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

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Then why tell all that furniture to kill me?”

  The Marquess cocked her head to one side. Her black hat bobbed merrily.

  “September, I had to make it look real. Otherwise, you would have suspected that you were doing my work all along. Oh, just everyone has told you what a wicked beast I am—you’re quite biased against me. And more importantly, you had to see how dangerous Fairyland can be. How quickly these darling little creatures with their funny habits can turn on you and destroy you. Otherwise, you might not do my work. I am not really wicked at all. They are nasty and cruel. But I can be so terribly kind, September.”

  September looked into the Marquess’s shining blue eyes. “But I would have. To save my friends. I would have done whatever you asked.”

  “No,” answered the Marquess ruefully. “Not this. Not even to save them. Believe me, September, I have thought on these matters a great deal. I have made calculations that would beggar your soul. What is it that villains always say at the end of stories? ‘You and I are more alike than you think.’ Well”—the Marquess took September’s hand in hers and very gently kissed it—“we are. Oh, how alike we are! I feel very warmly toward you, and I only want to protect you, as I wish someone had protected me. Come, September, look out the window with me. It’s not a difficult thing. A show of faith, let’s call it.”

  September allowed herself to be led to one of the sheer crystal walls. Gleam followed silently, flashing with anxiety. Below them, the sea crashed away, sending up spray and spume. The Marquess held up her hand—and the sea calmed, drew aside, all in a moment. The sky cleared in a widening circle, like an iris. Stars beamed through—and half a moon. And where the sea had been were huge stone shapes in the water, turning at a creeping pace. Click. The shapes had wide square teeth like gears. Gears of ancient stone, enormous and inexorable. Click. They turned against one another. Click.

  “What are they?” September asked.

  “The Gears of the World. We are within the secret heart of Fairyland, September. The current that moves through the sea begins and ends here. And more than that—so much more.”

  The Marquess raised her hand again, and the sea drew farther away. September watched as the stone gears ground into something else—iron gears, more deliberately made, sharper.

  “This is the place where your world joins ours. Where the human world touches Fairyland, just for a moment. This place is all that allows folk to travel—only occasionally and by strange roads—from one place to another. The touch of the iron makes Fairies weaker, so that they cannot storm over your world and subdue it. The stone keeps humans at bay. But some can pass through. Without that brief kiss of iron and stone, the worlds would uncouple and separate entirely. No one would ever get trapped here or in the human world. No child could be stolen and replaced with a goblin, or worse, replaced with nothing and her mother left to mourn. No one would ever get lost.”

  “Oh…”

  “You see, don’t you? What you have to do.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But it is the right thing. Take up thy mother’s sword, September, the only girl in Fairyland who could have pulled a wrench from that casket, whose mother could have known and loved machines, engines, tools. As soon as you told me about her, I knew, I just knew that we were meant to find one another, here, at the end of everything. Uncouple the worlds, September. Tear them apart so that no one can ever again drag a poor, lost child across the boundaries and abandon them here without a friend in the world.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  CLOCKS

  In Which All Is Revealed

  “Surely the Wrench is too small,” said September.

  “I told you,” coaxed the Marquess, her hair full of storm colors, violet and gray. “It is not a wrench. It is a sword, impossibly old. It will be whatever size you need it to be.”

  “But … then there would be no more adventures. No more Fairies in my world to tell stories about, and no humans here to know what a Wyvern looks like. No more fairy tales at all, for where would they come from?”

  “No more Fairies making mischief, spoiling beer and cream, stealing children, eating souls. No more humans meddling with Fairyland, mucking up its politics and tracking mud all over the floor.”

  “And I should not ever be able to go home.”

  “That is why I had to go to such lengths to bring you here, to show you Fairyland as it really is. It is a sacrifice I ask of you, September. A very great one, I know. But you must do it, for all the other children to come.” The Marquess’s hair seeped indigo. “Besides, it shouldn’t be that hard. You didn’t even wave good-bye to your father, shooting at people in some awful battlefield! You didn’t think of your mother at all! You don’t want to go home, not really. Stay here and play with me. I will let your friends free, and we can all dance together through the snow and the storm. I know such wonderful games.”

