The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (2 page)

And so the final dish in Fairyland's tea was a heaping, hideous, unruly platter of shouting, stomping, and rather unskilled fisticuffs.

“
You
shut up!” screeched Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, who collected all the bright and shining things from all the worlds and hoarded them in Fairyland before the days of the week had names. Warm sunshine danced through the blooming walls of the Briary's great hall. Light bounced off the Raven Lord's onyx-armored wings.

“Emperors do
not
shut up!” roared Whipstitch, the Elegant Emperor, who ruled Fairyland with a silken fist five hundred years before your grandmother learned to dance. The golden buttons on his peacock-blue cloak trembled in fury.

“Has anyone got a rowan branch?” trilled Titania sweetly—and I'm sure I needn't tell you who
she
is. She stared down a certain pale giant by the name of Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth, with angry red stitches running all up and down his tattooed skin and
SPALDING
written on his back in a lovely hand. “It's
just
the thing for giving jumped-up sporting equipment a good hiding.”

Goldmouth bellowed rage at the palace hall.

“And you I'll have for a coat,” Titania purred to Reynaud the Fox, a King so old the word hadn't been invented when he pounced upon the crown.

“
What
did you say to me?” the fox snarled, his tail puffing up ferociously, the smell of his wrath filling the crowded room. The room was so crowded, in fact, that some Kings and Queens and duchesses and lords and presidents and empresses and sultans and ancient foxes from before a noun was a noun had begun to spill out into the street. They all wore such fine clothes and finer voices and the very, very finest of tempers that it hurt to look at the great, rude, noisy lot of them all crammed together like a pack of businessmen trapped in an elevator. Everyone who had ever ruled Fairyland, even for the littlest moment, poured into the grand hall of the Briary. More and more came all the time, some still wearing the robes they'd been buried in, others, respectably retired, caught in their dressing gowns, still others, like Reynaud and Horace the Overbear wearing no more than their own good fur.

“You are all despicable fools and if you do not cease your whining I shall cease your faces,” seethed Madame Tanaquill, Prime Minister of Fairyland, and, to her mind, the only one in the room with half a right to speak. The buckles and horseshoes and blades of her iron dress clanked against one another.

“Please!” cried a girl in a blue dress, wearing a crown of glittering jeweled keys. “Everyone please be quiet!”

We know this girl awfully well, you and I. She was born in May, and she has a mole on her left cheek, and her feet are very large, but no longer ungainly at all. Her name is September. She is seventeen years old. She was born in Nebraska, she has not seen her parents in ever so long, and she rather wishes her dress was orange.

She is the Queen of Fairyland and All Her Kingdoms.

In short, everything was just as you and I left it not so very long ago. The world had gotten itself turned on its ear and couldn't hear itself think for the braying and honking and
see here, young goblins
of the royal mob.

The trouble was, only a few moments ago, September had been a stately middle-aged woman languishing in a prison that looked very much like a rum cellar. A Moon-Yeti had taken the years of her youth from her. A Dodo had given them back. And somewhere between the Yeti and the Dodo, she'd forgotten what it was like to have a seventeen-year-old voice, a voice that didn't know its own strength yet, a voice that Grown-Ups felt very safe ignoring completely. No one paid her the mind they'd pay a bus ticket.

“A-Through-L, would you?” September said, looking up, with the impish sort of love that occurs between a girl and a reptile, into the shimmering orange eyes of a towering scarlet Wyvern.

“Oh yes!” A-Through-L cried. After all, he was aces at
shhh
ing, being only half Wyvern. His father was a Library. A powerful
shhh
is the final test of any Great Librarian, and Ell had been practicing.

The Wyverary opened his long red jaws and roared fit to deafen the moon. A stream of indigo fire erupted from behind his wicked teeth, twisting and crackling over the heads of the furious Kings and Queens of Fairyland. Thrum, the Rex Tyrannosaur, roared right back in Ell's face. But as he was merely an extinct lizard and not a Wyverary, his roar had no fire in it. No one else so much as took a breath between insults. Half of them had gone red in the face, the other half green, and at least a third had begun to cry.

A great stone strode up to the rear of the crush of Fairies and foxes and gnomes and ravens. It had legs and fists but only the barest beginning of a face. It did not even have a name. It was the last to arrive, but the oldest and strongest of them all—the First Stone of Fairyland, laid down before one seed of glowerwheat, before the first luckfig root went searching in the soil for water.

