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

this boisterous, talkative shadow-boy.
    They did not know that a thing hunted them in the dark because between the three of them they actually had very little in the way of knowledge about formal magic. They knew it was delightful fun and rollicking, and had a rough guess as to how to make it happen, but that is like saying you know all about how airplanes work because you once rode in one all the way to the sea. There are many different kinds of magic in Fairyland. Light and Dark were just not enough to satisfy everyone’s needs. In the very old days, magic in Fairyland was like a blanket too small to cover everyone’s feet. So magic broke itself up obligingly into patchworks: Dry Magic and Wet Magic, Hot Magic and Cold Magic, Fat Magic and Thin Magic, Loud Magic and Shy Magic, Bitter Magic and Sour Magic, Sympathetic Magic and Severe Magic, Umbrella Magic and Fan Magic, Wanting Magic and Needing Magic, Bright Magic and Dim Magic, Finding Magic and Losing Magic.
    Marketplaces use Thin Magic to hunt and pounce. And a small, hungry Market moved just behind and beyond September and Ell and Saturday’s field of vision, for it had caught a whiff of their Thinness.
    You see, a Marketplace is like a lithe, hungry dog. It can sense when you need something and have even the littlest bit of money, just like a dog knows when a plump little rabbit is wriggling her nose in the forest. They can smell it when you have a great deal of money and very little sense, or when you need something very specific, but might be enticed by something enchanting and just beyond your reach. A Market can make itself any sort of shape or size in order to capture its quarry, fill itself with this or that, depending on how it has decided to have you.
    No sooner had they passed the rich brown grass of the Samovar’s estate and into a broad obsidian plain than music spun up all around them like sudden smoke and fire. Bright, pale tents unfolded and puffed up, long ebony tables full of glittering things and groaning with food rolled out, and long strands of starry colored lights spooled along tall spires. A little creature toddled from tent to tent, her eyes huge and luminous and moon colored, her ears long and heavy, her skin dark and mossy like a tree’s trunk, her hair decorated with every kind of jewel and feather.
    Saturday clapped his hands.
    “A Goblin Market! Oh, September, you see, I told you fabulous things were waiting for us just round the bend! They’re just the very best kind!”
    The little creature seemed to finally notice them. She bent double and slowly, deliberately somersaulted across the courtyard to September, turning over and over again like a determined boulder. She came up squat and green-black, her skin thorny and smooth in complicated swirling patterns. Agates, bloodstones, and tiger’s eyes stuck all about her hair and face, a dull, glinting mask.
    “Come buy, come buy,” she said beguilingly. Her long, pale lips drew up into a smile. She pushed her graceful, many-knuckled fingers into her heavy black waistcoat and came out with a bunch of shockingly bright carrots, shining as though they had been panned from a creek of gold, large and gnarled and pointed as knives. “Come buy, come buy, come hear my cry! Oh, hark, oh, hark, oh, heed and hark, sweet child of sun and fable, come rest your feet, come share your heat, and sup your fill at my table!”
    “No, no, none of that,” said A-Through-L as September looked at the vegetables calmly, without once reaching for them. She had learned her lesson with regards to tasting things without examining them thoroughly and asking a goodly number of questions. “You must look out for Goblins especially hard when they rhyme, September. Rhyming means up to no good !” He said the G very hard, so that September would know he knew what he was talking about.
    “But then again,” Saturday added thoughtfully, “ up to no good may mean up to something interesting ! The other Saturday got