  September might have cried a week ago, ashamed at how she had treated her mother and father. But she was wrung dry of tears now.

  “I won’t,” she said firmly. “It was wrong of me not to say good-bye. That does not mean it is right to put an end to everything. How awful it would be to say that no other child should ever get to see what I have seen. To ride on a Wyvern and a highwheel, to meet a witch.”

  The Marquess frowned. Her hair shivered into a frosty white. “I suspected you would say that. You are selfish, after all, and heartless, like all children. But allow me to make my argument?”

  Iago, the Panther of Rough Storms, appeared silently at her side as though he had always been there. He purred.

  September, her skin finally and slowly warming in the hall, allowed the Marquess to pull her onto Iago’s back, where an onyx saddle bore her up. She could not help but think of the Leopard and the Green Wind as the monarch of Fairyland settled in behind her and put her arms around September’s waist.

  Gleam hesitated:

  She will lie to you.

  “I know,” September sighed. “But how else will Saturday see the sun again? Or Ell?”

  I am one hundred and twelve years old.

  That is a long time. I know her—

  With a singing snap, a silver arrow pierced Gleam’s papery skin, and she dropped to the floor in mid-sentence. September whirled in the saddle. The Marquess tucked her iceleaf bow behind her back, where it disappeared like vapor, the thorny branch of it still quivering slightly as it dissolved.

  “Old folk are so terribly annoying, don’t you agree? Always trying to spoil our fun with their incessant babbling about bygone days!”

  Before September could protest, Iago leapt into the air, soaring up into the towers of the Lonely Gaol, leaving the ruin of a paper lantern behind them.

  A pale-green hand crept out of the top of the lantern, covered with blood. After a while, it was still.

  Everywhere she looked, September was surrounded by clocks. In a tiny room at the top of a bulbous tower, the Marquess, Iago, and September crowded in, nearly squeezed out by the volume of clocks: grandfather clocks and bedside alarm clocks and dear little Swiss cuckoo clocks with golden birds in them, pocket watches and pendulum clocks and water clocks and sundials. The ticking went on and on, like heartbeats. Under each clock was a little brass plaque, and on each plaque was a name. September did not recognize any of them.

  “This is a very secret place, September. And a very sad one. Each of these clocks belongs to a child who has come to Fairyland. When it chimes midnight, the child is sent home—all in a huff, whether she asked to go or not! Some clocks run fast, so fast a boy might dwell in Fairyland for no more than an hour. He wakes up, and what a lovely dream he had! Some run slow, and a girl might spend her whole life in Fairyland, years upon years, until she is snapped horribly back home to mourn her loss for the rest of her days. You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run—and always faster than you think.”

  The Marquess leaned forward, her hair shining redder than any apple. She smoothed th
e dust from a plaque under a particular clock: a milky pink-gold one, cut out of a whole, enormous pearl. Its hands stood golden and motionless at ten minutes to midnight.

  The plaque beneath the clock read, SEPTEMBER.

  “You see?” crooned the Marquess. “You have so little time left. Just enough to fly down to the seaside with Iago and do as I ask. Or else you will be snatched back, and your friends stuck here with me. I promise, I will take out my frustration upon them. Don’t be stubborn! Just a little turn of your Wrench, and all will be well. You can eat lemon ices and ride highwheels to your heart’s content, and your boys safe beside you.”

  September touched the face of the pearly clock. She picked it up, marveling at it. She was so tired. All she wanted was to sleep, and wake up to steaming cocoa, then sleep again. If Saturday and Ell were safe, she could sleep. She tried not to think about Gleam. It would be wonderful, really, to live in Fairyland forever. Isn’t that what anyone would wish for? Isn’t that what she herself had wished for, so often? To fly and leap and know magic and eat Gagana’s Eggs and meet Fairies? September closed her eyes: She saw her mother there, on the backs of her eyelids. Crying on the edge of her bed. Because September had not left a note. Had not even waved good-bye.

