The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente Read Free Book Online

impressed, I promise. Start with your name, that’s easiest.”
    September put down her arms and folded them in her lap. The dragon hunched in close, his smoky-sweet breath flaring huge red nostrils. “September,” she said softly. “And…well, I’m very scared and I don’t know if you’re going to eat me or not, and it’s hard to do tricks when you’re scared. Anyway, where I come from, it’s a known fact that dragons eat people and I prefer to be the one doing the eating, if eating is to be done. Which it hasn’t been since last night. I don’t suppose you have cake? I think dragon food would be all right, it’s only Fairy food I’m to watch out for.”
    “How funny you are!” crowed the beast. “First off, I am not a dragon. I don’t know where you could have gotten that idea. I was very careful to show you my feet. I am a Wyvern. No forepaws, see?” The Wyvern displayed his proud, scaled chest, the color of old peaches. He balanced quite well on his massive hindquarters, and the rest of him rose up in a kind of squat S-shape, ending in the colossal head, which bore many teeth and a thick jaw and snapping bits of fire-colored whiskers. “And you must have very rude dragons where you come from! I’ve never heard the like! If people show up to a dragon’s mountain yelling about sacrifices and O ye FELL BEAST SPARE MY VILLAGE this and GREAT DRAGON I SHALL MURDER THEE that, well, certainly, a fellow might have a chomp. But you oughtn’t judge, any more than you judge a lady for eating the lovely fresh salad that a waiter brings her in a restaurant. Secondly, no, I don’t have any cake.”
    “Oh. I didn’t mean any offense.”
    “Why should I be offended? Dragons are a bit more than cousins, but a bit less than siblings. I know all about them, you see, because they begin with D.”
    “What is your name, Wyvern? I should have been more polite.”
    “I am the Honorable Wyvern A-Through-L, small fey. I would say ‘at your service’ but that’s rather fussy and I’m not, you see, so it would be inaccurate.”
    “That’s a very funny name for…” September considered her words. “Such a fine beast,” she finished.
    “It’s a family name,” A-Through-L said loftily, scratching behind one horn. “My father was a Library. So properly speaking, I am a Lyvern, or…a Libern? A Wyverary? I am still trying to find the best term.”
    “Well, I think that’s very unlikely,” said September, who preferred Wyverary .
    “However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth, and therefore one hundred percent likely. My sainted mother was the familiar of a highly puissant Scientiste, and he loved her. He polished her scales every week with beeswax and truffle oil. He fed her sweet water and bitter radishes grown by hand in his laboratory, and therefore much larger and more bitter than usual radishes. He petted her, and called her a good Wyvern, and made a bed for her out of river rushes and silk batting and old bones. (They didn’t come from anyone he knew, so that was all right, and a Wyvern nest has to have bones, or else it’s just not home.) It was quite a good situation for my mother, even if she hadn’t liked him a great deal and thought him very wise. As all reptiles know, the bigger the spectacles, the wiser the wearer, and the Scientiste wore the biggest pair ever built. But even the wisest of men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals. So went my mother’s patron, in a spectacular display of Science.”
    “That’s very sad,” sighed September.
    “Terribly sad! But grief is wasted on the very roasted. Without her companion, my mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, allowing herself to grow closer and closer to Compleat, to