Next came the Once and Future Club, sauntering, swaggering, and staggering, for few of them had anything polite to say to a good night’s sleep. Each of them came well equipped for racing: Madame Tanaquill led the way, riding a magnificent horse with eight legs, a mane of rainbow light, and two vicious, glowing red coals where a usual horse’s kind dark eyes would be. Pinecrack followed by himself, as he felt quite capable of achieving top moose-speeds on his own four legs. The Knight Quotidian drove a sensible four-wing family dragon. Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, flew an enormous Roc named Wenceslas down from the Herringbone Heights into the Plaited Plaza. A Roc is a great enormous carnivorous bird, bigger than a humpback whale and the color of the sun. Now, you might think a Roc flies faster than a raven, and that was why Hushnow chose one for his mount. But it is not so—Rocs are quite slow as fliers go, somewhere between a bit of dandelion fluff and a paper airplane of middling quality. Hushnow, the Ancient and Demented Raven Lord, was really and truly fabulously demented, much more demented than ancient, and he thought the Roc was a wonderful plan.
Cutty Soames strutted in in a captain’s tricorn hat, seven gold earrings in each ear, and the polished wooden wheel of his ship, the H.M.S. Chimbley’s Revenge. She waited at anchor on the Barleybroom docks. The Headmistress sat in a prim chair perched atop a magnificent brass school bell that bounced up and down on its clapper. She whacked her bell smartly with a riding crop. It whinnied, a little fearful trill of a ring. Charlie Crunchcrab rode in on a sea-goat with frightful horns like ships’ anchors. He glared furiously at September and refused to speak to her. More came, thick and fast, on horses and gryphons and giant platypi, in carriages that blinked out in one place and reappeared in another, in complicated machines September did not think anyone could get out of without a team of engineers or possibly doctors. And then came the heavyweights, riding nothing because nothing could carry them: Thrum, the Rex Tyrannosaur, the First Stone, and Goldmouth the Clurichaun, his tattoos gleaming black in the sun, his magenta eyes burning with fury that he should have to lower himself to a footrace with the rest of them.
A sharp pain snaked up through September’s right foot. She lifted her shoe; a tiny creature glared up at her with hatred, no bigger than a stone in a ring. She sat atop a hazelnut carriage roofed in grasshopper wings, whose wheel-spokes were long, slender spiders’ legs. Whatever drew the carriage was so small September could not see them at all—the harnesses floated free, as thin as cobwebs, strung between empty collars made of bright, pale moonbeams. The carriage-driver was a lady caught halfway between beautiful and terrifying—her face so gaunt, her hair so wild, and her eyes so huge that she looked like an electrified dragonfly who had once asked to be made into a human girl for Christmas and almost, almost gotten her wish. She snapped a whip made of cricket’s bone; its filmy lash cracked against nothing, yet the hazelnut flew forward. It barreled toward Madame Tanaquill, who was feeding her horse a lump of fire and making what she considered an extremely fine joke to Curdleblood, the Dastard of Darkness, who simply refused to understand it. He forced a smile and patted his mount, which appeared to be a long streak of the color black and nothing more. But when Tanaquill saw the little nut-coach and its fierce-faced driver, she went quite pale. Her hand fluttered to her iron necklace and the welt beneath it. Tears filled her eyes. And the Prime Minister of all of Fairyland dropped to one knee. She bowed her head, and then covered her face with her hands, letting the other knee fall to the ground, until she was simply crying on her knees like a little child.
“Queen Mab,” she whispered.
September suddenly felt very self-conscious, standing on her own two feet. She knew that she oughtn’t bow herself, being Queen, at least for the next little while. But she felt terribly cold and uncertain to see Madame Tanaquill shiver as she extended her long finger for Queen Mab to whip mercilessly. The Prime Minister shuddered; September shuddered herself.
She should have thought to bring a steed. Surely, the Briary had heaps of them. But Ell and Saturday had always been everything she needed. She could hardly run like Pinecrack or whip a bell into fighting shape. Ell could fly, but so could half the other racers—and it’s very hard to balance on a Wyverary’s back when he dashes through the clouds. But September needn’t have worried. I would never abandon her so. I have been waiting for ages and ages to give her my coronation present—and here it comes, huff-puffing across the patchwork cobblestones with a burlap sack that reads AROOSTOOK POTATO COMPANY over its spare wheel.
Aroostook the Model A Ford sped blithely toward September and Saturday, almost preening in the sunshine. Mr. Albert would never have recognized his old farm car now—Aroostook’s windows had all turned to stained glass, its wheel to a hard, bright green sunflower, its dash to tangerine scrimshaw, its levers to thin golden arms ending in cuff links and balled fists, its squeeze horn to a cobalt-and-white-striped phonograph bell. Since September had seen it last, the Model A had become even wilder. Not a trace of its old greenish-black paint remained. Now Aroostook’s doors and wheel wells were covered in brilliant feathers and striped pelts. Its wheels had outgrown the need for tires and wrapped themselves up in storm clouds—all except for the spare, which, beneath the old burlap sack, was a long, thick cat’s tail, curled up around itself in satisfaction.