The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente [50]
Out of the dark, Saturday returned amid much grinding and crushing noises, leading two huge highwheels behind him. They rolled along docilely, leaning in to nuzzle the other’s handlebars occasionally.
“They’ll take us, as fast as they can, faster, even,” said Saturday firmly. “They’re ready to go home, they don’t want to wait. They’ll leave right now if we want, they’ve drunk their fill.”
“Hey! Only I talk to them!” said Penny, hands on her little hips.
Saturday shook his head and crouched next to her, his wild blue hair catching the firelight and blazing orange. “There’s not a creature living that doesn’t have wishes, Penny. And I can always hear wishing, even the very quietest kind.” The Marid stood up. “No whipping,” he said softly, almost embarrassed. “Not ever. Not even if the whipping would make them do your will as fast as blinking. Especially if.”
Calpurnia Farthing held out her hand. Saturday shook it, thought better, and then kissed it in a very courtly way. “I said I didn’t like to. They’d have forgiven me. Probably not you, but me, they would have loved again.”
“I know.”
“Let’s off, then. I’ll see you to the edge of the equinox. Leastaways I can do, for such raw wheelers as you and yours.”
Into the silver-spangled night, two great bicycles rolled silently, bearing them all into the dark, so swift the moon never saw them go. A-Through-L ran beside them, his tongue clamped between his teeth, willing his legs to pump faster.
“Calpurnia,” said September, when they had left the last ruddy light of the campfire behind them, “I thought fairies danced in reels together, and had big families.”
“Ayup, we do.”
“Then why are you alone? And Charlie Crunchcrab, too? Where has everyone gone?”
Calpurnia turned her face away. Her wings fluttered weakly under their iron chain, and September could see where red hives had boiled up under the metal. It’s the iron, she though, fairies are allergic.
When Calpurnia Farthing, Queen of the Velocipedes, looked out across the flats again, her face was streaked with silent, stubborn tears.
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Chapter XI: The Satrap of Autumn
In Which September Finally Eats Fairy Food, Very Nearly Matriculates, and Discovers the Nature of Autumn.
I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood-fires burn at night so that everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two.
Autumn in Fairyland is all of that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland forest, or the morbidity of the Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half-burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland.
And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly-cold air on their snorting, roaring highwheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gone gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect,