The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (14 page)

Blunderbuss gave him a pitying look. “No offense, but your girl doesn't even want to boss Fairyland about. You can't win without a want boiling in your belly. Besides, my kids have magic leaking out of their ears. None of this would have happened without them.”

“Oh yes,” said September slyly. “Thank you, Hawthorn and Tamburlaine, for bringing Goldmouth back to life. A king so wicked there's a statue of him dying in the capital for everyone to wash their stockings in. I'm sure we're all terribly grateful.”

“I wouldn't go talking about bringing ornery things back to life, Miss Egg. It doesn't look too good on you.”

September laughed. She knew the wombat meant to sting her, so she laughed instead of blushing or sputtering, which never got a girl anything but rolled right over. It was a fair point, anyhow. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. The wind pushed it right back, hot and sweet and full of the best sorts of city smells. She took a breath and said the thing that had spent the last three days pacing all the rooms of her mind. “Maybe I don't want to be Queen, exactly. But if we don't win, then someone dreadful might. We've got to win, because we can't count on the Marquess or Tanaquill or Goldmouth losing. And … and I'd be a good Queen, I think. I wouldn't be
bad,
anyway. Maybe I could be the opposite of a tyrant, an un-tyrant, and Fairyland would be, well, like a story in a book.”

And if I were Queen, I could stay,
she added silently.
I could stay in Fairyland. I could be good at Fairyland, the way the Sibyl was good at guarding the entrance to the underworld and the Calcatrix was good at the magic of money.
A terrible longing for her mother pressed on her chest. Her mother would tell her that if there was ever a chance to do something extraordinary, it ought to be snatched immediately.
Only, if I stay, will I ever get to hear her tell me a single thing again? Perhaps … perhaps I could bring my parents through the Closet Between the Worlds and we could all be together here. Halloween brought my father to Fairyland-Below, and she's only my shadow. You're allowed to do that sort of thing when you're Queen.

Darling September! That is why anyone wants to rule. Oh, they would never admit it. But at the bottom of their hearts, anyone who longs for power longs to have everyone and everything they love safe and happy forever in one place, no matter the cost. It's only what happens to those they do not love that makes it all go wrong-headed and hard.

Saturday stared out over the river, into the dry hills beyond. He could not quite tell where Pandemonium had settled herself. They had to get moving. If they won, she would stay. He whispered it over again in his mind like a song. “It doesn't matter. We've got to figure something out before the opossum's bubble pops and we're surrounded by the worst family reunion that's ever packed itself a picnic.”

“I shall be honest,” began September, pulling her emerald smoking jacket tight round her. “I haven't any little idea what the Heart of Fairyland is or where to find it. I had hoped someone else might.”

Saturday, Ell, and Blunderbuss exchanged guilty looks. “We've been whipping our brains against it for days,” the scrap-yarn wombat said. “I've only just got to Fairyland so don't look at me. I hardly know where the broom closet is! But if you ask me, anything important is in the Land of Wom, and if it's not in the Land of Wom, it's not awfully important.”

“I don't know,” said Saturday. “But I know where I would hide something, if I needed to. I would hide it way down deep at the bottom of the sea, snug under the weight of water and safe from all those silly toy monarchs who can only breathe air.”

“
Hearts
begin with
H,
Ell,” September said to the Wyverary. “I thought you might know where we ought to go. Where Fairyland hides its heart. Because Saturday's right. It's got to be hidden, or else the Derby would be over in a minute and a half.”

The Wyverary fretted and clawed the earth. He wanted so to be useful. “But, September, everything has a heart! Well, mostly everything. I can tell you all about Wyvern hearts, if you want. Or Periwig hearts or Fairy hearts or Marid hearts or even a little about human hearts. But you can't leave it all up to me! I thought
you
would know! It sounds like the sort of secret a Queen would learn on the occasion of her coronation, doesn't it?”

“Just try, Ell,” coaxed Saturday.

The huge red Wyvern cocked his head to one side and spoke slowly, as if reading from a book. “Hearts: hollow pumping organs that move blood throughout the body or any similar thing. The center of a body. The part of a creature that feels and fears and wants and swells with courage. The important bit—
the heart of the matter
. A suit in a deck of playing cards. The shape of a Valentine with two round parts and one pointy part.”

September grinned. “Cross-reference!
Heart
begins with
H
and
Fairyland
begins with
F
!”

A-Through-L scrunched up his snout. His long whiskers flicked and snapped. “The Dun Cow Café in Gingham Green serves a drink with melon chunks in it called the Heart of Fairyland. When Cutty Soames was King, he had a grand pirate ship built out of dryad bones and starlight and he called
it
the Heart of Fairyland. It's also the name of Queen Mab's sword, only it's not really a sword so much as a spindle. Oh, and they used to call the Moon the Heart of Fairyland, in the days before astronomy was born.” The great Wyvern sighed. “September, my father was only a little local Library. Worlds don't print their secrets in encyclopedias! I wish it were as easy as reading off the population of Pandemonium! I would have read the H's more carefully if only I'd known.”

“Oh, Ell, don't worry! You know I can't bear to see you frown. Goodness, I wish I'd paid more attention to my lessons twice an hour!” She touched his scaly skin. It was so warm, as warm as Summer.

Blunderbuss gnawed at her own whiskers. “What's that bit about the center of a body?” she said thoughtfully.

“Oh!” exclaimed September. “Could it be that easy? Ell, what's the exact center of Fairyland? Where I come from, it's somewhere off the coast of Africa, I think. What's neither east nor west nor north nor south, but perfectly in the middle?
Center
begins with
C
!”

