The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

by Catherynne M. Valente

  She floundered and dipped beneath the giant waves, only to bob up again, spluttering, gulping air. She kicked hard, struggling to get her legs properly under her and orient herself toward the shore—if there was a shore—so that the waves would carry her toward land—if land there was—and not away from it. Riding the crest of a horrid wave sickeningly upward, she turned her head as fast as she could and glimpsed through the last, stubborn streaks of ointment a fuzzy, orangish strand off to the west. Against the will of the water, she hauled her body around until she was more or less pointed at it and stroked as fast as she could on the swell of the next wave, letting it push her and punch at her and drag her—whatever it liked, as long as it was closer and closer to land. September’s arms and legs burned and her lungs were seriously considering giving the whole thing up, but on she went, and on and on until quite unexpectedly her knees knocked on sand, and she fell face-first as the last waves slid up past her onto a rose-colored shore.

  September coughed and shook. On her hands and knees, she threw up a fair bit of the Perverse and Perilous Sea onto the beach. She squeezed her eyes shut and shivered until her heart stopped beating quite so fast. When she opened her eyes, she was steadier but elbow-deep in the beach and sinking fast. Thick red rose petals, twigs, thorny leaves, yellowish chestnut husks, pine cones, and rusty tin bells littered the shoreline as far as she could see. September scrambled and tripped and waded through the strange, sweet-smelling rubbish, trying to find some solid ground beneath the blackberry brambles and robins’ eggshells and wizened, dried toadstools. The land was not very much more solid than the sea, but at least she could breathe—in sharp, jerky gulps, as the brambles pricked at her and the twigs pulled at her hair.

  I have not been in Fairyland nearly long enough to start crying, September thought, then bit her tongue savagely. That was better; she could think, and the flotsam of the beach did seem to get shallower as she pushed through the wreckage. Finally, the wreckage was only knee-deep, and she could trudge through it like so much heavy snow. At the far edge of the shore were tall silvery cliffs, spotted with brave, stubborn little trees that had found purchase on the rocks and grew straight out sideways from the cliffside. At their tops, great birds wheeled and cried, their long necks glowing bright blue in the afternoon light. She stood alone on the beach, breathing heavily. She rubbed her eyes to get the last of the gnome ointment out, where it had hardened like sleep dust. When September’s eyes were clean of salt and gnome, she looked back down the beach in the direction she had come from. Suddenly, the beach didn’t look like rose petals and sticks and eggshells at all. It glittered gold, real gold, all the way down to the violet-green water. Doubloons and necklaces and crowns, pieces of eight and plates and bricks and long, glittering sceptres. These shone so brightly September had to shade her eyes. No matter how she walked, to the left or right, the shore stayed firmly golden now.

  September shivered. She was terribly hungry and dripping rather dramatically. She wrung out her hair and the skirt of her orange dress onto a huge golden crown with crosses on it. The jacket, mortified that it had been so distracted from its duties by a mere momentary drowning, hurriedly puffed out, billowing in the sea wind until it was quite dry. Well, September thought, it’s all certainly very strange, but the Green Wind is not here to explain it anymore, and I can’t stay on the beach all day like a sunbather. A girl in want of a Leopard still has feet. She looked out at the rolling purple-green waves of the sea once more. A stirring that she could not name fluttered within her—something deep and strange, to do with the sea and the sky. But deeper than the stirring was her hunger and her need to find something that bore fruit or sold meat or baked bread. She folded up the stirring very carefully and put it away at the bottom of her mind. Tearing her eyes from the stormy waves, she began to walk.

  After a moment, she prudently knelt down and gathered up a particularly jewel-encrusted sceptre. You never know, she thought, I might have to ransom things, or bribe folk, or even buy something. September was not prone to stealing, but neither was she entirely stupid. She began to walk up the beach, using the sceptre as a walking stick.

  The going was not easy. Gold is very slippery to walk on and insists on sliding all over the place. She found that her bare foot was actually a bit more suited to the task than the shod one, as she could grasp at the gleaming ground with her toes. Nevertheless, every step set off a little cascade of coins. By afternoon, September thought she had probably stepped on the collective national worth of Finland. Just as this rather grown-up thought crossed her mind, a long, peculiar shadow fell across her path.

