The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(14)

“It used to work that way,” admitted the Sibyl. “It’s the proper sort of thing. But the trouble is, when they leave their sacred objects, I’m left with a whole mess of stuff I have no use at all for. Good for them—they learn not to rely on their blades or their jewels or their instruments of power, but for me it’s just a lot of clutter to clean up. After a thousand years, you can see it heaps up something monstrous and there’s just no safe way to dispose of magical items like these. I met up with the other Sibyls a few centuries back—and wasn’t that a sullen meeting!—and we decided that the only thing for it was to change our policy. Now you have to take something, and maybe in another thousand years I’ll have space for a nice bookshelf.”

September looked around. The swords shone suggestively. Swords were useful, certainly, but she did not relish the idea of taking up another knight’s bosom friend, a sword no doubt accustomed to another hand, and to being wielded with skill and authority. She did not really even look at the jewels. They might be magical, might even be pendants of such piquant power that they bore names of their own, but September was a plain and practical girl. And her plain and practical gaze fell upon something else, something dull and without glitter, but something she could use.

Out of the heap of heroic leftovers, from beneath the wide necklace of blue stones, September pulled a long coat. She had been shivering for days in her birthday dress, and it would no doubt be colder underneath the world. A girl raised on the prairies does not turn away from a good warm coat, and this one was made of ancient, beaten beast-hide, dyed a deep, dark shade, and dyed many times over, the color of old wine. Creases and long marks like blade-blows crisscrossed the cloth. Around the neck, a ruff of black and silver fur puffed invitingly. September felt a pang as she ran her hand over the long coat. She recalled her emerald-colored smoking jacket, and how it had loved her and tried its best to be everything she needed. She could not imagine where it might be now, if it had fallen off between the worlds or found its way back to the Green Wind somehow. She wished it well, and in her heart whispered, I am sorry, jacket! I shall always love you best, but I am cold and you are not here.

She pulled the wine-colored coat on. It did not immediately tighten or lengthen to fit her as the emerald smoking jacket had. Instead, it seemed to regard the new creature within it coldly, guardedly, as if thinking, Who are you, and are you worthy of me? September hoped that she was, that whoever had owned the coat before had been someone she had a hope of matching for bravery and wiles. The fur felt silky and soft against her cheek, and she tightened the coat herself. September felt taller in the coat, sharper, more ready. She felt like Taiga with her reindeer-skin on, armored and eager to bite things. She grinned, and somehow she felt the coat was grinning slyly with her.

The Sibyl stood from her chair and pivoted smartly to one side, like a door swinging on its hinges. Behind her, a crevice opened in the wall of the scarlet elevator, a stony, lightless crack. A long staircase disappeared down into it, curving away into the shadows.





CHAPTER V


YOU ARE FREE BEASTS

In Which September Leaves Fairyland-Above, Encounters an Old Friend, Learns a Bit of Local Politics, and Changes into Something Very Exciting, but Only Briefly

The stairway wound around and around. The wooden steps creaked beneath September’s feet. Several slats were missing, crumbled away with age and use. Just as her eyes adjusted to the total dark, little freckles of light spattered the gloom before her. As she went deeper, September saw that they were stars, small but bright, hanging like old lightbulbs from the stony ceiling, dangling on spangled, bristly cables. They lent a dim, fitful light, but no warmth. The bannisters of the staircase prickled with frost. September trailed her hand along the cave wall. I am not afraid, she reminded herself. Who knows what lies at the bottom of these steps? And just as she thought this, her idle hand found a smooth, slick handle set into the wall, the kind that forms a huge switch with which someone might start a very great machine. September could just barely see the ornate handle in the dark. It made her think of the one that, when flipped, animated Frankenstein’s monster in the film her mother quite regretted taking her to. For a week afterward, September had run about the house, turning on the lights in every room and booming out what she considered a very scientific and professional cackle.

September threw the switch. She could hardly have done otherwise—the handle invited her hand, carved delicately but with a real heft to the wood, as perfect and solid and enticing as if it had been made just for her. Some switches must be flipped, and some children cannot help turning off to on and on to off, just to see what will happen.

This is what happened:

The lights came on.

Fairyland-Below lit up at the bottom of the staircase like a field of fireflies: Streetlights flared; house-windows flushed ruddy and warm. A million glittering specks of light and sound flowed out as far as September could see and further, not one city, but many, and farms between them, a patchwork of rich, neatly divided lands. She stood as if on a cliff, surveying the whole of a nation. Above it all, a crystal globe hung down on its own huge, gnarled cable. The black, slippery rope disappeared up into a gentle, dewy mist. The great lamp glowed at half wax, a giant artificial moon that turned the silent underground blackness into a perpetual violet-silver twilight. On its crystalline face, a ghostly smoke-colored Roman numeral glowed: XII.