The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(36)

Halloween, the Hollow Queen, stared up at her. September stared back. Neither moved first as the Revelers went wild around them.

The shadow was September. A shadow-September still wearing the shadow of her old orange dress and worse—the shadow of her beloved green smoking jacket. She wore the shadow of one sweet little mary jane. The Queen’s face was just the same as her own, though shaded with azure and lavender and perhaps a little more canny, a little more used to getting her way. When September had watched her shadow go into the water with the Glashtyn, it had been flat and dark and featureless, but now it had weight, shape, dimension. Halloween was a person. Her gaze sparkled with mischief and a secretive glee. On her familiar head rested a wispy crown of autumn mist, and within that misty ring rode a small autumn moon like a crown jewel.

September did not feel shy or cowed. She could not—that was her wearing that crown, her own self, left behind and gone quite fey, but her self all the same. It was not like looking at the Marquess in her finery. She felt quite able to speak, and even a little impatient with herself. Had she really been so frightened? This was her own face in a mirror! Herself from a year past, still with only one shoe. No, she was not afraid. But she was not confident either. If only Saturday hadn’t turned her into a Fairy! She felt ridiculous. The other Saturday would never have done it, not without her permission.

“Hullo, shadow,” said September, and she tried a tiny, hesitant smile.

“Hullo, girl,” said Halloween, and smiled identically.

There was nothing for it but to try. September extended her hand, covered with faintly glowing Fairy tattoos. “Come home with me. Don’t you want to go home?”

The Hollow Queen laughed. She laughed so long and high and loud that her laughter began to echo around the towers of Tain and come back to her doubled and tripled. The scaly-girl’s elephant head shrunk back down, and the shadows all got very quiet. As Halloween laughed, everyone’s glasses filled up again, even those drained dry.

“Why would I ever want to go home?” September’s shadow sneered in her own voice. “Haven’t you noticed that home is terrible and boring and nothing ever happens there? Come on, September! Tell me you didn’t spend all year just waiting to come back to Fairyland, pining away and reading up on centaurs and looking out your window for our Green friend?” Halloween spread her shadowy hands. “Tell me you spent your days just basking in the wonderfulness of Nebraska and appreciating its simple joys, having just as many lovely adventures as you would have had here, happy as a clam not to be in a place where magic is real and everyone knows your name! Look me in the eye and tell me it’s true, and I’ll come back with you right now. I’ll tag along like a good little doggy!”

September’s heart flooded with shame, and Saturday’s magic chose just then to shrivel up. Her wings wrinkled away. Her heavy wine-colored coat and the hidden dress beneath came rushing back around her with an indignant snap, the rough leather brushing her ankles. She landed on her chair and stepped down from it hurriedly. She and Halloween were, naturally, the same height precisely. The shadow of the green smoking jacket reached out a curious sash to the red coat and stroked its sleeve hopefully. The wine-colored coat allowed its own sash to flow out, just a little, to meet it, and the two girls watched their clothes greet each other.

“I can’t say that,” September admitted.

“Of course you can’t! Come home with you? Never in a hundred thousand evers! I don’t want to have to go to school and lie there on the floor while you learn long division! I don’t want to wash shadow-teacups while your fingers get all wrinkly from the dishwater! When I can be Queen and have parties whenever I like and eat pumpkin tarts every single day and dance on mushroom caps while the Glashtyn sing and drum the night down? No, thank you! If you thought about it for half a second, you’d agree with me. It’s no kind of life being your shadow! Or anyone’s shadow! My name is not September, it is Halloween! We are not your tails to wag! We are our own hounds, and we will not be bossed about any longer!”

The Reveling shadows roared approval.

“I might agree,” said September, “I might. Magic is powerful fun, and I did want to come back to Fairyland, more than anything. Except what will you leave me to come back to? Or anyone? Don’t you know they’re rationing magic in Fairyland-Above? It’s bleeding away, because you’re taking their shadows! Soon there will be nothing magic left up there. All the wildness and fabulous happenings and strangeness will be down here in the dark!”

Halloween smiled, and this time it was not September’s smile, but something altogether narrower and more sly. “So? I like the dark.”

“You can’t just take things without asking,” September said, feeling somehow that she was not winning this argument as handily as she had thought she would.

“Since when are you such a rules-minder? You ate Fairy food! You went into the Worsted Wood! You took a sceptre and a sword and all sorts of things without asking! It’s all right for a real girl, but not a shadow, is that it?” A hot, shrill pain lanced through the Queen’s voice, pain and fear and a heap of words that had been waiting so long to be said. September remembered suddenly that a whole handful of years had passed in Fairyland. Halloween was not new at ruling, and in fact, though she looked no different than September, she must be much older now, perhaps fifteen or even sixteen! Almost a grown-up. And she must have been stewing over this, chewing over her fear in the dark, the fear that she was not real. That she was only a reflection of September, a poor, ignored little sister. September felt suddenly sorry for her. But she remembered Taiga and Hreinn and the Sibyl and the magic rations in her pocket, and her anger came rushing back as bright as before.