“Hullo, Leopard,” she said shyly.
At the sound of her voice and the tiny gust of her breath on the brassy muzzle, the Leopard’s eyes softened and turned toward September.
“Hullo, Tem,” the beast growled, but it was not an unpleasant growl, nor loud, but cozy as a purr.
September startled as though she had been struck. Her mother and father called her Tem, years and years ago, when she was tiny. They never did anymore, she was too big for small names, her father always said.
Saturday squeezed her hand comfortingly. A-Though-L pressed his red forehead into her shoulder just exactly like a cat. And then both of them took a few steps away and turned their backs. It was her fate. They would not leave her, but they would give her privacy. Candlestick followed their example, though she thought not a one of them ought to have come along in the first place. Only Aroostook watched September and her fate, her headlamps illuminating the glittering Leopard’s spots.
Neither girl nor cat said anything else for a long while. September stared. Everything she could ever be or know was inside this brass creature. What could she possibly say to it?
“Try the Appeal to Probability,” Candlestick called over her shoulder without looking. “It’s a good opening gambit with fates. It’s a fallacy, of course, but what isn’t? Such and such will probably happen, wouldn’t you agree, Leopard? That sort of thing.”
But September could not stop staring. She thought of the older Saturday, standing in front of her car, blocking her way. She thought of the Blue Wind laughing at her. She thought of the Fairies, speeding through time so that they never, ever had to wait to find out what happened next, never, ever had to long for anything before they had it in hand.
Candlestick cleared her throat. “I do like the Fallacy of Many Questions as well, mind you. Loaded questions, leading questions, lying questions…”
The Leopard stared back at her. September thought of the Sibyl, how surely she had known what her life would look like all along and all through. She thought of Saturday in the circus, how gorgeously he’d flown. She thought of Ell in his Library, shelving romances. And she thought, she could not help thinking, of the awful night when she wrestled Saturday on the Gears of the World, and burnt his back with iron, and how when it was done they had looked up and seen someone. September had seen a little girl with blue skin and a mole on her left cheek-but of all the things she had tried not to think of since she first knew about Fairyland, she had tried hardest not to think about that. She didn’t like it. She didn’t know what to do with it. It sat on the floor of her heart like a toy with a thousand working pieces that could not possibly be put together. Their daughter, Saturday had said, as out of time and out of order as any true Marid.
Slowly, September said: “A Yeti is frightening. Frightening and strong and so much bigger than me. But not half as frightening as thinking your whole life has already happened and you don’t have any choice in it.”
The brass Leopard curled and uncurled her tail. “I didn’t think we frightened so easily,” she purred. “Aren’t we ill-tempered and irascible? Isn’t that us?”
“Is there a way to defeat Ciderskin?” September whispered, and once she had asked one question the rest tumbled out after. “What will I be when I am grown-up? Will my father ever really be well? Is the war really going to end? Will the Marquess wake up? Am I going to have that daughter no matter what, no matter how, no matter which way I go? Will I like the version of myself I will be if I have her? Is everything done, done and decided and all there is for me is to wait for it to happen to me? The Green Wind said I chose myself. Please say he wasn’t lying. I do know winds lie, I do know it, but please let that have been true, of all the things he said.”
“Dodgy attribution,” the Buraq coughed. “Quoting from a biased and frankly fanciful source.”
The brass Leopard said nothing. She lifted her paw and pressed it into her spotted breast. A little door came open, a patch of brass fur and jewels with a darkness inside it, and empty space.
Within that empty space lay a book.
The book was a very deep and very vivid red, with curling gold shapes stamped in the corners. It had a lock upon it and many, many pages clapped up within. It glowed in her fate’s chest like a heart.
September reached inside and took out the red book. It was heavy. A girl’s face graced the cover, finely embossed, but it was turned away, gazing at some unseen thing. Perhaps it was her own face, perhaps not. A miniature version of herself, after all. Was it an answer? Was it everything already written?
“You can’t argue with something that’s written down,” she said, stroking the red locks of hair on the cover. “If the heart of my fate is a book, there’s nothing for it. Once it’s written, it’s done. All those ancient books always say ‘so it is written’ and that means it’s finished and tidied and you can’t say a thing against it.”
Oh, but September, it isn’t so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written-but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.
Has she heard me? Have I tilted my hand? I cannot tell. Look close-she is not moving. Well, my powers are not infinite.
September held the red book of the Leopard’s heart tightly. Her fingertips turned white. She looked past it, not to the grass but to her black silks, flowing around her body, clinging and warming her and announcing its own purposes to everyone she met. I chose myself, she thought furiously. I did choose. Some distant night-bird called. She did not know if she could do it. Candlestick called this place holy. What would that make her? This was no way to win an argument, certainly. The lesson of Pluto sounded in her heart, heavier even than a brass Leopard. Perhaps she was, in the end, a Criminal. A breaker of laws. A vandal.
September lay the red book on the raingrass. Blades shivered and broke beneath. You cannot argue with fate, whatever Candlestick says, she thought. You can only defy it.
“You can only say no,” she said aloud. “No is how you know something’s alive.”
Out of the pocket of her silks she drew her last possession, the one thing the Wind would not take when he demanded Everything She Had. Her iron hammer.
With a great deep breath and a choked cry, September lifted the hammer high and brought it singing down onto the red, red body of her fate.
The book shattered.
A roaring, rumbling, blossoming sound shook the world-a moonquake, splitting the ground and shaking like nothing would stop it.
What others call you, you become.
INTERLUDE
