The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente [54]
“Well,” she said, “if the damage is already done…it certainly does look delicious. And I have a weakness for pumpkin.” Her mother often liked to say she had a weakness for things: for hot cocoa, for exciting novels, for mechanics’ magazines, for her father. September felt it quite a grown-up thing to say.
Let it be said that no other child has ever eaten as September did that night. She tasted some of everything--some more than others, for Fairy food is a most adventurous cuisine, complex and daring. She even sipped the hazelnut-beer and slurped at the cauliflower ice cream. Together, she and Saturday took on the challenge of a Gagana’s Egg, which was not really an egg at all, he explained, but a sugar-glazed shell of many colors containing a whole meal. Saturday deftly placed eight bone cups around a massive copper-rose globe. Saturday pierced the egg with an icepick (thoughtfully provided) in eight places, and let steaming liquid spill into the little cups in eight different colors. September delighted in each one, the violet brew that tasted of roasted chestnuts and honey, the bloody red one that tasted like fig pastry, the creamy pink one a kind of limey rosewater treacle. Saturday drank, too, always after her. His stomach was still weary from starving, and would have preferred a nice saltlick and a lump of schist, but for her he would eat any sugar, drink any red draught. When September finished the cups, Saturday showed her how to pierce the top hemisphere of the egg four more times so that the top of the shell could be lifted away whole and filled with water to steep into a sort of gooseberry-tasting tea. Inside the egg, a golden broiled bird nestled next to oil-soaked bread, brandied clams, and several fiery, spicy fruits September could not name, but which quite took her breath away.
Indeed, by the end of the feast she was only sorry to have waited so long to gorge herself on Fairy food.
Doctor Fallow belched loudly.
“Have you strength in you still to see my offices? I think you’d find them most interesting.” The spriggan’s eyes flashed like a wolf’s in the candlelight, for it was now quite dark. The stars of autumn wheeled overhead, hard and bright and cold. A lonely wind began to pick up outside the warm, ruddy village. “Rubedo and Citrinitas must come along, too, of course.”
“But it’s their wedding night!” protested September. “Surely they would like to retire with milk and a nice book!”
Ell snorted. Bits of radish remained in his whiskers. In the firelight his eyes seemed crinkly and soft. September remembered what he said, that they belonged to each other. She rather liked to think that. She felt it was a thing she might take out and look at when all was dark and cold, and it might warm her.
Doctor Fallow waved his hand. “Rubbish. Every night is their wedding. Every night is their feast. Tomorrow, too, they will be married with just as much pomp and song, and we will eat just as well, and then go to my offices, for work must be done even on wedding nights. And then we will do it all over again. How wonderful is ritual, what a comfort, in dark times!”
September remembered what the Marquess said: A place where it is always autumn, where there is always cider and pumpkin pie, where leaves are always orange and fresh-cut wood is always burning and it is always, just always Halloween. So many of the spriggans wore masks, and danced wildly, and leaped out from the shadows to spook one another.
“You may as well come along, September. You were expected, and the expected ought to do what they’re told. It’s only manners.”
“But the casket in the wood…I don’t have much time…it took so long to get here!”
“All that tomorrow, my dear! You can’t worry on a full stomach!”
The whole colorful throng of them, Rubedo and Citrinitas arm in arm, A-Through-L prickly and guarded, Saturday walking silently just behind September, his eyes huge and wary, September herself, and Doctor Fallow leading the way, crossed the square to one of the largest buildings. Thready clouds hid its roof, up above the crowns of the trees. It