The boom rang out again, clapping sharp against the cold.
No paw followed, any more than thunder followed the lightning in the Lightning Jungle. September opened her eyes. A third rolling, smashing blast sounded, and what followed it was neither blows nor storms but laughter, tinny and thin. Through the ponds of the Ellipsis, a cannonball flew, beneath the water, the color of Jupiter, all cream and fire. The shot began in a pool some ways farther off from them and barreled through the waters, streaming bubbles behind it, disappearing when the little lake ended and reappearing once more in the next. Finally, in the dark circle nearest them, it found its target. The ball exploded against the grass basket of a great striped hot-air balloon suspended down beneath the rippling surface. The perspective made September feel a little sick; the balloon hung down deep into the water as though the water was the sky and they stood on some strange circus platform higher than the heavens, looking down on the creatures of the air. The balloon’s basket rocked back but did not break. A hissing blast mark blossomed on its woven grass, joining many other smoking star-shapes already there.
“Call that a love letter, do you, Marigold? Smells like a burnt bugbear’s least favorite beehive.” The tinny, thin laughter tittered out again. It came all the way up through the pool, softening and quieting and thinning out along the way. September peered down into the pond. The balloon’s stripes gleamed white and teal. Jets of bubbles burped out of its neck now and then, keeping it aloft, or submerged, however one ought to measure a thing that flew underwater. But she could not see anyone in the basket. Someone hid there, surely! A small door in the charred grass opened; the mouth of a cannon popped forward, silver so pure it looked like glass, blown into the shape of a man’s head, mouth wide to fire true, every curl of his hair a strand of silver butterflies. The body of the cannon, his arms, bound back and down into a hospital straitjacket. A second cannonball roared out of the man’s silverglass mouth, the color of Neptune, hot turquoise and boiling white.
But this one did not speed through all the ponds and up far off into the range of mountains beyond-another balloon bobbed into the dark of the second pool, turning on like a lightbulb where it had not been before. The second balloon was more nimble; the Neptunian shot careened off the basket’s bumpers, skipping up through the ponds like a stone, but never disturbing the surface. A second voice giggled, muffled, as if they had their ears against the bottom of a glass tumbler pressed up to a locked door.
“I know you miss me, Tamarind, but you miss me by so much I wonder if you love me at all!”
September peered down into the other pond. She could see the owner of this voice, under her gold and wine striped balloon. It belonged to a thin, pearl-colored insect shaped like a wintry twig, delicate and coiling, but hard and brilliant. She peered over the side of her basket eagerly. Her antennae, chartreuse and much longer than her body, snapped like horsewhips. She crawled around the edge of her basket, her body softening and arching and inching along like a caterpillar. When she stopped to speak again, she hardened back into her branch-like posture.
“It does sting so to miss a person!” the insect cried, her tiny sapphire eyes blazing. “The only solution is to be doubly careful with one’s trajectories!” An identical door opened in the basket, and an identical cannon showed itself-but the head was a woman’s.
Candlestick cleared her throat. No cannonball burst from the twig-insect’s balloon.
“Good evening, Marigold,” the Buraq said. She turned to the first balloon, the first pond. “Tamarind. How lovely to see you getting along so well.”
Saturday frowned. “They’re shooting at each other!”
The tinny, thin, invisible voice floated up to them out of the depths. “Hold still, my darling! I’m going to kiss you right in the face!”
September, and Ell beside her, peered closer till their eyes felt like peeled grapes-and finally saw that the first duelist was a grasshopper, his wings iridescent, his great bulging eyes black as the water, sparks gleaming dully within. He was so nearly the color of the grass balloon-basket that he seemed no more than grass himself.
“Don’t mind them,” Candlestick said. “They’re Lunaticks.”
“Oh, that’s unkind!” yelled the grasshopper.
“Princess Lunatick to you, you old mule!” cried the wintry twig.
September sighed a little.
Marigold drew herself up to her full frosty height. “Don’t you sigh at me, young lady! I suppose you think Princessing is nothing more than dresses and blushing and dancing and the occasional side-job as a distressed damsel! Young people today, why, they’ve no more sense than a gumdrop!”
September winced-for that was precisely what she had been thinking. The Duke of Teatime had wanted to make her a Princess, and she’d felt then just as she felt now-that if one had to be in the kind of stories that had Princesses, it was much better not to be the Princess, for they were given very little to do other than weddings and distresses, neither of which offered much in the way of excitement or exercise.
“Where I come from, being a Princess is a job, young primate!” huffed Marigold. “A position in the civil service! We are Executive Branch, child! Why, I never wore a dress except on a dare! I wore a suit, like any government employee. And a fine suit, too, with a hat to match! I had more ties than a railroad! A Princess must be serious and calculating, she must learn Fiscal Magic and Severe Magic and Fan Magic, both Loud and Shy Magic as well as Parliamentary Procedure, Heraldry, and Constitutional Conjuring. I had a desk at the castle like all the other Princesses, and we ate packed lunches every day, I’ll have you know. Of course I had ten fingers then, it’s much easier to run a kingdom when you have fingers. I was an excellent Princess, one of the best. I loved my work! I personally negotiated the peace of Parthalia, despite the ogre-of-record eating the first, second, and ninth drafts. The Fairy Queen Tanaquill herself gave me my first double-breasted jacket. I don’t suppose she is queen anymore. But how proud I stood that day! She saw Princesses for what we are: the engine that fuels Politicks. No Devious Dragon or Knavish Knight would dare tower me up as long as I wore my suit of armor, my sharkskin shield! Ah, but then, but then!”
Tamarind’s wings buzzed. “Then we came to the Moon. We’d only just married, we were young and bald and had all our limbs! We wore our hearts on our sleeves!”
“That’s what you wear to your wedding if you’re a Lamia, which we are,” chirped Marigold. “To show that you mean it, to show you know that love means wearing your insides on your outside. And under the first waxing moon after the ceremony, you swap.”
Tamarind chittered. “You swallow your love’s heart, and they swallow yours. Then forever after, your heart is living inside your mate, and theirs lives inside you.”
“You’re not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You’re only playing.” Marigold gazed across the thin strip of raingrass between her black pond and her husband’s, and her gaze shone deep and warm.
“But you’re not a Lamia!” scoffed A-Through-L, who counted Lamiai safely within his alphabetical kingdom. “A Lamia is a beautiful person with long shining hair who has a snake’s tail and sharper teeth than you want to know about. They drink blood!”
Marigold snapped her antennae. “Don’t be superior. Everyone drinks blood. Blood is a word that means alive. You can do without almost anything: arms, legs, teeth, hope. But you can’t do without blood. Lose even a little and you grow slow and stupid and not yourself at all. We are all of us beautiful and complicated vessels for carrying blood the way a bottle carries wine. I suppose you think there’s no blood in your roast beef? Life eats life. Blood makes you move, makes you blush, makes the pulse pound in your brow when you see your love walking across a street toward you, makes your very thoughts fly through your brain. Blood is everything and everything is blood. That’s the law of the Lamiai.”