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

Which September Discovers a Forest of Glass, Applies Extremely Practical Skills to It, Encounters a Rather Unfriendly Reindeer, and Finds that Something Has Gone Terribly Awry in Fairyland
    September looked up from the pale grass. She stood shakily, rubbing her bruised shins. The border between our world and Fairyland had not been kind to her this time, a girl alone, with no green-suited protector to push her through all the checkpoints with no damage done. September wiped her nose and looked about to see where she had got herself.
    A forest rose up around her. Bright afternoon sunshine shone through it, turning every branch to flame and gold and sparkling purple prisms—for every tall tree was made of twisted, wavering, wild, and lumpy glass. Glass roots humped up and dove down into the snowy earth; glass leaves moved and jingled against one another like tiny sleigh bells. Bright pink birds darted in to snap at the glass berries with their round green beaks. They trilled triumph with deep alto voices that sounded like nothing so much as Gotitgotitgotit and Strangegirl!Strangegirl! What a desolate and cold and beautiful place those birds lived in! Tangled white underbrush flowed up around gnarled and fiery oaks. Glass dew shivered from leaves and glass moss crushed delicately beneath her feet. In clutches here and there, tiny silver-blue glass flowers peeked up from inside rings of red-gold glass mushrooms.
    September laughed. I’m back, oh, I’m back! She whirled around with her arms out and then clasped them to her mouth—her laughter echoed strangely in the glass wood. It wasn’t an ugly sound. Actually, she rather liked it, like talking into a seashell. Oh, I’m here! I’m really here and it is the best of birthday presents!
    “Hullo, Fairyland!” she cried. Her echo splashed out through the air like bright paint.
    Strangegirl! Strangegirl! answered the pink-and-green birds. Gotitgotitgotit!
    September laughed again. She reached up to a low branch where one of the birds was watching her with curious glassy eyes. It reached out an iridescent claw to her.
    “Hullo, Bird!” she said happily. “I have come back and everything is just as strange and marvelous as I remembered! If the girls at school could see this place, it would shut them right up, I don’t mind telling you. Can you talk? Can you tell me everything that’s happened since I’ve been gone? Is everything lovely now? Have the Fairies come back? Are there country dances every night and a pot of cocoa on every table? If you can’t talk, that’s all right, but if you can, you ought to! Talking is frightful fun, when you’re cheerful. And I am cheerful! Oh, I am, Bird. Ever so cheerful.” September laughed a third time. After so long keeping to herself and tending her secret quietly, all these words just bubbled up out of her her like cool golden champagne.
    But the laugh caught in her throat. Perhaps no one else could have seen it so quickly, or been so chilled by the sight, having lived with such a thing herself for so long.
    The bird had no shadow.
    It cocked its head at her, and if it could talk it decided not to. It sprang off to hunt a glass worm or three. September looked at the frosty meadows, at the hillsides, at the mushrooms and flowers. Her stomach turned over and hid under her ribs.
    Nothing had a shadow. Not the trees, not the grass, not the pretty green chests of the other birds still watching her, wondering what was the matter.
    A glass leaf fell and drifted slowly to earth, casting no dark shape beneath it.
    The low little wall September had tripped over ran as far as she could peer in both directions. Pale bluish moss stuck out of every crack in its dark face like unruly hair. The deep black glass stones shone. Veins of white crystal shot through them. The forest of reflections showered her with doubled and tripled light, little rainbows and long shafts of bloody orange. September shut her eyes several times and opened them again,