“If we win, you will…” But he couldn’t think of how to finish.
September touched his face. “Just hold on, Saturday. We’ll find out what’s wrong.”
A-Through-L howled. “There’s no woolly trees or pumpkin pies or anything! Where are we?”
Blunderbuss opened her nostrils wide and sucked in the scents of the place that was decidedly not the Worsted Wood.
“Slap my bony rump if that’s not the best whiff I’ve ever gulped! What’s your problem? Come on, you dags! Open your mouths and huff! Chew on that air! Each breath’s as good as a meal! You don’t know, it might be the Wood! Maybe the spriggans have redecorated since you last popped by. I’m sure it is! You said the Worsted Wood was beautiful—isn’t this beautiful?”
Blunderbuss wasn’t wrong. The smell of the place was wonderful—rich and sweet and savory and sharp. But it was so strong. September felt faint, as though a bushel of apples had pummeled her head. The scrap-yarn wombat scampered on ahead.
“Are those blue tongues? Ell, you gotta try these! They turn your tongue blue, see?” She dove headfirst into a thicket of electric-blue berries and came up sticking out her scrap-yarn tongue, stained ultramarine with juice. Ell adjusted his sea-glass spectacles and checked his turnip pocket watch.
“It’s quarter past that rotted bit there,” he fretted. “Hadn’t we better figure out where we are and get back to the Derby? Someone could cross the finish line anytime and we wouldn’t even know unless Ajax sent us a note! We have to go!”
“I know! I know!” Blunderbuss danced from paw to paw, hardly able to contain herself. “But … but we’re here. Now! What if we never find it again? Even though you won’t let me have my turn with the specs, let us DEDUCE the STUFFING out of it, mon ami! Whaddowe got? Quandongs?” She snarfed a big red one off a bush. “Check. Macadamias? Check. Passionfruits?” She ripped a dozen off their vines and gobbled them down. “Huge spanking check! Emu apples, golden wattles, blue tongues, warrigal greens? Cram ’em in your face! Top-shelf digging dirt? Oh yes, we have some right here! And if that’s not enough, look, look, follow me!”
The scrap-yarn wombat leapt out of the brush and scurried up over a hill covered in blue tongue berries. Her paws left wet prints full of smashed cerulean fruit. They scrambled up after her. Blunderbuss was already crowing and jigging and spinning around three times in excitement. She bent down and bit the earth, to show that she liked a thing, and that she thought a thing was delicious, and that she thought it was hers.
“We’re in the Land of Wom!” Blunderbuss roared.
September got herself up to the top of the hill, slipping on berries all the way. She looked down into the north end of the valley. A village spread out as happily as a cat in a sunbeam. It was a shantytown, full of clapboard houses and peeling boardwalks and rusty nails and swinging signs. Warm wind whistled through the slats of the buildings. But the slats and boards and posts and roofs were all painted like the night sky. Deep black and blue and burning stars, white comets and tiny, twinkling red planets. I’ve never seen painting like that, September thought to herself. Even that fellow in Rome couldn’t make that bakery look so exactly like the Milky Way.
“I’m home! Me! Blunderbuss! The Great Chicago Wombat! What are the odds?”
September smiled. She thought of the door she’d chosen and was glad for Buss. But she’d chosen to win against odds—Oddson. She’d thought it would take them right where they needed to go. But why would the Heart of Fairyland be hiding in the Land of Wom? This couldn’t be right. “Buss, if you’re from Chicago, how do you know we’re in Wom?”
Blunderbuss puffed out her chest proudly. “When Hawthorn asked me to come to life, he specifically said: Please wake up right now this moment and be alive like Scratch and be a real wombat and be able to talk and walk and bite and do marvelous things like firing passionfruits and horseshoes and whiskey bottles out of your mouth at our enemies and singing the ancient songs of the Land of Wom, which we both know is the most beautiful Land that ever was a Land. He’s a very polite boy and he thought of everything and now I am HOME and HOME means BITES, FOODS, and OTHER WOMBATS. Last one to Wom is a kangaroo!”
“Wait, Buss, we can’t stay! Wait!” September protested.
But off she ran, and off they all ran after her. They couldn’t leave her if they wanted to—if they got to Mummery without their steed, they’d be disqualified anyway. Saturday laughed madly and spun around a few times of his own on the way into town, without a care. September was all care, but she resolved not to show it. Not yet. Everyone deserves to go home and feel happy about it when they get there, she thought. Everyone. Queens shouldn’t worry or whine, should they? We can’t be so badly off. It’s not halftime yet. Ajax said at halftime we all swap places.
Blunderbuss tumbled into the center of town, her hugeness throwing shadows up against the night-sky shacks.
“Whoa there, cobber!” a handsome, furry wombat hollered from a twilit rocking chair on a starry porch. The sign over his head read PUDDING-FOR-ALL GENERAL STORE. He wore a smart waistcoat and small, round sunglasses. “Slow yourself down, how about that?”
For a moment, September thought Blunderbuss was going to cry. She scrunched up her diamond-shaped magenta button eye, and then her thick brass button eye. She wrinkled up her nose and shook her head bullishly from side to side. She got so choked up she couldn’t say a thing, which was certainly a first. The scrap-yarn wombat had never met a claw-and-fur wombat before.
The other wombat pulled a carrot-cob pipe out of his waistcoat pocket and lit it without a match. He had a bit of Wombat Magic and didn’t mind showing off. “No need to go thundering about like your arse’s on fire. Ruddy tourists. No respect for anyone. Go on, get your postcards and be on your way, thank you!”
Blunderbus
s finally found her voice. “I’m not a tourist, I’m a wombat!”
“Oh, come off yourself, you are not,” scoffed the furry fellow.
“I am so! Look at my teeth!” Blunderbuss bared her cloak-clasp teeth, which only seemed to make the other wombat uncomfortable.
“If you’re a wombat, I’m a cockatoo!”
“She’s the most wombat I’ve ever known,” A-Through-L said with all the sternness any Wyvern can command. If only he had not had a turnip tied round his waist, even a mountain would have cowered.
The wombat spat onto his veranda. “You’re made out of yarn and you’re the size of a rhinoceros. I know wombats are the greatest animals ever invented, and it’s only natural you should want to be one, but you’re embarrassing yourself, mate.”
Blunderbuss gritted her teeth. She strode proudly over to the Puddings-For-All General Store and pointed one fuzzy lilac-colored paw at the wombat in the rocking chair. “You listen here, Little Lord Much-a-Much. I am from Chicago and in Chicago, all wombats are made of yarn and the size of rhinoceroses! Is this how you say how-do to out-of-town cousins? I always heard the Fairyland branch of the family were nice as raisins, but you’re just a cheeky little runted bear cub and I shall tell everyone so when I get back.” She was, of course, quite right. Being the only wombat in Chicago, all wombats in the city looked just like her.
The wombat creaked back and forth on his spangled rocker, puffing on his pipe. Then he burst out of the chair and off the porch, giving Blunderbuss’s paw a great, solid bite. Buss didn’t yelp. She grinned like Christmas.