  When she opened them again, her eyes fell on the little brass plaque: SEPTEMBER. Furtively, so that the Marquess might miss her doing it, she glanced at the other plaques. They said things like, GREGORY ANTONIO BELLANCA and HARRIET MARIE SEAGRAVES and DIANA PENELOPE KINCAID. But hers just said, SEPTEMBER. And didn’t it look a little tacked on? Was there—possibly—just the shadow of something else behind it? September bent her head and picked at the bottom corner of the plaque with her thumb.

  “What are you doing?” the Marquess said sharply.

  September ignored her. The plaque gave a little—she pried it out with her fingernails. It clattered to the floor. Behind it was a much older plaque, gone green with verdigris. It read,

  MAUD ELIZABETH SMYTHE.

  “True names,” said September wonderingly. “These are all true names. Like, when your parents call you to dinner and you don’t come, and they call again but you still don’t come, and they call you by all your names together, and then, of course, you have to come, and right quick. Because true names have power, like Lye said. But I never told anyone my true name. The Green Wind told me not to. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I do now.” September looked up. Iago watched her with his round, calm eyes. He flicked his gaze toward the Marquess, and all of the sudden September knew; she knew it, though she could not say, not exactly, how she could possibly have known. “This is your clock!” she cried, brandishing it. “And it’s stopped!”

  The Marquess’s hair went black with rage. Her face flushed and Iago growled under his breath. But finally, she gave out a long sigh and simply took off her hat. She lay it gently on the gable of a cuckoo clock. She ran her hands through her hair—it faded to a plain, dull blond. She ran her hands over her dress—it became a gray farmer’s daughter’s dress with old yellow lace at the collar.

  “I dreamed about you!” cried September.

  “We are alike, I said. It would break your heart, September, how alike we are. This is what I looked like when I was twelve and lived on my father’s farm. We grew more tomatoes than any other farm in Ontario. Just acres of them. But we weren’t rich. My father drank most anything we earned. My mother was a seamstress—she took in all the mending from the neighbors. She died when I was eight, and I took up the mending after that, so that I could eat some and have a Sunday dress after the harvest was in and the whiskey house closed down. I always smelled like tomatoes. And then one day, when I couldn’t bear the mules and the chores and the horrid, horrid tomatoes any longer, I hid in the attic until my father gave up looking for me and went to work the fields with his hands. I had a splendid day up there, rooting around among all the old things my mother had left behind, and her mother before that. Of course, you can imagine what happened. There was an old armoire, covered in a drop cloth. I pulled down the cloth, and when I opened the door of the armoire, it was so deep and dark in there that I couldn’t see a thing. So I climbed inside. And the door closed so fast behind me. And I kept walking, until somehow the sun was shining again and I was standing in a field of the greenest grass and the prettiest red flowers you ever saw. And right there in front of me was a Leopard, as big as life.” The Marquess’s eyes filled with tears. “I Stumbled, September, into Fairyland. I didn’t know what I’d done, only that it was so beautiful, and the wind was so sweet, and there were no tomatoes anywhere. I certainly didn’t know I had a clock. I had such adventures, oh, so many! I grew up a bit and was so glad to grow up a bit and not be small and gray any longer. I learned such things—I met a young sorcerer with funny old wolf ears, and he let me read all of his books. Can you imagine? A farmer’s daughter, being allowed to sit and read all day with no one to bother her? I thought I would die with the pleasure of it. And every day, the sorcerer would ask my name, but I was ashamed to tell him. Maud is so ugly and plain, and everyone here was named something marvelous. But one day, we were working the garden. The sorcerer was showing me how to harvest a particular root to make a kind of candy that might—if you boiled it just right—turn your hair all manner of colors.” The Marquess looked up at September, tears streaking her face. She spread out her hands, trembling. “I took his hand in mine, and I said, ‘You can call me Mallow.’”

  September’s mouth dropped open.

  “The days went by like dreams, September. Before I knew it, I had a sword and I’d faced down King Goldmouth and his army of clouds, and I was Queen. I ruled long and well and wisely. Anyone will tell you. I married my sorcerer. We were happy. Fairyland prospered, and I could hardly remember what a tomato was anymore. My Leopard played at my side. I discovered, by and by, that I was with child. I had not told my sorcerer yet. I was enjoying my secret, lying on the broad lawn outside my palace and drifting off into sleep, my head propped up on my Leopard’s flank.

