September saw the red book shattering in her mind, over and over, like a thousand photographs. She thought of her father disappearing and coming back older, more hurt, and how once he was back it seemed like he’d only been gone a minute-except there was the older version of him on the couch with the plaid blanket, the more hurt version. How when she came home from Fairyland, never more than an hour had passed in Nebraska. How Saturday was not a fish but a boy, a boy who could fly through the air like a long blue arrow, a boy who practiced so carefully that when he finally did a thing, it was perfect.
Ciderskin spoke up suddenly, as though he had all along been discussing fate with them. I forgot a Yeti, September thought. I was listening so hard I forgot a Yeti.
“Time is the only magic,” he said. “And Marids swim through time like the sea. Think: If you hurt yourself, and I bandage it, and after weeks and weeks it gets well and there’s no scar, that’s not magic at all. But if you hurt yourself and I touch you and it heals in a moment, you’d call me magic before your skin closed. It’s not magic to cook a feast, roasting and baking and frying for hours and hours, but if you blink and it’s steaming in front of you, it’s a spell. If you work for what you want and save for it and plan it out just as precisely as you possibly can, it’s not even surprising if you get it on the other side of a month or a year. But if you snap your fingers and it happens as soon as you want it, every wizard will want to know you socially. If you live straight through a hundred years and watch yourself unfold at one second per second, one hour per hour, that’s just being alive. If you go faster, you’re a time traveler. If you jump over your unfolding and see how it all comes out, that’s fate. But it’s all healing and cooking and planning and living, just the same. The only difference is time.”
September turned this over in her head. “But the trouble is, I do want to be surprised. I want to choose. I broke the heart of my fate so that I could choose. I never chose; I only saw a little girl who looked like me standing on a gear at the end of the world and laughing, and that’s not choosing, not really. Wouldn’t you rather I chose you? Wouldn’t you rather I picked our future out of all the others anyone could have?”
“I chose you,” he said simply. “All the fish of me turned toward you at once.”
September felt panic burn through her like gasoline. Why couldn’t he understand her? “But I didn’t! I have hardly had a chance to breathe since I got here and it’s always like that in Fairyland. Everything is always happening and all at once. And I am growing up, Saturday! I am growing up and I have read books, so many books, and I know that growing up means you can’t keep going to Fairyland the way you did when you were a child! Something happens to you and suddenly you have to keep a straight face and a straight line and I am afraid! I want something grand and I don’t want to know what it is before it happens!”
“There are grown-ups in Fairyland,” Saturday said. “Who told you you couldn’t come back when you’re grown? Was it the same person who told you grown-ups don’t cry or blush or clap their hands when they’re happy? Don’t try to say otherwise, I’ve seen you fighting like a boxer to change your face so that it never shows anything. Whoever told you that’s what growing up means is a villain, as true as a mustache. I am growing up, too, and look at me! I cry and I blush and I live in Fairyland always!”
And he was blushing, bright frost on his cheeks. She who blushes first loses, September thought. She put her hand on his cheek, the place where the Blue Wind had slapped her once. But what does she lose? What contest is on that I never even knew about before the Blue Wind said I’d lost?
September tried to pull on her sternness. It was becoming a habit. She could show her sternness and think about this another time, when it was quiet and no new red Moon turned somersaults in the sky. But when she reached for her sternness, all September found in her heart was the bar of a trapeze, swinging wild, inviting her to catch it.
The older Saturday fixed his dark eyes on her. They had kind little wrinkles at their edges, where smiles had gotten stuck and never left.
“It’s a terrible magic that everyone can do,” he said. “So do it. Breathe. Choose. Something, anything, whatever you want. Or don’t choose. Or choose and if you don’t like it later, it’ll be all right because when you were very young, you took a hammer and smashed your fate into a hundred pieces.”
September did not even look at the Saturday with kind wrinkles. She looked at her Saturday. The present she had to meet over and over. He was right. She lived out of order and upside down, a jumble of time and girl. He was right. September blushed. She blushed and she let herself blush. There was no losing in it, only feeling. Fairyland, she thought. Fairyland is what I have where a ship has ballast. In high seas it keeps me upright. And maybe growing up only means getting bigger. As big as Almanack, as a whelk on the moon who can hold a world inside it. September’s heart sat up inside her and spoke.
She leaned up and kissed her Marid and hoped it was the right thing. Her heart caught the bar and swung out, swung wild, over the lights and the gasps below, reaching for a pair of sure blue hands in the air and willing them to find hers.
When they separated, the older Saturday put his long blue arms around the child of himself. He beckoned to September and she went to him. He smelled of cold stones and the sea. It was a good smell. “Listen to me,” the older Saturday interrupted. His voice was Saturday’s voice, but deeper and roomier, with space inside to curl up in.
But he did not get to finish.
I have been many things in our time together. Sly and secret and full of tricks, cruel and heartless in my own way. But for now I shall be kind. Saturday, the Saturday who has seen how it all comes out, wanted to tell himself a thing, and September, too. You and I, as we get on in years together, will many times wish to take our past selves in our arms and stroke their hair and tell them how the world is, how it is made, what can be done about it. Saturday could not be allowed to do it, any more than we can, and that is why I caused the Moon to shudder just so. I do have some small privileges.
But I will tell you what he meant to say, because we are friends and the space before an epilogue is a sacred place, soft and full of possibilities.
Saturday wanted to say: Listen to me. Love is a Yeti. It is bigger than you and frightening and terrible. It makes loud and vicious noises. It is hungry all the time. It has horns and teeth and the fore of its fists is more than anyone can bear. It speeds up time and slows it down. And it has its own aims and missions that those who are lucky enough to see it cannot begin to guess. You might see a Yeti once in your life or never. You might live in a village of them. But in the end, no matter how fast you think you can go, the Yeti is always faster than you, and you can only choose how you say hello to it, and whether you shake its hand.
CHAPTER XX
EVER SO MUCH MORE TROUBLE
In Which Many Things Forgotten Are Recalled Rather Suddenly and With Alarming Effect
But Saturday said none of these things, and neither September nor his young self heard them.
Another quake shuddered out from the wound in the middle of Patience. It felt shallower, but it snaked sudden and sharp across the ground. September tottered and stumbled, falling into the two Saturdays. They both caught her, and for a moment all three of them held each other, clinging together with the stars like promises overhead. But then the quake sheared back the other way, a terrible aftershock, a terrible afterbirth, and September fell backward, away from the Marids who loved her.