The morning sea rolled in, blue and violet with little sharp eddies of pink and green sizzling along through the breakers. Waves crashed and rippled onto a beach that had only once felt cold, in a nightmare when it was young. Coconut trees bent low with fruit. Thirsthorn thickets crowned high dunes like unkempt golden hair, their fruit sloshing with fresh water. Crystal floatberry bushes grew as close as they could to the surf. The first floatberries grew in the rich cumulus fields of Cloud Cuckoo Land, carefully tended by clockwork falcons. The rest of them are always trying to get back home, twisting and curling drifting up into the air, joyfully drinking up the sea mist. The black sand beneath September’s and Saturday’s toes crumbled so soft and fine it felt like walking on top of a chocolate cake. September could not help reaching down and running her fingers through it.
Saturday bolted into the waves, leaping up in the air, spinning round twice, and plunging into the foam and the tide. He stayed down for ages and ages, far longer than September could, even on her best day at her best swim meet. When he finally came up again, he looked quite different. September realized that in all the time she had known the Marid, she had never once seen him at ease. Not really. Now that he had his ocean around him, every tiny part of him relaxed. He matched the ocean world like one shining button in an endless, flowing blue coat.
“Watch this!” Saturday grinned. He crouched down, balancing on the pads of his bare blue feet. He made a little coaxing, shushing, trilling noise in the back of his throat. “Come on, then,” he said gently, sweetly, as though calling a kitten stuck up in a tree.
The Marid stroked the sand softly—and seashells sprang up under his fingers. Hot-pink scallop shells shone wetly against the jet-black sand. Turquoise cockleshells rose up, too, and lemony-bright hermit crab shells, spiny tangerine conches, little spiraling brindled snail shells, spotted cowrie shells, and big bronze geoduck shells. (A geoduck is a terrifyingly large and opinionated clam that lives both in Fairyland and, curiously, in the part of the world where your intrepid narrator was a child.) Saturday clapped his hands, pleased with himself, for he had felt just the teensiest bit uncertain that it would work. He hadn’t done it in so long.
Saturday pressed his fingertips against the shells like the keys of a very odd piano. His hands flew over them, tapping in some sort of order that September could not guess at. Each shell yelped when he touched it, but their yelps sounded like whale songs and buoy bells bonging away together. When he finished, the waves began to churn and froth and bubble. Something glassy broke the surface, and kept on breaking until it broke free.
“What did I tell you? A Bathysphere, scrubbed up and ready, just for us.”
It was a bathtub.
A burly, walloping bathtub, bronze and deep and wide, with fierce claw feet. The back of the thing rose high up so that you could rest against it, and a curving glass dome closed in the Bathysphere so that dryhairs like September could ride inside and not drown.
“We won’t fit in there,” Blunderbuss said doubtfully. “And anyway I’m made of wool. If I go swimming, I’ll shrink. And I like being big! I’ve gotten used to it already because it is the best and I am also the best so I ought to be big.”
A-Through-L nodded vigorously. “Shrinking is the most dreadful thing,” he said from experience. “It feels like disappearing. You lose yourself, inch by inch. Don’t do it, Buss.”
“We’ll stay,” the scrap-yarn wombat said firmly. “You go paddle about in your supersecret lair of secretness and we’ll just lie out in the sun and discuss Agatha Christie and eat coconuts—ALL THE COCONUTS.”
“Are you certain you’ll be all right?” September said. “I don’t want to leave you! Awful things happen when we’re apart, Ell. What if one of the other racers comes and you have to duel?”
The wombat and the Wyverary leapt up into the sky together, circling, jostling, bonking their heads together, and tumbling back down laughing. The ground shook. “Look at us! We’d knock down the sun if it gave us the side-eye!” Blunderbuss rolled around in the sand, kicking her stubby feet into the air.
Ell shrugged down their traveling bag so that September could pack herself the royal supper, just in case. “Besides, you’re the racer, September. If Tanaquill or Crunchcrab come whinging by, we’ll just wave and have another coconut. If you’re not here, Meridian’s an unoccupied square.”
I have read a number of stories in which the hero strides boldly and bravely into the next adventure, never once turning to look back. September looked back several times. Over her shoulder, over the lip of the Bathysphere, once or twice turning completely around and opening her mouth to speak, to say that she’d thought of some way to cram them all in—but she hadn’t thought of it, and couldn’t say much of anything. This was their only lead. If they didn’t go to Mumkeep Reef, they might as well give up and go see what was playing at the cinema in Pandemonium.
“Please be here when we get back,” September whispered instead.
A-Through-L beamed at her, flaring his crimson wings in the sunshine.
“I am always here when you get back, small fey. Haven’t you learned anything?”
*