Slowly, without warning, snow began to fall.
September leapt out of the car at the same instant the other Saturday leapt toward it. Her black silks rippled, warming her skin against the icy air. They met in the snow. September looked up into the eyes of someone very grown-up. More grown-up, she thought, than she could ever be.
He said her name. He said it so gently it was as though he was holding it in his hand, trying not to crush it. Slowly, he reached out a hand and touched her hair. He smiled at her, a smile so full of knowing and warmth and merriness that what he said next hit September as though he had reached out and shoved her.
“You have to get out of my way,” he said. His voice boomed deep and hard. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, “but you’re in my way and you have to get out of it.”
September was frozen. She could not move. The awful bawl sounded again and a gust of wind blew as though someone had dashed by without stopping long enough to be seen.
The older Saturday had had enough. His arms shot out, and, knocking September aside, curled behind Aroostook’s seat. He snatched the ivory casket from the backseat without a word.
“Get in and sit down,” the taller Saturday said calmly. “Or this will hurt more.”
September did, numbly. She pulled her legs into the car just as that walloping fist came banging into the other side of Aroostook and they twisted out into the black again. September fell forward against the hard green sunflower and did not hear the other, older, colder, stranger Marid’s voice chasing her down into dreams.
“I love you,” Saturday whispered after September and Ell and his own small, miserable self, and vanished.
CHAPTER XIII
ONLY THE DEAD DON’T ARGUE
In Which September Is Troubled by the Mechanics of Time and Fate, the Course of a Curse, the Unlikelihood of Visiting Pluto, and a Very Argumentative Donkey
September woke washed in light.
At first she thought she was back home and doused in a bubbling bath-light fizzed and frothed all around her, a shade of white that had great ambitions to grow up to be purple. Great tall viney stalks rose up all around, thick as trees and thicker. Balls of light clung to their sides like brussels sprouts, crackling and sizzling and popping. The white-violet brilliance turned everything brighter than day. Aroostook, battered but still sputtering, showed deep, shadowed claw marks in her doors. September had to squint; her skin looked like the slope of a lightbulb. Saturday’s face leaned down over her, his teeth blinding against his lightning-shadowed skin.
“Please be all right,” he whispered, and it did not take September’s heart long to catch up with her memory. He did not only mean that they’d had their heads knocked about by, presumably, a Yeti with a fist like a train car.
“It was you,” she said, rubbing her glowing, aching arm. “That was you, just now, just then.”
Beside her, Ell groaned. He shook his head from side to side like a bull, his black horns catching wisps of light and tossing them into the air like fireflies. The whole forest hummed and snapped. September winced before she even turned her head-how many times had he breathed his fire to protect them?
The Wyverary stood up. He stood a hand taller than Mr. Powell’s pregnant roan, his face perplexed and unhappy. He patted his own head with one wing.
“Is it bad?” he whispered. “Am I little?”
“No, no!” said September. “You’re a great big beast, just like always!” She crawled to her feet and went to him. She put her arms around his long neck with ease, and the easiness of it unsettled them both.
“Little begins with L, but I don’t want to be it,” the Wyverary said as quietly as he had ever said anything.
“It’s not so bad to be little, you know!” September smiled when she said it though she felt no more like smiling than like writing a composition with her mashed arm.
“Oh, it’s all right for you!” cried Ell. “You’re meant to be little! I like your littleness! It means I can hoist you up and make you feel big and show you all the things I can see from where I stand. But…but if I get much littler, who will be big, among the three of us? Wasn’t it my job to be big and stomp and carry you and look menacing if looking menacing was called for?” A-Through-L’s orange, feline eyes filled with turquoise tears. He whispered: “Who will hoist me up, if I am little?”
September shook her head helplessly. She did not know what to say to comfort him except to hold him tight, which is a language primates use to say: Everything will be all right somehow. Reptiles, however, prefer for everything to simply be all right, at once, and then they will feel comforted. Above them, a cluster of lightning-sprouts flashed a hot blanket of light like a summer storm and then quieted again. September listened for the thunder by instinct; none came. It felt very strange, this silent and thunderless storm.
“You have to try not to,” she begged the Wyverary. “We’ve ever so much farther to go.”
“Oh, September, if you tell me how I shall, I promise!” How awful it was to see fear swimming in those kind eyes!
But she could not tell him.
“He has it,” she whispered instead. “Ciderskin has the Stethoscope. We hardly made it out of Almanack before he took it-and I couldn’t do anything! We couldn’t! We were helpless. And now he can hear us!” September felt sick with failure. A simple box and she couldn’t keep it in her hands for a day.
“Maybe not,” Ell said miserably. “It’s a frightful mess when you listen to the Moon-maybe Ciderskin won’t be able to sort it out, either.”
“Did he come because I took the Stethoscope out of the box? Did he smell it? It was so fast! I should have left it where it was! I just needed to do something, I was crawling with it! I was so sure we’d hear the paw…”
September sank into a long quiet. Finally, she took out the troubling thing that would not leave her be and opened it up like a dark picnic between them.
“But it was you,” she said through her teeth. Saturday looked away from her. “And you were helping the Yeti!”
“Please remember that I am a Marid…”
“I know you are! And that was yourself from some day a long time from now, yourself older and another Saturday and I understand that but how could you be helping Ciderskin, even a hundred years from now?”
“I don’t know!” yelled Saturday. September jumped inside her skin. Her belly went cold. Saturday had never yelled. He had never spoken crossly to her. His voice had never hardened up along the edges like other people’s voices did; the light had never gone out of it the way it went out of anyone’s when the upset got too wet and heavy and snuffed it out. His first words to her at the circus drifted back: I’m glad I found you first.