The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (5 page)

“Why would you go there?” Neep said suddenly, his voice high and nervous. “It’s
dreadful
. It’s dark and there’s no law at all and the Dodos just run riot down there, like rats. And…” he lowered his voice to a squeak, “the Alleyman lives there.” The other Hreinn shuddered.

September squared her shoulders. “I am going to get your shadows back, all of you, and Our Charlie, too. And even mine. Because it’s my fault, you see. I did it. And you must always clean up your own messes, even when your messes look just like you and curtsy very viciously when what they mean is,
I am going to make trouble forever and ever
.”

*   *   *

And so September explained to them about how she had lost her shadow, how she had given it up to save a Pooka child and let the Glashtyn cut it off her with a terrible bony knife. How the shadow had stood up just like a girl and whirled around in a very disconcerting way. She told Taiga and Neep and the others how the Glashtyn had said they would take her shadow and love her and put her at the head of all their parades, and then all of them dove down to the kingdom under the river, which was surely Fairyland-Below. Though she could not quite work it out, September felt sure that her shadow and everyone’s shadows were all part of the same broken thing, and broken things were to be fixed, whatever the cost, especially if you had been the one to break it in the first place. But September did not tell them any more about her deeds than she had to. When it came down to it, even if hearing that she was good with a Fairy wrench might have made them more sure of her, she could not do it. It was nothing to brag about, when she had left Fairyland so upset in the doing of it. She begged them again to tell her how to get down to that other Fairyland; she would risk the hunters that ran so rampant in the forest.

“But September, it’s not like there’s a trapdoor and down you go,” insisted Taiga. “You have to see the Sibyl. And why do that, why go see that awful old lady when you could stay here with us and eat moonkins and read books and play sad songs on the root-bellows and be safe?” The reindeer-girl looked around at her herd and all of them nodded, some with long furry faces, some with thin, worried human ones.

“But you must see I can’t do that,” September said. “What would my Wyvern think of my playing songs while Fairyland was hurting? Or Calpurnia Farthing the Fairy Rider or Mr. Map or Saturday? What would I think of myself, at the end of it all?”

Taiga nodded sadly, as if to say,
Arguing with humans only leads to tears
. She went to one of the bookshelves and drew out a large blue volume from the top shelf. She stood on her tiptoes.

“We’ve been saving it,” she explained. “But where you’re going you’ll need it more.”

And she opened the midnight covers. Inside, like a bookmark, lay a thin and beautifully painted square notepad with two sheaves left inside, the rest ripped out and used up long ago. Its spine shone very bright against the creamy pages, its edges filigreed with silver and stars. It read:

MAGIC RATION BOOK

MAKE DO WITH LESS, SO WE ALL CAN HAVE MORE.

CHAPTER IV

A
D
OOR
S
HAPED
L
IKE A
G
IRL

In Which September Meets the Sibyl, Has Her Hair Done, Acquires a New Coat, and Takes a Step into the Dark

Let us say that the world is a house.

In that house, a wide and lovely place where all is arranged just so, the world that you and I know, the world which contains Omaha and Zimbabwe and strawberry ice cream and horses with spotted rumps and Ferris wheels and wars in Europe, would be the front parlor. The first thing you see when you arrive, the room which stays clean for company’s sake. Fairyland would be a richly decorated bedroom, full of toys and gold-stitched blankets and the walls all painted with dancing green scenes, connected to the parlor by a long, cluttered closet and several stairs.

There may be other rooms, too, that we have not visited yet, exciting kitchens and thrilling dining rooms, positively breathtaking libraries, long sunny porches soaking in light. But we are not investigating those other rooms today. Today we, and September with us, are looking for a certain door, set far back in the wall. It is a little door, painted gray, with a silver knob that desperately needs polishing.

Most houses worth their windows have basements, and the world does, too. Dark spaces under the busy rooms, lit only with lightbulbs hanging by the ceiling from lonely cords at the bottoms of creaky staircases. The world keeps a great number of things down there—liqueurs and black beers brewing for summer, barrels of potatoes and apples, jams glowing like muddled gems in their jars, meats curing, pickles pickling, bundles of long green herbs, everything working, everything steeping, everything waiting for spring. So, too, are there boxes kept down in the cellar of the world, all nicely labeled with pretty handwriting, all the things the dear old planet packed away from its previous lives, pyramids and ziggurats and marble columns, castles and towers and burial mounds, pagodas and main streets and the East India Trading Company. All of it just sleeping down there in the dark, tucked away safely, until a fuse blows in the upper house and somebody, a little girl, perhaps, has to venture down those creaky stairs and across the lumpy earthen floor to turn the light on once more.

Fairyland-Below is such a cellar, and the Sibyl is that little gray door, so small you might miss it, if you were not already looking so carefully.

*   *   *

The land between Moonkin Hill and Asphodel is called the Upside-Down. No one ever named it that in an official capacity—no one ever cut a ribbon over the place and put in a plaque. But everyone who passed through called it so—and September did, too. So would you, if you found yourself wandering around in it, for it looked just as though some mischief-minded giant had ripped up the land and put it back inside out and upside down. Roots grew up like trees from soil as rich and soft as whipped butter; bright orange carrots and golden onions and purple turnips and ruby beets sprang up everywhere like hard, squat flowers. Here and there yawning pits opened up where hills might properly have risen. Even more rarely, the foundations of little houses sat squarely on the ground, a glimpse of their green or blue porches just showing, disappearing down into the earth like crowns of radishes. A low mist gathered, dampening September and everything else. The mist, too, traveled upside down, but that makes little difference when it comes to mist.

