“Go eat an anchor, you soot-addled pile of bricks!”
It wasn’t bad. She put a nice, solid sneer on it. The Blue Wind clapped her hands in her judge’s frame—she always wanted September to learn to sneer properly. And it did genuinely hurt Cutty’s feelings. But all she got for her efforts was a shower of chimney-bricks floating down to her like flakes of fish food dropped into an aquarium. They mortared themselves neatly into a wall any garden would love to bring home to meet the tomatoes. September and Saturday crouched quickly behind it, but the wall could do nothing more for them than be the best wall it knew how. So it swiveled round and circled them safely, mortaring up its own seam quick as oats.
“I tried!” September insisted. “It’s hard enough to think of something cutting without having to make it something that’s good for battling as well.”
“Go again,” urged Saturday. “He got about twenty in one breath, surely you get more than one.”
“That was the best I had!”
September felt a small hand tug at her recently tattooed wrist. It gave her such a startle she nearly vaulted over the wall and into a gaggle of giants. She turned to look what had her by the arm, her heart bouncing all round her insides like a lost pinball.
A small boy squeezed her hand. A small blue boy. A small blue boy with a topknot and the very beginnings of a long, lovely tattoo that would one day look like curling waves breaking over his shoulder blades. It was Saturday, when he was young and small, a Marid in his natural habitat: out of time and out of order, popping out of the past to pull on her sleeve.
“Hullo, Bear Lady,” said this new Saturday. He was no more than four or five, his little black eyes quick and mischievous. “I saw you be a bear so that’s what I’m going to call you.”
Saturday blinked at his younger self. Then he laughed, really rather loudly, as though he’d only just understood a joke he’d heard years before. “Hiya, Little S,” he said, and tugged affectionately on the boy’s much-shorter topknot.
Four-year-old Saturday hopped up on his own blue feet. “Hiya, Big S! I came to help! I’m top of the food chain when it comes to name-calling.” He put his hands on his hips. “Slights, mockeries, slanders, cheap shots—if you want someone to run home crying, I’m your fish.”
“Saturday!” September gasped. “That’s not you! You wouldn’t curse a storm if it flooded your house!”
The older Marid shrugged, half embarrassed, half proud of the pixyish little hooligan he’d once been. “I wasn’t always quiet, you know. Before I got locked up in a lobster cage and wrestled every day for wishes, I ran wild through the Sea. Marids are all orphans for a while. We live in jumbled-up order—what Papa could keep up? I told you I met my mother on a beach when I was twelve and she was twenty-four. I gave her a dune daisy. But all the versions of me before I turned twelve still had to have something to do while they were waiting to be born. Some of me sold cockleshells, some of me played high-level hopscotch with the narwhals, and some of me picked pockets and ran with the rougher schools of mackerel and mermaids.”
“You said you’d never stolen anything before.”
Saturday laughed. “Well, only some of me has. It wasn’t really a lie. Don’t be angry.” He turned to Little S. “I remember being you. It was fun. Before the Marquess’s nets came down.”
Little S didn’t seem too worried about the nets or cages in his future. A Marid lives all at once, like sparkles of sunlight darting through moving water. Why wear yourself out gnawing on the rind of the future? Right here and now, Little S meant to call some giants nasty names, which was the most fun he could imagine. “Let’s not tell our life stories when we’ve got a pirate to put down and flaming badgers to put out!” he scolded them. “I’m small, but I have a big mouth. You have to, on the mean old Seas! Grammy doesn’t like it when I swear, and she won’t let me drown anyone because it makes a mess, but I can do you at least a hundred bang-up taunts and five or six scorchers without breaking her rules. This is gonna be a day for my scrapbook!” The boy bent down and kissed September’s hand quite gallantly. He deliberately twinkled his eyes at her. “I’m gonna love you some day, Bear Lady, so I wanna get started on impressing you.”
Little S put his foot into a crack in the brick wall. The wall dug out a row of handholds for him and he scrambled up, sticking his nose up over the ledge.