In an Absent Dream Read online

  An hour a night would leave plenty of time to go to the Market with Moon and look for ways to pay off her debt, to ease her closer to humanity. It might even leave time for Lundy to buy her own blunt fingernails back. She nodded enthusiastically. “That seems wonderful,” she said.

  “Excellent,” said the Archivist, and beckoned her inside.

  The books were in no particular order, and Lundy found the process of sorting them remarkably soothing, involving, as it did, a strange sort of scavenger hunt through the entire shack. Books had been used to prop up tables and level out shelves; they were piled on surfaces where books had no business being and tucked under the edge of the thin mattress of the Archivist’s bed. In the case of books that had become load-bearing, Lundy used her school ruler to carefully note their heights and went searching for rocks or pieces of scrap wood that would do the job as well, if not better. In the case of books left too near to water or exposed to the air, she rolled her eyes and whisked them away to literary safety.

  The books under the mattress gave her pause. She was standing there, trying to decide what should be done with them, when she heard a footstep behind her. Lundy turned. The Archivist looked at her kindly.

  Lundy took strength from that expression, stood a little straighter, and asked, “What should I do with these?”

  “Leave them. They have bad dreams, and I’m trying to help them tell themselves a little better.”

  After everything else she’d seen in the Goblin Market—centaurs who baked pies, children who turned into birds, fingernails that sharpened into talons—Lundy had no trouble with the idea of tucking books into bed to soothe them. “Oh,” she said, and turned to go.

  “No.” The Archivist put a hand on her shoulder, stopping her. “Fair value means you’re done for tonight, and should sleep. Children need their rest.”

  Lundy hesitated. “I’ve given fair value?”

  “You have.” The Archivist glanced at Lundy’s clawed fingers. “Tomorrow, will you be looking for other ways to give fair value?”

  “I left Moon alone when she was sad, and she got lost. I promised her I’d help her find the way back.”

  “Promises are their own form of fair value, as long as they’re kept.” The Archivist let go of Lundy’s shoulder. “If you and Moon travel to the Market’s edge, you’ll find a man doing laundry by the stream. He’s always looking for help, and few people offer it. Laundry is hard, sweaty work. But he pays well, because of its difficulty, and might be willing to clear a debt.”

  Lundy, who was used to debts being things owed to individuals, and not to entire communities, bit her lip and nodded. “May I ask a question?”

  “You may, and if answering it would require payment, I will decline to answer.”

  “Why … why is Moon so deeply in debt, if it’s that easy to clear debts away?”

  “Come to the fire with me.”

  The Archivist turned and walked away, speaking as she went, so that Lundy had to follow or miss her words.

  “You don’t live here yet, if you ever will,” said the Archivist. “You’re a tourist, a summer person, coming through and moving on. That gives you a certain flexibility where the rules are concerned. People will be eager to find ways for you to clear any debts you acquire, because they don’t want you carrying them with you into the wider world.”

  “Moon is the same age I am,” said Lundy. “Why isn’t she a summer person?”

  “Moon was left here by her mother, who was once of ours, but who chose to leave us for a summer world, like yours,” said the Archivist. “I don’t know how she persuaded the door to open one last time. The door should not have opened. I have to believe she paid for it, somehow. But she left the child, and Moon took the oath of citizenship when she was barely higher than my knee. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been allowed to do so. Perhaps she should have stayed a tourist, at least until she was old enough to see if the door to her mother’s world would open for her. We were all she had. When she asked if we were going to send her away, what could we say but ‘no’ and ‘never’? The rules make no exemptions for age. Once a citizen of the Goblin Market, always a citizen, and you’ll pay as anyone else does. Everyone pays.”

  Lundy worried her lip between her teeth as she watched the Archivist lay out a pallet on the floor in front of the fire, creating a rough but serviceable bed. Finally, she asked, “What’s the citizenship oath?”