A road wound through the Upside-Down, made all of bright, cheerful blue cobblestones. The painted side faced down, and September walked upon naked gray stones. She tried to be cheerful, but the mist dispirited her. How she would have preferred to ride through this sad, backward place upon Ell’s bright red back! Fairyland seemed altogether stranger and colder and more foreign than it had before—was that September’s doing? Or worse, was this the natural state of Fairyland, to which it returned when the Marquess left her throne, no longer demanding that it make itself into a marvelous place for children to love?

She could not believe that. She would not. Countries had regions, after all, and how foreign would her own world seem if she returned to Alaska rather than dear, familiar Nebraska? It was winter in Fairyland now, that was all, winter in a province or state or county far from the sea. And not the pristine snowy winter, either, but the muddy, wet sort that meant spring was coming, spring was right around the corner. Winter is always hungry and lean, and the worst of it comes right before the end. September cheered herself with these thoughts as she walked through the rows of root vegetables with their showy colors glinting in the mist. She thought, briefly, of simply tearing out a ration card and magicking herself to Ell’s side—but no.
Wasting rations hastens hunger,
Mrs. Bowman always said when a poor soul had no more bread cards and the month only half done. September would have to spend her magic ration carefully. She would have to save it, as her mother had saved all those sugar cards to make her birthday cake. She would spend her magic only when the time was right.

September bent and snapped off a carrot, munching it as she went. It was quite the most carrot-like of any carrot she had ever tasted. It tasted like the thing other carrots meant to copy. She picked a few onions and put them in her pockets for roasting later. Sooner or later, she would get to make that fire; September had little doubt.

Once—but only once—September thought she saw someone on the upside-down road with her. She could hardly make them in the low, glittery fog, but someone had been there, a rider in gray. She thought she glimpsed long, silver hair flying. She thought she heard four huge, soft paws hitting the cobblestones in a slow, steady rhythm. September called out after the shape in the mist, but it did not answer her, and the thing it rode upon—something enormous and muscled and striped—sped off into the clouds. She might have run, might have tried to catch them, to best her performance in the wheat field, if Asphodel had not reared up out of the drizzling, smoky wet and caught her swiftly in its tangled streets.

*   *   *

The sun always shines in Asphodel. Hanging big and golden-red as a pendant in the sky, it hands down its warm gifts as to no other city. September blinked and squinted in the sudden brilliance, shading her eyes. Behind her, a wall of swirling fog hung as if nothing unusual had happened, and what was she looking at, really? But having stepped upon the great avenue of Asphodel, September bathed in sunshine. All around her, the city rose up into the cloudless air, busy, shadowless, dazzlingly bright.

Asphodel was a city of stairs. Seven spiral staircases wound up from the street like skyscrapers, so huge that in each pale, marble-veined step, September could see windows and doors with folk bustling in and out of them. Little black sleighs ran up and down the bannisters, carrying passengers and bags of letters and parcels from one gargantuan step to another. Smaller staircases dotted side roads and alleys. Cupboards opened in their bases out of which bakers or tinkers or umbrella makers waved their wares. Some of the stairs whorled with delicate ironwork, some creaked in the pleasant wind, their paint peeling, their steps dotted with dear little domestic window boxes dripping with green herbs and chartreuse flowers. Though each staircase towered and loomed, September had a strange feeling that they were not meant to go
up,
but rather
down.
If she had been big enough to walk down those giant’s stairs, she imagined that she would be compelled to begin at their heights and walk downward, to the place where the steps disappeared into the earth. She felt certain for no particular reason that the natural direction of travel in Asphodel was not to ascend but to descend. It was a strange feeling, like suddenly becoming aware of gravity in a social way, sitting down to tea with it and learning its family history.

No one took the smallest notice of September as she walked among the great staircases. She thought of asking after the Sibyl from any number of fauns or duck-footed girls with mossy hair that she happened by, but everyone seemed so furiously busy that she felt rude even thinking of interrupting them. As she passed a pale-green spiral staircase, a handsome brown bear with a golden belt on climbed into one of the black sleighs and told it very loudly and clearly, “Eighteenth stair, second landing, please. And make it half speed; I’ve a bellyache from all that honey-beer down on twelve. S’Henry Hop’s birthday lunch. I hate birthday lunches. Spoils the whole office with silliness.”

The sleigh rolled smoothly up the bannister, and the bear settled back for a little nap. An empty sleigh clattered down the other jade-colored bannister and waited, empty, patient. September looked around. No one got in or even looked at the lovely thing, with its curling runners and silver ferns and little flowers embossed on the door. Carefully, as if it might bite her or, more likely, that someone would suddenly tell her she wasn’t allowed, September opened the sleigh door and sat down on the plush green seat.

“I’d like to see the Sibyl, please,” she said slowly and clearly, though not as loudly as the bear.

The black sleigh bounced harshly, once, twice. September winced, sure she had broken it. Instead, as she clung to the smooth, curved bow of the thing, it detached from its bannister and unspooled four long, indigo vines from its belly. The vines splayed out on the ground like feet, and thick, fuzzy lemony-white flowers opened up where toes might usually find themselves. The sleigh rose up totteringly on its new curlicue legs and, with a jostling, cheerful gait, darted off between the staircases, the sun glinting on its dark body.

*   *   *

The Sibyl did not live in a staircase. The black sleigh brought September far beyond the city center to a square of thick grass full of violet and pink crocuses. Hunched up against the beginnings of a stony crag sat a great red cube the size of a house with a filigree brass gate closed firmly over its open end. The sleigh bounced again as if to discharge itself of its responsibility and jogged back off toward Asphodel proper.