“HELLO,” said the First Stone politely. It sat on the grass, carefully trying not to crush the violets.

September, Queen of Fairyland and All Her Kingdoms, waved back shyly. She hadn't the first idea how to be a Queen. She could be a Knight, or a Bishop, or a Criminal, or a Spinster, but what could she possibly do with
Queen
? She thought of the Marquess and Charlie Crunchcrab. She thought of the Whelk of the Moon. She thought of everyone she'd ever met who was in charge of anything. She thought of her mother bossing around her engines, of her father keeping peace in his classroom—and September knew what to do. After all, in chess, the Queen does whatever she wants.

Queen September put her hand straight up in the air as though she meant to ask a question in class. She waited. It always took a while when her father did it. The Changelings Hawthorn and Tamburlaine understood right away, having been in middle school only last week. They raised up their hands immediately. Hawthorn's huge, mossy troll fingers and Tamburlaine's dark, slender wooden palm shot up into the air. Saturday extended his long blue arm. Scratch and Blunderbuss, being a gramophone and a wombat, respectively, could not quite work out how to manage it. They sat up as straight as they could instead, stretching scrap-yarn nose and gramophone bell toward the ceiling.

It was no good. September was not as tall as the First Stone or Gratchling Gourdbone Goldmouth, or even the Quorum of Quokkas wrenching their tails in anxiety.

“May I?” she asked Blunderbuss. The scrap-yarn combat wombat was nearly the size of A-Through-L, made of a hundred different colors of leftover yarn, and, September judged, quite comfortable for standing on. A Wyverary's back is rather knobbly and pointy—good for riding, but a terrible podium.

“You'd do my fuzzy heart happy,” chuffed Blunderbuss, and got down on her huge knees to let September up. Saturday thatched his fingers together to help her hoist herself. He kissed her cheek as she put her toes into his hands. “Ha!” barked Blunderbuss, when September was safely aboard. “I always thought a Queen would weigh more! I could carry a hundred of you, if you'd all sit still, which you wouldn't, but I'd make you!”

Once again, Queen September put her hand into the air. She did not say a word. And now, slowly, the others began to notice September and her friends and their funny fingers pointing at the sky. A duchess here, a pharaoh there, a brace of congressional banshees in the corner.

“What's she doing?” asked Pinecrack, the Moose-Khan. “She looks quite, quite stupid. I shan't have the first pang of guilt about impaling her with my doom-antlers.”

“Perhaps it's some new gesture of power at court. We had many in my day,” considered Curdleblood, the Dastard of Darkness, a shockingly handsome young man dressed like a minstrel, if only minstrels wore all black and had long, sharp teeth hanging from his hat instead of merry bells.

“Your day was a thousand years ago,” snapped the Headmistress, who had ruled only a short while before King Goldmouth swallowed her whole, and was extremely unhappy to be teleported from her tidy ghost-crosswords into this intolerable clutter.

“And it was a
wretched
day, I must say,” said a sweet young lady with candy-cane bows in her hair and a dress all of butterscotch and marshmallows. When she conquered Fairyland, folk called her the Happiest Princess, though at the moment she felt quite cross. But she didn't stop smiling, even as she spat at Curdleblood: “You painted the whole country black! I was still scrubbing behind the mountains when I lost my crown!”

“Still,” the Moose-Khan mused, “we shouldn't like to appear
ignorant.
Much may have changed since the age of hoof and snow. I don't want the Queen to think me old-fashioned.”

Pinecrack sat back on his haunches and lifted one hoof into the air. The Headmistress, ever conscious of manners, followed suit.

“Her?” snarled Charlie Crunchcrab, who had been King Charles Crunchcrab I only ten minutes ago. It's very hard to make such a quick adjustment, and we ought not to think too harshly on him for behaving as poorly as he is surely about to do. “
Her?
She's not the Queen. That's just September! And that name is a Naughty Word, you know. She's the Spinster. She's a troublemaker. She's a revolutionary and a criminal and a dirty
cheat
. She's a human girl! She hasn't even got wings! If she's the right and proper Queen, then my hairy foot is the Emperor of Everything!”

“Sir, I beg your foot's pardon, but
I
am the Emperor of Everything,” a young boy in a dizzying patchwork suit interrupted. Though he was a child, his voice rolled deep and sweet across the floor, like cold chocolate poured out of a dark glass. “At least I was,” he finished uncertainly. And he raised his hand in the air.