  “It is a promise you make to the Goblin Market, when you’re sure you want to stay. A promise you make to yourself.” The Archivist gave her a sidelong look. “Are you sure?”

  Lundy—who had returned, despite the promise she’d already made, because she was angry and hurt and sad and couldn’t imagine spending one more minute among people who said one thing and meant another, who lied and cheated and looked down on her for not being gregarious, and soft, and kind, and all the things they believed a girl should be—shook her head, fast and fierce. “No,” she said. “I’m not sure. I didn’t think … when I left before, I thought I was leaving for always. I didn’t think I was coming back.”

  “Because you were sad.”

  “Because I was sad.” Lundy looked at the Archivist with a child’s innocent confusion, and asked, “Why did Mockery have to die?”

  “All things die, child. It’s part of giving fair value. Eventually, even the Market will die, and this world will become one more piece of the great graveyard that fills the walls between worlds. Your friend was very brave, and very clever, and she was cheated when she died too soon. But you and Moon were able to slay the Wasp Queen, even though she was older and wiser and more powerful than you were, weren’t you?”

  Lundy nodded silently, trying not to remember the way the brittle, terrible beast had screamed.

  “That was the world trying to give fair value for something that shouldn’t have happened so terribly soon. In the world you come from, unfair things can happen without consequences. Here, as soon as the Wasp Queen slew an innocent, she was doomed to lose.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair either,” said Lundy. “Mockery didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Sometimes ‘fair’ is bigger than just you,” said the Archivist. She handed Lundy a pillow. “Sometimes ‘fair’ has to think about what’s best for everyone. You don’t have to be sure yet, Lundy. Remember the curfew. You still have time.”

  She turned and walked back to her own bed, lying down without undressing or brushing her teeth. That left Lundy unsure as to whether she should do those things, or whether the rules were different in the Goblin Market. She was older now. It seemed more important to have clean pajamas and a clean mouth before she went to sleep, like the Sandman—if he existed—might judge her for poor hygiene.

  There was nothing to be done for it. She wasn’t going to stay long. She had only come because she’d been angrier than her lingering sorrow over the loss of Mockery; she’d been intending to run away for a little while, to cool down and calm down and go back to school apologetic, after Mr. Holmen had had time to learn his lesson about treating girls like they were less than boys were. But Moon needed her here, and she couldn’t run out on a friend, especially not a friend whose troubles were partially the result of Lundy’s own mistakes.

  And it wouldn’t matter if Moon told her to go, anyway, because she couldn’t leave at all, not while her fingernails were still claws, impossible things that had no place on a little girl’s hands, that would mark her as a monster and worse outside the Goblin Market. Her father would weep if he saw them, would break down and cry as she had only seen him do once, the first time she’d returned. Her mother would never understand. Even Diana would shy away from her and scream. So no: she didn’t have a choice.

  Lundy stretched out on the blankets, her head resting on the pillow, which smelled like barley and lavender, and let the crackle of the fire soothe her into sleep.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE WOKE, the shack was bright with sunlight streaming through the cracks in the wal
ls. Lundy stretched luxuriously, trying not to grimace at the foul taste in her mouth. She had to find a way to brush her teeth if she was going to sleep here again. There was simply no way around it.

  “Oh, good, you’re up,” said a voice.

  Lundy screamed, sitting bolt upright and whipping around. Moon, who was crouched on the low table just inside the front door, blinked.

  “You have some lungs on you,” she said. “I bet you’d be a mockingbird. Or maybe one of those big parrots that can still talk no matter how big their beaks get. Not everybody gets to be a parrot. I always hoped I’d be one, until my first feathers came in brown.” She plucked at one of the feathers tangled along her hairline.

  Lundy’s stomach sank as she realized that the feathers she’d naively assumed were some kind of fashion affectation were actually growing from Moon’s scalp. No wonder Mockery had laughed when Lundy had asked her to braid a band of them into Lundy’s own hair; no wonder her father had reacted so badly when she’d come home from the Goblin Market with them brushing against her shoulders. He must have thought that she’d already gone into debt.

