Free The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente Page A

staircase must have been in a shallow part of the world, for the rest of it was as deep as the sea and twice as full of life.
    “Ever seen a mushroom?” Ell said, flexing his shadowy claws.
    “Of course!”
    “No, you haven’t. You’ve seen a little polka-dotted cap or an oystery bit of fungusy lace. What a mushroom is, what it really looks like, is a whole mad tangle of stuff spreading underground for miles and miles, tendrils and whorls and loops of stem and mold and spore. Well, Fairyland-Below isn’t separate from Fairyland at all. It is our cap. Underneath, we grow forever secretly outward, tangling in complicated loops, while what you see in the forest is really little more than a nose poking out.”
    Somehow, a thought squeezed through the radiant shriek of flight in September’s veins. She stopped short in the air, pumping away with her fat saffron feet, four claws clutching at the night.
    “Why didn’t you have to use a magic ration? Why can you do this? Ell can’t do this—he would have, if he could have. We had to walk so far! Tell me you have been studying hard and have gotten a diploma from a Turning-Girls-into-Things school. Tell me I have not tasted something wicked by letting you change me—I do not want it to be wicked! I want to feel like this always!”
    A-Through-L’s face made a complicated expression. It looked shamed, then thought better of it and looked proud, then cunning, then filled up with so much love that all the other quirks of his mouth and angles of his brow smoothed together into one beaming, jubilant frown.
    “We’re the mushroom, September. Why would we ever need to ration magic down here? Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun. Fairyland-Below is the shadow of Fairyland, and this is where magic gets born and grows up and sows its oats before coming out into the world. The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming. Before Halloween, we lived in the upper world, where the light makes us insubstantial, thin, scraps of thought and shade. We weren’t unhappy—we made good magic for the world, sportsmanlike stuff. We reflected our bodies’ deeds, and when our brothers and sisters went to sleep, we had our own pretty lives, our shadow loves, our shadow markets, our shadow races. But we had no idea, no idea how it could be under the world with our Hollow Queen. And now we shall never go back. The more shadows join us in the deep, the more our cities get soaked in magic, just sopping with it, and you don’t even need a book of spells or a wand or a fancy hat. Just want something bad enough, and run toward it fast enough. The rations are for Above-Grounders. They can’t have it without us, and they’ve been drinking from our hands for far too long.”
    September’s huge jaw hung open. Her red whiskers floated beautifully on the cave-winds. And in a moment, as fast as it had happened, her Wyvern-body vanished. She fell, tumbling through the sky—only to land softly on A-Through-L’s broad belly. He held her gently with his hind legs. September cried out miserably—her body had gotten small again, like a dress that has shrunk in the laundry. Her skin felt so tight she would surely die of tininess. Her bones groaned with loss, with longing to fly once more.
    “It doesn’t last long,” Ell admitted. “Not yet.”
    After a long while of feeling sorry for herself and worrying over what the Wyverary had said, September whispered, “If Fairyland-Below is Fairyland’s shadow, what is the shadow of Fairyland-Below? What’s under the underworld?”
    Ell laughed like thunder rolling somewhere far off. “I’m afraid it’s underworlds all the way down, my dearest, darling flying ace.”
    *   *   *
    Now, just as there are important Rules in Fairyland, there are Rules in Fairyland-Below, and I feel I must take a moment to curtsy in their direction. These are not the sorts