“We would never!” cried Ell, quite offended at the idea.
“When I was a child, my mother took me to see it. She let me stay and play there for days and days. In the turtleshell vaults and the captains’ chests and the safes with the hexacoral locks. The crabs and the starfish and the shipwrecks and the leviathans whispered with me until I fell asleep and my mother carried me home. What I mean to say is, we could go there. I could take you there. It’s the best place to keep a secret. Meridian is not so far from the ocean. I can hear it. I can smell it. The waves are laughing. But I could be wrong! I could be wrong and we could end up so far behind and the Marquess probably has the Heart by now anyway. I don’t want to be wrong. Not when it’s this important.”
September watched Saturday talk. She loved to watch him talk—the way his eyebrows moved when he meant something sincerely, the way his mouth twitched when he knew something he wouldn’t say, the way he tugged on his topknot when he felt too shy to interrupt but so badly wanted to interrupt that he felt his thoughts coming out of the top of his head. Once, he could hardly get through a sentence without apologizing for it. But you can’t stay bashful once you’ve joined the circus, and he’d learned his voice on the high trapeze.
Still, it was easy to forget that Saturday was not simply a human boy with blue skin. That he had never seen a blackboard or a snowplow or an office building, just as she had never seen a shipwreck or a leviathan or a reef. He was far stranger even than Ell or Blunderbuss. For Marids lived in every direction at once, like the currents and eddies of the sea. A Marid might meet his future or his past walking down any street on any morning, whether or not he had had his coffee yet. They had met his older self on the Moon once, and September had felt as though she might shake apart at the sight of Saturday standing beside himself as though nothing at all could be the matter. They were almost the same age, but even when she had been the Spinster, Saturday had always seemed so much older and so much younger than she.
“Your home is near Meridian?” she said softly.
“Well, if you mean the place where I was born, no. Not even a little. Do you know when we got closest? It’s funny. When the Marquess locked Ell and me into the Lonely Gaol, I could hear the seals barking in my old neighborhood. But look—can’t you see? The silver light where the land meets the sky. That’s the ocean. It’s only a few miles. And if we can get to the shore without too much trouble, I can summon a Bathysphere in two clicks of a dolphin’s tongue. But if I’m wrong, it could cost you the Derby and you’ll never be Queen and you’ll vanish again, like all the lights going off.”
Saturday put his blue hand over his mouth. He hadn’t meant to say all that. But he wasn’t sorry he had. So he smiled, to show he was glad of having told the truth.
“I’m just sure I’m wrong all the time,” September said softly, and she put her hand on his knee. “But I always do it anyway. It’s a good plan.”
Death herself could not say no when Saturday smiled.
*
Meridian lies in the warm, wafty lands below the Tropic of Scorpio. Winter snow only comes once every five years, and when it visits, you cannot imagine a more cheerful, polite guest. It brings gifts of ice and Christmas pudding, tidies up after itself without having to be asked, and never overstays its welcome. The moment anyone begins bellyaching about shoveling the walk, Winter has already fetched its hat and coat from the rack in the hall. So the beach that Saturday sought was not a stony, gray, and frozen bluff, though that would have been very romantic in a certain sort of way. They flew through the night, rather than lose time walking over the miles of berry brambles, mango forests, and chartreuse sand dunes. September clung to Ell’s back while Saturday gripped Blunderbuss’s woolly flanks with his knees, and everyone felt very clear on the point that none of this made anyone a steed, it just made them sensible with their resources and admirably efficient people.