The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (5 page)

September could hear her footsteps echo wildly as she crossed the hall to peer at the book. At the top of each thick, parchment page, she read:

GUEST BOOK.

PLEASE SIGN IN.

And below that, a number of neat columns with titles like
NAME, SPECIES
, and
TIME IN/TIME OUT
, each one brimming with magnificent signatures. She ran her fingertips over the last two entries in the lovely ledger:
The Marquess. Human. 2:15 p.m., April 2nd, the Year of the Yellow-Tongued Hobgoblin/Deposed via Ravished Girl, 10:58 p.m., May 24th, the Year of the Valiant Teacup. Charles Crunchcrab. Fairy. Midnight, August 9th, the Year of the Unhappy Hippogriff/Deposed via Dodo's Egg, Teatime, March 15th, the Year of the Emerald Acrobat.
September searched for a quill pen—under the edges of the book, on the ledge of the podium. She felt a little like the older kids who scratched their names—and other, bolder things—on the bathroom walls at school. Surely, someone would come along and scold her any moment now. But she found nothing.

“Oh, I'm terribly sorry,” came a brisk, tidy voice, a voice like snug seams and straight hems. “How unprofessional of me! Wait just a moment.”

September whirled round. A creature clattered forward through the rows of wonderful clothes. Her slender limbs were made all of wrought iron, curling and twisting in lovely patterns like the ones in a fine old gate. The wrought-iron girl stood much taller than September, her long legs bent backward like a heron's, her hair forged in a crown of leafy iron vines round her dark skull. As September stared, the lady opened her wrought-iron rib cage like the lid of a secretary desk. A sewing machine unfolded out of her, kept hidden where her heart might have been. She reached down and pulled a coil of plain linen from a scrap basket sandwiched between an Elizabethan gown and a motorcycle jacket and fed it through her machine heart. The needle moved up and down merrily and when the linen emerged, it had become a graceful quill pen with a sharp bronze nib. The quill was a real quill, too, a sturdy turkey feather with gold and red speckles.

September pulled it free and dipped the new pen into the scarlet inkwell. She bent down to the guest book, trying to make her face as brave and bold as the one she'd shown to the Stoat of Arms, and she only hesitated a moment before writing:
September Bell. Human. A Bit After Teatime, March 15th, the Year of the Emerald Acrobat
. She frowned at her handwriting—it looked rather plain next to the dashing flourishes above, the
t
's crossed with rapiers and
i
's dotted with alchemical sigils of the other “guests.”

“Most excellent. Now we can begin!” said the wrought-iron lady, folding up her black rib cage again. “I am the Archbishop of the Closet, the Sartorial Seneschal. You may call me Jacquard. Jack, if you are lazy and cannot manage two whole syllables. I'm here to help with your fitting.”

September smiled broadly. “You didn't call me
Your Majesty
or
Your Grace
or
Your Highness
.”

Jacquard shrugged. Her eyes were the only part of her that wasn't smelted out of iron, but delicately etched silver with warm sunstone irises. They glittered like real eyes when she blinked. “Oh, I don't trouble myself with that sort of thing. I've seen so many of you under my tape it would be like bowing to a buttonhole. But I can try to remember if you'd prefer.”

September sighed with relief. “I wouldn't, at all! Really, I don't see why anyone does! I didn't ask them to! Anyway, it seems to me that whenever a person says:
Your Majesty
, they mean:
I would rather drink a glass of gasoline than spend another moment with you
.”

Jacquard grinned. Her lips had ribbons carved into them, all tied in smart bows. “Good girl. Perhaps you'll last longer than the soup course in your supper tonight.”

“I don't want to
last
at all. I don't want to be Queen. I keep telling people that, but no one listens to me. I just want to be left alone.”

Jacquard chuckled. She produced a measuring tape from her metal arm the way a lady might produce a handkerchief from her sleeve. “Young miss, if you didn't want to be Queen, perhaps you shouldn't have kept whacking every monarch you met with
quite
such a large and pointy stick. The trouble with upsetting the applecart is that you've got to clean up the fruit when you're done.”

“How do you know what I've done?”

