The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(13)

September found herself climbing up into the Sibyl’s flat gold-and-silver lap before she could even protest that she was far too big for laps and, anyway, what did she mean by medicine? She felt very strange, sitting there. Slant had no smell at all, the way her father smelled of pencils and chalk from his classroom, but also good, warm sunshine and the little tang of cologne he liked to wear. The way her mother smelled of axle grease and steel and also of hot bread and loving. The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.

Slant smelled like nothing.

The Sibyl lifted a comb from a table that had certainly not been there before. The long gray comb prickled with gray gems: cloudy, milky stones and smoky, glimmery ones; clear, watery ones; and pearls with a silvery sheen. The teeth of the comb were mirrors, and September saw her own face briefly before the Sibyl began, absurdly, to comb her hair. It did not hurt, even though September’s brown hair was very tangled indeed.

“What are you doing?” she asked uncertainly. “Am I that untidy?”


“I am combing the sun out of your hair, child. It is a necessary step in sending you below Fairyland. You’ve lived in the sun your whole life—it’s all through you, bright and warm and dazzling. The people of Fairyland-Below have never seen the sun, or if they have, they’ve used very broad straw hats and scarves and dark glasses to keep themselves from being burned up. We have to make you presentable to the underworld. We have to make sure you’re wearing this season’s colors, and this season is always the dark of winter. Underworlds are sensitive beasts. You don’t want to rub their fur the wrong way. Besides, all that sun and safety and life you’ve stored up will be no use to you down there. You’d be like a rich woman dropped into the darkest jungle. The wild striped cats don’t know what diamonds are. They’d only see something shining where nothing ought to shine.” The Sibyl paused in her combing. “Are you afraid of going below? I am always curious.”

September considered this. “No,” she said finally. “I shall not be afraid of anything I haven’t even seen yet. If Fairyland-Below is a terrible place, well, I shall feel sorry for it. But it might be a wonderful place! Just because the wild striped cats don’t know what diamonds are doesn’t mean they’re vicious; it just means they have wildcat sorts of wants and wealth and ways of thinking, and perhaps I could learn them and be a little wilder and cattier and stripier myself. Besides, I haven’t yet met anyone who’s actually been to Fairyland-Below. Oh, I know Neep said there were devils and dragons—but my best friends in all the world are a Marid and a Wyvern, and anyone in Omaha who met them would call them a devil and a dragon, because they wouldn’t know any better! Fairyland itself frightened me at first, after all. It’s only that I wish I did not have to do it all alone. Last time, I had such marvelous friends. I don’t suppose … you would want to come with me, and be my companion, and tell me things I will promise to find extraordinary, and fight by my side?”

The Sibyl resumed her combing, stroke by long, steady stroke. “No,” she said. “I do not go in, I only guard the door. I have never even wanted to. The threshold is my country, the place which is neither here nor there.”

“Sibyl, what do you want?”

“I want to live,” the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. “I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.” At that, Slant patted September’s hair and returned the comb to the table—but in the mirrored teeth, September saw herself and gasped. Her hair was no longer chocolate brown but perfect, curling black, the black of the dark beneath the stairs, as black as if she had never stood in the sun her whole life, and all through it ran stripes of blue and violet, shadowy, twilit, wintry colors.

“I look like a…” But she had no words. I look like a Fairy. I look like the Marquess. “… a mad and savage thing,” she finished in a whisper.

“You’ll fit right in,” said the Sibyl.

“Will you make me solve a riddle or answer questions before I go in? I am not very good at riddles, you know. I’m better at blood and troths.”

“No, no. That’s for those who don’t know what they’re looking for. Who feel empty, needy, and think a quest will fill them up. I give them riddles and questions and blood and troths so that they will be forced to think about who they are, and who they might like to be, which helps them a great deal in the existential sense. But you know why you are going below. And thank goodness! Nothing is more tedious than dropping broad mystical hints for wizards and knights with skulls like paperweights. ‘Do you think you might want to discover that you had the power in you all along? Hm? Could shorten the trip.’ They never listen. No, what I want is this: Before you go, you must take up one of these objects and claim it as your own. The choice is yours alone.”

September shuffled her feet and looked around at the piles of glittering junk around her. “I thought,” she said meekly, remembering her books of myth, in which ladies were always leaving their necklaces and crowns and lords were always leaving their swords as tribute, “folk were meant to leave things behind when they went into the underworld.”