There must be blood, September thought, and rubbed her finger where she had pricked it, so long ago, and bled to open the doors of Fairyland.
“Don’t act like you’ve never eaten anyone’s heart,” Tamarind said.
“I haven’t!” cried September. Saturday opened his mouth, but thought better of it. He rubbed at the backs of his blue hands.
“Then I’m sorry for you,” the grasshopper sighed. “It’s a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.”
“But we couldn’t wait, you see,” Marigold whirred in her balloon. “We couldn’t wait for the waxing Moon. So we took the road all the way up-when you’re on the Moon, we reasoned, it’s all the Moons together, waxing, waning, new, old. We met here, with a little flask of fizzing whipwine, to devour each other’s hearts and begin our lives together. And just as we’d held our rite and Tam started back toward the Jungle, just as I’d called him husband and he called me wife, that Yeti, that terrible Yeti, came bawling and brawling out of the wood, clutching his bleeding wrist and caterwauling like the stars had gone out.”
“His foot came down and I was under it,” wept Tamarind, shaking his head.
“His next step took me, too,” whispered Marigold. “And the Yeti’s blood filled up his prints and caught us in their black cups. And here we stay, separated by a step. We cannot get from one pond to the other. We cannot even see each other properly. The balloons crashed down into the water during a Thaumaturgists’ duel some time later. The cannons are all that’s left of the duelists-they can break through, but we cannot. And now my heart’s living over there in that old grasshopper and what am I supposed to do?”
Tamarind went on. “We had no plans to live forever! But blood is everything; everything is blood. The Yeti’s blood got old, too. It’s not exactly blood now, though I suppose that’s obvious. It pickles us, preserves us, pumps through us and keeps us running like a couple of old clock towers. We live and live, but it doesn’t keep us young. We started shrinking and shifting and warping, the way anything does when it ages enough, turns to stone or dust or stories. Only we became-well, first I was an iguana, wasn’t I? You were a water dragon. Oh, wasn’t that nice! Halcyon days! Then I was a salamander and she was a rattlesnake, then she was a turtle and I was a boa, then for a long bit we were both frogs and it was like we were young together again, then I can’t remember, sometimes she was the male of the species and sometimes I was, sometimes I was female and sometimes she was, sometimes I had legs and sometimes I didn’t, sometimes she had a mouth and sometimes she had mandibles, and then on our anniversary we suddenly got wings and I was a butterfly, she was a dragonfly, I was a bat, she was a moth, I was a ladybug, she was a beetle, and so on and so forth and at the moment she’s an inchworm and I’m a grasshopper.”
“It never bothered me any, you being a grasshopper,” sighed Marigold. “Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you’re changing into a hundred other things, but you can’t let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he’s a rabbit, or a mouse while he’s still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he’s a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It’s harder than it sounds.”
The Buraq nodded sympathy. “It’s Yeti’s blood, you see. Time speeds down there like it’s racing against the world. For them, it’s been thousands of years. More. Thousands of thousands. They’ve gone a bit mad, started firing broadsides and counting obsessively-which is how they’re useful to me.”
“Are we going fishing?” cried the inchworm with delight.
“If you’re not to tired after your cannonades.”
“Never!” buzzed Tamarind.
Candlestick beckoned September forward. The Buraq instructed her to put her hand down into the ponds, one after the other. When September did as she was told, her fingers disappeared as though they had been severed. The cold black pond drew closed over her wrist like a curtain. Tamarind and Marigold’s antennae quivered and snapped in their private pools. Then without warning, the balloons shot out twin clouds of blue-white bubbles, collapsed down into scraps of cloth, and disappeared wholly.
“The mosaic covers the whole of the Moon,” Candlestick explained, her peacock tail waving in the starlight. “Even with the records in the Sajada, it would take months to find the little pebble that hides your fate. But once I met the Lunaticks, I discovered they’d counted everything on the Moon, every tile of the mosaic and every root and every fish. The pools have seeped down and down and down until they run all over the insides of the Moon like veins, and they’ve had so long to look for some little place where their waters might meet. When I want a fate, I send my lightning-sprouts through the Sajada to find the record and light it up-for the Sajada has veins, too, and roots as well. But if I want it faster, I send the old kids fishing-they get a taste of you, a smell of you, and race down through the Moon to find the lit-up tile that tastes and smells like you and bring it back fast as thinking.”
Sure enough, Tamarind’s balloon bounced back up underwater like a lightbulb coming on. Marigold’s appeared a moment later.
“I win!” the grasshopper cried. “That’s three in a row! You’re losing your touch, dear!”
“It was in your hemisphere, that hardly counts,” huffed the inchworm, and crossed two of her wintry, spindly arms. Her cannon slid out from the grassy basket and fired as sharp as a retort. Her Jovian ball blasted through the inky water, arcing beautifully, like a comet-and landed squarely, precisely, in Tamarind’s own basket. It smoked and rolled, gleaming. And it had knocked something free: something small and glinting, rising up through the pond toward them.
“Oh,” sighed the grasshopper, “oh, it’s still warm where you loaded it into the cannon. It still smells of your perfume.” Tamarind laid down upon the cannonball and closed his wings around his green body.
September knelt and caught the small, glinting thing as it bobbed up out of the black-though it was not so small after all, almost as long as her own arm. Saturday got down into the grass to help her haul it out and get it upright on the shore.
It was a Leopard.
It was her Leopard. Imogen, the Leopard of Little Breezes, the cat who had borne her to Fairyland that first day. September would know those whiskers and those spots anywhere. Yes, she was smaller than she had been and entirely still and silent, but all the same it was her. September cried out and threw her arms around that dear, wooly neck.
But it was not the Leopard of Little Breezes. It was not a living Leopard at all. September’s arms found no wool on that neck, but cool brass, pocked with onyxes, a statue of her Leopard, with a flat, stony gaze.
“I thought you said it would be a little toy version of myself,” said September, a little embarrassed. “I am not a Leopard or a Little Breeze.”
“I… I don’t know why it isn’t!” Candlestick’s face creased in confusion. “Perhaps it’s on account of you being human. I’ve never dredged up a human fate before. That will teach me to make assumptions! Assumptions are the enemy of logic!”
September looked the Leopard over. It did not seem to be in the least alive and she had no notion of how it might talk to her, let alone argue.