“How did you know I would end up in the Penalty Box?”
Lye laughed and soap bubbles came dancing from her mouth. “How could you not? Everywhere you turn you bump into rules and knock them off their tables and break them on the floor. You trample half a dozen rules on your way from bed to breakfast. Oh! I am meant to say to you…” Lye straightened her back and made her voice as loud as she could, which was not very loud, but she did try. “September, you have been sent to the Penalty Box without supper for the breaking of Dueling Conventions, vis-à-vis having a great lot of wombats do your dirty work for you instead of biting Thrum definitively with your own teeth and/or other sharp stuff. You may commence being ashamed of yourself.”
Lye let her body relax again. “I don’t think you have to be ashamed and I knew you’d find your way to me, but, oh, September, the folk I have had to suffer waiting for you! The First Stone broke my bathtub and Pinecrack, the Moose-Khan, soiled my garden and Curdleblood filled up all the wood boxes with despair and burnt toast. Madame Tanaquill has been here four times already and I’ve had to listen to her tales of the Old Days four times because she never remembers me because I am not important, I am a bar of soap. She told me that and then told me how in her day everything knew its place and no slip of used-up soap would dream of putting on such airs as to speak to her or take her coat or prepare her tea but you know she drank up all my tea anyway and I didn’t have anything left for the dinosaur and I am glad you bit him because he ate my laundry. I had to hide the tea I brought for you under a hearthstone.”
“Poor Lye! I shall try very hard to be a better guest. Only how long does a penalty last? What’s happened to Ell and Saturday and Blunderbuss?” September looked round for the eleventh or twelfth time, hoping they would come suddenly crashing out of the woods, full of tumbling words. But the woods only rustled with the mist and the wind.
“I do not know. I asked only to be the Penalty Box so I could catch you up in my house. You can’t leave until Ajax sounds an Oxenfree Horn for you. I will be sorry if you want me to be sorry. It was only my first try at a conspiracy and I am not practiced at it yet. I have not even asked you inside so please come inside and drink the tea I have made for you specially and forgive me that I let you stay in the mist so long.”
The cast-iron ducks followed September into the achingly cozy house. The kitchen had started modestly and grown to take up nearly the whole of the downstairs. Everything hung smartly in its place. A rack of well-used copper pots hung from the rafters, freshly spun wool hung over the stone hearth. Sheaves of lavender and thyme and hot peppers hung drying over the doorway—along with an old iron horseshoe. September glanced at it and put it away in the pockets of her mind to take out and take apart later. Whose house was this? No Fairylander could have hung that shoe. They were allergic to iron. Lye had laid out tea on a spicy-smelling wood table covered in a handsome black lace tablecloth. She’d made luckfig and pea-shoot sandwiches, lemon and loveplantain pound cake, hard-boiled peacock eggs. Deep magenta dishes dotted the table, filled with sugar cubes, lemon slices, pots of honey, cinnamon stirring sticks, and fresh sweet cream. But it was not tea for two—it was tea for five. Five cups, five saucers, five little spoons.
The soap golem’s cheeks glowed. “You cannot have a conspiracy of one. The others have far to come and we did not know when Ajax would play his trick and some of us have strict rules governing where we can and cannot travel. Sit and drink and eat and be yourself and do not worry about your friends because they are very wonderful people who can do wonderful things with and without you and sometimes when all our friends are close round we cannot be ourselves as completely as when we sit alone in a little house in the country where there are ducks and a garden growing. Now I would like to make you tea even though we ought to wait for the others but I am proud of it because I had it sent through the post and it took weeks.”
September sat gratefully at the table. The ducks nosed at her feet for crumbs. “But I’m not alone, Lye. You’re here.”