Jacquard wrapped the tape round September's waist. “If you had to mend the trousers of Fairyland's masters, you'd learn the name
September
quick as a stitch, my humble hellion. I've heard your name along with the most dreadfully impolite language—you'd blush if I repeated it. I've heard it hissed, hollered, snarled, cursed, and flung against the wall. You're quite famous, I'm afraid. Public menace number one. I'm just fiendishly pleased to meet you! I would shake your hand, but Fairylanders are quite allergic to me. Now, we have a great heaping basket of decisions to make and not much time, so why don't we buckle down to our task?”

“Why don't we have much time? If I'm Queen, surely I can take as long as I like to decide whatever it is that needs deciding.”

“The Cantankerous Derby begins in three days' time. Unless you are much faster and cleverer than you look, your reign will go down in my book as precisely seventy-two hours long. Not the shortest—that honor goes to the Blessed Bonk, a hobgoblin who lasted all of fifteen minutes before falling down a flight of stairs, hitting his head on a china cabinet, and drowning in a mud puddle. The mud puddle turned out to be the very river nymph who succeeded him. But three days is not quite long enough to stretch out in. No, you must choose your regalia quickly. You must get ready for the Race. If the Queen stood at the starting line in her street clothes, I would die of shame.”

“My regalia?” September had to admit her Spinster dress no longer fit her. It was too long in the arm and the hem. But
regalia
did not sound like the sort of thing you could ride a Wyverary in.

“Oh yes!” cried Jacquard. “A ruler must have regalia, just as a businessman must have his suit and briefcase, just as a soldier must have his rifle and his cap, just as a flying ace must have her aeroplane. How will anyone take you seriously as a Queen if you do not look like one? It is the dearest duty of the Archbishop of the Closet to assist you in choosing all the tools of your trade.” The wrought-iron girl spread her long arms to indicate the vast reaches of the Royal Closet. “Your name, your scepter, your costume, your shoes, and your steed. You have your crown already.” September touched the circle of jeweled keys on her head. She hardly felt its weight anymore.

Jacquard led September to a row of drawers with glass tops, like a jeweler's case where engagement rings might be kept. Inside lay ribbons of every color and fabric, olive lace and copper silk and crimson damask and orchid rope. Each one had tiny words woven into them, winding round and round the ribbon like lengths of black thread. “Firstly, you must choose a name.”

“My name is September.”

“No, no, you misunderstand, my dear! You must choose a
dynastic
name. You can be anything you like—a Queen, a Sultana, a Caesar, a Marquess, an Empress, a Baroness—any sort of Ess you can think of.” Jack opened the drawers and pulled out a length of ribbon for each title. “You could even be a King, if you liked—Fairyland is wonderfully modern on that point. If you don't care for old-fashioned courtly ranks, you could be the Sheriff or the Cannoneer or the Dark Horse, the Alewife or the Tobacconist or the Hydronaut—oh, we haven't had a Hydronaut in
centuries
! And it needn't be so plain as one word. You might be the Princess of Pluto or Lady Ironbones or Count Fortune or the Wintry Warlord. The choice is yours—your first choice. Your name goes before you—it tells everyone what you're about. Names are awfully old magic, older than the monarchy, older than me. Your name is the armor you wear in the Battle of Everyday. Hardly anyone gets to pick their own. It is one of the privileges of your position. When your parents choose your name, they make a little wish for your future and fold it up inside your heart forever. When you choose your own, you make your own wish.”

“What others call you, you become,” said September softly, remembering the words a Yeti had once spoken to her.

“Oh yes. If you were to choose Lady Brightbat, for instance, I daresay you'd find your vampire teeth half grown in by bedtime. If you wrap Warlord round your shoulders, soldiers a thousand miles away will wake up with a start.”

September considered. She had been a Knight and a Bishop and a Criminal and a Spinster—so many titles for a girl from Nebraska with the smell of chicken feed and dish soap still on her! But she never stayed in any of them long, always running out of one name and into another. Would she really transform into whatever she called herself? Perhaps it should be something big and powerful, then. The Gryphon or the Valkyrie or the Giantess. But if she became a Giantess, she would have a devil of a time explaining to her parents why she suddenly needed a horse-acre bed instead of her sweet old pillow. And now that she was free, she would go home when her hourglass ran out, wouldn't she? Those were the rules. Even being Queen did not change them. The Marquess knew that and so did she. Would her parents know her at home, if she came back a Giantess? Something not so grand as a Gryphon, then. And thinking of home, September's heart ran ahead in front of her mind, and before she knew it, she had decided.

