“Tell me the rules,” said September, laughing as she leaned her head against the Leopard of Little Breezes’s spotted fur. She felt she would never stop laughing now the Green Wind had come back. Nothing could go too terribly awry when he was about.
“Firstly, dinner is served promptly at six o’clock in the evening in the Moonwort Pavilion,” answered the Green Wind, and drew aside the rich curtain onto a vast and lovely room that looked as though it had been waiting all its life for a motley gang of Changelings alongside a Marid, a gramophone, an outsized red reptile, a Queen, and a woven wombat the size of an overambitious elephant. A great cheer went up from all of them when they saw September, who gasped as Saturday and Ell barreled toward her across the bright floor.
Saturday called: “September! I thought we’d never find you in this place!”
“The Scuttler said you’d come,” trumpeted A-Through-L. “Do you know, he’s a Taxicrab! Our Taxicrab! Do you remember Taxicrabs? I don’t suppose there was much work on the Moon after we finished with it. Oh! You’ve got your jacket back!”
The place felt like the common room of a particularly unhinged college or a particularly well-behaved madhouse. September supposed it had once been a billiards room. Someone had stacked six colorful feather mattresses on a stately old pool table to make a kind of nest—a nest considerately furnished with river rushes, silk batting, and old bones. Just the thing for a Wyvern’s nap. Beneath a bank of green glass windows stood a marvelous brass soaking tub big enough for ten or twelve dolphins and a few of their friends, filled invitingly to the brim with salty ocean water, cold enough for a Marid who had not seen the sea in ever so long. A round, dark table stood in the center of the room, set for one. One plate, one goblet for water and one for wine, one knife, one fork.
“Dinner is served promptly at six o’clock in the Moonwort Pavilion,” said the Green Wind again. “Though we’ll make an exception, just for tonight.”
Saturday held her tight.
Chessboards and checkerboards and brownie backgammon and pooka poker lay on twisted, tangled tables fashioned out of ivy and willow whips and marigolds and fig flowers. And there lay Blunderbuss, the combat wombat, rolling and snorting in a huge tangled burrow along the east wall. Raspberry vines and old eucalyptus leaves and banksia flowers like orange ice cream cones thatched together over a patch of rich, dark dirt as thick as a Persian carpet.
“Oh! Oh!” cried the scrap-yarn wombat, scrabbling in the dirt with both front paws. “I never thought I’d get to dig again! I thought I’d got so big I’d never again know the joy of hiding underneath the brush and waiting for someone startleable to come wandering by! Don’t bother me, darling dimwits! I washed up to go exploring, but now that’s done, I’m gonna get good and dirty again. How’s Queening? Is it marvelous? Do you like it? Have you spat out any good laws yet?”
Hawthorn the troll grinned at his friend. He was sitting on a pistachio flower stool beside a handsome cinnamon-wood desk, which he knew was meant for him, as it said HUMPHREY! in a fancy cursive hand on the left-hand corner. He touched the edges of a stack of fresh notebooks and the points of nine pencils sticking out of an old-fashioned inkwell. He kept pulling them out and smelling them when he thought no one was looking, the wonderful scent of anything freshly sharpened.
“The Zinnias wouldn’t let us leave once they stowed us here,” explained Tamburlaine, who lay dreamily on her back before a sweetstone fireplace of every color, plus two the Briary had invented just for its own use. It took up the whole west wall of the room. “They’re being very strict with everyone—I suppose they don’t want anybody getting strangled in the hallways with all these old devils creeping about.”
Fire roared cheerfully in the hearth and the silver wood-rack groaned with glittering fresh logs brought all the way from the Glass Forest. Beside the fireplace rested a glorious golden cabinet filled to bursting with records of every size and sort. Scratch hopped and clattered like a newborn horse, using his needle to flip through albums with a thrill only a gramophone can know. Tamburlaine laughed, but not cruelly. Her hair was blooming brighter and thicker than it ever had in the human world, not only plum blossoms now but pomegranate and wild lobelia, too. The Leopard of Little Breezes stretched out beside her to soak up the fire.