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

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Is she? Really?”

  Penny picked at her golden shoes. All changelings must wear identifying footwear, September remembered, as though from a hundred years ago. “Didn’t like the ’chestra,” Penny mumbled. “Can’t play nothin’.”

  “She’s right. I went to a recital—the poor thing was playing her grummellphone upside down. Fortunate-like, I keep my pockets full of oilcan candy in case I’m in need of bait. I offered her a handful, and she jumped right into my arms. Took to the velos much better—practically born to it, you might say!”

  “But a changeling,” said September, “that’s when a Fairy takes a baby and leaves a Fairy in the crib.”

  “It’s more like … a cultural-exchange program,” Calpurnia said, ripping off a chunk of tire in her teeth. Her eyes were wild and golden, and the starlight was all caught up in her wings. September tried not to stare. “Well, unless they leave a poppet. That’s just a bit of a joke. But usually, we swap them out again when they grow up, and everyone’s the wiser for solid communication between realms. It’s nice. Well, not nice, but fun. I’m not having that for my Penny, though! Princess of the Highwheels, I’ll have her up to be!”

  “I talk to the little velos,” whispered the child. “They say, ‘Penny, where’s your seat?’”

  “I don’t approve of the changeling orchestra. It’s not pretty; it’s just a zoo, really. For rich Fairies—who are in good with Miss Fancy Curls herself—to peer at. Couldn’t bear that for such a sweet thing as Penny. Time was, changelings were the toast of the town, fed with biscuits and new cream and got to dance at the Thistle-Balls in the spring, dance until their shoes wore through and then dance some more—”

  “That doesn’t sound quite nice either…,” said September uncertainly.

  “Well, it’s a certain sight better than being strapped to a grummellphone until your spine grows W-shaped!”

  “Grum’phone sounds like a cow chucking, anyway,” Penny groused.

  “That’s right, chickie-love. And you never have to play one again. Anyway, I don’t approve of chamber music in general. It’s stuck-up on itself. Much prefer the velo horns.”

  “What was her name before?” asked September.

  “That’s private. No one needs to know that but her.”

  “Molly!” piped Penny. “I was a Molly! And I had a Sarah and a Donald, and they were a sister and a brother. And I had a velo of my own! Only it wasn’t wild, and it didn’t talk. It was pink, and it had a little bell and three wheels instead of two. But I didn’t have a Calpurnia, so I must have been sad. I don’t remember, really.”

  They were all silent for a while, staring into the fire as those not possessing tires and spokes have done since the dawn of the world. The Wyverary drifted helplessly to sleep, sitting up. He snored lightly; it sounded like pages turning. Calpurnia scratched under her hat.

  “Where are you lot off to, then? You’ll pardon, you don’t seem like the lifestyle type. Short-term transport, am I right?”

  “The Autumn Provinces,” answered Saturday, his voice echoing low among the snorting, snuffling highwheels as they teemed around their watering hole and spun their spokes in antique mating dances.

  September found she did not want to say why they were going. She delicately wrapped the sash of the smoking jacket around her recovered Spoon. Calpurnia whistled.

  “Ayup, that’s a respectable haul! We ought to make that in a week or two. Hope you brought comestibles of your own!”

  “A week or two!” cried September. “But that’s not fast enough! We need to get there and back in seven days.”

  Penny giggled. “Can’t do it!”

  But Calpurnia was thinking. She scratched her chin with three long brown fingers, then licked them and held them up to the wind. “Aye, but we might … if you think you can handle your alpha. I don’t like to do it, but I’m not so dense as to miss that you’re running hard, and that almost always means there’s a beast behind you.”

  September nodded miserably.

  “Well, a velo is a lazy thing in the end. They don’t like to go as fast as they can go. It suits them just as well to roll along leisurely-like. This is the Great Migration—they’re all homebound, to the spoke nests, to mate and die. Some of them feel the mating drive stronger than others. Some only feel the dying drive. Makes them lag. But if you and I apply a bit of encouragement, they’ll bear down on the road like it’s dinner. And by encouragement I mean whipping of course and I know it’s not civilized and I cringe to think of it but sometimes with steeds it’s all you can do.”

  “Don’t want to whip my velos,” Penny whimpered.

  “They forget, chickie. They’ll all forget.”

  “No they won’t! They’ll whisper, ‘That Penny, she’s naughty and nasty!’”

  “Penny, you don’t have to do a thing,” said Saturday gently, who knew a thing or two about whipping.

  “But Saturday, we’ve so little time…”

  Saturday looked at September for a moment, his expression, as always, unreadable. Then he leaned over and rubbed his cheek against her forehead just as she had done to him. The Marid got up and walked away from the fire into the dark and wavering grass and the volerie of snorting, spinning velocipedes.

  “Is he yours, then?” Calpurnia asked, draining her wooden flask with relish. She spat into her goggles and rubbed them clean with her fingers.

  “Mine? No, he’s his own.”

  Calpurnia grunted doubtfully and squinted at the dark.

  “Miss Farthing, may I ask you a question?”

  “How can I deny such a nicely wrapped request?”

