The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(49)

The Glashtyn made ready to bar them with his knife—though the green-blue flames like pilot lights in his eyes would have stopped them quite handily. But something flickered in those flames, something like recognition. He squinted at her.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” the Glashtyn whispered. “Yes, it must be. I remember you. Do you remember me?”

He wore a silver ring through his equine nose like a bull. September tried to remember this exact Glashtyn. The J?rlhopp’s Clutch warmed against her chest. A memory pricked up in the back of her mind.

“I … I think so,” she whispered back, and Saturday’s shadow stirred against her. “I think you took my shadow one day a long time ago. On the river.” September tried not to let him see her tremble. He had been terrible on that day, frightening and violent, and she knew the feel of that bone knife.

The Glashtyn bent his noble head and all his fierceness softened. He spoke quietly and kindly. “That I did, human girl. If you would know me better, I will tell you my name is the Oat Knight. I see in your bearing I was terrible to you. I was terrible then because it was my job to be terrible. I aimed for terribleness, and I like to think I often caught it! But the Hollow Queen, bless her name, let me fold up my terribleness at last and put it in a steamer trunk at the bottom of my spirit, quite locked up. You know, before the Marquess press-ganged us to pull the ferry, I was a peaceful boy who wanted to be a poetry farmer. I suppose that sounds strange to you. It’s such easy work down here—hardly a Knight’s profession. You hoe a blue field and give it a bit of water and moonshine, and poems just come popping out of the earth like winter squash.” The Glashtyn snorted gently, reminding himself to make good conversation. “I hear it is harder, where you come from.”


September thought of the poems she had been made to write in class, the hours she had spent trying to find a rhyme for this or that thing. She liked poetry, liked how, in a good poem, the words fit together like a puzzle. But she had not, in her estimation, ever managed a good poem. Hers came out fitting together more like a broken faucet and an angry milk-goat.

“Harder, yes,” she admitted.

The Oat Knight nodded. “This I have been told.”

Several lithe, young horse-headed boys peeked out of the rein-houses. They stepped nimbly onto the sand and stared at her, standing stiff and tall. The Oat Knight put a cold, blue-gray hand on her arm.

“Come,” he said. “We wronged you. Break bread with us and we will mend.”

The Oat Knight led them to the bonfire, and the other Glashtyn brought out bowls of clean, fresh water, salads of alfalfa and apples, lumps of sugar dotting oatmeal soaked in whiskey and cream, thick, lush seaweed and round, firm fern heads. Inside the oatmeal mash hid a little roasted puffin, glistening with brown fat. The Glashtyn sat cross-legged on the ground and ate with their fingers—which should have seemed vulgar but instead looked rather nice, when they did it. September even saw a few Glashtyn girls, with rings in their velvety ears rather than their noses. Aubergine enjoyed the food greatly, but she kept looking out to sea, as if she expected something to appear over the horizon. Saturday ate with relish. Ell only sampled the vegetables.

The Oat Knight introduced the others: the Millet Knight and the Corn Knight and the Barley Knight and the Apple Knight and the Bean Knight, and the mares too, called the Buckwheat Knight and the Rice Knight and the Rue Knight. They shook her hand one by one, putting their hands over their hearts as they did so. After supper, the Oat Knight gave them each a clay cup of appley drinking chocolate, and they all walked together onto the dark sand beach. The crystal moon was visible again, showing a bold V on its milky face. Long bleached-wood piers stuck out into the moon-colored sea. September watched the waves break against the shore; they shattered into a foam of tiny black diamonds.

“I chose, you know,” September said, embarrassed by the silence and the deference the Glashtyn Knights showed her. “I chose to do it. I could have let you take the Pooka girl and kept my mouth shut—though perhaps I couldn’t have. I’m not very good at keeping my mouth shut! But, anyway, you mustn’t feel so bad about it. I made the choice.”

“But we made you choose,” the Oat Knight said wretchedly. “And we meant it selfishly. A Knight should not be so selfish. But we hated the ferry so. We hated the hauling and the endless work of it! We wanted to end it. We would have done anything to end it.”

“But it is ended!” Ell said. “You can be happy now!”

September had not thought a horse could blush, but the Oat Knight did, his whole face heavy and hot with shame. How could she have feared this boy so? He was hardly older than herself!

“We are free of the Marquess now. We no longer pull the ferry—we no longer have to. You must not think we are ungrateful. We know what it cost. September, look there and see the emblems of our gratitude.”

September looked. It took a long time to see it, like a half-finished puzzle whose picture you cannot guess until it snaps into focus all at once. The pleasant hills that guarded the Glashtyn village were not hills at all, but vast, heavy chains, grown over with grass and moss and kelp, with little hardy trees growing up out of their green links.

Pale scars shone on the Oat Knight’s slender chest where once he had borne those very chains. The Knight touched them lightly.

“Someday, perhaps, I may sow my poems as I wished to, because of you.”