“I shall be honest,” began September, pulling her emerald smoking jacket tight round her. “I haven’t any little idea what the Heart of Fairyland is or where to find it. I had hoped someone else might.”
Saturday, Ell, and Blunderbuss exchanged guilty looks. “We’ve been whipping our brains against it for days,” the scrap-yarn wombat said. “I’ve only just got to Fairyland so don’t look at me. I hardly know where the broom closet is! But if you ask me, anything important is in the Land of Wom, and if it’s not in the Land of Wom, it’s not awfully important.”
“I don’t know,” said Saturday. “But I know where I would hide something, if I needed to. I would hide it way down deep at the bottom of the sea, snug under the weight of water and safe from all those silly toy monarchs who can only breathe air.”
“Hearts begin with H, Ell,” September said to the Wyverary. “I thought you might know where we ought to go. Where Fairyland hides its heart. Because Saturday’s right. It’s got to be hidden, or else the Derby would be over in a minute and a half.”
The Wyverary fretted and clawed the earth. He wanted so to be useful. “But, September, everything has a heart! Well, mostly everything. I can tell you all about Wyvern hearts, if you want. Or Periwig hearts or Fairy hearts or Marid hearts or even a little about human hearts. But you can’t leave it all up to me! I thought you would know! It sounds like the sort of secret a Queen would learn on the occasion of her coronation, doesn’t it?”
“Just try, Ell,” coaxed Saturday.
The huge red Wyvern cocked his head to one side and spoke slowly, as if reading from a book. “Hearts: hollow pumping organs that move blood throughout the body or any similar thing. The center of a body. The part of a creature that feels and fears and wants and swells with courage. The important bit—the heart of the matter. A suit in a deck of playing cards. The shape of a Valentine with two round parts and one pointy part.”
September grinned. “Cross-reference! Heart begins with H and Fairyland begins with F!”
A-Through-L scrunched up his snout. His long whiskers flicked and snapped. “The Dun Cow Café in Gingham Green serves a drink with melon chunks in it called the Heart of Fairyland. When Cutty Soames was King, he had a grand pirate ship built out of dryad bones and starlight and he called it the Heart of Fairyland. It’s also the name of Queen Mab’s sword, only it’s not really a sword so much as a spindle. Oh, and they used to call the Moon the Heart of Fairyland, in the days before astronomy was born.” The great Wyvern sighed. “September, my father was only a little local Library. Worlds don’t print their secrets in encyclopedias! I wish it were as easy as reading off the population of Pandemonium! I would have read the H’s more carefully if only I’d known.”
“Oh, Ell, don’t worry! You know I can’t bear to see you frown. Goodness, I wish I’d paid more attention to my lessons twice an hour!” She touched his scaly skin. It was so warm, as warm as Summer.
Blunderbuss gnawed at her own whiskers. “What’s that bit about the center of a body?” she said thoughtfully.
“Oh!” exclaimed September. “Could it be that easy? Ell, what’s the exact center of Fairyland? Where I come from, it’s somewhere off the coast of Africa, I think. What’s neither east nor west nor north nor south, but perfectly in the middle? Center begins with C!”
Ell did not even take a moment to consider it. “Why, Meridian, of course!” The Wyverary’s voice grew quiet and full of awe. “The Great Grand Library lives there. The biggest and widest and deepest and oldest Library in all of Fairyland. My great-great-great-greater-than-great-grandmother. She hatched all the other Libraries. Even the Fairyland Municipal Library. Even the Lopsided Library on the Moon. Even my father, Compleat. Fairyland has a Library in the center of it—maybe the Heart is there! Maybe the Grand Library is the Heart! But I suppose we would have a terrible time trying to carry the Grand Library to Runnymede Square. Still, even if the Library doesn’t have the Heart of Fairyland, surely someone, sometime, wrote something about it! A thing is hardly real if no one’s written about it. It’s the writing that makes a thing proper and solid and true in the first place.”
A-Through-L nodded firmly, agreeing with himself. Though the red lizard didn’t know it, he had just spilled the first law of Dry Magic. It is true in our world, too, and this is why the first thing we do when a child gets born is write down her name and her weight and everything else we know about her.
“Does anyone know where we are, exactly? I’ve been trying to pinpoint us, but I can’t tell,” Saturday said. He added quietly to himself: “I can’t smell the sea.” It is very frightening for a Marid when he cannot smell the sea, or hear it, or see it glimmering in the distance. If he cannot smell the sea, he cannot find his way home. “I think those are the Handhills—but then that bit of mist over there might be the Inksop Marshes, except they should be west of the hills…”