Madame Tanaquill tried to dazzle the girl who didn’t even know she’d chosen a boy’s title with her eyes. It was one of her favorite tricks with humans. She flared her wide, ultraviolet wings and made her eyes into planets of joy and despair in which any human mind would wander, mad, forever.
“No,” Mallow said simply. It had always been her best magic. Her first magic. The No filled her up with its heat so completely that it left no room for anything else, let alone a Fairy’s bedroom eyes. Tanaquill ignored her. She slapped Good Queen Mallow hard in the face, so hard her nails drew blood. “No,” Mallow said. Tanaquill drew a slender sword. But Mallow waved her Spoon, and it melted away like ice. “No.”
September stroked Saturday’s scorched brow, the Saturday who did not remember her, even a little, whose memory had been cut away by terrible teeth. “I can fix it,” September said.
“How can you fix it?” Ell whispered. “Oh, I didn’t meant to say you couldn’t, it’s only … how?”
September knuckled away tears from her eyes. She looked up into the warm orange eyes of the first creature in Fairyland who ever loved her.
“I think it’s because I called myself the Engineer. When they said I had to choose a title. I can see how things work—how everything works. And I saw how Aroostook worked, the ballast down inside it. And I can see how Saturday works, all the places he’s broken. And Ell … I know what the Heart of Fairyland is.”
She coaxed the type-blocks up onto Saturday’s skin, smoothing them all right side up with her careful hands. September drew the Greatvole’s whisker and held it at its tip like a long, black, crystal pen.
“The Heart of Fairyland is a story,” she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of the rightness of it that she thought she might faint. “It’s a story that gets told over and over, a million different ways, with a million different boys and girls and Marids and wombats and Wyveraries and trolls. It’s a story that keeps all of us moving through the world like blood through a body. Like a race. Like a hunt. Like a Cantankerous Derby. We were always making the Heart. Under the sea and in the Land of Wom and in the Great Grand Library. And what do you need to make a story? What has Fairyland got where Aroostook has its ballast?” September smiled up at all. “You need a pen”—she waved the whisker—“you need words and letters and capitals and lowercases.” The letter blocks shivered with the pleasure of being needed. “You need paper.” She touched Saturday’s blue chest with her shaking, exhausted fingers. A large, bold letter S hopped up to cover the spot. “And you need ink.”
September pricked her tattooed arm with the point of the Greatvole’s whisker. She cut deep, so there would be enough—but she needn’t have worried. The cuttlefish’s ink, black and green and blue and gold, flowed out of her arm, out of her wrist and her elbow and her shoulder and her bicep, out of every part of her that Sepia Siphuncle had painted. The ink flowed down over the crystal whisker and dripped over the letter blocks and onto Saturday’s blue skin. But still, he did not wake.
“It’s not working,” fretted Ell.
“Someone still has to tell the story, silly,” September said. She traced the whisker over and around the letters and whispered their story to Saturday.
“Once upon a time, there was a girl from very far away and a boy who lived every which way at once…”
The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people—and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety. I have told you September’s every little secret. I have never held back even once. But I will let her have this last one, for you have heard already how the girl from very far away found a boy in a cage, and what they did after.
When September finished her tale, she laid her head on Saturday’s chest. The ink smeared and ran and turned her face quite blue. She couldn’t breathe or move. I’m right, I know I’m right—aren’t I?
She felt a cold, hard hand on her head. As cold and hard as stones in the sea.
“Hullo, September,” whispered Saturday. “I thought you’d never come back.”
September sucked in her breath so fast she choked. She held her Marid as tight as anything. “Saturday! Oh, Saturday! I missed you so!”
“HELLO!” bellowed the First Stone of Fairyland, late to Mummery, sitting against a marionette and watching everything with great interest.
“Who cares?” Madame Tanaquill snorted. “The rest of us are still here, you know—the ones who didn’t wander around like morons with a seventh grader’s badge on their coats.”
“No, they’re not,” September whispered. “No one’s here but us.” She kissed Saturday just as though it was her First Kiss. And he kissed her back like it was his last.
“We won,” the Marid said to her, touching her face all over now that he knew it so well again. “We won, so you’ll stay.”