  “Are you helping us because you want to? Because you like us, because you’re friendly and good-hearted? Or because the Marquess wants you to be nice? Because she’ll greenlist you if you’re not?”

  Calpurnia Farthing looked long and deep into September’s eyes. She felt as though she was naked again, as she had been in the bath house. The Fairy’s golden gaze seemed heavy and hot.

  “What makes you think I’m not already greenlisted, girl? Do you think taking a changeling out of the orchestra comes at no price at all?” She tugged on the flaps of her hat. “If it will make you feel better, I can lead you to a pit in the forest or steal your breath or whatever it is I might—and I’m not admitting to anything—have done in my profligate youth. These days, I have my highwheels and my girl to look after. Hardly time to go spoiling the barley for beer. Maybe when I retire, I’ll go back to it. But if it pleases the Marquess to think that her hoofing list is all that’s keeping me in my place, then let her think it. Mainly, I’ll help you because lost little human girls are a hobby of mine.” Penny snuggled up to Calpurnia and laid her head on her lap. The Fairy woman stroked her changeling’s matted hair. September smiled. She liked them. She felt safe with them near.

  Out of the dark, Saturday returned amid much grinding and crushing noises, leading two huge highwheels behind him. They rolled along docilely, each leaning in to nuzzle the other’s handlebars occasionally.

  “They’ll take us as fast as they can—faster, even,” said Saturday firmly. “They’re ready to go home, they don’t want to wait. They’ll leave right now if we want. They’ve drunk their fill.”

  “Hey! Only I talk to them!” said Penny, hands on her little hips.

  Saturday shook his head and crouched next to her, his wild blue hair catching the firelight and blazing orange. “There’s not a creature living that doesn’t have wishes, Penny. And I can always hear wishing, even the very quietest kind.” The Marid stood up. “No whipping,” he said softly, almost embarrassed. “Not ever. Not even if the whipping would make them do your will as fast as blinking. Especially if.”

  Calpurnia Farthing held out her hand. Saturday shook it, thought better, and then kissed it in a very courtly way. “I said I didn’t like to whip anyone. They’d have forgiven me. Probably not you, but me, they would have loved again.”

  “I know,” whispered Saturday.r />
  Calpurnia slapped her thigh. “Let’s be off then. I’ll see you to the edge of the equinox. Leastaways I can do, for such raw wheelers as you and yours.”

  Into the silver-spangled night, two great bicycles rolled silently, bearing them all into the dark, so swift the moon never saw them go. A-Through-L ran beside them, his tongue clamped between his teeth, willing his legs to pump faster.

  “Calpurnia,” said September, when they had left the last ruddy light of the campfire behind them, “I thought Fairies danced in reels together and had big families.”

  “Ayup, we do.”

  “Then why are you alone? And Charlie Crunchcrab, too? Where has everyone gone?”

  Calpurnia turned her face away. Her wings fluttered weakly under their iron chain, and September could see where red hives had boiled up under the metal. It’s the iron, she thought, Fairies are allergic.

  When Calpurnia Farthing, Queen of the Velocipedes, looked out across the flats again, her face was streaked with silent, stubborn tears.

  CHAPTER XI

  THE SATRAP OF AUTUMN

  In Which September Finally Eats Fairy Food, Very Nearly Matriculates, and Discovers the Nature of Autumn

  I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so that everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins, and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two.

  Autumn in Fairyland is all of that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland forest or the morbidity of the Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland.

  And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring highwheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gone gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

  September’s orange dress seemed suddenly drab; the Wyverary’s scarlet skin looked a bit brown and dull. They could not compete—but they laughed all the same, as leaves drifted slowly from trees and fell into their hair. Penny balanced expertly on her highwheel seat and reached up to catch them out of the air, whooping and giggling.

  “Ah, Penny, we’ll not go in, though,” sighed Calpurnia Farthing, raising her goggles to drink in the colors of the forest ahead of them, its shady paths, its mournful brown birds.

  “Oh, why not, Cal? They’re sure to have flapjacks! I’m hungry!”

  “We have to bring in the herd, love. The highwheels’ home is off farther toward the sea, in the oil tides and the nickel pools. We’ll camp, and I’ll sing you ‘The Nobell Lay of the Unicycle and the One-Legged Gyrl’—you like that one! The rest of the velos will catch up, and we’ll take them down to the water’s edge, and I’ll let you have a puff of my pipe.”

  “Can’t we just stay one night?” Penny pleaded, pulling her pigtails.

  Calpurnia shuddered. “It’s best … not to go in if you don’t have doings there. Autumn has a hungry heart—September is the beginning of death.” The Fairy looked at the earnest girl in the orange dress and laughed shortly, realizing what she had said. “Well … Pan forgives all puns. Be glad autumn is brief, Penny, in our familiars. As for you, September, I feel a powerful urge to tell you to be careful, but I think you’ve lead ears for such advice. Just remember that autumn is also called fall, and some falling places are so deep there’s no climbing out.”

