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

even if they were made of soap.
    “I am a golem, child,” answered Lye calmly. “My mistress wrote it there. She was marvelous clever, and knew all kinds of secret things. One of the things she knew was how to gather up all the slips of soap the bath house patrons left behind and arrange them into a girl-shape and write truth on her forehead and wake her up and give her a name and say to her: be my friend, and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad. ”
    “Who was your mistress, Lye?” said A-Through-L, settling into the courtyerd as best he could, his feet crunched up against a broken pillar. “She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”
    Lye sighed--her bayberry soap shoulders rose and fell abruptly, as though no one had really taught her how to sigh before. “She was a beautiful young girl with hair like new soap and big green eyes and a mole on her left cheek and she was a Virgo and she liked a hot bath first and then a very cold one right after and she always went barefoot and I miss her. I am sure she did spend a lot of time in libraries, for she was always reading books, little ones she could hang from her belt and regular ones with garish covers and big ones, too, so big she’d lay on her stomach in the spine to read them. Her name was Mallow and she has been gone for years and years but I am still here and I keep going and I never stop because I don’t know how to stop because she said I’d never have to stop.”
    “Mallow!” cried the Wyverary, his scaly red eyebrows shooting up. “ Queen Mallow?”
    “I am sure she could have been Queen if she wanted to, she was marvelous clever, as I said.”
    “Who is Queen Mallow?” asked September, who felt quite left out of the excitement. “You mentioned her before. And why is there a Marquess now if there was a Queen before? It seems to me that if you want to mess about with monarchy you might at least get your traditions straight.”
    “Oh, September, you don’t understand!” said Ell, curling his tail down around her. “Before the Marquess came with her lions and her great old panther with his ivory collar, Fairyland dwelt in the eternal summer of Good Queen Mallow, the Bright and the Bold. She loved us and governed with rhyming songs and cherries for all on Sundays. When she rode out on holidays, she wore a crown of red pearls the selkies gave her, and all the pookas did gymnastics just to make her laugh. Every table groaned with milk and wheat and sugar and hot chocolate. Every horse was fat. Every churn was full. Queen Mallow danced in circles of silver mushrooms to bring on the spring--and apparently, before she became Queen, ran a bath house.”
    “But Mallow begins with M. How do you know so much about her?” asked September.
    “ Everyone knows about Good Queen Mallow,” replied the Wyverary, shocked that September did not.
    “Master Wyvern, if you please, where has my mistress gone? It has been many years, and I have drawn many baths, but she has never come back to me, and I cannot sleep or eat because she didn’t teach me how to sleep or eat and it is dark at night and bits of me slough off in the rain.”
    “Oh, darling Lye,” cried the Wyverary. “How I wish I could bring you good news! But late in the golden reign of the Queen, the Marquess arrived and destroyed her. Or made her sit in a corner. Reports vary. And now there are complicated proclamations and the lamentations of the hills and my wings are locked down to my skin and no one has cocoa at all. Some of us hope that in the dungeons of the Briary the Queen is still alive, and playing solitaire to pass the years, waiting for a knight to release her, to repeal the Marquess’s laws and restore cocoa to Fairyland kettles.”
    A single liquid tear melted the cheek of the soap golem. “I suspected,” she whispered thickly. “I suspected when the place began to break down and crumble and cry big dusty tears