Madame Tanaquill rolled her eyes. “Oh, do shut up.”
The Marquess knelt beside Iago and stroked his ears. He purred in delight. “I do know what it is. Perhaps the rest of you spent your time in the Briary counting your gold or your servants or your toenail clippings, but I did not. Even before my first reign, Queen Mallow’s reign, I was a student of Dry Magic and Dry means books. I know more about Fairyland than any of you could scrape off the floors of your glitter-rotted minds. Even you, Foxy. I’ll meet you all at Mummery with pots of tea and a footbath ready, and when you’ve had a nice rest, you can all go hang. Coming back the first time was so hard, so difficult. But this? This is easy. This is nothing. This is a postmistress’s work. Get the package, deliver it, collect postage fee, which, in this case, is my crown.” She looked straight at September. “You wicked little thief.”
“It’s sweet when humans try to lie,” Crunchcrab sneered. “They’re such amateurs. You’re nothing but a filthy farmer’s daughter and the only thing you know is what to feed a cow. I don’t know why anyone is pretending we don’t know what will happen on Thursday. Tanaquill will win and grind all our faces into the dirt, and we’ll have to call her Your Highness for a thousand years. That is how the world works. The worst wins. I wasn’t bad enough, that’s where I went wrong. And you? You’re not even on the books, Missie Marquess.”
The Marquess’s hair flushed deep cerulean blue, like the underside of the sea. She smiled. It was a smile that grew in the grinning, deeper and wider and kinder and brighter, until September shuddered. She remembered that smile. It froze her bones.
“And you are a Ferryman who abandoned his boat. You ought to be ashamed. Do you even know where she’s anchored? I do. Starfish have chewed halfway through the hull, giant seagulls have pecked out the portholes, and there’s a family of sea lions living in the captain’s cabin. That poor ship. I’ve half a mind to mend her myself.”
Anyone else might have ignored her, or scoffed at her, for it would never list among the immortal lines of villainous banter. But Charles Crunchcrab the First flushed deeply, horror and shame flooding his face. His eyes filled with hot tears. The Ferryman of the Barleybroom said no more.
“Now,” said the Marquess cheerfully, her hair brightening to gold. “I should very much like a drink.”
But as September watched her stare down the First Stone until he put a little sand in a cup and dropped it in front of her, she thought that the Marquess had no better idea than any of them. After all, she knew a little about pretending to be brave when the fear in you has eaten up half your heart.
*
September left the Once and Future Club exhausted, hardly able to stand in her mary janes. The Green Wind was not waiting to guide her to her bedroom, nor the Stoat of Arms nor Saturday nor A-Through-L nor even the stuffed wombat. She stood alone in the Briary. All she could hear was its quiet, steady blooming.
“Sleep, Briary,” she whispered. “Show me where I sleep.”
For a moment, the hallway remained a hallway, long and green and silent. Then, a slender row of pale silver flowers sprang up beneath her feet. It whirled forward, each blossom sprouting as September put her foot to it. She laughed and ran along the silver path, her tiredness all gone, racing the flowers down staircases and round pillars, under buttresses and through doors wide and small. Finally, the silver blossoms came up short in a wine cellar deep within the Briary, at the edge of a trapdoor with a bronze pull-ring bolted into it. September felt very uncertain that this was meant to be her bedroom, but the flowers seemed insistent, waving back and forth all round the door in the floor.
“All right, all right!” said September, and pulled up the ring. She saw nothing inside but a soft half-light. She thought, for a moment, of climbing through all the dark doors of Fairyland Below until she found a Minotaur. She thought of wriggling into the hole at the top of Moonkin Hill. September took a breath. “All of that turned out reasonably well, I suppose!” And she crawled down into the light, toes pointed like a dancing girl’s.