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

of Rules that get posted in front of courthouses or municipal pools. For example, underworlds, on the whole, encourage roughhousing, speeding faster than twenty-five miles per hour, splashing and diving. Unattended children, dogs, cats, and other familiars are quite welcome. And if September had come underground at any other time, she might have seen handsome, clearly lettered signs at every crossroad and major landmark kindly letting visitors know how they ought to behave. But she came underground at just the exact time that she did, and Halloween had had all those friendly, black-and-violet-colored signs knocked down and burned up in a great fire, which she danced around, giggling and singing. Halloween felt it quite logical that if you destroy the rule-posting, you destroy the rules. The Hollow Queen hated rules, and wanted to bite them all over.
    But some Rules are immutable. That is an old word, and it means this cannot be changed .
    Thus, both September and Halloween did not know something on the day our heroine entered Fairyland-Below. September did not know the Rules, and Halloween did not know that the Rules still ran on like a motor left idling, just waiting to roar into motion.
    I am a sly narrator, and I shall not give up the secret.

CHAPTER VI
    T HE E LEPHANT’S F IERY H EART
    In Which September Is Introduced to High Society, Is Granted a Certain Rank, Finds a Friend Somewhat Different Than She Remembered, and Has a Spot of Tea
    A-Through-L’s gleaming shadow set September down on a broad brown lawn. It was not a nasty, unkept, dying sort of brown, but the very rich and beautiful shade of good dark coffee or expensive chocolate or perhaps a deeply steeped tea. The wired stars and the great artificial moon shone down on little brown leaves and little brown buds and little brown flowers. Cinnamon-colored peapods rattled; russety weeds puffed clouds of toast-colored fluff into the twilit air. The blades of brown grass rippled in the myrrh-scented underworld breeze, all bending in one direction, toward an extraordinary house in the center of the field.
    The house stood tall and gleaming, a sort of elaborate pear-shaped silver pot crowned in a flourish of golden branches bearing copper flowers and long, slender bronze leaves. The pot stood on four golden claw-feet. It had four golden spigots arching gracefully around its big, curved belly. Ribbons of a red metal September had never seen before curlicued all round the polished crown of flowers, and in the loops of ribbon several pretty silver teacups peeked out. One of them puffed friendly chimney smoke. On account of the chimney, September knew it must be a house—and one with someone at home in it!
    As she and Ell’s shadow walked closer to it, September could see a delicate porcelain porch and porcelain stairs leading up to it. A thin line traced a round door in the belly of the pot, so thin she wouldn’t have noticed it if the crystal moon hadn’t shone just so.
    “Where have you brought me, Ell?” she asked.
    “Oh, oh, I am so bad at keeping secrets and making surprises! They begin with S’s! Two of them!” Ell could hardly contain his excitement, hopping from one blue-black foot to another in the long chocolatey grass. “It so happens, this place begins with S, too. But I come here a great deal, whenever I want something to pick me up and make my heart shake the rain off. So I know all about it. It’s called the Samovar—that’s a nice old word for a teakettle. The Duke and the Vicereine live here.”
    September wondered quietly whether a Duke was very much like a Marquess and what in the world a Vicereine was to begin with. This Ell wouldn’t take her to a wicked Duke in a wicked house, would he? She simply could not be sure.
    The whipping violet whiskers on Ell’s dark muzzle quivered with delight. “No, I mustn’t spoil it for you! The other Ell wouldn’t; he’d wink and wait, because that’s how you make a surprise, and so I shall,