The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente [67]
“You know my name.”
“I know quite a number of things, you’ll find.”
“But surely there is some place from which it is a short distance! If one could only get on the right side of it.”
“Surely. But I will not take you there.”
“Whyever not?”
Mr. Map looked grieved again.
“Fftthit,” he said softly. “We all have our masters.”
September clenched her fists. She could not bear to think of her friends in a wet, dreary prison. “It’s not fair! I could have gotten her this wretched thing in seven days! She didn’t even give me a chance!”
“September, my calf, my chick, seven days were never seven. They were three, or eight, or one, or whatever she wished them to be. If she wants you at the Lonely Gaol, she has a reason, and you could never have gone anywhere else. And I suspect,” he looked at the copper wrench, twisting his mustache in one great hand, “that she has devised some work for you to do there, with your fell blade. Hello, old friend,” he greeted it, “how strange for us to meet again, like this, with the snow blowing so outside.”
“You know my…my wrench?”
“Of course I know it. It was not a wrench when we were last acquainted, but one’s friends may change clothes and still one knows them.”
“Why does she need me to go all the way to her horrid old Gaol? I had the sword! The lions could have taken it and left us alone!”
“September, these things have their rhythms, their ways. Once the sword is taken up, none but the hand that won it can brandish it true. She cannot touch the sword, not for all the power in both her hands. But you can. And both your hands called it forth, gave it shape, gave it life.”
“I’m really very tired, Mr. Map. Ever so much more tired than I thought I could be.”
Mr. Map signed his parchment with a flourish.
“Fftthit, sweet kitten. So it always goes.”
September turned to go. Her feet felt heavy. She turned the knob of the great door and listened to the lock whirr in the wood. When she opened it, no winter wood glittered outside, but a long shore and a bright sea. Gillybirds cried over head, wrestling over bits of fish. The tide flowed out foamily from a silver beach, the very opposite from the one she had arrived on. Here the sand was all manner of silver coins and crowns and sceptres and bars, filigreed diadems and long necklaces set with pearls and chandeliers glittering with glass. The violet-green sea--The Perverse and Perilous Sea, she reminded herself--beat huge waves against the strand.
“What is a map,” said Mr. Map, “but a thing that gets you where you’re going?”
“The sword,” September whispered, her eyes all full of the sea. “Who had it before me?”
“I think you know. My Lady Mallow kept it.”
“And what was it, when she had it?”
Mr. Map cocked his head to one side. He drank off the last of his hot brandy.
“A needle,” he said softly.
September stepped out of the hut and onto the silver beach.
September could see the current Mr. Map meant. It flowed just offshore, a deeper violet amidst the violet waves, fast and cold and deep. She could see it--but she was still only September, and she could not swim all the way around Fairyland. The empty beach stretched far and long, and nowhere hulked a broken ship or raft for her to climb aboard. She had come so far, and for lack of a boat her friends suffered in who knew what dark place. And Saturday, especially, had such a horror of being closed up and trapped. And Ell! Sweet, enormous