  Could girls even grow feathers in the world outside the Market? If she took Moon home with her—grabbed her right now and ran for the door—would the feathers fall out, or would they both be monsters for the rest of their lives, child-bird hybrids who belonged in a zoo more than they belonged in a classroom?

  “Did I surprise you?” Moon sat back on her heels, looking apologetic. “I didn’t mean to. But you’ve been asleep for so long, and I’m hungry, and the Archivist said we were going to go do some work today to try and pay off more of my debts.”

  “There’s a man,” said Lundy, finally getting her breath back. “He does laundry. She said he might let us help him.”

  “Oh.” Moon’s face fell. She held up hands which, while closer to normal than they had been, were still too long and thin to be anything other than changed. “I can’t fold clothes very well. My fingers don’t want to bend the right way.”

  “That’s okay.” One good thing about sleeping in her clothes: she was already dressed, and she felt like she could run a mile if she had to. “I’ll do it. My hands are good, and once I pay back for the claws, they’ll be even better. Then you can take the value and buy yourself off.”

  “I can’t pay you for that kind of generosity.”

  “So we’ll make another promise.” Moon looked so small and lost that Lundy couldn’t imagine not trying to help her. They had to help each other. If it wasn’t a rule, it should have been: it should have been hanging in the hall with all the others. Lundy offered her a wan smile. “I’ll do the work until you can help, and you can get more girl and less bird, and then if I need you to help me, you’ll do it. That’s fair value, right? The rules say it’s okay for me to work for you if you’re going to pay me sometime later. Like the rules said it was okay for you to do the bartering and get half of the pies.”

  “I think that’s fair value,” said Moon slowly. Then, more firmly, she said, “I know it’s fair value. We’ve found fair value! Come on!”

  She grabbed Lundy’s wrist with her long, strange fingers, hauling her to her feet. Lundy didn’t shudder from Moon’s touch. Together, they ran out of the shack and down the path, skirting around the edge of the great breathing body of the Market until they came to a platform constructed to overhang the stream. There, a man so old and weathered that he could have been grandfather to them all was stirring great wooden tubs full of laundry with a stick.

  He wrinkled his nose when he saw them coming, and said, “It’s two buttons a load for something as soiled as what you’re wearing, and I can’t promise you’ll have all the ribbons back when I’m finished.”

  “We’re not here to ask you to do more work,” said Lundy, who had always been good at being polite to adults, and could see that this wasn’t a man who often had children seek him out for kindness. “We were hoping we could do some of the work for you. If you wouldn’t mind.”

  The old man lifted his eyebrows, looking first at Lundy, and then at Moon’s impossible fingers. “I’m too tired to be taking on debts for foolish little girls who couldn’t mind fair value,” he grumbled. “You’d have to accept the laundry yourself, not do what’s already here, and you’d have to do it proper, no slacking off or lollygagging. It’ll be hard and tiresome and not as fun as running wild in the woods all day.”

  “Yes, but at the end of it, we won’t fly away,” said Lundy. “I think we can tolerate a little hard work if it means we keep our feet on the ground.”

  Moon, who was closer to being a bird, and hence closer to the sky, looked unsure, but said nothing. She was still human enough to want to stay that way. The tipping point of her heart, if it existed, had not yet been reached.

  The old man looked between them, and sighed. “All right,” he said. “I could do with a rest. You can use my supplies, and in exchange you’re to give me half of what you make. Soap doesn’t grow on trees, you know, not unless the weather’s gone strange.” He went back to stirring his pot of laundry, which didn’t feel much like resting to Lundy, but what did she know? She wasn’t an old man, and she didn’t operate her own business. She couldn’t call it “owning,” because there was no building, or sign, or business card—all the things she had learned to associate with the idea of owning a thing.

  She and Moon sat on some rocks off to the side, and waited for people to bring their washing.

