The Green Wind chuckled. “I suppose that would be true if the earth were round.”
“I’m reasonably sure it is…”
“You’re going to have to stop that sort of backward, old-fashioned thinking, you know. Conservatism is not an attractive trait. Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.”
The Leopard of Little Breezes gave a light roar. Several small clouds skipped huffily out of their path.
“The earth, my dear, is roughly trapezoidal, vaguely rhomboid, a bit of a tesseract, and altogether grumpy when its fur is stroked the wrong way! In short, it is a puzzle, my autumnal acquisition, like the interlocking silver rings your aunt Margaret brought back from Turkey when you were nine.”
“How did you know about my aunt Margaret?” exclaimed September, holding her hair back with one hand.
“I happened to be performing my usual noontime dustup just then. She wore a black skirt; you wore your yellow dress with the monkeys on it. Harsh Airs have excellent memories for things they have ruffled.”
September smoothed the lap of her now-wrinkled and rumpled orange dress. She liked anything orange: leaves; some moons; marigolds; chrysanthemums; cheese; pumpkin, both in pie and out; orange juice; marmalade. Orange is bright and demanding. You can’t ignore orange things. She once saw an orange parrot in the pet store and had never wanted anything so much in her life. She would have named it Halloween and fed it butterscotch. Her mother said butterscotch would make a bird sick and, besides, the dog would certainly eat it up. September never spoke to the dog again-on principle.
“The puzzle is not unlike those rings,” said the Green Wind, tipping his gaze over his green spectacles. “We are going to unlock the earth and lock it up again, and when we have done it, we shall be in another ring, which is to say, Fairyland. It won’t be long now.”
And indeed, in the icy-blue clouds above the world, a great number of rooftops began to peek out. They were all very tall and very rickety: cathedral towers made of nailed boards, cupolas of rusted metal, obelisks of tattered leaves and little more, huge domes like the ones September had seen in books about Italy, but with many of their bricks punched out, broken, turned to dust. Just the sorts of buildings where wind howls hardest, whistles loudest, screams highest. The tips and tops of everything were frozen-including the folk that flew and flittered through the town, bundled up tight much like the Green Wind himself, their jodhpurs and jackets black or rosy or yellow, their cheeks puffed out and round, like the cherubs blowing at the corners of old maps.
“Welcome, September, to the city of Westerly, my home, where live all the Six Winds in nothing at all like harmony.”
“It’s… very nice. And very cold. And I seem to have lost one of my shoes.”
The Green Wind looked down at September’s toes, which were beginning to turn slightly purple. Being at least a bit of a gentleman, he shuffled off his smoking jacket and guided her arms into it. The sleeves were far too big, but the jacket had learned a drop or two of manners in its many travels and adjusted itself around September’s little body, puffing up and drawing in until it was quite like her own skin.
“I think I look a little like a pumpkin,” whispered September, secretly delighted. “I’m all green and orange.”
She looked down. On her wide, emerald velvet lapel, the jacket had grown a little orange brooch for her, a jeweled key. It sparkled as though made out of the sun itself. The jacket warmed slightly with bashfulness and with hoping she’d be pleased.
“The shoe is a very great loss, I won’t lie,” clucked the Green Wind. “But one must make sacrifices if one is to enter Fairyland.” His voice dropped confidentially. “Westerly is a border town, and the Red Wind is awfully covetous. Terribly likely your shoe would have been stolen eventually, anyway.”
The Green Wind and September entered Westerly smoothly, the Leopard of Little Breezes being extra careful not to jostle the landing. They strode down Squamish Thoroughfare, where big-cheeked Blue and Golden Winds went about their grocery shopping, piling their arms with tumbleweeds for rich, thorny salads. Clouds spun and blew down the street the way old paper blows in the cities you and I have seen. They were heading for two spindly pillars at the end of the Thoroughfare, pillars so enormous that September could not see right away that they were actually people, incredibly tall and thin, their faces huge and long. She could not tell if they were men or women, but they were hardly thicker than a pencil and taller than any of the bell towers and high platforms of Westerly. Their feet went straight down through the clouds, disappearing in a puff of cumulus. They both wore thin circular glasses, darkened to keep out the bright Westerly sun.
“Who are they?” whispered September.
“That’s Latitude, with the yellow belt, and Longitude, with the paisley cravat. We can’t get very far without them, so be polite.”
“I thought latitude and longitude were just lines on maps.”
“They don’t like to have their pictures taken. That’s how it is with famous folk. Everyone wants to click, click, click away at you. It’s very annoying. They made a bargain with the Cartographers’ Guild several hundred years ago-symbolic representations only, out of respect, you understand.”
September felt very quiet in front of Latitude and Longitude. Being young, she was used to most people being taller than she was. But this was of another order entirely, and she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and travel by Leopard is very tiring. She didn’t think she ought to curtsy, as that was old-fashioned, so she bowed from the waist. The Green Wind looked amused and copied her bow.
Latitude yawned. The inside of his mouth was bright blue, the color of the ocean on school maps. Longitude sighed in a bored sort of way.
“Well, you wouldn’t expect them to speak, would you?” The Green Wind looked slightly embarrassed. “They’re celebrities! They’re very private.”
“I thought you said there would be a puzzle,” said September, catching Latitude’s yawn. The Green Wind picked at his sleeve, as though miffed that she was not more impressed.
“When you solve a jigsaw puzzle,” he said, “how do you do it, pumpkin-dear?”
September shuffled her cold foot on the smooth blue stone of the Thoroughfare. “Well… you start with the corners, and then you fill in the edges to make a frame, and then work inward until all the pieces fit.”
“And, historically, how many winds are there?”
September thought back to her book of myths, which had been bright orange and therefore one of her favorite possessions.
“Four, I think.”
The Green Wind grinned, his green lips curling under a green mustache. “Quite so: Green, Red, Black, and Gold. Of course, those are roughly family designations, like Smith or Gupta. And actually there is also Silver and Blue, but they’ve made trouble off the coast of Tunisia and have had to go to bed without supper. So the fact remains: Today, we are the corners.” He gestured at the placid Latitude and Longitude. “They are the edges. And you, September”-he gently pulled a strand of September’s hair free of her brooch-“are the middle pieces, all funny shaped and stubborn.”
“I don’t understand, Sir.”
“Well, it’s all in the verbiage. One of the pieces is a girl hopping widdershins on one foot, nine revolutions. One is wear motley colors. One is clap hand over one eye. One is give something up. One is have a feline in attendance.”