“I am not a person but thank you for calling me one. It makes me feel very real.”
September thought this a strange thing to say, but she let it lie between them on the table like an unfolded napkin. Lye pulled a copper kettle down from the rack and set it on a great black gas stove. It sat smugly in the corner of the kitchen, assured of its place in the center of the world. I have told you that everything has a heart, and a kitchen is the heart of its house. All the best holidays and feasts and gossip and midnight confessions and schemes and intrigues and biscuits and pies come from the kitchen. And the stove lords over the kitchen, for it makes the feasts, and there is nothing so good for hatching a plot as stirring a pot for hours. That is why witches do it so often.
Lye turned one of the black dials and lit a matchstick—but the stove did not light. She tried again and sighed.
“It is my fault. I do not come to Winesap often enough and a lonely house will break for attention if no one minds it and pets it and tells it it is a good house,” Lye said, deeply embarrassed.
“Let me try? Perhaps I can fix it,” suggested September.
She gave the black range a good long stare down. It glared mulishly back at her, and if it had had two big metal arms to cross over its chest, it would have. September cocked her head to one side. She opened the cold oven and peered inside.
“It’s simple enough,” she said with a little grunt, dropping to her knees, reaching her fingers in, and feeling around for what she wanted. “Her name is Mrs. Frittershank and she’s got so many nieces and nephews she can’t count them but she does try and once she had an ambition to cook something French but she got so busy with other things that it just never happened for her. She fell in love with a woodpile once but it ended badly and if she’s honest she’s never quite gotten past it and she’s very cross with you, Lye, I’m sorry to say. She says you don’t know goulash from guacamole—well, Mrs. Frittershank, I’m not sure I do either! And you only use her to boil up the bathwater and she will go on strike if she doesn’t get something interesting to do and also she has a bent thermo-coupler.”
Lye, being made of soap, thought nothing so odd about a talking stove, even if she couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear lots of things. “I am as full of sorry as a golem can be,” said Lye, and folded her hands before her, staring mortified at the well-polished floor.
September could hear Mrs. Frittershank as clear as a blue flame lighting. She could hear where the stove was broken in the lilt and tilt of her voice, and how she stopped in the middle of words like a burner clicking on but not catching fire. “I’ve almost got it!” she reported from deep inside Mrs. Frittershank. Her voice echoed a bit.
Soft, dark laughter rang in the doorway like a shop bell. “If only everyone back home could see the Queen of Fairyland face-deep in an oven! Are we making Queen-pie? I’ll want ice cream on mine!”
September smiled as she popped the thermo-coupler back into place. She knew that voice. She couldn’t help but know it, for the voice was her own. She pulled her head and arms gently out of Mrs. Frittershank, stood, and struck a match. The flame lit without complaint and she put the kettle on before turning around, quite blackened with carbon and grime.
“Hello, Halloween.” September looked fondly into her shadow’s eyes.
Halloween, the Hollow Queen, Princess of Doing What You Please and Night’s Best Girl stood under the lavender and the thyme and the horseshoe, carrying a present wrapped in black paper with a black bow. She wore a shadow of September’s orange dress and a shadow of her smoking jacket, and on her head a crown of autumn mist with a pumpkin-colored jewel floating in it like a harvest moon. Like September, she had grown older. Unlike September, she looked quite well rested and top-full of secret delight.
“How nice of you to dress up for our little party, September. I love your tattoo,” the Queen of Fairyland-Below said, and glided forward to kiss her grubby cheek.
September’s shadow sat at the kitchen table with the ease of someone who has visited many times and has permission to get herself biscuits from the cabinet whenever she likes. But she had not come alone. Another shadow darkened the door. A thinner, more nervous shadow, with violet and blue and silver slights flickering in the depths of her skin. She wore a lacy shadow-dress, with thick shadow-petticoats underneath it, and elegant shadow-gloves and shadow-stockings and shadow-slippers. And the shadow of a very fine hat.
September knew her name—but even if she hadn’t, Mrs. Frittershank was weeping all over the inside of her head, calling it out over and over: Maud! Maud! Maud!
The Marquess’s shadow had brought a small black pot with a lid on it. September reached out to take it.