  In Omaha, signposts are bright green with white writing, or occasionally white with black writing. September understood those signs and all the things they pointed to. But the signpost before her now was made of pale wind-bleached wood and towered above her: a beautiful carved woman with flowers in her hair, a long goat’s tail winding around her legs, and a solemn expression on her sea-worn face. The deep gold light of the Fairyland sun played on her carefully whittled hair. She had wide, flaring wings, like September’s swimming trophy. The wooden woman had four arms, each outstretched in a different direction, pointing with authority. On the inside of her easterly arm, pointing backward in the direction September had come, someone had carved in deep, elegant letters:

  TO LOSE YOUR WAY

  On the northerly arm, pointing up to the tops of the cliffs, it said:

  TO LOSE YOUR LIFE

  On the southerly arm, pointing out to sea, it said:

  TO LOSE YOUR MIND

  And on the westerly arm, pointing up to a little headland and a dwindling of the golden beach, it said:

  TO LOSE YOUR HEART

  September bit her lip. She certainly didn’t want to lose her life, so the cliffs were right out, even if she thought she could climb them. Losing her mind was not too much better, and besides, there was nothing about with which to fashion a seagoing vessel, unless she wanted to sink promptly on a raft of gold. She had already lost her way, walking for miles in this direction, and anyway, if one’s way is lost one cannot get anywhere, and she definitely wanted to get somewhere, even if she didn’t know where somewhere was. Somewhere mainly involved food and a bed and a fireplace, whereas here had only Fairy gold and a roaring, cold sea.

  Only the heart was left.

  You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out, Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.

  Besides, she could see smoke off in the distance, wafting upward in thin curlicues.

  September ran off toward the spiraling smoke. Behind her, the beautiful four-armed woman who pointed the way closed her eyes and shook her birch-wood head, rueful and knowing.

  “Hello!” called September as she ran, tripping over the last of the gold bricks and sceptres. “Hello!”

  Three figures hunched blackly around a large pot, a cauldron, really—huge and iron and rough. They were dressed very finely: two women in old-fashioned high-collared dresses with bustles, hair drawn back in thick chignons, and a young man in a lovely black suit with tails. But what September chiefly noticed were their hats.

  Any child knows what a witch looks like. The warts are important, yes, the hooked nose, the cruel smile. But it’s the hat that cinches it: pointy and black with a wide rim. Plenty of people have warts and hooked noses and cruel smiles but are not witches at all. Hats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, that her mother would still love her even though she hadn’t waved good-bye. For one day, her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadn’t been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

  These hats were not Halloween witch hats, made out of thin satin or construction paper and spangled with
cheap glitter. They were leather, heavy and old, creased all over, their points slumped to one side, being too majestic and massive to be expected to stand up straight. Old, knotted silver buckles gleamed malevolently on their sides. The brims jutted out, sagging a little, the kind of brim you might expect cowboys to have, the kind that isn’t for show, but to keep out wind and rain and sun. The witches hunched a little under the weight of their hats.

  “Hello?” September said, a little more politely—but only a little.

  “What?” snapped one of the women, looking up from her muttering. She held a beaten black book in one hand, heavily dog-eared.

  “I said, ‘Hello!’”

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  “What?” said September, confused.

  “Are you very dull or very deaf?” said the other woman, flinging an alarmed lizard into the cauldron.

  “Oh!” cried the young man. “A little deaf child! How sweet! We should adopt her and teach her to write symphonies. She’ll be all the rage in town. I’ll buy her a powdered wig and a tricorne!”

  “I’m not deaf,” said September, who was very cross when she was hungry. “Or dull. I said, ‘Hello,’ and you said nothing sensible at all.”

  “Manners, child,” said the woman with the book, her cruel witch’s smile curling up the corners of her lips. “If you haven’t got your manners, you might as well toss it all and become a witch.” She peered at the cauldron and after a moment’s disapproving stare, spat into it. “My name is Hello,” she continued as if nothing had happened. “So you see the confusion. This is my sister Goodbye and our husband, Manythanks.”

  “He’s married to both of you? How odd!” Suddenly their eyes narrowed, and they stood very straight. September hurried to correct herself. “I mean—my name is September. How do you do?”

  “We do perfectly well,” said Goodbye coldly, pinching off one of the black pearl buttons at her throat and tossing it into the brew. “It all works out very nicely, really. My sister and I are very close, and very efficient, and when we were young, it seemed like a great waste of time for us both to go through the tiresome nonsense of courtship and blushing behind curtains and love potions and marriage. So we went through it once, together. We estimate that we saved each other two full years of living. And besides, all witches must keep up a certain level of deviance in their personal lives, or we should be expelled from the union.”

  Hello smiled as demurely as a witch can manage. “We chose Manythanks for his many virtues, and because, besides being a wonderful cook and a superb mathematician, he is also a wairwulf.”

  “Really? A real werewolf? And you turn into a wolf when the moon is full?”

  Manythanks grinned.

  “No, dear,” said Hello, “a wairwulf.” She rolled her r a little, otherwise it seemed quite the same word to September. “It’s quite different. Twenty-seven days a month, my love is a fine wolf, with a great powerful jaw and a thumping tail. During the full moon, he becomes human, as he is now. My husband is the wolf, hers is the man.”

  “That doesn’t seem quite fair,” said September. “She gets a lot more husband.”

  “Oh, we agreed upon it long ago. I don’t like men to talk too much, and she doesn’t like them too much underfoot,” Hello said with a laugh. Goodbye smiled at her husband with a deep fondness.

  “Aren’t you … afraid of the wolf?” asked September, who secretly felt she might get over such a fear, if the wolf would love her and guard her and not get mud on the covers.

  “I’m quite civilized, I promise,” Manythanks sniffed, smiling. “Wairwulves are cultured. We have choirs and charity races and rotary clubs. It’s when we’re human that you must take care.”

  “Now what is it you want, child? As you can see, we’re quite busy.” Goodbye sniffed deeply at the pot.

  Be bold, thought September. An ill-tempered child should be bold. “I … I hoped you might have something for me to eat. I’ve only just gotten here and … well, I’m not lost, because I haven’t any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to.” Even to September that did not sound quite right. “I’d like to get lost, because then I’d know where I was going, you see. But the Green Wind wasn’t terribly clear about what to do once I got here, only what not to do, so getting lost would be making very good headway, all things considered. But I don’t know where I am and the beach was full of garbage, and then it wasn’t—”

  “Fairy gold,” interrupted Manythanks. “It lies about, waiting for a Fairy to pick it up on her way to the human world. You must have had some gnome ointment gobbed on you or you wouldn’t be able to see it at all. Some things any old ravished child can see. Some things are only meant for locals.”

  “Yes, Betsy … she showed me Rupert, but then she threw that stuff at me, too.” September clutched her sceptre a little tighter.

  “She must have taken a shine to you. I assume Rupert was very terrible and frightening? A good scare will knock your eyeballs sideways enough to see a few brownies. But not enough for Fairy gold and other things besides. Else playing tricks on tourists would not be half as fun.” The wairwulf sighed heavily. He had little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “But there’s rationing these days, and gnomestuff is precious. Have you got any left?” Manythanks peered at her eyes and sighed in disappointment. September did not like being examined so closely.

  “I’m very hungry, Sir Wulf,” she whispered hopefully. “Is that soup?”

  “Don’t you dare!” breathed Goodbye. “It’s our spell, and you can’t have any.”

  September brightened a little. This was what she had come for: witches and spells and wairwulves. “What sort of spell?”

  All three looked at her as though she had asked what color a carrot is.

  “We’re witches,” said Hello.

  Manythanks pointed meaningfully at his hat.

  “But witches do all kinds of spells—”

  “That’s sorceresses,” corrected Goodbye.

  “And magic—”

  “That’s wizards,” sighed Hello.

