t set off to do ridiculous things nobody in their right mind would dream of? Come on, self, what did we long for all those rainy days if not to jump over the Moon like the cow in the song and cross paths with a Yeti? I’m sure I couldn’t fight him any more than a ladybug could fight me, but you can’t say it’s not an adventure, not for a moment! We’ll find that paw and maybe I won’t have to crack skulls together with him like a couple of gentlemen deer in the springtime.”
“Bully for us, every one,” said the Periwig dryly.
It was her Moon. It was her Moon because Ell lived there and because it was Fairyland’s Moon. Because if she had a shell to comfort and protect things she loved, they would be inside it, tucked in tight. I suppose, she thought, running back down to Fairyland for pie would be as selfish as the Blue Wind said I am. Well, I shan’t let her be right about anything if I can help it.
September took up the Sapphire Stethoscope, folded its tubes and earpieces together, and tucked it back into the ivory casket. She shut the lid; it locked loudly in the great round Library.
“I do think this falls under Guarding the Library from Night-Marauders, which is in my contract,” A-Through-L said, by way of asking Abecedaria’s leave. The Periwig shook her fuzzy head. Finally she whispered:
“Child, we are dying because of him. The Moon is dying. What can we do? A paw is only a Tool in the end. Whoever it belonged to is long gone. I shall make you a bargain. I shall feel guilty on your behalf. I shall feel wretched in the extreme. After all, it was I who told you about it. That way you can ply your trade with an easy heart. Leave it to the professionals, that’s best. I certainly prefer to be left alone at my work.”
September nodded, but it did not soothe the prickling of wrongness in her breast. She looked up at Ell, her heart stretching to hold the whole sight of him.
“We’ll have to go and collect my car before we leave,” she said finally, because it seemed the sensible and grown-up thing to say. But after a moment, she added, “It’s us again, Ell, you and I off to do something very unlikely.”
“Car begins with C, so I shall be thrilled to meet it!” And then he lowered his head like a puppy playing, smiling a secret smile of I know something you don’t know. “But September,” he purred, “don’t you think we ought to go and collect Saturday first?”
CHAPTER XI
AEROPOSTE
In Which September Discovers a Friend in the Circus, Reads a Number of Hands, Feet, and Faces, Tucks Into a Most Literate Lunch, and Hears a Perfectly Practiced Tale
A-Through-L swooped and soared down the gentle slopes of Almanack. September clung tight to his back. She had ridden him before—but then he’d walked, his bumpy, two-legged chicken-gait. His wings had been chained down horribly. And in Fairyland-Below she had flown as a Wyvern herself before turning back into a girl mid-flight. But this was the first time she and Ell had flown together. Laughter and tears and shouting got jumbled up on the way to her mouth and tried to come out all at once. A Wyvern was meant for flying—how clear that was now! She could feel delicate muscles under his skin moving gracefully, tipping into the air and dipping under it as if they were such good friends.
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Down below, someone else was flying. Many someones—the lovely folded-paper trapeze artists and acrobats and elephants of the Stationary Circus, zooming and twirling and wheeling madly over their wide, boisterous ring. And in their midst, darting between them and leaping among them, was a someone with long black hair in a topknot and flowing tattoos on his back.
Someone blue.
Saturday had joined the circus.
September could not take her eyes away as they circled down. How could she not have seen him before? Saturday spun from the trapezes of the Stationary Circus, catching the slim arms of a newspaper girl, stretching out his long blue body in the rich peacock light of Almanack, his tattoos gleaming, his topknot fluttering behind him. An illustrated boy caught him by the ankles and tossed him up into a gorgeous arc; Saturday bent in half and touched his toes in the air, hanging perfectly still, longer than anyone should be able to hang. Where the tips of his fingers touched the tips of his feet, a blossom of dark seawater gurgled into life and then fell down to the ring below as rain. The Marid snapped flat, snatched the next bar as it came swinging toward him, and came to rest on a high platform, landing on one foot and balancing a sudden huge black pearl on his nose like a seal. He flipped his head back, caught the gem in his mouth, and blew a ball of glittering sea foam into the air like a smoke ring. The roustabouts down in the empty stands applauded with great, strong dictionary-hands. It was only a practice—but what a practice! The Marid smiled—and September had never seen a smile like that on the face of her shy, uncertain friend. His face blazed turquoise with exertion and excitement and exultation. He knew his own strength and it surged through him like a blue tide. He waved at the ringmaster, whose broad body was made of vivid postage stamps folded every which way. She blew Saturday a peony; he caught the deep orange flower with a quick blue hand. He wore long silken trousers the color of tarnished silver with whorls and loops of spangled writing running round his legs and no shirt at all. His muscles moved under that familiar blue skin, lean and long and lithe.