Ell did not even take a moment to consider it. “Why, Meridian, of course!” The Wyverary's voice grew quiet and full of awe. “The Great Grand Library lives there. The biggest and widest and deepest and oldest Library in all of Fairyland. My great-great-great-greater-than-great-grandmother. She hatched all the other Libraries. Even the Fairyland Municipal Library. Even the Lopsided Library on the Moon. Even my father, Compleat. Fairyland has a Library in the center of it—maybe the Heart is there! Maybe the Grand Library
is
the Heart! But I suppose we would have a terrible time trying to carry the Grand Library to Runnymede Square. Still, even if the Library doesn't have the Heart of Fairyland, surely someone, sometime, wrote something about it! A thing is hardly real if no one's written about it. It's the writing that makes a thing proper and solid and true in the first place.”

A-Through-L nodded firmly, agreeing with himself. Though the red lizard didn't know it, he had just spilled the first law of Dry Magic. It is true in our world, too, and this is why the first thing we do when a child gets born is write down her name and her weight and everything else we know about her.

“Does anyone know where we are, exactly? I've been trying to pinpoint us, but I can't tell,” Saturday said. He added quietly to himself: “I can't smell the sea.” It is very frightening for a Marid when he cannot smell the sea, or hear it, or see it glimmering in the distance. If he cannot smell the sea, he cannot find his way home. “I think those are the Handhills—but then that bit of mist over there might be the Inksop Marshes, except they should be west of the hills…”

“Oh, it doesn't matter,” chirped Ell cheerfully.

“Doesn't it? I rather reckon it does, if we're headed toward your gran,” groused Blunderbuss.

“But it doesn't. I am a Librarian! Well, Assistant Librarian. And I haven't worked a shift in ever so long. But that's only because I was in prison! I wasn't
shirking
. So I should still be a member of the Catalogue in Good Standing.”

“What does that mean?” asked September.

Ell beamed. “All Librarians are members of the Catalogue. That's what you call a coven when it's made up of Librarians instead of witches. Librarians have sorted and alphabetized all the magic that ever thought to put a rabbit and a hat together. Who do you think invented Special Collections? Severe Magic and Shy Magic, Dry Magic and Wet Magic, Umbrella Magic and Fan Magic and all the rest? Librarians, that's who! And of course they learned a thing or two along the way. The Catalogue connects every Library to every other Library just the same as if they shared one long hallway. No one wants to wait for
On the Criminology of Fairies
to arrive by stagecoach when you could just pop out of the Municipal stacks and into the towering shelves of the Crowdleian Library and have it back in half a wing beat! It's very necessary magic. I'm not meant to tell anyone—it's one of the High Secrets of Circulation. The Catalogue would turn me into a bookmark if they knew! September? Is this right? Is this the way to win the Derby? Should I take us to Meridian? Or Wom? Or under the sea? Only I think Saturday would have to manage that.”

September squared her shoulders. She was the Queen of Fairyland, if only for a little while. She had better get used to deciding things, even if the idea of getting it wrong frightened her all over.

“Yes, Ell. Take us. We won't tell anyone how you did it.”

A-Through-L stretched out his long crimson wings to gather them all close in. Blunderbuss snagged a bit of her yarn on his talon. September tucked it back into place without a word, and at that moment, the wombat began to love her a little. Hawthorn would have fretted over it something awful, but September simply fixed her up without a fuss. The truth was, Blunderbuss hated to be reminded that she was made of yarn while everyone else was more or less made of meat or meatlike stuffs. September peeked under his wing at the deep, rolling Barleybroom. She remembered the first time she saw it, how wide and wonderful it seemed—until the Glashtyn came roaring out of it. What lived beneath now, she wondered?

The Wyverary danced from foot to foot. His orange eyes blazed with glee. He carefully laid one long black claw against his snout and whispered:

“SHHHHHH!”

And all four of them disappeared with a sound like a date-stamp clonking down, leaving behind a puff of dust that smelled strongly of dictionaries, first editions, and the complete works of everyone ever.

 

CHAPTER VIII

G
REENWICH
M
EAN
T
IME

In Which September Visits the Great Grand Library, Is Threatened by Numerous Bears, and Consults the Reference Desk

It is true that everything has a heart. The hearts of towns and villages and cities do not look very much like the heart of a person, but they have hearts all the same. Sometimes it looks like a train depot, sometimes it looks like a university, sometimes it looks like a castle, sometimes it looks like a river, sometimes it looks like a factory. A town must dream or it will die, and a town's dreams come from its depot or its university or its castle or its river or its factory. It longs for marvelous folk to come through the village center on a shining train and stay. It longs to make steel so strong it can build the whole of the rest of the world, or to see its river filled with great ships trading one thing for another until no one lacks any longer. It yearns to protect its villagers from the rampages of time and economics. It wants to make wisdom so bright it can keep the lights on for the whole of the rest of the world. If you look at the center of any city, you can see what it wants to be when it grows up.

The Great Grand Library did not know Meridian was the exact center of Fairyland when she settled there. She did not even know it was called Meridian, for it was not called anything at all yet. She was but a young and reckless hut whose owners had abandoned her during the first Fairyland Ice Age, which was caused by Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, biting off chunks of the sun for his children to gobble up. This is why ravens are wiser and wilier than most other birds and some people, though it also covered Fairyland in green glass glaciers. But without the glaciers, there would have been no ice wyrms, so on the whole, it all comes out reasonably even. The sun sulked and moaned for a thousand years or so and then got over it. But the Great Grand Library knew only that the family of were-mammoths whom she loved and sheltered had run off at the first sign of wyrms and left her alone with nothing more to her name than a candlestick with no candles, a porridge bowl with no porridge, and a single book without a bookshelf to keep it safe from the storms.