Free The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente Page B

I’ve never had tea colored indigo.”
    “Well, the Marquess said that sort of thing was silly. Everyone knows what a river looks like, she said. She got the Glashtyn to dam the tributary and drag along nets to catch all the leaves, and eat up all the lemon peels and sugar cubes. They cried while they did it. But you see now, it’s a nice, normal blue color.” The Wyverary scowled. “Proper, I guess,” he sighed. The jackal-girl chased her tail.
    “What is that girl, Ell?”
    “Mmm? Oh, just a Pooka, I suspect. Starts with P. None of mine, you know.”
    Finally, the procession fanned out before a great, gnarled pier of driftwood and ropy yellow vines. A great barge moored there, tiered like a black cake. Green paper lanterns swung from its ledges and arches; fell designs had been long ago carved into its wood. All along the top were old men leaning against monstrous poles. Ribbons and lily-strands streamed from the pole-tips. The whole effect was very gay and festive, but the old men were haggard and salty and grim.
    “The Barleybroom Ferry!” crowed the Wyverary. “Of course, never was a need for it before, when a body could fly into Pandemonium as quick as you like. But progress is the goal of all good souls.”
    September stared open-mouthed as they slowly inched nearer to the gangplank. She tugged at the tip of A-Through-L’s wing.
    “It’s a Fairy,” she whispered.
    “Of course it is, girl! What did I just say?”
    “No, not a ferry, a Fairy .”
    The toll-man was ancient and hunched, his grey hair caught up in several wild pigtails around two barnacled goat-horns. He had rheumy eyes and glasses as thick as beer-mug bottoms and three gold hoops in one ear. He wore a thick Navy peacoat with brass buttons and sailcloth trousers--and two iridescent wings jutted out of the back of his tailored coat, rimmed in gold, glittering as the sunlight made spinning violet prisms inside them. They were bound with a delicate iron chain, thin, but enough to keep them flat and useless against the old ferryman’s back.
    “Fare,” he growled as their turn came.
    The Wyverary cleared his prodigious throat. September started. “Oh!” she cried. “I suppose I’m the one with the purse strings.” She pulled her sceptre from the links in Ell’s chain. I knew I might need such a thing! September was quite pleased with herself for displaying such excellent foresight. With the end of one of Ell’s claws, she chipped two rubies from the bulb of the sceptre and held them out proudly.
    “‘’E’s too big,” sniffed the ferryman. “Have to pay double for Excessive Baggage.”
    “I am not baggage ,” gasped the Wyverary.
    “Dunno. She keeps her shiny whatnot on ya. Might be Baggage. Sure and you’re Excessive. Double fare, anyhow.”
    “It’s fine!” hushed September, and chipped a third gleaming red stone from the sceptre. All three glittered on her palm like pricks of blood. “Easy come, easy go. I certainly shan’t be going without you!”
    “On with it,” gruffed the ferryman, waggling his caterpillary eyebrows and scooping up the gems.
    The Wyverary gave one giant leap and settled gracefully on the top level of the great black ferry. September walked with her head straight, up the plank and around the spiral staircase to join him. Perhaps it was Lye’s bath, but she felt quite bold and intrepid, and having paid her own way, quite grown-up. This, inevitably, leads to disastrous decisions, but September could not know that, not then, when the sun was so very bright, and the river so blue. Let us allow her these new, strange pleasures.
    No?
    Very well, but I have tried to be a generous narrator, and care for my girl as best I could. I cannot help that readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.
    Chaise longues in blue and gold dotted the sunny deck of the Fairy. Lithe blue women and great pale trolls lay out, bathing in