“Time is the only magic,” he said. “And Marids swim through time like the sea. Think: If you hurt yourself, and I bandage it, and after weeks and weeks it gets well and there’s no scar, that’s not magic at all. But if you hurt yourself and I touch you and it heals in a moment, you’d call me magic before your skin closed. It’s not magic to cook a feast, roasting and baking and frying for hours and hours, but if you blink and it’s steaming in front of you, it’s a spell. If you work for what you want and save for it and plan it out just as precisely as you possibly can, it’s not even surprising if you get it on the other side of a month or a year. But if you snap your fingers and it happens as soon as you want it, every wizard will want to know you socially. If you live straight through a hundred years and watch yourself unfold at one second per second, one hour per hour, that’s just being alive. If you go faster, you’re a time traveler. If you jump over your unfolding and see how it all comes out, that’s fate. But it’s all healing and cooking and planning and living, just the same. The only difference is time.”
September turned this over in her head. “But the trouble is, I do want to be surprised. I want to choose. I broke the heart of my fate so that I could choose. I never chose; I only saw a little girl who looked like me standing on a gear at the end of the world and laughing, and that’s not choosing, not really. Wouldn’t you rather I chose you? Wouldn’t you rather I picked our future out of all the others anyone could have?”
“I chose you,” he said simply. “All the fish of me turned toward you at once.”
September felt panic burn through her like gasoline. Why couldn’t he understand her? “But I didn’t! I have hardly had a chance to breathe since I got here and it’s always like that in Fairyland. Everything is always happening and all at once. And I am growing up, Saturday! I am growing up and I have read books, so many books, and I know that growing up means you can’t keep going to Fairyland the way you did when you were a child! Something happens to you and suddenly you have to keep a straight face and a straight line and I am afraid! I want something grand and I don’t want to know what it is before it happens!”
“There are grown-ups in Fairyland,” Saturday said. “Who told you you couldn’t come back when you’re grown? Was it the same person who told you grown-ups don’t cry or blush or clap their hands when they’re happy? Don’t try to say otherwise, I’ve seen you fighting like a boxer to change your face so that it never shows anything. Whoever told you that’s what growing up means is a villain, as true as a mustache. I am growing up, too, and look at me! I cry and I blush and I live in Fairyland always!”
And he was blushing, bright frost on his cheeks. She who blushes first loses, September thought. She put her hand on his cheek, the place where the Blue Wind had slapped her once. But what does she lose? What contest is on that I never even knew about before the Blue Wind said I’d lost?
September tried to pull on her sternness. It was becoming a habit. She could show her sternness and think about this another time, when it was quiet and no new red Moon turned somersaults in the sky. But when she reached for her sternness, all September found in her heart was the bar of a trapeze, swinging wild, inviting her to catch it.
The older Saturday fixed his dark eyes on her. They had kind little wrinkles at their edges, where smiles had gotten stuck and never left.
“It’s a terrible magic that everyone can do,” he said. “So do it. Breathe. Choose. Something, anything, whatever you want. Or don’t choose. Or choose and if you don’t like it later, it’ll be all right because when you were very young, you took a hammer and smashed your fate into a hundred pieces.”
September did not even look at the Saturday with kind wrinkles. She looked at her Saturday. The present she had to meet over and over. He was right. She lived out of order and upside down, a jumble of time and girl. He was right. September blushed. She blushed and she let herself blush. There was no losing in it, only feeling. Fairyland, she thought. Fairyland is what I have where a ship has ballast. In high seas it keeps me upright. And maybe growing up only means getting bigger. As big as Almanack, as a whelk on the moon who can hold a world inside it. September’s heart sat up inside her and spoke.
She leaned up and kissed her Marid and hoped it was the right thing. Her heart caught the bar and swung out, swung wild, over the lights and the gasps below, reaching for a pair of sure blue hands in the air and willing them to find hers.
When they separated, the older Saturday put his long blue arms around the child of himself. He beckoned to September and she went to him. He smelled of cold stones and the sea. It was a good smell. “Listen to me,” the older Saturday interrupted. His voice was Saturday’s voice, but deeper and roomier, with space inside to curl up in.
But he did not get to finish.