  “And they change people into things—”

  “That’s thaumaturgists,” huffed Manythanks.

  “And make people do things—”

  “Enchantresses,” sneered Goodbye.

  “And they do curses and hexes—”

  “Stregas,” hissed both sisters.

  “And change into owls and cats—”

  “Brujas,” growled Manythanks.

  “Well … what do witches do, then?” September refused to feel foolish. It was hard enough for a human to get into Fairyland. True stories must be nearly impossible to get out.

  “We look into the future,” grinned Goodbye. “And we help it along.”

  “Why do you need lizards and buttons for that? And such nice clothes?”

  “Look who’s a witch now?” mocked Hello, snapping her book shut. “What could you know about it? The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.”

  “We have to dress well,” whispered Goodbye, “or the future will not take us seriously.”

  Manythanks put his hands out to his wives. “She’s just a child. We were once children. She knows nothing of the future. Be kind. We can afford to be kind to this one when there is so much ahead of her.” Manythanks reached into his pocket and took out a fat bundle wrapped in wax. He unwrapped it corner by corner, slowly, as if revealing the vanished dove at the end of a magic trick.

  Inside was a thick slice of deeply red cake, so moist it wet the paper, slathered with rich red icing. It glowed in the slight gloam of the seaside. The wairwulf bent down to her, the black tails of his suit whipping in the wind, and offered it, balanced delicately on one flat hand.

  September tried not to snatch it too fast. She swallowed it in three wulfish bites, so starving was she. But hadn’t the Green Wind said something about eating Fairy food? Well, reasoned September, this isn’t the same thing at all. It’s witch food.

  “I don’t suppose,�
�� gulped September, when the cake had settled in her belly, “that you would tell me what was ahead of me, so I could look out for it.”

  “Hello, I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens,” Goodbye said, laughing. Goodbye laughed a lot.

  Manythanks shook his head. “That’s really more a seer’s business, love—”

  “I’d be happy to show you your future, little one,” interrupted Hello, but her voice was dark. The witch dipped her bare hand into the gurgling, boiling soup of the cauldron. She hauled out a handful of lumpy muck, the color of bruises and jam gone off. She flung it at the earth, where it steamed and wriggled and reeked. All three witches peered at the gob intently. Mankthanks poked at it with a neatly trimmed fingernail. It quivered. The sisters looked meaningfully at one another. September tried to peer as well but did not feel she had the hang of it.

  “My future looks lumpy,” she said uncertainly.

  Goodbye broke ranks with her family and swooped around the great cauldron, kneeling before September. The witch suddenly looked very beautiful, her pale hair swept back, her eyes dark and bright. September did not remember her looking so beautiful before, when she was stirring the pot. But now, Goodbye’s face fairly glowed, her lips perfectly rose-colored, her cheeks high, aristocratic, even blushing a little. “September,” she breathed. Her voice was pure honeywine, warm and deep and sweet. “That’s what you said your name was, yes? I prefer October, myself, but it’s such a pretty name. Your parents must have loved you very much, to give you a name like that. Do you like my name? It’s unusual, like yours.”

  “Y … yes.” September felt odd. She wanted to please Goodbye very much—but more, she wanted Goodbye to like her, to love her even and tell her more about how much they were alike. The witch laughed again. But now it was a long rippling laugh full of notes, almost a song.

  “My sister has no shame at all, September,” Goodbye continued. “That’s a very secret thing she did—right in front of you! You see, the future is a kind of stew, a soup, a vichyssoise of the present and the past. That’s how you get the future: You mix up everything you did today with everything you did yesterday and all the days before and everything anyone you ever met did and anyone they ever met, too. And salt and lizard and pearl and umbrellas and typewriters and a lot of other things I’m not at liberty to tell you, because I took vows, and a witch’s vows have teeth. Magic is funny like that. It’s not a linear thinker. The point is if you mash it all up together and you have a big enough pot and you’re very good at witchcraft, you can wind up with a cauldron full of tomorrow. That lump of greasy, slimy goop is a prophecy, and my sister cast it for you.”