“You can’t stay,” the Tyguerrotype said. “You’ll burn away to nothing.” He opened his paw, which still held the squeezebulb of his camera.
“No wait!” squeaked Ell. “I don’t believe I’ve ever had my picture taken, so there won’t be any of me in here, but there’s her and I so rarely meet other Wyverns…”
“There’s quite a few in Country,” Errata said. Her voice thrummed deep and heavy. “People do like to snap photos of themselves standing in front of us, though I’m sure I have no idea why.”
“But there will be one of me here, when the picture’s done taking itself?” Ell said breathlessly.
Errata’s scales blushed a darker shade of charcoal. “I’d be happy to show him the Negative Gardens,” she said. “You have a very nice flame, though you’re quite small-but I don’t judge. It’s not my way.”
“I have a curse,” Ell sighed.
“Mating season can often feel that way,” agreed Errata, her silver tail coiling and uncoiling.
“Mating season?”
“Of course! Didn’t you know?”
“I was raised by a Library,” Ell squeaked, by way of apology.
The lady-Wyvern shrugged her massive shoulders. “Fire is always within us, but when the time comes for eggs and dancing, it isn’t content to roast our hearts. It must out.”
“We must out,” begged Saturday. His face had gone indistinct, his nose and eyes and cheeks swallowed up in a cloud of inky darkness.
“Not yet!” cried Ell. His tail shriveled into darkness. “How long does it last?”
Errata flicked her thick tail back and forth. “As long as it takes to find a mate. That’s what the Annual Picnic is for, of course. Lizards are solitary sorts, by and large. Always sulking in lairs or brooding on hoards. Wyverns are quite the most social of the genus. Oh, we make our beds of bones but have you ever known one not to have radishes for company or a comfortable vertebra for lonesome travelers? No, and you never will. I met a very fine gentleman at the Picnic-bright gold with a blaze of green! He read me poetry, couplets like strong hind legs. And I knocked a tree down with my tail to impress him. But he fell asleep in the briars by the time the photograph was taken, and he isn’t here at all. But the rest of us have a nice time in Country, when those spoilsports feel they can leave their hoards to their own devices for the afternoon.”
September’s parents were getting closer. She could almost see them clearly now, moving through the layers of film like mist.
“Mom!” she cried. “Dad!” And waved her arms, which had started to sizzle away into silver fumes. Her father walked so straight. Her mother held his hand.
But little Tem was already skipping away through the photographic fields, laughing heartlessly as she burst through the blurred and motionless Yetis, beckoning the pale Wyvern behind her. September watched as her younger self leapt up into her parents’ arms, laughing as though she had never heard the words war or shift or hospital. Errata looked back and forth between the two Septembers. Her whiskers flicked and quivered-but she went with her girl, as any beast would. She waved her tail at Ell as she skipped after her Tem-and September saw her own mother, out of focus and black and white though she was, reach up to pat a Wyvern’s neck fondly. She saw her father lift her child self up onto his shoulders as he used to. Tem screamed with giggling and kissed Errata’s offered nose. Like a needle in her chest, September saw their ease, their smiles, and all of her leaned toward them, as if by wanting it she could be Tem again.
I have missed Saturday and I have missed Ell and I have missed Fairyland-but how can I miss myself? September clenched her fist against tears that longed to well up and spill out. Instead, drops of searing, mercurial fluid dripped down her face, burning her skin away as they fell.
Ell stretched his neck forward, straining after Errata in his own way, calling for her to stay even as his eyes darkened to nothingness. The little Wyverary shook his head from side to side wretchedly. He had already started to hiccup.
“Oh no, no, Ell, you must try not to! Hold your breath or try to swallow it…”
But A-Through-L’s fire burst forth in a long, glowing stream of longing and she could feel him wither up in her arms.
The Tyguerrotype closed his paw around his squeezebulb. “We can’t wait any longer. You came for Patience and you got what there was to get.”
“Wait!” cried September. Her cheek yawned inky wetness, flushing down over her chin even as she spoke. “Don’t! Couldn’t we somehow come out here, here, in Patience, the place in this photograph, and not in Azimuth? Couldn’t we punch through this very film here and now, and come out on the other side of the Moon? If you don’t take the picture, if you don’t finish taking it, we could go some other way?”
“I don’t see how,” said the Tyguerrotype.
“I do,” whispered Ell miserably. “After all, photographs are only light and light is only fire.”
“Ell, you can’t.” September clutched at him. He fit into the palm of her hand. All of him. His red snout, his whipping orange whiskers, his long scarlet tail, his broad chest the color of old peaches. Like a newborn kitten, his tail snaking over her thumb. How much smaller could he bear to get?
As A-Through-L shut his eyes, blackness swallowed up his snout.
“No,” September said, and her voice was deathly hard. She put her hand over his mouth and stopped him.
Instead, she pulled her hammer from her pocket once more. It was iron. Nothing in Fairyland could bear iron.
She turned to Saturday. His face diffused into darkness. She felt herself fading, fading, hardly able to stand.
September raised the hammer, teeth first, and brought it shredding down into the image of Patience. Slowly, sickeningly, the photographed city melted around them. The Tyguerrotype fell backward through crisping and peeling layers of Country, batting them out and scowling. A picture of a fire brigade bristling with ladders shuffled through the prints.
“Where are you going?” came a voice behind them.
September turned. Flickering and popping in silver and black stood the Marquess as she had seen her long ago, in a newsreel, her velvet and silk and flowered and jeweled hat tilting to one side.
“You wicked little thief,” she said slowly, her mouth forming the words as though she were swallowing cream.
The picture of Patience swallowed them up before September could answer.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE HEART OF THE MOON IS A MONTH
In Which Much Is Revealed
The edges of the world sizzled silver, then black, and then vanished. September’s eyes burned; suddenly everything had color again and depth, too. The Moon seemed so much brighter and harsher. Afternoon spilled out over the bowl-curve of the inside edge of the Moon, turning the pale soil to gold dust. She felt her face, her throat, her chest, her hands-all whole, all full of color. In her lap, A-Through-L sat shivering, tiny, helpless. September held him close. She did not know what to say-so she ripped a scrap of fabric from her blouse and another from the long leg of her trousers, knotting them into a necklace with a black silk basket for him to ride in. A-Through-L climbed in, his eyes round and frightened, hardly knowing his own body, coiling his tail up through the cord and gripping the rim of the pouch in his claws.
“See? I will hoist you up, when you are little,” she whispered. Ell put out his red paw. September lay her finger inside it, and his claws closed round.
Aroostook struck the edge of a rise in the land and sprayed earth before them like a splash of seawater. Saturday gripped the dash as they crashed through the moongrass and down into a long valley. His blue fingers clutched the rough loops of a vivid tangerine-colored scrimshaw that had taken over the whole of the dashboard, the sort of carving old whalers once did on the long baleen teeth of their catches. They nearly crashed before they saw the creature who had been waiting for them, looking up from a lunar sandbar with piercing, intelligent eyes.