September frowned. All the while the Greatvole had been complaining, she’d been carefully, quietly fetching her flapjacks and cordial from their luggage. She paused with flask and plate in hand. “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. Whatever Thrum was doing at that moment, she felt sure it had nothing to do with bone-beer. “You’ve been asleep for a thousand years.” It seemed safer on the whole not to mention to a resentful behemoth that Thrum had come back from the dead along with everyone else and was therefore huntable and findable, so long as he had not had any dueling mishaps yet.
“Perhaps,” September said, hoping to sound both polite and commanding, “you might take us to the Worsted Wood? We need to move quickly, or I wouldn’t ask. You seem terribly fast and strong. If you took us under the ground instead of over it, we might make it in time to win the Cantankerous Derby.”
The Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern slowed and stopped. This took many miles, for anything as large as a Greatvole cannot go from top volespeed to zero in less than seven leagues.
“Oh,” Brunhilda said, her voice clogged up with sorrow. “A thousand years? Why didn’t anyone wake me? I suppose erosion will have spoiled my best work by now. The sea and the wind and the heat and the snow will have taken the edges off my crags and the colors off my canyons. A thousand years is a long time to go without basic maintenance. I meant to keep it all tidy and fresh, once I’d finished. I meant to finish.”
September did not think. She acted, and thought about it later, and had a little quiver, because the Greatvole could have eaten her and everyone she loved and asked for dessert. She tapped Ell’s knee. The Wyverary flew her gently down from the skull of the Greatvole, with Blunderbuss and Saturday following behind. She steadied her heart and strode up to the salt-jeweled beast’s huge face. You can stop up hurts, if you are Queen, she thought, and her heart beat madly in her chest.
“Brunhilda, Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern, I am September, the Engineer. Which is to say, Queen of Fairyland and all Her Kingdoms. It is my duty as Queen to send you right back to sleep with no supper. In fact, I am the only ruler of Fairyland in a thousand years to fail to keep you conked out. And I have to get you back to bed, because otherwise you’re going to start erasing villages again, and I daresay villages like to stay where they’re put.”
The Greatvole started to growl again, but September held up her hands. Her eyes shone with the strange feeling of knowing the right thing to do. If she’d only known it, she looked very like a certain Changeling troll had done on a playground in Chicago, talking to a boy who wanted very much to hit him.
“Brunhilda, thank you,” September said, and into her voice she put all the warmth she’d ever heard from her mother and her father and Ell and Saturday and Aunt Margaret and Aubergine and the Whelk of the Moon. “Fairyland is the most beautiful place anyone could want. I love it awfully. I love the Candelabra Desert and the Worsted Wood and the Perverse and Perilous Sea and every island in it. I love the Barleybroom and Pandemonium and the way you can follow a mountain road all the way to the Moon. I came across the whole universe just to see it. Most of the time, it’s so wonderful, it stops me missing my home and my family and everything I ever loved before I met Fairyland. Most of the time. “
“I made that mountain,” the Greatvole said shyly. “It was so hard to get the curls of her hair right.”
“I know you did.” September smiled, though she didn’t know that mountain had curly hair, for she’d never seen it from far off, only from its peak. “You did so well. But just now, Fairyland is in the middle of a rather sprawling mess, and if you start fixing up your work like I know you want to, no one will understand that you’re only trying to make it perfect. They’ll send the bees after you again. Now, I don’t want to put you to sleep. I hate the taste of these dry flapjacks anyhow. But I shall have to unless you do as I ask.”
The Greatvole gnawed on a bit of tunnel and waited.
“Let Fairyland stay. Brunhilda, it is finished. It’s finished and wonderful and none of us want it any different. Even the bits that the sea and the wind and a lot of revolutions have worn off and broken off and blown off—Fairyland wouldn’t be quite as lovely without her broken bits. So don’t sleep—just rest. Enjoy some bone-beer of your own. And when this is all done I promise to call down to Voleworld and you can come up and start a new geography in some place that hasn’t got a village yet. We’ll pick it out together. No bees, no bears, no one to tell you what fjord to put where. And before you rest, take us where we need to go, so that I can keep my crown and my promise.”
The Greatvole gnawed some more.
“Fine. But I hate fjords. Snap off one of my whiskers—the smallest one you can find or you won’t be able to fit your little hands around it. Take it and when you want me, when it’s time for my triumphant new archipelago … or maybe a chain of volcanoes … well, just stick it in the ground and call my name.”
The whisker was as long as a black crystal sword in September’s hand. She slid it into a sudden sheath in the Watchful Dress and looked at a clutch of dark tunnel entrances in the wall of Voleworld. The Greatvole bored happily through the earth up ahead of them, leaving them to their choice. Each had a neat wooden hatch with large, well-made words burned into it:
TO WIN THE DAY
TO WIN THE HAND