Jacquard shrugged. Her eyes were the only part of her that wasn’t smelted out of iron, but delicately etched silver with warm sunstone irises. They glittered like real eyes when she blinked. “Oh, I don’t trouble myself with that sort of thing. I’ve seen so many of you under my tape it would be like bowing to a buttonhole. But I can try to remember if you’d prefer.”
September sighed with relief. “I wouldn’t, at all! Really, I don’t see why anyone does! I didn’t ask them to! Anyway, it seems to me that whenever a person says: Your Majesty, they mean: I would rather drink a glass of gasoline than spend another moment with you.”
Jacquard grinned. Her lips had ribbons carved into them, all tied in smart bows. “Good girl. Perhaps you’ll last longer than the soup course in your supper tonight.”
“I don’t want to last at all. I don’t want to be Queen. I keep telling people that, but no one listens to me. I just want to be left alone.”
Jacquard chuckled. She produced a measuring tape from her metal arm the way a lady might produce a handkerchief from her sleeve. “Young miss, if you didn’t want to be Queen, perhaps you shouldn’t have kept whacking every monarch you met with quite such a large and pointy stick. The trouble with upsetting the applecart is that you’ve got to clean up the fruit when you’re done.”
“How do you know what I’ve done?”
Jacquard wrapped the tape round September’s waist. “If you had to mend the trousers of Fairyland’s masters, you’d learn the name September quick as a stitch, my humble hellion. I’ve heard your name along with the most dreadfully impolite language—you’d blush if I repeated it. I’ve heard it hissed, hollered, snarled, cursed, and flung against the wall. You’re quite famous, I’m afraid. Public menace number one. I’m just fiendishly pleased to meet you! I would shake your hand, but Fairylanders are quite allergic to me. Now, we have a great heaping basket of decisions to make and not much time, so why don’t we buckle down to our task?”
“Why don’t we have much time? If I’m Queen, surely I can take as long as I like to decide whatever it is that needs deciding.”
“The Cantankerous Derby begins in three days’ time. Unless you are much faster and cleverer than you look, your reign will go down in my book as precisely seventy-two hours long. Not the shortest—that honor goes to the Blessed Bonk, a hobgoblin who lasted all of fifteen minutes before falling down a flight of stairs, hitting his head on a china cabinet, and drowning in a mud puddle. The mud puddle turned out to be the very river nymph who succeeded him. But three days is not quite long enough to stretch out in. No, you must choose your regalia quickly. You must get ready for the Race. If the Queen stood at the starting line in her street clothes, I would die of shame.”
“My regalia?” September had to admit her Spinster dress no longer fit her. It was too long in the arm and the hem. But regalia did not sound like the sort of thing you could ride a Wyverary in.
“Oh yes!” cried Jacquard. “A ruler must have regalia, just as a businessman must have his suit and briefcase, just as a soldier must have his rifle and his cap, just as a flying ace must have her aeroplane. How will anyone take you seriously as a Queen if you do not look like one? It is the dearest duty of the Archbishop of the Closet to assist you in choosing all the tools of your trade.” The wrought-iron girl spread her long arms to indicate the vast reaches of the Royal Closet. “Your name, your scepter, your costume, your shoes, and your steed. You have your crown already.” September touched the circle of jeweled keys on her head. She hardly felt its weight anymore.
Jacquard led September to a row of drawers with glass tops, like a jeweler’s case where engagement rings might be kept. Inside lay ribbons of every color and fabric, olive lace and copper silk and crimson damask and orchid rope. Each one had tiny words woven into them, winding round and round the ribbon like lengths of black thread. “Firstly, you must choose a name.”
“My name is September.”