There was a moon in September’s bedroom. It shone down on a lush green valley full of long grass and glowing lacy mushrooms and more of those tiny silver flowers growing everywhere. The night sky soared overhead, black and full of stars like city lights, but somehow she knew she was not really outside. A little green hill on one side of the valley peeled back like covers of a delicious soft bed, inviting her to lie down. There was a stone well nearby; its pail sloshed with warm milk. Night birds whistled lullabies—lullabies she knew, involving biplanes of paper and ink. The air hung warm and sleepy all around her. This was Fairyland, some secret, loving heart of Fairyland where she was meant to sleep safely, where the strange wedding of a country and its Queen would take place.
September, though she did not feel at all sure about sleeping inside a hill, crawled into the grass and the silver flowers. She wished she were in the grand billiards room with Ell and Saturday and the rest. But she pulled up the hill over her shoulder. She did not feel squelchy mud on her toes and her knees, but soft, familiar sheets. September rested her head on a pillow of moss and slept the deepest sleep she had known since long before the Green Wind came to her window and showed her how to ride a Leopard.
INTERLUDE
SISTERS OUGHTN’T KEEP SECRETS
In Which Certain Ladies Make Their Own Way
Let us leave September to sleep for a little while. She has earned it—it’s ever so tiring to be suddenly in charge of a story when you have become quite accustomed to the story happening to you, rather than you happening to it. And besides, Kings and Queens are the most trying of people. There are far too many of them about for anyone’s comfort and peace of mind. Why, we have hardly gotten to catch our breath! Let us sit down together for a moment, and I shall pour you a glass of whatever you like best. You may hold my hand if you wish, I don’t mind. I shouldn’t want you to feel alone.
Now that we have made ourselves quite comfortable, I must tell you—we have forgotten about something important. I’m sure you did not mean to, and I certainly did not. It is only that so many exciting things have happened that we did not notice. Let us peer beneath the sofa cushions and beneath the bed for it. Let us jostle the curtains and lift up the tablecloth. We shall get ourselves into trouble if we do not find it. For this tale began in Nebraska, and we have not so much as glanced Omaha-way in ever so long. It is hard to remember to go knocking at a farmhouse door when so many palace doors await—but a door is a door, and a door is always an adventure.
In this particular farmhouse, which I expect you know nearly as well as I do by now, two women were standing in the kitchen. They looked terribly alike, as they always had, even as children. The same dark hair and dark eyes and fierce set of their jaws, just the same as September’s eyes and hair and jaw. Their names were Susan Jane and Margaret. They were sisters. And one of them had just said something very odd indeed. Margaret touched her sister’s cheek gently. She smiled, a smile that startled and teased and danced.
“Listen to me, Susie,” Aunt Margaret whispered, so that only they two could hear. “I know where September is.”
“How could you? Why wouldn’t you tell me at once?” said Susan Jane.
“Listen to me very carefully. Whatever I say, you must believe me, even if it sounds like the most ridiculous thing a person has said in the whole history of the world. Do you promise?”
“Yes,” said September’s mother.
Margaret found herself suddenly very afraid. There were words she had never said aloud to her sister before, or even to anyone in the state of Nebraska or the country of America. Words she knew weren’t safe to say, words more powerful than thunder. Aunt Margaret had led a life filled with secrets, and that is a very hard habit to break, even if you badly want to break it. So for a good while she said nothing, because she could not make herself say the thing she had kept hidden at the bottom of her heart for so long. Finally, she let a long breath out through her nose and wrestled her secret out into the little midnight kitchen.
“September is in a place called Fairyland. It’s very far away, farther away than any place you can think of, and then farther away still. It’s a storybook place. A place that’s met magic and shaken its hand. Now, I know this because … because I’ve been to Fairyland, too. All those times I said I was going to Paris or Turkey or Morocco or Mongolia? I’ve been lying up, down, and all around, Susie. Where would a woman like me get the money to visit Paris? No. I’ve never been to France. Never been to much of anywhere. Except this place. And I think you remember. I think you remember when I was little and I would run off into the woods and you couldn’t find me all day and into the night, even though you knew I’d run into the woods and the woods weren’t all that terribly big to begin with. I think you remember green shadows under the kitchen window, and the sound of a cat far bigger than ours purring at the door.”