Betsy waved her hands in the air as if to disperse an unpleasant perfume. “He’s such a lot of bother. You’re better off-theatrical folk are nothing but a bundle of monologues and anxiety headaches.”
The gnome pulled a little green leather book and a polished ruby-handled stamp from behind the podium. She opened the book and began stamping with a vicious delight.
“Temporary Visa Type: Pomegranate. Housing Allotment: None. Alien Registry Category: Human, Ravished, non-changeling. Size: Medium. Age: Twelve. Privileges: None, or As Many As You Can Catch. Anything to declare?”
September shook her head. Betsy rolled her red-rimmed eyes.
“Customs Declaration: One shoe, Black. One dress, Orange. One smoking jacket, Not Yours.” The Gnome peered down from her podium. “One kiss, Extremely Green,” she finished emphatically, stamping the book hard and handing it down to September. “Off you go now, don’t hold up the line!”
Betsy Basilstalk grasped September by her lapels and hauled her off her feet, past the podium, toward a rooty, moldy, wormy hole in the back wall of the closet between worlds. At the last moment, she stopped, spat out a Fairy curse like a wad of tobacco, and pulled a little black box out of her pocket. She slid a red rod out of it, and the lid snapped open. It was filled with a vaguely golden jelly.
“Pan’s hangover, kid.” Betsy cursed again. “Old habits die hard.” She dug her greasy finger into the stuff and flung it at September’s eyes. It dripped down her face like yolk.
The gnome looked profoundly embarrassed. “Well,” she mumbled, looking at her toes, “what if Rupert fell down on the job and you got there and all you could see was sticks and grasshoppers and a lot of long, empty desert? It’s a long way to go for desert. Anyway, I don’t have to explain myself. On your way, then!”
Betsy Basilstalk gave the girl a hard shove into the soft, leafy wall of the closet. With a wriggle, a squeeze, and a pop, September slid backward through to the other side.
CHAPTER III
HELLO, GOODBYE, AND MANYTHANKS
In Which September Nearly Drowns, Meets Three Witches (One a Wairwulf), and Is Entrusted with the Quest for a Certain Spoon
Salt water hit September like a wall. It roared foamily in her eyes, snatched at her hair, dragged at her feet with cold, purple-green hands. She gasped for air and got two lungs-ful of freezing, thick sea.
Now, September could swim quite well. She had even won second medal at a tournament in Lincoln. She had a trophy with a winged lady on it, though she had always wondered what use a flying girl would have for swimming. The lady should have had webbed feet, September was sure. But in all her after-school practices her coaches had never impressed upon her the importance of practicing her butterfly stroke while being dropped from a great height without any ceremony at all into an ocean. With Fairy ooze in one’s eyes. Really, September thought, how could they leave something like that out?
She floundered and dipped beneath the giant waves, only to bob up again, spluttering, gulping air. She kicked hard, struggling to get her legs properly under her and orient herself toward the shore-if there was a shore-so that the waves would carry her toward land-if land there was-and not away from it. Riding the crest of a horrid wave sickeningly upward, she turned her head as fast as she could and glimpsed through the last, stubborn streaks of ointment a fuzzy, orangish strand off to the west. Against the will of the water, she hauled her body around until she was more or less pointed at it and stroked as fast as she could on the swell of the next wave, letting it push her and punch at her and drag her-whatever it liked, as long as it was closer and closer to land. September’s arms and legs burned and her lungs were seriously considering giving the whole thing up, but on she went, and on and on until quite unexpectedly her knees knocked on sand, and she fell face-first as the last waves slid up past her onto a rose-colored shore.
September coughed and shook. On her hands and knees, she threw up a fair bit of the Perverse and Perilous Sea onto the beach. She squeezed her eyes shut and shivered until her heart stopped beating quite so fast. When she opened her eyes, she was steadier but elbow-deep in the beach and sinking fast. Thick red rose petals, twigs, thorny leaves, yellowish chestnut husks, pine cones, and rusty tin bells littered the shoreline as far as she could see. September scrambled and tripped and waded through the strange, sweet-smelling rubbish, trying to find some solid ground beneath the blackberry brambles and robins’ eggshells and wizened, dried toadstools. The land was not very much more solid than the sea, but at least she could breathe-in sharp, jerky gulps, as the brambles pricked at her and the twigs pulled at her hair.
I have not been in Fairyland nearly long enough to start crying, September thought, then bit her tongue savagely. That was better; she could think, and the flotsam of the beach did seem to get shallower as she pushed through the wreckage. Finally, the wreckage was only knee-deep, and she could trudge through it like so much heavy snow. At the far edge of the shore were tall silvery cliffs, spotted with brave, stubborn little trees that had found purchase on the rocks and grew straight out sideways from the cliffside. At their tops, great birds wheeled and cried, their long necks glowing bright blue in the afternoon light. She stood alone on the beach, breathing heavily. She rubbed her eyes to get the last of the gnome ointment out, where it had hardened like sleep dust. When September’s eyes were clean of salt and gnome, she looked back down the beach in the direction she had come from. Suddenly, the beach didn’t look like rose petals and sticks and eggshells at all. It glittered gold, real gold, all the way down to the violet-green water. Doubloons and necklaces and crowns, pieces of eight and plates and bricks and long, glittering sceptres. These shone so brightly September had to shade her eyes. No matter how she walked, to the left or right, the shore stayed firmly golden now.
September shivered. She was terribly hungry and dripping rather dramatically. She wrung out her hair and the skirt of her orange dress onto a huge golden crown with crosses on it. The jacket, mortified that it had been so distracted from its duties by a mere momentary drowning, hurriedly puffed out, billowing in the sea wind until it was quite dry. Well, September thought, it’s all certainly very strange, but the Green Wind is not here to explain it anymore, and I can’t stay on the beach all day like a sunbather. A girl in want of a Leopard still has feet. She looked out at the rolling purple-green waves of the sea once more. A stirring that she could not name fluttered within her-something deep and strange, to do with the sea and the sky. But deeper than the stirring was her hunger and her need to find something that bore fruit or sold meat or baked bread. She folded up the stirring very carefully and put it away at the bottom of her mind. Tearing her eyes from the stormy waves, she began to walk.
After a moment, she prudently knelt down and gathered up a particularly jewel-encrusted sceptre. You never know, she thought, I might have to ransom things, or bribe folk, or even buy something. September was not prone to stealing, but neither was she entirely stupid. She began to walk up the beach, using the sceptre as a walking stick.
The going was not easy. Gold is very slippery to walk on and insists on sliding all over the place. She found that her bare foot was actually a bit more suited to the task than the shod one, as she could grasp at the gleaming ground with her toes. Nevertheless, every step set off a little cascade of coins. By afternoon, September thought she had probably stepped on the collective national worth of Finland. Just as this rather grown-up thought crossed her mind, a long, peculiar shadow fell across her path.