A little country house nestled itself just so on the shore of a caramel-colored whiskey lake. The long, stove-black trunks and warm cream-colored leaves of trifle-trees, heavy with ripe raisin and soursop tarts, bent low to frame a peaked thatch roof and snug stone walls. Someone had planted a kitchen garden: Green luckfig vines and loveplantain creepers chased sage and sweet basil and parsley up toward lattice windows. It needed weeding, but the first tomatoes were already coming in, and the peapods looked so awfully crisp and fat that September’s mouth watered. Three cast-iron ducks waddled and quacked cozily between the brussels-sprout stalks, snapping at ladybugs. The door to the country house stood open. The smell of tea steeping and fresh cut lemons drifted out.
She was exhausted, hungry, and the chill peat-fog coming off the whiskey lake had already sunk into her bones. All she wanted to do in the world was run straight into that house, shut the door, climb into the warm sheets of the deep plush bed that surely waited inside, and never come out. But September hesitated. She had read far too many stories not to hesitate. When a girl finds a strange and perfect house in a wood, whether made of candy or on chicken legs or puffing smoke roses from the chimney, as this one did, she should never rush inside. The house usually wants to swallow her whole. And this was, presumably, the Penalty Box. She would find the table inside set for punishment. September drew the Greatvole’s crystal whisker from its sheath and held it before her.
The lady of the house leaned out of the pretty cedarwood door. A rich, clean perfume wafted out into the garden before her, for the woman was carved entirely from soap. Her face was a deep olivey green Castile, her hair a rich and oily Marseille, streaked with lime peels. Her body was patchwork: here strawberry soap with bits of red fruit showing through, there saffron and sandalwood, orange and brown. Her belt was a cord of hard, tallowy honey-soap, her hands plain blue bathing soap. On her brow someone had written TRUTH, though the bold teacherly handwriting stood no longer so deep and sharp on her forehead as it once had.
Relief flooded up from September’s toes all the way to the top of her head.
“Lye!” she called out, and ran up the neat flagstone path to fling herself into the arms of the soap golem. One of the awful secrets of seventeen is that it still has seven hiding inside it. Sometimes seven comes tumbling out, even when seventeen wants to be Grown-Up and proud. This is also one of the awful secrets of seventy.
“Hello, September,” said Lye in her slow, soft way. Warm, soapy bubbles drifted out of her mouth when she spoke. “You’ve grown so since I saw you. Welcome to the Penalty Box.”
“Oh, Lye, a million million things have happened since I saw you! I hardly know how to tell you!”
“Don’t worry, child. The gossip in Winesap is of the very best vintage. That’s where you are—just outside the village of Winesap Station, in Meadmarchen County. Nowhere near any part of Fairyland you’ve met. But I have made my friends here. I keep their courage scrubbed and clean and they keep my know-how and my know-who fresh and bright.”
The soap golem’s face glowed with something like pride. When September had met Lye long ago in the House Without Warning, the poor lady had carried such a big sadness that she never once smiled. September didn’t know what to make of the gleam of wicked delight on that green-soap face, or the tiny points of foam that rose up where a person might have a high-red blush.
“I made Ajax Oddson bring you here,” the golem confessed without looking the least bit sorry.
“What? How? You can’t bribe a boy from Blue Hen Island! What did you do?”
“I didn’t bribe anyone,” smirked Lye. “Mr. Oddson needed my help. He wanted to use the House Without Warning as his headquarters, and that is my house and that means I can leave the door locked if I don’t like who’s knocking. Mallow said that, and she was right. I told that Dandy I wanted to be paid and I thought I might faint when I said it for you know I never ask anything for myself even when I need it but I got my suds up under my bravery and it turns out demanding works very well. The Racemaster said he would make my bathhouse famous all over Fairyland. I would never run out of bathers for all my days. I said I was already famous. Anyone going to Pandemonium for the first time must come through my House. I have no need for advertising. The Racemaster said he’d give me a bucket full of emeralds and I told him I did not eat or drink or wear clothes and I owned my bathhouse and many books already so what use could I have for money and jewels? And the Racemaster thought and planned and laid out his racing blueprints on the tables of the House Without Warning and when he puzzled over how to move his racers when the time came to mix up their positions, I asked for my payment. That I should get to run the Penalty Box, all so that this racer”—Lye touched September’s long brown hair—“should sooner or later come here. After all, why not here? Winesap Station is only a village not near anything much at all, and this is only a little country house where I come to think, and no one could get a strategic advantage out of either of us, and it cost him nothing. I am sure he thought there was a cheat in it somewhere, but he could not find it, and no soap-flake dolly could ever get one over on a boy from Blue Hen Island and so he spit in his silks and shook my hand and I won something, I won something for the first time in my whole life, and it felt like every bubble inside me popping at once.”