They were all silent for a while, staring into the fire as those not possessing tires and spokes have done since the dawn of the world. The Wyverary drifted helplessly to sleep, sitting up. He snored lightly; it sounded like pages turning. Calpurnia scratched under her hat.
“Where are you lot off to, then? You’ll pardon, you don’t seem like the lifestyle type. Short-term transport, am I right?”
“The Autumn Provinces,” answered Saturday, his voice echoing low among the snorting, snuffling highwheels as they teemed around their watering hole and spun their spokes in antique mating dances.
September found she did not want to say why they were going. She delicately wrapped the sash of the smoking jacket around her recovered Spoon. Calpurnia whistled.
“Ayup, that’s a respectable haul! We ought to make that in a week or two. Hope you brought comestibles of your own!”
“A week or two!” cried September. “But that’s not fast enough! We need to get there and back in seven days.”
Penny giggled. “Can’t do it!”
But Calpurnia was thinking. She scratched her chin with three long brown fingers, then licked them and held them up to the wind. “Aye, but we might… if you think you can handle your alpha. I don’t like to do it, but I’m not so dense as to miss that you’re running hard, and that almost always means there’s a beast behind you.”
September nodded miserably.
“Well, a velo is a lazy thing in the end. They don’t like to go as fast as they can go. It suits them just as well to roll along leisurely-like. This is the Great Migration-they’re all homebound, to the spoke nests, to mate and die. Some of them feel the mating drive stronger than others. Some only feel the dying drive. Makes them lag. But if you and I apply a bit of encouragement, they’ll bear down on the road like it’s dinner. And by encouragement I mean whipping of course and I know it’s not civilized and I cringe to think of it but sometimes with steeds it’s all you can do.”
“Don’t want to whip my velos,” Penny whimpered.
“They forget, chickie. They’ll all forget.”
“No they won’t! They’ll whisper, ‘That Penny, she’s naughty and nasty!’”
“Penny, you don’t have to do a thing,” said Saturday gently, who knew a thing or two about whipping.
“But Saturday, we’ve so little time…”
Saturday looked at September for a moment, his expression, as always, unreadable. Then he leaned over and rubbed his cheek against her forehead just as she had done to him. The Marid got up and walked away from the fire into the dark and wavering grass and the volerie of snorting, spinning velocipedes.
“Is he yours, then?” Calpurnia asked, draining her wooden flask with relish. She spat into her goggles and rubbed them clean with her fingers.
“Mine? No, he’s his own.”
Calpurnia grunted doubtfully and squinted at the dark.
“Miss Farthing, may I ask you a question?”
“How can I deny such a nicely wrapped request?”
“Are you helping us because you want to? Because you like us, because you’re friendly and good-hearted? Or because the Marquess wants you to be nice? Because she’ll greenlist you if you’re not?”
Calpurnia Farthing looked long and deep into September’s eyes. She felt as though she was naked again, as she had been in the bath house. The Fairy’s golden gaze seemed heavy and hot.
“What makes you think I’m not already greenlisted, girl? Do you think taking a changeling out of the orchestra comes at no price at all?” She tugged on the flaps of her hat. “If it will make you feel better, I can lead you to a pit in the forest or steal your breath or whatever it is I might-and I’m not admitting to anything-have done in my profligate youth. These days, I have my highwheels and my girl to look after. Hardly time to go spoiling the barley for beer. Maybe when I retire, I’ll go back to it. But if it pleases the Marquess to think that her hoofing list is all that’s keeping me in my place, then let her think it. Mainly, I’ll help you because lost little human girls are a hobby of mine.” Penny snuggled up to Calpurnia and laid her head on her lap. The Fairy woman stroked her changeling’s matted hair. September smiled. She liked them. She felt safe with them near.
Out of the dark, Saturday returned amid much grinding and crushing noises, leading two huge highwheels behind him. They rolled along docilely, each leaning in to nuzzle the other’s handlebars occasionally.
“They’ll take us as fast as they can-faster, even,” said Saturday firmly. “They’re ready to go home, they don’t want to wait. They’ll leave right now if we want. They’ve drunk their fill.”
“Hey! Only I talk to them!” said Penny, hands on her little hips.
Saturday shook his head and crouched next to her, his wild blue hair catching the firelight and blazing orange. “There’s not a creature living that doesn’t have wishes, Penny. And I can always hear wishing, even the very quietest kind.” The Marid stood up. “No whipping,” he said softly, almost embarrassed. “Not ever. Not even if the whipping would make them do your will as fast as blinking. Especially if.”
Calpurnia Farthing held out her hand. Saturday shook it, thought better, and then kissed it in a very courtly way. “I said I didn’t like to whip anyone. They’d have forgiven me. Probably not you, but me, they would have loved again.”
“I know,” whispered Saturday.
Calpurnia slapped her thigh. “Let’s be off then. I’ll see you to the edge of the equinox. Leastaways I can do, for such raw wheelers as you and yours.”
Into the silver-spangled night, two great bicycles rolled silently, bearing them all into the dark, so swift the moon never saw them go. A-Through-L ran beside them, his tongue clamped between his teeth, willing his legs to pump faster.
“Calpurnia,” said September, when they had left the last ruddy light of the campfire behind them, “I thought Fairies danced in reels together and had big families.”
“Ayup, we do.”
“Then why are you alone? And Charlie Crunchcrab, too? Where has everyone gone?”
Calpurnia turned her face away. Her wings fluttered weakly under their iron chain, and September could see where red hives had boiled up under the metal. It’s the iron, she thought, Fairies are allergic.
When Calpurnia Farthing, Queen of the Velocipedes, looked out across the flats again, her face was streaked with silent, stubborn tears.
CHAPTER XI
THE SATRAP OF AUTUMN
In Which September Finally Eats Fairy Food, Very Nearly Matriculates, and Discovers the Nature of Autumn
I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so that everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins, and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two.
Autumn in Fairyland is all of that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland forest or the morbidity of the Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland.
And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring highwheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gone gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.