“Could I … could I be the Engineer? My mother's one, you see. And for a long while I didn't think much about anything except Fairyland—getting here and being here and staying here. But I haven't seen my mother since before I went up to the Moon and I miss her. I miss her so much. And she fixes things. Mends things. Makes them good and sound and flyable again. Even if I'm only Queen for a little while, that's the sort of Queen I'd like to be.”

“Done,” said Jacquard, and drew a great length of sturdy grass-green suede from the drawer. “Next, you must select your Royal Scepter. You will use it to make Decrees, which is a jumped-up way of saying Get Your Own Way at Once.” Jacquard pointed at the crowded umbrella stands. Ivory-handled canes glimmered, as well as golden staves topped with opals and tiger's eyes, shoehorns and fireplace pokers and rapiers and bullwhips and parasols. “A Royal Scepter is not quite so blunt as a sword, nor quite so fancified as a magic wand—though of course you could choose a sword or a magic wand if you wanted to bore me half to tears. You might have seen Royal Scepters and never known what you were looking at. Your predecessor used a crab hammer.”

“What did the Marquess use?” September said quietly. If she had to be Queen, the most important thing was to be nothing like the Marquess, she felt.

“She lost hers. She replaced it with a Spoon, I believe. I should mention, in the event of loss of any regalia, you must provide your own replacement. The Royal Closet is not responsible for articles lost or damaged in the process of monarchy or other shenanigans.”

A thought occurred to September. “Could I … could I have my old wrench? The one I pulled out of the casket in the Autumn Provinces.”

The wrought-iron lady rummaged through the umbrella stands, pushing aside raccoon caps and woolly scarves and sealskin kirtles. Finally, she produced, from a blown-glass stand half squashed beneath a pirate's chest full of spare buttons, the long, sturdy wrench September had won from the Worsted Wood so long ago.

“Everything ends up here, sooner or later. At least, it ends up here if it's any good. Many of the gowns and suits and winter coats and waistcoats and shoes you see in the Royal Closet belonged to some King or Queen once upon a time, was worn and loved and twirled about in.”

“What about the rest?”

“I made the rest. I am a Mantelet. I must make something, or I will die. Mantelets were one of the first beasts to crawl out of the cauldron when Fairyland was new and could not yet sleep through the night. We looked around us and saw trees, rivers, deserts, fields, even the Perverse and Perilous Sea—all the things that grew and lived according to their own cantankerous nature. But nothing
made.
Nothing woven or hammered or erected or distilled or sculpted or painted. We yearned to be the ones to weave and hammer and erect and distill and sculpt and paint. We saw visions of a Made World alongside the Wild World. I was born in the Houppelande Hills before the calendar learned to count to thirty-one. My father was a printing press with kind letter-block eyes. My mother was a blacksmith's forge with warm, molten arms. But I? I loved to sew. Every kind of stitch looked like scripture to me, scripture and starlight! Anything I could get my hands on I put under my needle—until I became so skilled that I didn't need anything under my needle to make a pair of seven-league boots, or a dress of fondest hopes, or Groangyre Tower with its silk balloon. The Elegant Emperor asked me to come and live at the Briary long ago. No one can touch me, on account of my iron, but I touch everything that touches them. Between fittings—which is what a Mantelet calls a coronation—I make the regalia of the future. A thousand skirts for a thousand Queens to come. I even made the Marquess's hat.” Jacquard smiled modestly. “There is nothing here that is powerless. I've soaked even the smallest lace ruffle and fleece lining in magic, in every kind of magic. This kimono?” She pulled a glittering white-and-black robe free of its cousins. “This kimono can call down the snow no matter how hot and high the sun rides. My chartreuse tuxedo can turn you into a lightning-breathing bird of paradise. This purple petticoat forces the wearer to tell the truth no matter how much they may wish to lie, while the black one compels them to sing a song for everything they do. I must have a
little
fun, after all. You may choose your Royal Costume from anything you see, or I will make you something new out of your name and your scepter and your longings and your needings. And perhaps … perhaps I can make you something to help with the Cantankerous Derby. Something swift and armored and full of tricks.”