The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (21 page)

And then she felt her Ell’s great strong presence beside her, and Saturday slipped his hand in hers. Oh.
Oh
. They would not abandon her. Of course, they would not. How silly she had been. They were her friends—they had always been. Friends can go odd on you and do things you don’t like, but that doesn’t make them strangers.

“Oh, I hate you!” September cried, her voice deep and loud with the strength of her folk around her. “Get out of here, you dreadful thing!”

And, somehow, for some unfathomable reason, in the face of them all, the Alleyman did. The red hat recoiled from her like a struck animal. It shook from side to side as if trying to clear its invisible head. The red hat dropped suddenly, and September knew, somehow, that the Lutin under that cap had fallen to his knees in some private trouble. It trembled below her gaze for a long moment.

Then, without a word, it simply rose and floated back inside the truck. The Alleyman’s truck ambled away down the skinny stony road, and September tried to calm her hammering heart. Aubergine came slowly into sight, the wired stars reflecting on her huge beak. The Onion-Man stood, for once, quite still. September tried to guess his thoughts, but his faceless head offered no sign.

Suddenly, she felt a lurching commotion in the pockets of the wine-colored coat. September reached in to see what was the matter. The flaps of the coat rustled and shook as the three small onions she had taken so long ago from the Upside-Downs leapt past her hands and out of the coat, landing joyfully on the ground.

Three little lavender-and-yellow onions rolled to the dancer. They ringed him in a circle, rolling through the dark earth, spinning with pleasure. The onion-headed man bent down and put his bone-hands to them, full of affection, brushing the tuft of onionskin at their heads. They rolled over like round puppies so that he could stroke their plump bellies. Finally, they bounced up and toddled into the gray house.

“I didn’t know they were yours,” September said by way of apology.

The Onion-Man bent down, for he was awfully tall. He took September’s cheeks in his skeletal hands and pressed his onion-face to her forehead. September’s eyes filled up with burning tears—as they always did at home when she chopped onions for Sunday soup. The Onion-Man began to move his feet from side to side again, dropping his shoulders and fanning his fingers against her cheeks, tapping out a rhythm. She found that though bones were certainly a little unsettling, they were warm and smelled like growing things and not dead things at all.

“You seem very nice, Mr. Onion,” she said. “But I do wish I knew why my ration card sent me here. I said I wanted to get to the Prince, and I don’t suppose you are anything of the sort.”

“But he is a Prince, a bit,” said Saturday. “The way Teatime is a Duke and his wife’s a Vicereine. The onions love him—and look!”

Beneath the Onion-Man’s tapping feet, tiny pale green shoots were wriggling up out of the dark soil, swaying a little to the pattern of his dance.

“You have to be very specific when it comes to magic,” A-Through-L said sheepishly. “You must say things as carefully as you can. Magic is like a machine that only does exactly what you tell it to do. So you have to speak to it in a way it can understand. And magic only understands you if you spell it out slowly. And use small words. You didn’t tell the card which Prince or how quickly you wanted to go. For all we know this
is
the shortest path—or it thought you meant our fragrant friend here! Or perhaps the Alleyman is some sort of Prince, too. The word
Prince
is very open-ended. You can’t really trust anything that far down in the alphabet.”

“I do believe everyone in Fairyland-Below is royalty!” September exclaimed. “Queens and Princes and Vicereines and Emperors—it’s like visiting Europe!”

Aubergine nodded. “That’s how it is in underworlds. And more so, the deeper you go. Even the flowers are Duchesses, in the deepest dells. Even the raspberries are Khans. In the beginning of the beginning, all the Kings and Queens of Fairyland came from Below. When they needed an Empress or a Tsar, they went to a certain frozen lake in the Hoarfrost Desert, cut a hole in the ice, and sunk a silver pole they called the Kingfisher into the frigid water. All through Fairyland-Below, we would see the great hook descending toward us, and the bait on the hook would tell us what sort of ruler they had in mind. A crown of rowan branches for a Fairy Queen, of obsidian for a Dark Lord, of iron for a Human Hero. It could be anything. So all of us had to be ready. Any day, someone could be called to duty. Everyone had to practice princely ways.”

