September scrambled up the Greatvole’s onyx teeth and over the top of her nose, grappling onto the red-black crystals to haul herself up. Saturday made no time for a first, second, or third thought: He whicked out a little pair of scissors from his trousers and cut his splendid topknot in half, climbing up after September. Ell looked worriedly at Blunderbuss. He could bite off his watch fob, no problem. But where would that leave the scrap-yarn wombat? She didn’t have any scissors, but even if she had, the loss of a leg would hurt her pride so. The Wyverary twisted round so that his snout poked right up against the greatsnout of the Greatvole. Ell had not met many folk bigger than himself, and if it were not very urgent, he’d sit his red haunches down for a long chat. But it was very urgent, and so the Wyverary took a short, shallow breath—enough to scald, but not to roast—and blew a bubbling burp of indigo flame straight into the left nostril of the Greatvole.
The creature roared indignantly and opened its mouth to give whatever had bothered it a good, deep bite. Ell and Blunderbuss flew up and over those smoking nostrils in a flash of orange and red, tumbling over the Greatvole’s eyebrows and skull, down her neck and black salt spine, and into a shallow space between her shoulder blades where September and Saturday sat on their knees, catching their breath. The emerald smoking jacket had already seamed itself back up into a fetching short emerald-colored bolero jacket, so that September could move about freely and not get a sash snagged on any vole parts. Two large, pearly tears dropped from Saturday’s eyes as he felt back for his proud topknot and found only a ragged, sawed-off ponytail. All September wanted to do was shake him until he explained why he couldn’t remember the most important things that had ever happened to them, but there was no time, no time. And the wombat was on fire.
September leapt forward and batted at Blunderbuss’s hind leg, which smoked and crackled like a broiling Christmas ham.
“Watch where you aim that fire hose, you great red lunkhead! Clodhopper! Donkey! Sir Oafington of Oaf Hall!” the wombat hollered and hawed, trying to stub out her paw on the Greatvole’s back like a cigar. Ell’s whiskers drooped. Saturday sniffled and puffed out his cheeks, then blew a ball of glittering sea foam at the half-cooked wombat-shank. September had seen him do that from a trapeze platform once, with a smile on his face that would blind every star in the sky. But now he did it with no more pomp than a winter’s cough. The foam sizzled as it hit blackened wool, but the embers died out, leaving only steam. Saturday fell back against Ell, exhausted, curling into a little blue ball.
Blunderbuss waggled her hind paw, trying to get a look at the damage. September could see stuffing coming out, but she didn’t want to embarrass Blunderbuss by saying anything. Then the wombat saw A-Through-L’s miserable, embarrassed eyes, pleading forgiveness with every long eyelash.
“Oh, come on, don’t be such a Sensitive Susie! I’ve called you worse over the question of Poirot’s mustache! You know I never mean it. You’re my Sir Oafington and I like you better than all the clowncakes in Oaf Hall. In the Land of Wom, that’s just how we talk to our families! You gotta be nice to strangers even when they are the worst, because they don’t know you well enough to understand how shut your big face can mean I’ve missed you more than the whole world can know. Come on! Call me something! You can do it!”
A-Through-L stared at his feet. He did try. But all that came out was “You have very nice eyes.”
Blunderbuss blinked her very nice eyes. “Ooof. Don’t worry about it, not everyone’s got the knack. Thanks for the escape, Inspector Ell-O. Now where the devil is this ripsnorter taking us?”
September wiped her hands on her legs. The Watchful Dress, though currently shaped like sensible work trousers, did not appreciate it. Mud came off her palms—they were all quite grimy, really. But little black crystals tumbled free as well, pieces of the huge dark rough-cut gems crusting over the creature’s mammoth body. September picked a little crystal up and tasted it gingerly.
“Salt!” she exclaimed. And then understood. “Oh … oh no. I thought we’d only been gone a few hours! But you said … you said we were under the sea all night and into the next afternoon. I didn’t have my breakfast! I didn’t eat my flapjacks or my cordial! This is the Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern and she’s woken from her thousand-year slumber!”
“My name is Brunhilda,” the Greatvole rumbled, like continents crashing together. “If you wouldn’t mind shifting, I’ve got a nerve just there, and you’re pinching it.”
They scrambled to move out of their little shallow between two shoulder blades, farther up so they nestled against the nape of her neck. The ride was much rougher up there. September clung on desperately as the Greatvole stretched her long-sleepy muscles.
“Are you … are you going to devour the world and chew on its bones?” Ell asked carefully.
T
he Greatvole snorted. The roofs of Voleworld’s taverns and inns fluttered with the force of her breath. “Not today, if that’s all right by you. Worlds give me heartburn. They stick in the gullet something fierce. But thank you for assuming the worst, it’s not at all painful to be wakened by ignorant prejudices!”
“I’m sorry! It’s only that I read all about you when I was a hatchling. You start with G! And all the encyclopedias in my father’s stacks agree that you nearly destroyed Fairyland with your terrible digging and chewing and tunneling, until the Rex Tyrannosaur hit you over the head with a mountain and sent the honeybees of Wallowdream to sting you to sleep.”
