“Tam!” Hawthorn shrieked. “No, Tam! Goldmouth, let her go! You Are to Do as You Are Told!”
But he was already Doing as He Was Told. He grinned at the wooden girl, the Fetch who had grown up fighting not to listen to the Changeling voice inside her that said she was made for causing trouble, for burning down human lives, for wrecking and ruining and never feeling bad about it. She’d loved her mother and her father, her flowers and his books, and because she loved them she’d strapped that voice down to the floor of her heart and never done a single bad thing.
“I broke your leg once,” rumbled Goldmouth. He ran his hand over her head and snapped off every one of her plum blossom branches, letting them fall in splinters to the ground at Hawthorn’s feet. “And now I’m going to eat your heart. Are you ready? You are the first meal of my new reign. And I am going to reign forever.”
“Tam!” Hawthorn screamed, weeping and stabbing at Goldmouth’s calves with Cutty Soames’s cutlass. The clurichaun didn’t pay him the slightest attention. “You can’t, you can’t, she’s my Tam, I need her…”
“Hawthorn,” Tamburlaine called down. “Hawthorn! Tom! Thomas!” She called him by his old human name. “It’s all right, Tom. Remember?” She turned her eyes to his, grinning like a fool who has finally thought of a way to make the King laugh. “I like to wreck things. Nothing feels as good as the moment right before you break something.”
Goldmouth shoved his tattooed fingers into her mouth, just as he had done to Hawthorn the day he dragged them into Fairyland. Just as he had done to countless folk when he ruled these kingdoms, reaching into her, searching for the tiny, hard nut of her soul, his favorite food, his only food. Tamburlaine’s jaw cracked sickeningly, stretching as he scrabbled in her for the core of herself. Just a little farther, she thought as all the timbers of her body groaned and cracked. Just a little farther, you ugly, useless baseball.
Goldmouth moaned in ecstasy as his fingernails scraped against the blue match head in Tamburlaine’s chest, the little talisman of her life his magic could distill out of a person if he could get his fingers far enough into them. He never knew what it would be, the surprise of it was half the point. Tamburlaine sighed and relaxed. She relaxed that part of her that had always struggled against her desire to wreck and ruin and burn and tear apart everything she touched. She gave in to it and it felt like eating a whole cake when she’d only had plain crackers since the day she was born.
Tamburlaine exploded. She went up in blue-gold flames that turned quickly to angry, bloody red. The flames of her engulfed the clurichaun, boiling away his tattoos, his scarlet thread, even the SPALDING on his back sizzled away.
Blunderbuss roared in depthless marsupial grief and bounded to Hawthorn’s side. But together, Tamburlaine and Goldmouth burned to the ground, and when it was over all that remained was a blackened slab of wood shaped like a girl.
And a blue boy, singed out of the sky, lying in a crumpled heap in the center of Runnymede Square.
“Saturday!” It was September’s turn to cry out. A-Through-L folded back his wings and shot earthward. She tumbled off his back to Saturday’s side. The Marid did not move. She touched his forehead, his cheeks, his lips, his shorn-off topknot, the tattoos on his arms so like hers. She whispered all the things a girl can whisper when she bargains with what has already happened: Please wake up, please be all right, please don’t go.
She looked at her love and she understood him. She understood the workings of him like the workings of Fizzwilliam and Mrs. Frittershank and Aroostook. And her mind leapt over itself to fasten everything together. She whistled softly.
The troll’s alphabet came dancing toward her from their hiding places, for when they’d left the House Without Warning, they’d known at once this was no place for nice words. All the copper and tin and wood and silver and glass and bone letterpress type-blocks rolled toward her like kittens who’ve heard their mother coming.
Madame Tanaquill simply could not believe that she was being ignored. It had never happened to her before, not really. She found she hated it.
“If you’re going to make it this easy for me,” she scoffed, and strode toward September with a long, old-fashioned sword in her hand.
“Don’t you go near her,” snarled Mallow. She put herself between the great former Fairy Queene and pointed a long, soup-beaten wooden spoon at her face. “If you take another step, I will take your breath from you and give it to the wind.”