“Oh, I see, you're trying to show me up!” cried Cutty Soames, the Coblynow Captain who sailed Fairyland across the Sea of Broken Stars to its current resting place. He stuck one sooty, filthy arm up with a sneer.

Others did the same, one by one, more and more, paw and hand and hoof and talon. No one wanted to be singled out as a country rube or an unfashionable cretin who didn't know the wonder and mystery of the Raised Hand. Finally, the grand hall stood quite silent, filled with all the Kings and Queens of history politely waiting, like schoolchildren, for the teacher to be satisfied with their manners.

“Thank you,” said Queen September, lowering her hand. “Now, you must stop behaving like a stepped-on sack of scorpions or we'll be here till Christmas, at least! And I don't think any of us would really like to holiday together, so let's all serve ourselves a nice big plate of hush.”

“HELLO,” said the First Stone from the long lawn of the Briary.

“Hello!” answered September brightly. “See, isn't it nice to act like somebody raised us well?”

“Who the devil are you?” hollered a mermaid soaking in the Briary's saltwater fountain, resting smugly in the arms of a silver statue of herself.

“You're a human being! You're not even allowed to look half of us in the eye!” howled a man in a waffle-cone hat and doublet and hose made all of mint ice cream. Have a care not to laugh—once, centuries ago, every soul in Fairyland feared the Ice Cream Man. “Get down off that wombat so I can break your neck, there's a good girl.”

Madame Tanaquill swept through the throng, her head held high, striding forward with the sure knowledge that the sea of kings would part before her. It did. The train of her iron dress steamed and sizzled behind her, burning the floor of the Briary and several unfortunate toes, any Fairy thing it touched, for none could bear iron but Madame herself. She glared at Hawthorn and Tamburlaine as she approached, but turned her sweetest smile toward September. And it
was
a sweet smile, the sweetest since the invention of kindness, full of patience and love and understanding. It chilled September to her toes. Madame Tanaquill put a hard, cold, possessive hand on September's foot.

“My dear friends!” she sang out. “Most beloved and respected jewels of Fairyland!” The way she said
beloved
and
respected
sounded very much like
rotten old rubbish
and
not worth the rust on my décolletage.
“May I present to you this marvelous morning, the brave and bold September, our darling monarch, our hallowed Queen! I'm sure you will soon come to love and admire her as I do.”

September wondered if every word Madame Tanaquill said meant just the exact opposite of what actually came out of her rosy, prim mouth. The Prime Minister did not love or admire her any more than she loved or admired a glass of spilled wine in her dancing hall. This same woman had dropped September and Saturday and A-Through-L in prison and promptly forgotten about them. But just now the great Fairy was looking up at her with every ounce of affection and joy a face could wring out, her wings fluttering demurely, a blush riding high on her glorious cheeks.

“You needn't worry,” September said flatly. She didn't like to say things flatly, but sometimes it is the perfect antidote to someone trying to convince you the noose in their hand is a lovely silk ribbon for your hair. “I don't want to be Queen. I didn't ask to be Queen. I shan't be Queen any longer than lunchtime if I can help it! I daresay a kitchen chair would make a better Queen than me.”

Madame Tanaquill's smile grew even deeper and more genuine, even more like a mother filled to bursting with pride. But the bottom fell out of her dark eyes; hateful lightning flashed within.

“I don't have a care what you want, you horrid little insect,” she hissed through her smile. “The Crown chose you. You
are
Queen of Fairyland. It's about as appetizing to myself personally as a pie full of filthy, crawling worms, but it's a fact. You can pull and pry and blubber, but that Crown won't come off until you're dead or deposed. I could cut you down in a heart's-breadth, but the rest of these ruffians would have my head. They take regicide
terribly
personally. Make no mistake; this present predicament is
entirely
your fault, you and your wretched Dodo's Egg. You will want my help to sort it limb from limb. You are a stranger in Fairyland—oh, it's charming how many little vacations you take here! But this is not your home. You don't know these people from a beef supper. But I do. I recognize each and every one. And if you show them that you are a vicious little fool with no more head on her shoulders than a drunken ostrich, they will gobble you up and dab their mouths with that
thing
you call a dress. You may not like me, but I have survived far more towering acts of mythic stupidity than you. I am good. I know what power weighs. If you have any wisdom in your silly monkey head, from this moment until the end of your reign—which I do hope will come quickly—you and I shall become the very best of friends. After all, Queen September, a Prime Minister lives to serve.”