The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

slab of saguaro cake, surrounded by Fairies who laughed at every joke you made. I’m sure they were really wonderful jokes, Sir Stoats! I should love to hear them someday. Yes, the night we met, I wore orange; you wore chickens. The brass band struck up ‘The Kraken’s Waltz.’ Saturday and I took to the desert dance floor. He put his arm around my waist. Ell let a gout of indigo flame erupt into the air for the delight of all the gathered lords and ladies. My love and I saw the violet sparks reflected in each other’s eyes. And then—oh, I just can’t recall what happened next! You must help me, Sir Stoats! What was it? You do remember now, don’t you?”
    The Stoat of Arms, for perhaps the first time in its long, long life, looked distinctly embarrassed. “Then you were arrested by Madame Tanaquill’s personal constabulary and buried in a cellar for two years. The car was impounded, I believe.”
    â€œYes, that’s it! How silly of me to forget.” September quirked her eyebrow and laughed quite deliberately, a hard, barbed laugh she had learned long ago from the dancing, dastardly Blue Wind. “She who blushes first loses,” she said in a gentler voice, and tapped the Stoat on the nose.
    My darlings, I am quite as surprised as you! A narrator looks away from her charges for half a tale and returns to find they’ve gone wily and wild in her absence, and learned all manner of new magics she intended to teach them much later.
    September straightened up and tugged on the (rather oversized now) long blue dress she’d worn when she was the Spinster and hatched her plots from the depths of a rum cellar. “This is where I’m to be coronated, is it? Well, Stoats, we’d best get it over with. Will you be all right on your own? I wouldn’t want you to get bored.”
    â€œWe have brought a magazine, and our pipes.” The two stoats, three cockerels, unicorn, Fairy, and human girl that made up the Stoat of Arms each produced handsome churchwarden pipes and waved them at September.
    â€œVery well, then!” said the Queen with a deep breath, and stepped inside the great round door.
    It shut behind her with a satisfied clunk . September calmed her hammering heart. She was not so wily or wild that it did not terrify her a little whenever she had to pull on haughtiness like a party dress and whirl about in it.
    Within the Royal Closet, lamps bubbled to life all along the walls, glass goblets filled with liquid light of blue and gold, like cups of punch at a birthday party. September stared—the room yawned on forever. She could see neither ceiling nor walls. A beautiful velvet floor spread out before her so that her feet fell without the littlest sound. Everywhere she looked she saw splendid clothes hanging neatly, or displayed on dress forms, or laid out for mending, or soaking in laundry tubs. Hatboxes towered up into the shadows beyond the goblet-lamps. A sea of shoes lapped at the hems of the hanging gowns and suits and cloaks and trousers. Umbrella stands bristled with swords, canes, scepters, staves, wands, and the occasional umbrella. The ranks of shining clothes were only broken by mirrors here and there, mirrors taller than a Wyverary and framed in gold, in ice, in green flame or indigo, in ancient oak, in unicorn and narwhal horns, in ships’ ropes, in curious, blinking eyes, in gemstones September could not name, in pocket watches, in brocade, in lost love letters. In the center of the vast wardrobe stood a little podium with a large and beautiful book lying open on it, along with a pot of scarlet ink.
    September could hear her footsteps echo wildly as she crossed the hall to peer at the book. At the top of each thick, parchment page, she read:
    GUEST BOOK.
    PLEASE SIGN IN.
    And below that, a number of neat columns with titles like NAME, SPECIES , and TIME IN/TIME OUT , each one brimming with magnificent signatures. She ran her