Saturday stood in the window of the Briary, leaning against the viny wall, one leg crossed casually over the other. He wore indigo trousers with as much silk to them as a skirt with ghostly pale blue stars peeking out from the folds. He had on turquoise gloves and sapphire-colored boots with crisscrossed icicle laces all the way to the knee. A long, beautiful sky-colored coat hung like a dress from a heavy silver belt at his waist, swirling with aquamarine stitching, trimmed in wild, woolly fur from some impossible, blueberry-colored sheep. His long, glossy black topknot coiled out its full length beneath a cobalt cap rimmed in the same blue shag. The cap had an ice-spike on top of it, like old pictures of the Kaiser. In his hand, the Blue Wind held a little baby puffin, cheeping cheekily at them all.
September remembered the old Green Wind telling her how new Winds were made: The Red Wind had to be defeated in single combat, the Golden Wind had to be beaten in a singing competition—and you had to steal something from the Blue Wind. She laughed. Saturday leapt down from the windowsill and swept her into his arms. They kissed, and it was a new kind of kiss as well, for between them blew all the winds of all the worlds. Green and blue forever.
CHAPTER XXIII
EXEUNT ON A LEOPARD
In Which Nothing Is Over
Once upon a time, a girl named Rebecca grew very tired indeed of her parents’ house, where she washed the same green and blue soup bowls and matching saucers every day, slept under the same patchwork quilt, and played with the same large and surly cat. Because she had been born in July, and because she had a mole on her right earlobe, and because her feet were very small and graceful, the Green Wind took pity on her, and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday. She was dressed in a green smoking jacket, and a green carriage-driver’s cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. It is very cold above the clouds, in the shantytowns where the Six Winds live.
“You seem an ill-tempered and irascible enough child,” said September. “How would you like to come away with me and ride upon the Leopard of Little Breezes, and be delivered to the great sea that borders Fairyland? I shall take you safely all the way there, past a comet, over several stars, and through a very cluttered closet, whereupon I should be happy to deposit you upon the Perverse and Perilous Sea.”
“Oh yes!” breathed Rebecca.