“Such a lot of fuss over a few earthquakes! Nobody talks about how beautiful my new mountain ranges looked, or the new ski resort opportunities I opened up every time I broke the surface and shoved up fresh slopes, or how nicely a bottomless chasm goes with any city, no matter the style. Or all the jewels and gold I spat out when I got done chewing through a desert! Or the absolute fact that without me, Fairyland would still be a big flat boring nix and naught full of crabgrass and dust, fit for nothing but lawn chairs! I tunneled out everything here! S’why they call it Voleworld and not Rabbitworld or Meerkatworld. Every time you relax in a lovely valley or tightrope between two towering crags, you ought to thank your lucky geography for Brunhilda the Greatvole! But no! Instead, they all whined and bawled like a bunch of babies because good design takes risks. Because I erased a few rough drafts when anyone could see farming villages just don’t go with tundra ecosystems! Let me be a lesson to you, kiddies—keep your dreams small. Build your own house and they’ll praise you staircase to windows. Build your own world and you’ll get all the thanks a mouse gives a snake. So yes, then Thrum the Rex Tyrannosaur sent all those bees after me and I’m sure he had a grand old party with all his Uptop friends, telling vicious vole jokes and congratulating themselves on getting a spanking-new topography for the bargain price of a vole’s pride. Maybe he’s still lording it on his Cretaceous Throne, guzzling bone-beer and admiring the swanky cave I made for him.”
September frowned. All the while the Greatvole had been complaining, she’d been carefully, quietly fetching her flapjacks and cordial from their luggage. She paused with flask and plate in hand. “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. Whatever Thrum was doing at that moment, she felt sure it had nothing to do with bone-beer. “You’ve been asleep for a thousand years.” It seemed safer on the whole not to mention to a resentful behemoth that Thrum had come back from the dead along with everyone else and was therefore huntable and findable, so long as he had not had any dueling mishaps yet.
“Perhaps,” September said, hoping to sound both polite and commanding, “you might take us to the Worsted Wood? We need to move quickly, or I wouldn’t ask. You seem terribly fast and strong. If you took us under the ground instead of over it, we might make it in time to win the Cantankerous Derby.”
The Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern slowed and stopped. This took many miles, for anything as large as a Greatvole cannot go from top volespeed to zero in less than seven leagues.
“Oh,” Brunhilda said, her voice clogged up with sorrow. “A thousand years? Why didn’t anyone wake me? I suppose erosion will have spoiled my best work by now. The sea and the wind and the heat and the snow will have taken the edges off my crags and the colors off my canyons. A thousand years is a long time to go without basic maintenance. I meant to keep it all tidy and fresh, once I’d finished. I meant to finish.”
September did not think. She acted, and thought about it later, and had a little quiver, because the Greatvole could have eaten her and everyone she loved and asked for dessert. She tapped Ell’s knee. The Wyverary flew her gently down from the skull of the Greatvole, with Blunderbuss and Saturday following behind. She steadied her heart and strode up to the salt-jeweled beast’s huge face. You can stop up hurts, if you are Queen, she thought, and her heart beat madly in her chest.
“Brunhilda, Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern, I am September, the Engineer. Which is to say, Queen of Fairyland and all Her Kingdoms. It is my duty as Queen to send you right back to sleep with no supper. In fact, I am the only ruler of Fairyland in a thousand years to fail to keep you conked out. And I have to get you back to bed, because otherwise you’re going to start erasing villages again, and I daresay villages like to stay where they’re put.”
The Greatvole started to growl again, but September held up her hands. Her eyes shone with the strange feeling of knowing the right thing to do. If she’d only known it, she looked very like a certain Changeling troll had done on a playground in Chicago, talking to a boy who wanted very much to hit him.
“Brunhilda, thank you,” September said, and into her voice she put all the warmth she’d ever heard from her mother and her father and Ell and Saturday and Aunt Margaret and Aubergine and the Whelk of the Moon. “Fairyland is the most beautiful place anyone could want. I love it awfully. I love the Candelabra Desert and the Worsted Wood and the Perverse and Perilous Sea and every island in it. I love the Barleybroom and Pandemonium and the way you can follow a mountain road all the way to the Moon. I came across the whole universe just to see it. Most of the time, it’s so wonderful, it stops me missing my home and my family and everything I ever loved before I met Fairyland. Most of the time. “
“I made that mountain,” the Greatvole said shyly. “It was so hard to get the curls of her hair right.”
“I know you did.” September smiled, though she didn’t know that mountain had curly hair, for she’d never seen it from far off, only from its peak. “You did so well. But just now, Fairyland is in the middle of a rather sprawling mess, and if you start fixing up your work like I know you want to, no one will understand that you’re only trying to make it perfect. They’ll send the bees after you again. Now, I don’t want to put you to sleep. I hate the taste of these dry flapjacks anyhow. But I shall have to unless you do as I ask.”
The Greatvole gnawed on a bit of tunnel and waited.
“Let Fairyland stay. Brunhilda, it is finished. It’s finished and wonderful and none of us want it any different. Even the bits that the sea and the wind and a lot of revolutions have worn off and broken off and blown off—Fairyland wouldn’t be quite as lovely without her broken bits. So don’t sleep—just rest. Enjoy some bone-beer of your own. And when this is all done I promise to call down to Voleworld and you can come up and start a new geography in some place that hasn’t got a village yet. We’ll pick it out together. No bees, no bears, no one to tell you what fjord to put where. And before you rest, take us where we need to go, so that I can keep my crown and my promise.”
The Greatvole gnawed some more.