The onion-dancer did not especially seem to care about Aubergine’s history lesson. He pulled at September’s hands, lifting his arm to twirl her underneath. He prodded her to dance with him, and extended one long arm to invite the others, too. Saturday was already sweeping his arms overhead and making the most curious shapes with his slender limbs, grinning with delight. His eyes flowed with tears, too—they all wept, and laughed at their weeping, for the onion-fumes grew stronger the more excitedly he danced. Ell rocked from hind leg to hind leg, curling and uncurling his tail in an elegant motion. Even Aubergine, her feathers blushing a frosty shade, fluffed up her feathers, flared her wings, and began to hop in an odd but not unlovely dance.

“Come on, September,” pleaded Saturday, and the Onion-Man pleaded, too, in his silent way. He was happy, she could see. He had been spared. And though she was deathly shy of dancing, though she could not bring herself to at the Revel, there in the dark, September joined the little tribe in a silent, joyful dance. They held hands and spun in circles, laughing and crying and jumping and somersaulting like little children. And everywhere the onion-dancer stepped, shoots came up out of the ground, growing and curlicuing and corkscrewing upward until the five of them danced in an onion forest, the tops of the trees unfurling strange leaves to catch the starlight.

And through the great onion-trunks, September thought she saw, only for a moment, a figure all in silver slipping through the wood. She called after it, but it did not pause, so pale and brief it might almost never have been there.

“Oh, tell me you know the way to the bottom of the world,” whispered September into what she guessed might be the Onion-Man’s ear as he lifted her up at the height of the dance, breathless and flushed, spinning her around and around. The lights of the underworld blurred in her vision.

He set her down and pointed with one long fleshless arm toward the weather-beaten cellar doors.

CHAPTER XIV

T
HE
O
AT
K
NIGHT’S
A
POLOGY

In Which September Encounters an Old Enemy, but Finds Him Rather Nice After All, Offers Aubergine Her Freedom, and Ends Up in a Bad Way

September climbed up onto a dune covered in salt-crusted pink grass. She pulled Aubergine by the talon out of the cellar passage and closed the door behind Ell as he shook his scales like a wet dog. On this side, the door was a slab of shining mahogany with a neat brass knocker. The roaring of the sea greeted them all, a sharp marine wind rippling through the coral-colored dune grass. Big, heavy silver bees buzzed sleepily around a few giant emerald-colored flowers clotted with black pollen. Holding her dark hair back from her face, September looked around for anyone or anything—and saw only a heaving, smoky, frost-colored sea below, a shade just like moonlight, its waves swelling up and rolling into shore, where they crashed against boulders and a long dark beach.

She shrugged and headed up over the dunes.
I’m sure to find someone eventually,
she told herself. Every patch of Fairyland-Below seems topful of folk! As they walked, September took Saturday’s hand in hers and squeezed.
In a day or two, I may forgive you for the kiss,
she wanted the squeeze to say.
So long as you stand by me always as you did back there. I want to think you’re my Saturday just as much as the one aboveground. I want to believe it. So I shall, as best as I am able.

He squeezed back.

*   *   *

They saw the village as they slid and slipped down the face of a dune patchworked with wild licorice and wintergreen, the perfume of it all as heady as the onion-fumes had been. A ways off from the beach, where a few gentle hills protected it from the sea-wind, several bungalows crowded around a tremendous hearth full of flaming driftwood logs. As they drew closer, they got a better look at the bungalows, all built of braided leather like horses’ reins. On top of each, a great saddle perched as a stout roof, the pommel dappled with sea moss. The window frames were big silver stirrups tipped in spurs, and over each door a golden horseshoe shone like a piece of the sun.