  The first to arrive was a beleaguered-looking man with a long cow’s tail and four children trotting along behind him. All of them had tails like his, and the two girls had curving horns growing from their foreheads, on which they had tied a remarkable number of bows. His arms were full of clothes, which he tried to thrust at the old man.

  “Not me, not today,” the old man said, and hooked a finger at Lundy and Moon. “These clever young things are working off a spot of debt. Give what wants doing to them. Payment’s as standard, and their work will be up to snuff or I’ll take fair value out of their hides.”

  The cow-man—or bull-man, Lundy supposed—looked dubious, but handed his washing over anyway. “It all needs to be clean by high-sun,” he said. “The children will have found a mud puddle or something of the like by then, and we’ll have to start all over again.”

  “You can count on us, sir,” said Lundy brightly. “It’ll be clean as anything.”

  The bull-man still looked dubious. But one of the children had found a frog and was on the verge of pursuing it into the stream, and two more of them were already halfway up a tree, and the fourth was poking a stick into a hole, and it was clear he didn’t have the time to argue about laundry.

  “Fine,” he said. “But I won’t pay until I’m back, and I won’t pay for anything I don’t receive.”

  “Fair value,” agreed Lundy, and smiled prettily as the bull-man rounded up his children and ushered them away, to potentially less muddy climes.

  When she turned, the old man was looking at her. “Well?” he said. “Get washing.”

  Doing laundry by hand was even harder and less pleasant than Lundy, who had grown up with a washing machine, could ever have imagined. First they had to wet the clothes all the way down, and it seemed like the fabric fought this process, refusing to soak through even though she knew, just knew that everything would have been drenched in an instant if she hadn’t wanted it to be. Then they had to beat the wet clothes against some rocks the old man had placed for that purpose, breaking up the stains, and then came the soap, and the scrubbing, and the wringing-out.

  Lundy had never cared for doing laundry. After an afternoon spent by the stream, washing other people’s clothing by hand, she thought she would welcome the chance to do it every day, forever, as long as she got to use the machine. The machine was heaven.

  But the bull-man came back for his clothes, and was quietly pleased to find them clean and dry and ready, and he paid the man who owned the soap and barrels a handful of glittering sand, and some of th
e feathers fell out of Moon’s hair.

  But the woman with the snails slithering through her hair came back for her flowing gowns, and was surprised and delighted to find them clean and damp and ready, and she paid the man a handful of empty snail shells that clattered like bones, and somehow the lines of Moon’s face relaxed so that her orange eyes were only human-sized, and not large and round as buttons.

  Over and over, their customers came back for their things and found fair value had been more than given, and they paid, how they paid! The old man looked more and more satisfied as their day’s take increased, until he turned to them as the sun was setting and said, “You have done better than I had any right to expect you to. Come back anytime.”

  He handed Lundy a silver coin with tarnish along the edge, like a small and captive moon, and the talons fell from her fingers, leaving them stubby and childlike once again. She felt an unexpected pang of regret, like she had just given up something precious, which made no sense at all. How could having claws possibly be precious?

  Moon, whose eyes were still orange, who still had feathers in her hair, but who otherwise looked like an ordinary child, beamed at her. “Look how much we did in a day!” she crowed. “You’re my lucky charm.”

  Lundy, who had some questions about how Moon had been able to amass so much debt if she could pay it all off in a single day’s work, tucked the coin away in her pocket and smiled. “I guess somebody has to be,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  And so they did.

  8 BY THE FIRE

  MOON LAY IN A heap next to the Archivist’s fire, snoring with openmouthed gusto. The Archivist looked at her, amused, before returning her attention to Lundy.

  “You want to know about debt,” she said.

  Lundy, who had raised no such questions, blinked. Then she nodded. “Yes. I do.”

  “I told you it would be easier for you because you don’t belong here yet. As long as you’re a tourist, people will pay you generously. Your enjoyment is a part of fair value, until you make your mind up one way or the other.”