  “Good-bye, dragon!” chirped Penny, and A-Through-L, still panting from his great exertion across the plains—three days’ running with barely a break for napping—did not argue with her but tolerated her smacking a kiss on his toes. “Good-bye, Saturday!”

  Calpurnia Farthing brusquely extended her hand to Saturday, but when he moved to shake it, she grabbed it up and kissed his fingers like a lord kissing a lady’s hand. She crouched down to look the boy in the eye. “I have a thing to tell you, Marid.”

  Saturday waited patiently.

  “We’re not kin, but fey to fey, you’ll hark?”

  He nodded. She leaned in to whisper in his ear so that September could not hear.

  But we have special privileges. I shall tell you what Calpurnia Farthing said. “The riddle of the Ravished,” she whispered, “is that they must always go down into the black naked and lonesome. But they cannot come back up into the light alone.”

  The light in the Autumn Provinces is always late afternoon light, the golden, perfect kind that slants and sighs, that casts gentle shadows on the earth.

  Of course, September had no shadow.

  But the shadows of the others walked long and thin through the forest of bloody-bright trees. They were disturbed by their missing compatriot, and pulled away from the place where September’s shadow was not. Shadows have a kind of camaraderie. As folk become friends and have adventures, so, too, do their shadows frolick and quaver in fear and emerge triumphant from battles with enemies’ shadows, all unknown to us, who think we are the movers of our tales. And so the shadow of the Wyverary mourned the loss of his companion, and the shadow of the Marid caught its black mood.

  And yet, none among them could keep from delight as many paths opened up wide and even before them, a bed of crisp brown leaves blowing up in little dervishes and settling again. A few mournful birds sang out. The wind smelled of smoke, and baking bread, and apples. Saturday closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth like a cat to take it all in. A-Through-L fairly skipped.

  “Truly, Autumn is my season,” the scarlet beast chortled. “Spring and Summer and Winter all begin with such late letters! But Autumn and Fall, I have loved best, because they are best to love.”

  The three of them might have taken any path through the forest and come upon little but toadstools and acorns. However, on account of the tendencies of Fairy towns to get quite firmly in one’s way, they did not. They found themselves striding into the herald’s square of a place called Mercurio before they could discuss whether it was nightingales or sparrows that sang so prettily in the woods. That September’s shoes were dark and crafty and most certainly knew their way around the world can have had nothing to do with it, I am sure.

  I wonder if every city in Fairyland is made of some strange thing? thought September. For some mad baker had built the town of Mercurio from loaves of thick, moist bread shingled with sugar and mortared with butter. Heavy eaves of brown crust shaded sweet little dinner-bun doors. Many of the houses were small. September could reach up her hand and tear off a piece of their roofs to eat if she had had a mind. But many more were enormous, towering up high, cakes piled upon cakes, baked dark and fragrant, up past the tops of the trees. The cobbles of the square were muffin-tops, and all the fountains gushed fresh, sweet milk. It was as though the witch who built the gingerbread house in the story had a great number of f
riends and had decided to start up a collective.

  In the center of the square stood a statue of a lady September knew well by now, patted together from cream-colored crumpets. Below her benevolent gaze, a long table groaned with food: apple dumplings and apple tartlets and candied apples and apple chutney in big crystal bowls, huge roasted geese glistening brown and gold, giant potatoes and turnips split and steaming, rum cakes and blackberry pies, sheafs of toffee bundled together like wheat, squash soup in tureens shaped like stars, golden pancakes, slabs of gingerbread, piles of hazelnuts and walnuts, butter domes carved like pine cones, a stupendous broiled boar with a pear in his mouth and parsley in his hoofs. And pumpkin, pumpkin everywhere: orange pumpkin soup bubbling in hollowed-out gourds, pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, frothy pumpkin milk, pumpkin trifles piled up with whipped cream, pumpkin-stuffed quail, and pumpkin pies of every size cooling on the clean tablecloth.

  No one ate at the table or guarded the feast. The Wyverary, the Marid, and the human stared in naked hunger, having had nothing but tire-jerky and axle-whiskey for days. Ell stepped forward but hesitated.

  “Surely, it belongs to someone,” he fretted.

  “Surely,” agreed Saturday.

  “I oughtn’t to have any, anyway,” said September mournfully. “A feast out of nowhere and no one here who might have cooked it or had it cooked for them? That’s Fairy food to be sure.”

  A little man stepped deftly out from behind the pig, as if he had been there all along, though surely they had seen no feet under the table. His nose curved down: long, skinny, hooked like a bird’s beak, the kind meant for fishing beetles out of logs. A pair of square spectacles perched on it, showing large, orange, red-rimmed eyes, as if tired from too much reading. He rubbed his little hands together—they each had only two fingers and a thumb, long and hooked like his nose. His skin was all over deep, baked brown, like good bread. Most odd of all, however, were his clothes: He wore a tweed jacket with velvet elbow patches; a caramel-colored waistcoat; toast-brown plaid trousers; and an oak-leaf ascot, fading from green to brown, full of wispy holes, pinned with an acorn button. Over all this, a white laboratory jacket, gone yellow with age, draped over his hunched shoulders.