The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There Read Online Free Page B

I’m in the astronomy club, and Miss Gilbert was very specific about that.”
    “Then I’m sorry for your moon—what a poor, sad planet! We will set a place for her at dinner, out of respect. Our moon is rich and alive. Rice fields and moonkin meadows as far as you can see. And Hreinn like moss spores, so many and scattered so far. And hunters. All kinds—Fairies, Satyrs, Bluehearts, Ice Goblins. Once the moon was generous enough for all of us. In our reindeer-bodies, we ran and hid from pelt traders and hungry bowmen. That was fine. That’s how the moon plays her hand—she’s a tough, wild matron. We eat and they eat. Grow fleet and clever went our lullabies. Escape the hunter’s pot today, set your own table tomorrow. But once the huntsmen saw us change, they knew our secret, and they wanted more than stew. They stole our skins and hid them away, and when a body has your skin, you have to stay and cook and clean and make fawns for them until they get old and die. And sometimes then you still can’t find your skin, and you have to burn the cottage down to catch it floating out of the ash. They chased us all the way down the highway to Fairyland, down from the heavens and into the forest, and here we hide from them, even still.”
    “You’re cooking and cleaning now,” September said shyly. A Hreinn boy looked up from kneading dough, his pointed ears covered in flour. She thought of the selkies she’d read about one afternoon when she was meant to be learning about diameters and circumferences: beautiful seals with their spotted pelts, turning into women and living away from the sea. She thought of a highway to the moon, lit with pearly streetlamps. It was so wonderful and terrible her hands trembled a little.
    “We’re cooking for us to eat. Cleaning for us to enjoy the shine on the floor,” Taiga snapped. “It’s different. When you make a house good and strong because it’s your house, a place you made, a place you’re proud of, it’s not at all the same as making it glow for someone who ordered you to do it. A hunter wants to eat a reindeer, just the same as always. But here in the Hill we’re safe. We grow the moonkins and they feed us; we love the forest and it loves us in its rough way—glass shines and cuts and you can’t ask it to do one and not the other. We mind our own, and we only go to Asphodel when we need new books to read. Or when a stranger tromps around so loudly someone has to go out and see who’s making the racket.”
    September smiled ruefully. “I suppose that’s my racket. I’ve only just arrived in Fairyland, and it’s hard to make the trip quietly.” She hurried to correct herself, lest they think she was a naive nobody. “I mean to say, I’ve been before, all the way to Pandemonium and even further. But I had to go away, and now I’m back and I don’t want to trouble you, I can clean my own floors quite well even if I complain about it. Though I think I would complain even if it were my own dear little house and not my mother and father’s, because on the whole I would always rather read and think than get out the wood polish, which smells something awful. I honestly and truly only want to know where I am—I’m not a hunter, I don’t want to get married for a long while yet. And anyway where I come from if a fellow wants to marry a girl, he’s polite about it, and they court, and there’s asking and not capturing.”
    Taiga scratched her cheek. “Do you mean to say no one pursues and no one is pursued? That a doe can marry anyone she likes and no one will leap on her in the night to make the choice for her? That if you wanted you could live by yourself all your life and no one would look askance?”
    September chewed the inside of her lip. She thought of Miss Gilbert, who taught French and ran the astronomy club, and how there had been quite the scandal when she and Mr. Henderson, the math teacher, meant to run off together. The Hendersons had good money and