Mallow shut her eyes and shook her head. “You can’t wash my anger, Lye. It’s too big. It’ll never come out. Never.”
Maud, Mallow’s shadow, dunked a bucket into the bath and poured the scalding water over her head. “When you are first hurt, your anger is fresh and bright and clean. It is hot and eager to defeat injustice. It makes you sharp and keen and quick, so that you can outrace your hurt and leave it lying on some faraway ground where it happened. This is why children cry so bitterly and scream until their faces go red at the smallest hunger or loneliness. They must get terribly, piercingly angry so that they can get out in front of all the little hurts of being new, or else they will never get free of them. But anger can go off like milk in the icebox. It can go hard and rotting and turn everything around it rotting, too. By the time you have made your peace, your anger has reeked up your whole heart, it’s so gunked up with fuming. That’s why you must wash your anger every now and again, or else you can’t even move an inch.”
September took the bucket from Mallow’s shadow, filled it, and poured it over the girl who had been the Marquess’s head. The cuttlefish colors all ran out of her hair. She wept and was Maud again, blond and young and running away over and over again. The girl who was once the Marquess clung to Lye. September felt she ought to turn away, that such grief was not hers to comfort, and so she did.
She walked over to Aroostook and put her hand on its hood. “What adventures you must have had!” September said, and was very glad the Model A had come through without a dent or a prick in her windshield. The engine warmed under her hand with recognition and tired happiness.
And then September heard Aroostook’s voice in her head, just as she had heard Fizzwilliam the Bathysphere’s voice and Mrs. Frittershank the gas oven’s. It told her all about how it had escaped from Madame Tanaquill’s impound garage and gone wildly wandering through Fairyland, changing whenever some old part of it felt wrong in this new place. It wanted stripes and scales and tangerine scrimshaw and a sunflower steering wheel and great gryphon feet so very badly. It had always had those things, Aroostook told her, even when Mr. Albert first bought it from the lot, it was only that no one else could see them. When September drove it through to Fairyland, it woke up, just as September did the first time she soared across the worlds. It would wake anyone up! And the more the Model A wandered, the more it yearned, the more it began to look on the outside as it had always known it should. Aroostook was a Terrible, Wonderful, Splendid Engine now! It fought a valkyrie and won! That was her helmet, there, in the desert-stone backseat! Be proud of me, September, be proud of your Splendid Engine. Lift my hood and look at what I’ve made of myself! And tell Mr. Albert I’m sorry but I shan’t ever be coming back, ever, ever.
September popped the clasp on the Model A’s hood and raised it up. Inside lay an engine all of glass and wildflowers and stalactites and bright sapphire cogs wrapped round with striped fur, all turning gracefully and sipping from the fuel tank still brimming with Ballast Downbound’s sunshine-gas. It was a cave of wonders. And she understood it, just as she understood how to drive Fizzwilliam and fix Mrs. Frittershank. She understood Aroostook’s workings top to bottom, and so she knew that if she lifted that ring of toadstools there, she would find what Ballast Downbound, the stalwart Klabautermann who had helped her to the Moon, said lay inside ships and people and everything alive: ballast. Anything that ever fascinated the ship, made it sail true, patched it or broke it, anything the ship loved or longed for, anything it could use, B.D. had said. It all just sort of sinks down and jumbles up together into something hot and heavy inside you, and the weight of everything you ever wanted in the world will keep you steady even when the worst winds blow.
She lifted the ring of toadstools and moss and there it was. Small, because Aroostook was only a baby, really. But it lay nestled in the deep of her Splendid Engine—a little tight jumble of lunar rock and strands of Almanack, the Whelk of the Moon’s hair, scraps of September’s black criminal’s silks, a stump of a candle from the Candelabra Desert where they’d been taken captive, a few chicken feathers from Mr. Albert’s prize rooster, all wrapped around her carburetor, beating away like nothing so much as a heart.
CHAPTER XX
THE HEART OF FAIRYLAND
In Which Many Plans Find Their Ends
September stepped out of the House Without Warning and into a clanging, bonging, crashing, blinding riot of color and chaos.
Saturday giggled and swooped out behind her, soaring up to meet the madness, his blue limbs disappearing into the throng.
“I think we’re late,” A-Through-L said, his orange eyes widening to take it all in.
A twisted silver sign arched between two blazing juggler’s torches, its letters spangling in bright, fogless sun:
RUNNYMEDE SQUARE