No one moved between the houses or tended the fire, but as September and her gang stepped onto the sandy meadow, a creature leapt out from behind a wind-warped whitethorn tree and drew a rough bone knife from his belt.

It was a Glashtyn.

His soft black horse’s head gazed on them with limpid eyes, his mane wild, wind-tossed, decorated with sharp, jagged shells. The rest of him was naked—a fact September had long since ceased to be particularly embarrassed about—his knees and forearms only sheathed in silver armor. His skin matched the color of the sea.

The Glashtyn made ready to bar them with his knife—though the green-blue flames like pilot lights in his eyes would have stopped them quite handily. But something flickered in those flames, something like recognition. He squinted at her.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” the Glashtyn whispered. “Yes, it must be. I remember you. Do you remember me?”

He wore a silver ring through his equine nose like a bull. September tried to remember this exact Glashtyn. The Järlhopp’s Clutch warmed against her chest. A memory pricked up in the back of her mind.

“I … I think so,” she whispered back, and Saturday’s shadow stirred against her. “I think you took my shadow one day a long time ago. On the river.” September tried not to let him see her tremble. He had been terrible on that day, frightening and violent, and she knew the feel of that bone knife.

The Glashtyn bent his noble head and all his fierceness softened. He spoke quietly and kindly. “That I did, human girl. If you would know me better, I will tell you my name is the Oat Knight. I see in your bearing I was terrible to you. I was terrible then because it was my job to be terrible. I aimed for terribleness, and I like to think I often caught it! But the Hollow Queen, bless her name, let me fold up my terribleness at last and put it in a steamer trunk at the bottom of my spirit, quite locked up. You know, before the Marquess press-ganged us to pull the ferry, I was a peaceful boy who wanted to be a poetry farmer. I suppose that sounds strange to you. It’s such easy work down here—hardly a Knight’s profession. You hoe a blue field and give it a bit of water and moonshine, and poems just come popping out of the earth like winter squash.” The Glashtyn snorted gently, reminding himself to make good conversation. “I hear it is harder, where you come from.”

September thought of the poems she had been made to write in class, the hours she had spent trying to find a rhyme for this or that thing. She liked poetry, liked how, in a good poem, the words fit together like a puzzle. But she had not, in her estimation, ever managed a good poem. Hers came out fitting together more like a broken faucet and an angry milk-goat.

“Harder, yes,” she admitted.

The Oat Knight nodded. “This I have been told.”

Several lithe, young horse-headed boys peeked out of the rein-houses. They stepped nimbly onto the sand and stared at her, standing stiff and tall. The Oat Knight put a cold, blue-gray hand on her arm.

“Come,” he said. “We wronged you. Break bread with us and we will mend.”

The Oat Knight led them to the bonfire, and the other Glashtyn brought out bowls of clean, fresh water, salads of alfalfa and apples, lumps of sugar dotting oatmeal soaked in whiskey and cream, thick, lush seaweed and round, firm fern heads. Inside the oatmeal mash hid a little roasted puffin, glistening with brown fat. The Glashtyn sat cross-legged on the ground and ate with their fingers—which should have seemed vulgar but instead looked rather nice, when they did it. September even saw a few Glashtyn girls, with rings in their velvety ears rather than their noses. Aubergine enjoyed the food greatly, but she kept looking out to sea, as if she expected something to appear over the horizon. Saturday ate with relish. Ell only sampled the vegetables.

The Oat Knight introduced the others: the Millet Knight and the Corn Knight and the Barley Knight and the Apple Knight and the Bean Knight, and the mares too, called the Buckwheat Knight and the Rice Knight and the Rue Knight. They shook her hand one by one, putting their hands over their hearts as they did so. After supper, the Oat Knight gave them each a clay cup of appley drinking chocolate, and they all walked together onto the dark sand beach. The crystal moon was visible again, showing a bold V on its milky face. Long bleached-wood piers stuck out into the moon-colored sea. September watched the waves break against the shore; they shattered into a foam of tiny black diamonds.