Suddenly, all the sound in Skaldtown snuffed out. September couldn’t hear A-Through-L listing off his best words or Hemlock applauding, nor Blunderbuss snuffling at her crocheted foot, nor Saturday asking if someone couldn’t please tell him what a velocipede was. It was on the tip of his tongue, only he felt so tired.
No, all September could see now was Ajax Oddson, the Dandy made of racing silks, floating in front of her.
“The Cantankerous Derby cordially requests the presence of September at a duel currently in progress! Get your judging wig on, my gallant girl, my shrew of shrewdness! It’s time for…”
And September saw a glittering purple ocean spread out before her, lying over the grassy hills and stone bridges of Skaldtown like a movie projection. A glorious galleon at full sail sliced through the surf toward a sun-colored Roc named Wenceslas. Above them all, green fireworks shot into the air, exploding into the words:
A Duel Delights Forever!
Beneath the flickering image, September could see her friends leap up and call her name frantically—but their lips moved without a sound.
“I’m all right!” she yelled back, hoping that they could hear her. “I’ve got to judge a duel! Maybe it’ll be quick…”
Ajax’s voice rang all round her head like broken church bell. He sounded so excited, September had to laugh. He really loves all this, she thought. This is the best day of his life.
“Today our swashbuckling scrappers are hashing it out on the Perverse and Perilous Sea! On the giant red bird we have Charles Crunchcrab the First! Looking resplendent on the Coblynow flagship, the H.M.S. Chimbley’s Revenge, meet the Changeling Squad of Hawthorn and Tamburlaine! Oh, but I do think you’ve already met!”
September waved joyfully at Hawthorn and Tam. She could see them quite clearly if she turned toward their ship, as though she’d stood on the rail herself. They leapt about on the deck of the Chimbley’s Revenge, wearing Cutty Soames’s fabulously feathered tricorns and his best rapiers. Scratch danced out behind them, wearing his pirate’s hat jauntily askew on his gramophone bell.
“I thought you left him behind!” called September.
Tamburlaine laughed and wound his crank. Scratch sang out in the voice of the siren who sang the greens back at the Briary:
Can’t keep a good devil down, sweetheart
Can’t keep a good devil down!
The more you try to make him frown
Clip his wings and take his crown
He’ll roar right back and paint the town
No, you can’t keep a good devil down, my love
You can’t keep a good devil down!
“He stowed away, the rascal!” Hawthorn cried. He looked happier than September had ever seen him, his cheeks whipped red by the wind, his hair tangled and mussed, his eyes glistening and giddy. “We’ve been doing fantastically, how about you? We beat Piebald and the Knight Quotidian—he was dreadful, you’d never believe it. The soul of a scrub-brush and the mind of a to-do list!”
“Well, you won’t beat me, you little turncoats,” groused Charlie Crunchcrab.
The old ferryman wore his old thick goggles and his wild thick hair billowed over his barnacled ram’s horns. He still wore his name tag. Hawthorn’s own handwriting, reading Charles Q. Crunchcrab. The former King of Fairyland glowered at her from the back of his Roc, clearly airsick and homesick and competition-sick, which Ajax would call a terminal illness. “You were meant to work for me! My personal spies—and now you dare aim those cannons at your King?”
“Well,” said Tam. “You’re not our King. She is.” The fetch pointed one long wooden finger at September. “For now.”
“And you hired us to find a way to make you not-King anymore. Which I think we did smashingly! Go us!” Hawthorn grinned.
“I was wrong,” Crunchcrab said simply. “One minute, everyone looked at me like I mattered more than their own mothers. The next, no one looked at me at all. You try taking that drop with a smile and a curtsy! I will be looked at! I will be seen! I will matter!”
Ajax Oddson’s voice chimed in her ear like a boxing bell. “Choose weapons quickly—time is shortening its reins! The endgame approaches!”
“I’m sorry, he says I’ve got to choose weapons,” September called to the Chimbley’s Revenge.