  “I think, well, when I remember it now, I think I can remember the tick. The last tick of my clock. With one awful ticking, I was swept out of Fairyland as though I had never been there. I woke up in my father’s house, curled up inside the armoire, as though no time at all had passed. No Leopard. No sorcerer. No child. I was twelve again and hungry, and my father was just getting home from his day’s work. He bellowed up to me, his voice thick with liquor. But oh, how I remembered it all! I remembered it fiercely, my whole life in Fairyland, taken away in an instant! Because a clock ran out! September, surely, you can feel in your bones the unfairness of it! The loss! I screamed in the armoire. I kicked the wooden walls in, trying to get back. I cried as though I were dying. My father found me and gave me a good thrashing for sneaking around where I oughtn’t. I tasted blood in my mouth.”

  The Marquess sank to her knees. Iago pressed his silky black head against her cheek.

  “How … how did you get back?” September said softly.

  “I clawed my way back, September. I would have broken the world open to crawl back in. I searched every scrap of furniture in that attic for another way. But the armoire was just an armoire, and the closet just a closet, and the jewelry box just a jewelry box. I read newspapers ravenously, looking for missing children, begging my father to take me to the places where they’d vanished. He refused. He got a new wife, and she sent me away to school, to be rid of me. I didn’t care—I was glad to be rid of them! My new school was old and creaky, with dusty corners and drafty halls. Just the sort of place that might conceal a door to Fairyland in a story. And one morning, just walking to geometry class, I took one step on those dirty cobblestones and took the next one in a broad golden field full of glowerwheat. It was a hard passage—blood shot out of my nose, and I think I probably fainted. We aren’t meant to come that way, so harshly. But it was the only way.”

  “What was?” September was almost afraid to know.

  “The clock, September. The
clock is all. It is the only arbiter. What I needed was a man on the inside. Someone in Fairyland, a friend. Not a husband or a Leopard. Someone whose loyalty and love for me was greater than any law, any boundary, stronger than blood or reason or cat or man. Someone I had made with my own hands, who loved only me, who could not bear to be parted from me.”

  “Lye!”

  “Yes, Lye, my poor golem. She risked her whole being to come here, where the water is relentless and wore so much of her away. She battled the guards, who in those days were bear-wights, and gained entrance to this little room. She set my clock going backward and pulled me back into this world by the scruff of my neck. I didn’t know that then. It was only later, when I came here myself, that I discovered her tracks. Standing in her soapy footprints, I stopped my clock, so that it could never snatch me back out of my own life again. I was a child once more, but I was home. Time is a mystery here. Only a year back home, and everyone I knew here in my life as Mallow had grown old or died. No one remembered what I looked like as a child. I told them I’d killed her. I tore down her banners and broke her throne. And so I had my revenge.”

  “But why? You could have ruled well again and been loved! Maybe your time was done, maybe defeating King Goldmouth and restoring Fairyland was your destiny, and when it was finished…”

  The Marquess grimaced. She ran her hands back over her hair—the black curls returned. She ran her hands over her dress—black crinoline flowed over her, and lace, and jewels. She placed her hat firmly back on her head and dried her eyes.

  “I am not a toy, September! Fairyland cannot just cast me aside when it’s finished playing with me! If this place could steal my life from me, well, I, too, can steal. I know how the world works—the real world. I brought it all back with me—taxes and customs and laws and the Greenlist. If they wanted to just drop me back in the human world, I can drop the human world into theirs, every bit of it. I punished them all! I bound down their wings, and I set the lions on them if they squeaked about it. I made Fairyland nice for the children who come over the gears, I made it safe. I did it for every child before me who had a life here, who was happy here! Don’t you see, September? No one should have to go back. Not ever. We can fix this world, you and I. Uncouple the gears and save us both! Let this be a place where no one has to be dragged home, screaming, to a field full of tomatoes and a father’s fists!”