The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente [52]
The three of them might have taken any path through the forest and come upon little but toadstools and acorns. However, on account of the tendencies of Fairy towns to get quite firmly in one’s way, they did not. They found themselves striding into in the herald’s square of a place called Mercurio before they could discuss whether it was nightingales or sparrows who sang so prettily in the wood. That September’s shoes were dark and crafty and most certainly knew their way around the world can have had nothing to do with it, I am sure.
I wonder if every city in Fairyland is made of some strange thing? Thought September. For some made baker had built the town of Mercurio from loaves of thick, moist bread shingled with sugar and mortared with butter. Heavy eaves of brown crust shaded sweet little dinner-bun doors. Many of the houses were small. September could reach up her hand and tear off a piece of their roofs to eat, if she had had a mind. But many more were enormous, towering up high, cakes piled upon cakes, baked dark and fragrant, up past the tops of the trees. The cobbles of the square were muffin-tops, and all the fountains gushed fresh, sweet milk. It was as though the witch who built the gingerbread house in the story had a great number of friends, and had decided to start up a collective.
In the center of the square stood a statue of a lady September knew well by now, patted together from cream-colored crumpets. Below her benevolent gaze a long table groaned with food: apple dumplings and apple tartlets and candied apples and apple chutney in big crystal bowls, huge roasted geese glistening brown and gold, huge potatoes and turnips split and steaming, rum cakes and blackberry pies, sheafs of toffee bundled together like wheat, squash soup in tureens shaped like stars, golden pancakes, slabs of gingerbread, piles of hazelnuts and walnuts, butter domes carved like pine cones, a huge and broiled boar with a pear in his mouth and parsley in his hoofs. And pumpkin, pumpkin everywhere: orange pumpkin soup bubbling in hollowed-out gourds, pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, frothy pumpkin milk, pumpkin trifles piled up with whipped cream, pumpkin-stuffed quail, and pumpkin pies of every size, cooling on the clean tablecloth.
No one ate at the table, or guarded the feast. The Wyverary, the Marid, and the human stared in naked hunger, having had nothing but tire-jerky and axle-whiskey for days. Ell stepped forward, but hesitated.
“Surely it belongs to someone,” he fretted.
“Surely,” agreed Saturday.
“I oughtn’t to have any, anyway,” said September mournfully. “A feast out of nowhere and no one here who might have cooked it, or had it cooked for them? That’s Fairy food, to be sure.”
A little man stepped deftly out from behind the pig, as if he had been there all along, though surely they had seen no feet under the table. His nose curved down: long, skinny, hooked like a bird’s beak, the kind meant for fishing beetles out of logs. A pair of square spectacles perched on it, showing large, orange, red-rimmed eyes, as if tired from too much reading. His rubbed his little hands together--they each had only three fingers, long and hooked like his nose. His skin was all over deep, baked brown, like good bread. Most odd of all, however, were his clothes--he wore a tweed jacket with velvet elbow patched, a caramel-colored waistcoat, toast-brown plaid trousers, and an ascot: an oak leaf fading from green to brown, full of wispy holes, pinned with an acorn button. Over all this, a white laboratory jacket, gone yellow with age, draped over his hunched shoulders.
“Of course it’s Fairy food,” he chuckled. “Where do you think you are?”
“Well,” September answered, “I’m not to eat Fairy food. I’ve been very careful, and only eaten witch food, dragon food, dryad food, that sort of thing.”
The little man laughed so loudly a few folk like him poked their heads out of the bread-house windows in curiosity. He held his small paunch and