I have been many things in our time together. Sly and secret and full of tricks, cruel and heartless in my own way. But for now I shall be kind. Saturday, the Saturday who has seen how it all comes out, wanted to tell himself a thing, and September, too. You and I, as we get on in years together, will many times wish to take our past selves in our arms and stroke their hair and tell them how the world is, how it is made, what can be done about it. Saturday could not be allowed to do it, any more than we can, and that is why I caused the Moon to shudder just so. I do have some small privileges.
But I will tell you what he meant to say, because we are friends and the space before an epilogue is a sacred place, soft and full of possibilities.
Saturday wanted to say: Listen to me. Love is a Yeti. It is bigger than you and frightening and terrible. It makes loud and vicious noises. It is hungry all the time. It has horns and teeth and the fore of its fists is more than anyone can bear. It speeds up time and slows it down. And it has its own aims and missions that those who are lucky enough to see it cannot begin to guess. You might see a Yeti once in your life or never. You might live in a village of them. But in the end, no matter how fast you think you can go, the Yeti is always faster than you, and you can only choose how you say hello to it, and whether you shake its hand.
CHAPTER XX
EVER SO MUCH MORE TROUBLE
In Which Many Things Forgotten Are Recalled Rather Suddenly and With Alarming Effect
But Saturday said none of these things, and neither September nor his young self heard them.
Another quake shuddered out from the wound in the middle of Patience. It felt shallower, but it snaked sudden and sharp across the ground. September tottered and stumbled, falling into the two Saturdays. They both caught her, and for a moment all three of them held each other, clinging together with the stars like promises overhead. But then the quake sheared back the other way, a terrible aftershock, a terrible afterbirth, and September fell backward, away from the Marids who loved her.
As she fell, September saw the yawning black chasms shudder in the surface of the Moon. The cuts made by birth and the Bone Shears spat out their last blood and shivered toward closing, faster and faster as Ciderskin and the Black Cosmic Dog moved the heavens like a spinning ball and performed the only magic, the kind that heals all. Far off in the distance two bright balloons popped up out of the long, deep wounds, firing cannons as madly as fireworks in summer. The older Saturday winked out like a lantern, back into the open sea of timelines and flickering, turning fish.
September landed hard on her side against the metal edge of a typewriter dusty with lunar weeds. The keys mashed hard, whacking some incomprehensible word onto the roller. The impact jolted her teeth. She felt something break in her thigh and had time to think Oh no, no, I’ve broken my leg again before she began to bleed. Hot wetness soaked through the black silks of her trousers in a moment and seeped out onto the keys of the typewriter. Pain sparkled up along her hip. She put her hand against the wound gingerly—and it came away bright with color. But it was not quite the right color for a human wound. Some streaks of true red blood ran down her fingers, but they drowned in the hot fluid oozing dark orange over her hand,
thick, syrupy, the color of a campfire. It still bubbled a little.
Ballast Downbound’s orange fizz had shattered in her pocket. The sunlight of ancient days, of giant ferns and dimetrodons and werewhales and memory, remembering everything it ever had been and longing to return to being it once more. It spread out hungrily, crimson and thick and shining, dripping into the guts of the typewriter, splashing onto the carriage.
September laughed with relief—and then winced, for the shards of glass still stuck in her thigh. She rolled off of the soaked typewriter only to splash into a river of the Moon’s own blood, still oozing from a canyon not quite yet stitched shut. She was not careful enough—September tried to keep her leg out of the warm planetary fluids and leaned too far over, crunching again against the typewriter, soaking it in orange fizz, in impossibly ancient light.
The typewriter began to smoke.
September thought at first that it was on fire. The deep orange stuff bubbled and oozed over the keys, spotted like a leopard’s skin with September’s own blood. It sizzled and sparked, beams of sunshine ribboning out and spooling back again, the sunlight of some long-vanished day when Fairies were young, stealing their first wings, when werewhales and dimetrodons and apples of immortality and cyclopses soaked up the heat and warmth of it into their skins. Sunlight that wanted only to make things bigger, to make them what they had been long ago, bigger ferns and more dimetrodons and orchards covering all the hungry earth like armies. Ballast’s fountain-drink melted into the keys, its sugar and sirop dissolving the letters. It smelled like deep goodness, growing and living and working and ripeness. But beneath it the typewriter was coming apart, shrinking and surging at once until it erupted like a well-loved mountain.
And then, the typewriter turned into a girl.
She was enormous, so much taller and stronger than any Fairy September had seen or imagined. Her wings unfolded into vast prisms of fire-colors, their glassy membranes glinting green-red in the light of the still-wheeling stars, the still-flashing dawns flicking by like cards shuffling. Overhead, the small red Moon had grown broad and wide, wide enough for lakes and seas to crash into foam on its face, wide enough for snowy peaks already catching the light of the new Moon’s mother below. The Fairy’s hair streamed out around her head like a crown, twisted with green vines and fronds and roses bursting like stars going nova. Vermillion jewels covered her copper-colored body from throat to toe.
The Fairy looked down at September. Her eyes were black, as black as the beginning of the world. And they were filled with white, burning stars.
The Fairy seized September in her great hands like a doll. And she began to laugh.
September looked down, her head spinning. Saturday was climbing onto Ell’s back to come after her. Ciderskin had sunk to his knees, his ruby eyes full of terrible tears. She wanted to cry out to them but could not. Her throat would not move. Aroostook glittered and shone in her new glassy skin and long stripes. September reeled in the Fairy’s hand. The searing, living, growing, bright, and earthy smell of the Fairy made her dizzy. What happened to you, Aroostook, while I was smashing and yelling and running after Yetis? Suddenly it seemed important as September drifted in the fog of perfume and laughter and thin, thin air. I will find out, I promise, we’ll have a sit down, just like the Blue Wind said. But she could not make her lips and lungs work together to say that, either.
And then September felt a pulling in her, a hook in the heart, and she knew the feeling, she knew it but it was too soon, she had been in Fairyland but a moment, only a moment! Over the Fairy’s terrible shoulder, she could see the Blue Wind coming, as the Green Wind had come for her twice now, sailing over the edge of the world to snatch her out of it and send her home.
“I only had a day!” September whispered, her voice strangled in the Fairy’s endless gaze. “Don’t make me go!”
Dawns popped and spun over her face at once as the Yeti went about his childrearing, moving time to give the little red Moon a chance to grow. Her skin felt hot, tight, too small for her, as though some hideous hand pulled at her hair and her feet to stretch her as far as she could go. September screamed.
The invisible hook in September hauled at her and the Fairy laughed her booming, wild, savage laugh, and Saturday reached for her and A-Through-L roared in panic—
September fell out of Fairyland like a drop of spilled blood.
And fell back in again.
She felt it, she felt Fairyland push her out, away from Saturday, away from Ell, away from Aroostook, away from everything.
But the Fairy held her fast, and kept laughing, higher and louder until it became thunder, until it became a squall, and even Ciderskin quailed. The Blue Wind, her puffin vast beneath her, her shaggy blueberry-colored coat flapping in the lunar winds, flew merrily around the Yeti’s head, grinning like Christmas morning. She rested her brocade elbows on the puffin’s glossy dark head and rested her chin in her hands.
“You can cause ever so much more trouble by taking folk seriously,” she crowed, her blue eyes dancing. “And doing just as they ask.”
September was stuck fast in Fairyland, like a nail driven home.
CHAPTER XXI
THE GIRL WHO WAS GONE
Twilight made the rounds on the prairie, turning the lights on and sounding the bell for supper. The ruined fence was mended now and all well. A few strands of greyhound fur matted into the wire of the patch. The sun set over the main road, over to Mr. Albert’s farm, the Powells, September’s own small house. The night came on proper, full of familiar, happy stars. The moon, her own moon, our dear moon with its old face in it, came up in the south, full and bright as life.
In the Powell barn, the big roan groaned and sweated and pushed. A tangle of horse came tumbling free. Pure white against the red matted fur of her mother. The colt kicked wildly—and almost immediately tottered upright, her ghostly white body shining in the dim light, so bright against the red of blood and roan and barn.
The full moon rose passed the high barn windows, spilling in like milk.
But September was not there to see it. The next day’s sun will peer in on an empty bed, a woman with engine grease under her fingernails and yelling with panic in her voice like bright paint for her husband to wake up and call her sister, call her now, use Mr. Albert’s telephone and call her sister, stop asking questions—and a little dog nosing through the pillows for a girl who was gone.
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