The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(12)

The Sibyl poured tea from a carnelian pot with a little three-headed stone dog prancing on the lid. One of the dog’s legs had gotten snapped off in some tea-related incident years past. The liquid splashed purple and steaming into a ruby cup. The parchment tag of a tea bag dangled from the lip of the cup. In square, elegant writing it said:

All little girls are terrible.


“Are your sisters about?” September asked, trying to keep her voice from shaking. She felt suddenly that she had chosen dreadfully wrong, that this alien, faceless woman did not mean well to anyone. Taiga had called her an awful old lady, and perhaps she was right.

“What sisters?”

“The Sibyl of Comfort, perhaps? I’ll take Cruel-but-True if I have to.”

The Sibyl laughed, and it came out all wrong, jangling, crashing, crackling somewhere inside her strange body.

“There is only me, girl. My name is Slant, and I am all the Sibyls. You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece. I was impressed with your choice, so if you take it back now, then I shall have to be disappointed in you, and make you write ‘I Shall Not Chicken Out’ a thousand times.”

“Why … why would you be impressed? It’s only that I could not bear the others. It was cowardly, really.”

The Sibyl’s head turned slowly to one side, and kept on turning until it had rotated all the way around like a wheel. “Most people don’t like complexity. They would prefer the world to be simple. For example, a child is whisked away to a magical land and saves it, and all is well forever after. Or a child goes to school and grows up and gets married and has children, and those children have children, and everyone enjoys the same cake for Christmas every year and all is well forever after. You could get yourself a sieve the size of the sea, sift through half the world, and still find not two together who would choose a complex world over a simple one. And yet, I am a Sibyl. Complexity is my stock in trade.”

“What is a Sibyl, exactly?”

“A Sibyl is a door shaped like a girl.” Slant sipped her tea. September could hear it trickling down her metallic throat like a rain down a spout. It was a pretty answer, but she did not understand it.

“And how do you … get into that line of work?”

September believed the Sibyl might have smiled, if her mouth worked that way.

“How do you get any job? Aptitude and luck! Why, when I was a girl, I would stand at the threshold of my bedroom for hours with a straight back and clear eyes. When my father came to bring my lunch, I would make him answer three questions before I let him pour my juice. When my governess came to give me a bath, I insisted that she give me seven objects before I let her enter my room. When I grew a little older, and had suitors, I demanded from them rings from the bottom of the sea, or a sword from the depths of the desert, or a golden bough and a thick golden fleece, too, before I allowed even one kiss. Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at; some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard. I had felt it since I was a baby and asked my mother to solve an impossible riddle before I would let her nurse me. By the time I was grown, I had turned the whole of our house into a labyrinth to which only I had the map. I asked high prices for directions to the kitchen, blood and troths. My parents very sweetly and with much patience asked me to seek out employment before they went mad. So I went searching all over Fairyland, high and low and middling, seeking the door that fit my heart. You know how questing goes. You can’t explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams. I looked under a rock, but it was not there. I looked behind a tree, but it was not there, either. Finally I found Asphodel. The ground is thin here, and a little cave greeted me with all the joy a hollow rock can manage. A thousand years later, most breaths spent in Asphodel are concerned with trade with and transit to Fairyland-Below. The Sibyl industry has boomed all over Fairyland, in fact. There are two other gates now, two! I have even heard of a third in Pandemonium itself. What a degenerate age we live in! But still, I was first, and that counts for something.”

“You’re a thousand years old?”

“Close enough for mythic work. A Sibyl must be more or less permanent, like the door she serves. The door keeps her living, for it loves her and needs her, and she loves and needs it.”

“Is that why you look … the way you do?”

The Sibyl Slant stared out of her slit eyes, the disc of her face showing no feeling at all. “Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning. I’ve stood between the above world and the below world for an age. Some men get pocket watches when they have worked for fifty years. Think of my face as a thousand-year watch. Now, if we’ve done with introducing ourselves—by which I mean I have introduced myself and you’ve said very little, but I forgive you, since I know all about you, anyway—come sit on my lap and take your medicine like a good girl.”