September, of course, didn’t have a shadow anymore. But she had worn most of her bravery and cunning on the outside. Her wildness though, her powerful colors, perhaps those she had not taken out often enough, to breathe in the sun. And though she did, very much, want to accomplish her great deed, she had missed Saturday so much, and somehow just being among the fay, dancing shadows made her skin prickle and her blood beat faster.
“Well, I suppose I could have just a little look at a Hippogryphe,” she said finally, “I don’t have the first idea how to find Halloween, anyway, or what to do when I do find her.”
“I do!” said the Littlest Earl, his mouth still half full of cupcake.
September startled.
“Don’t meddle in Politicks with your mouth full, dear,” said the Vicereine gently.
“But I do know!” The Littlest Earl, his black-leaf hair bouncing, jumped up and put his hand over his heart, as if reciting poetry. “You’ve got to stick yourself back together with her. Girl and shadow!” He smacked his little hand against his chest.
Saturday looked down at her teacup. She had guessed that much. She wasn’t a fool. But how do you stick a dancing, reveling shadow to yourself and hope to have her stay put?
Scarlet-black grounds clumped and drifted on the bottom of her cup. They moved into a shape, growing sharper and deeper as the specks of coffee swirled and drifted. Finally, they formed a face, a sweet, gentle face September did not recognize. The leaves glowed with a dim, wet fire. The face was deeply asleep, its coffee-eyes shut.
The Vicereine looked into the cup and gasped, her hand fluttering to the black bean at her throat. She seized September’s arm and turned her deftly away from the others. The lady inclined her head and her face grew dark, fear clouding in like cream. She whispered: “You mustn’t show anyone what your cup wanted to tell you. Especially shadows. We’re all Royalists here-we’re loyal! You see how we have parties and dance and sing just as the Queen likes it.”
“Who is it?” September asked. “I’ve never seen that face before.”
“That is Myrrh, the Sleeping Prince, who might have been King of the Underneath, but that he never wakes. He dreams at the bottom of the world, in a unopenable box in an unbreakable bower. You mustn’t speak of him, or think of him-Halloween is our Queen and we love her, we do. She says History is just a Rule ripe for breaking. We believe that, truly!”
September trembled a little. The force of the Vicereine’s whispers made her do it, and she did not like it at all.
The Vicereine leaned even further in, so that no one might possibly hear her. The music had struck up again, and Saturday was tugging Ell out of his couch to dance. “And now that we’ve taken you in and given you back your friend and made you a nice coffee-made you a Fairy Bishop to top it all!-you’ll put in a good word for us with the Queen, won’t you?”
“I hardly think I have any influence!” protested September.
“You do though. You must. You are her, really, even if you don’t think so. Even if she doesn’t think so. You must vouch for us.” The Lady’s hand grew tighter and tighter on September’s arm. “Tell her we’re loyal. Tell her we make Baroque magic and throw Rococo fetes. That we were so good to you. Tell her to keep the Alleyman away from us, please, September. Please.”
INTERLUDE
TWO CROWS
In Which Two Crows Called Wit and Study Leave Our World for the More Thrilling Climes of Fairyland
Perhaps, being hungry for exciting tales of the underside of Fairyland, you have forgotten by now about the two curious crows who chased September into Fairyland. That is certainly forgivable! They seemed so ordinary, and who gives crows a second thought? But I have not forgotten them, and it is by far time to tell you what befell those two brazen birds who have broken into our story as if it were an unlocked house.
Firstly, their names were Wit and Study. These might seem quite fanciful names for a pair of common crows, but those are the sort of names all crows have. All modern crows are descended from their royal Scandinavian progenitors, Thought and Memory, who got to fly about with a very fine fellow indeed and sit on his shoulders and tell him their opinions about everything. Most people would never listen to a crow who sat on their shoulder-they wouldn’t even know how. Still, those are the very highest and most respectful names a crow can earn, even today. All crows set aside a berry or a scrap of grasshopper for Auntie Thought and Auntie Memory at their suppers. It’s the family thing to do.
Like all crows, Wit and Study found themselves drawn irresistibly to the glittering and glowing, and on the day September tumbled over the low stone wall in the glass forest, they glimpsed the tiny tear in the world that tripped her up. Nothing they had ever known had glittered or glowed or shone or shimmered the way that tiny tear did. First, they saw the rowboat with the man in the black slicker and the silver lady in it vanish through the tear, and then they saw the little girl disappear slightly less gracefully, and within two caws, they knew this was the thing for them. Wit and Study folded their wings in tight and darted through just as the world righted itself and the wheat resumed waving gently in the deepening twilight.
Even birds long for adventure. Even birds who have gotten nicely fat on farmers’ seeds long for the world to be made of more than things to eat and things to nest on.
“Where do you suppose we’re headed, Wit?” cawed Study to her brother in the secret language of crows.
“I don’t know, Study! Isn’t it something?” keened Wit to his sister.
They flew faster.
And when they finally burst through the borders in a puff of feathers and slightly frostbitten beaks, they found themselves not in the glass forest in which September was even then trying so hard to make a fire, but in a peculiar city made of clouds. This suited them just fine, being creatures of the air. Cloud bridges and cloud houses and cloud roads puffed and blossomed around them. The two crows took turns somersaulting through garlands of cloud roses and seeing how many cloudhips they could fit into their feathery cheeks at once.
They rocketed through the empty cloud cottages and cathedrals, not quite paying attention to anything but how delightful it was to find a whole town in the sky, all to themselves. They did not think at all about a girl named September, or her troubles beneath the ground, or where everyone who lived in that cloud village might have gone.
CHAPTER VII
GOBLIN ECONOMICKS
In Which September and Her Friends Acquire Transportation, Learn a Great Deal About the Stock Market, Drive a Hard Bargain, and Get New Clothes and a New Companion Out of It, Both More Extraordinary Than They Look
As they left the Samovar, saying an uneasy good-bye and walking out past the edge of the chocolate lawn to a tidy little road ribboning off into a broad twilit country, September and her friends were being watched-no, stalked. They had no notion of their hunters, of course. Saturday danced down the path, his black-turquoise feet leaving silver prints, singing about the times they would soon have. Ell stayed close to September, his great head drooping near her shoulder in case she spoke. She stared after Saturday, unable to get used to this boisterous, talkative shadow-boy.