The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  “Don’t move,” said Linny to Elias, and very carefully, without letting her feet shift an inch, she shrugged one bundle off her shoulder, the one with the lourka in it.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” said Elias in a whisper. His teeth chattered a little on the last word.

  “Shh,” said Linny.

  She wriggled the lourka into place under her right elbow. Her left hand, the fingering hand, hesitated over the strings a little, thinking about notes she might be able to play. And then her other hand plucked a string, and the sound filled that tiny corner’s worth of canyon, filled it and filled it and spilled over its edges.

  “You can’t do that!” said Elias into her ear. “You crazy thing! What are you doing?”

  But Linny was squinting into the vague places in front of them. The note had changed something in the rock just ahead. She was sure it had. She played another couple of notes, just to see what happened.

  What happened was the wind kicked up around them, as if the air had perked up its ears and taken interest. And the rocks trembled a little in the wind. They shuddered. They thinned.

  Elias’s hand trembled on her shoulder.

  Linny was still trying very hard to ignore him. She frowned down at her strings. She was trying to put those notes back together into the pattern of her song. She had known it so well, yesterday afternoon. It must be there somewhere.

  A few sweet notes in a row—so it was still there! She looked up in triumph, and for a moment the rocks right in front of her eyes faded right away and became part of a different place, a hazy place, hard to see, where on the edge of something someone was sitting, someone was turning her head—

  But several things happened at once just then, while her fingers stumbled on, plucking out the notes of that first song. The wind that had come back again to whip itself right around her head, chattering, fell away from one instant to the next, into that complete silence that was somehow worse than noise. The Voices were back. Or had just been back.

  The someone in the different place turned and maybe held out one hand, but everything shimmered, so that it was hard to see. And it was hard to focus on anything, with the ghostly Voices still trembling in the air. They had just been jabbering everywhere all around, insisting on something. Insisting and insisting. The shadows of all those Voices made it hard to think, and harder still to see. Linny wanted very much to see clearly, because there was someone there, she was almost certain, past the shimmer.

  She took a step forward, elbowing her way through the last traces of the rocks, reaching out toward that not-quite-there shape that was also reaching, reaching toward her.

  “Sayra?” she whispered, even that much of a sound intruding rudely into the silence carved out for themselves by all those Voices.

  For one instant, she felt—she was almost sure she felt—thin fingers brushing against hers, pressing something soft and cool into her hand, like a message, and she thought all in a joyful rush, I’m doing it I’ve done it it’s Sayra Sayra—

  And then something or someone grabbed her from behind, shouting out as he did so—it was Elias, why? What was he doing? There was a struggle of some kind going on between him and things that could not be seen nor heard, and Linny was in the middle of it like a flaxseed caught in a whirlwind. The wind was back again, and screaming.

  Meanwhile Elias, that lummox, had grabbed Linny’s lourka right out of her hands and was waving it around in the air. And he was shouting nonsense, too. “Go away! Go away! You can’t have her! It was me! I was the one playing!”

  “You were not,” mumbled Linny, but it made no difference, Elias was making so much noise. And she pulled hard on something, on the beautiful lourka that was hers because she had made it, and there was a struggle, and something gave way with an awful cracking sound, and something else clonked her on the head, and the rocks at the end of the canyon became hard again and indeed scraped themselves painfully against her outstretched hands, and she would have cried from the pain of that, but the world was spinning, she was losing her balance, she was tipping over some edge while the wind screamed at her, she was gone. . . .

  6

  TWISTS IN THE PATH

  Each of the first few times Linny tried to open her eyes, she caught a different glimpse of the world: a pool of trees, their pointy tops dipping into a blue sky . . . an ant climbing with enormous, heartbreaking patience up a tree trunk . . . a bruised and anxious face looking at her and saying something she couldn’t hear. She knew if she were just a little more awake, she would recognize that face, and for a moment she tried to figure out why she had been asleep and where she was, but thinking made her head hurt, so she let her eyelids close again and just hid in the darkness until everything stopped spinning.

  “Linny,” said someone later.

  It was not the voice she was expecting. It wasn’t Sayra, and it wasn’t her mother. She forced her eyes open again and saw that the light had changed, that it was late in the day, and that the face looking with such worry and confusion at her belonged to that lummox Elias. Only at the moment he didn’t look as much like a lummox. He looked worn out and dusty. She also realized, all of a sudden, that her body felt like it had just been popped over a cliff with a river of rocks. She was pummeled all over, and her hands stung.

  “Ow,” she said, trying to get a look at her hands. Someone had wound strips of cloth around her left palm. And her right hand was clenched very tightly around something. Something small and soft. “Elias?”

  “Is that you? Are you back?”

  He sounded so incredibly relieved and exhausted. It was all very disconcerting. It was not like Elias to be worried about Linny. I must have been nearly dead or something, thought Linny. It was the only explanation that made sense.

  “Where are we?”

  She asked because she really could not tell. Which was a strange feeling all in itself. She must not have been awake when they came here.

  “I don’t know,” said Elias. “When those awful Voices grabbed at you up there, I went kind of nuts, I think. And then there was a big shaking, and I lost my balance, and we sort of rolled around a lot of corners at once. I don’t know where we ended up, but I think we’re pretty far below Lourka. Someplace I never even saw before.”

  It was all coming back now. Linny scowled at Elias, and then had to wince, because her head was too sore for scowling.

  “I almost had her,” she said, remembering. The fingers of her right hand had memories of their own: they were still clenching, clenching, as if holding on now could change the past. “She was right there. I think I touched her. But then you grabbed at me and ruined it.”

  “You didn’t have anyone, you idiot,” said Elias. That was more his regular voice. “You took out that stupid lourka, and in like one minute they almost had you. I should have stopped you faster, but my head was all confused. Should have been me playing. Too late now. We messed up. And now she’s really, truly gone.”

  He stood up with an angry, dismal jerk and walked off into the woods. Linny turned her head to watch him go, and the slightly spinny feeling she got from moving her head added to all the other bad feelings in her, until she worried she might actually be sick. But by lying very still until Elias came back, with a cookpot’s worth of water sloshing around in his hands, she made it past that bad moment.

  She recognized the cookpot. That made her wonder how the rest of her stuff was doing. But she wasn’t really ready to look around for it yet.

  So she lay there, thinking uncomfortable thoughts. Was it true? Had she almost been trapped in Away, like Elias said? It was hard to remember the details.

  Her left hand throbbed. The fingers of her right hand clenched and clenched, holding on to—whatever that was. Something almost like nothing.

  “What’s wrong?” said Elias, looking over at her. It was part of his being good with lambs and kittens, she figured—noticing when creatures were twitching.

  “Something’s in my hand,” she said. �
��But my fingers won’t move so I can see what it is.”

  “Hand’s been cramped up all day,” said Elias, poking gently at her fingers. “Fools you into thinking it’s got something inside. Here, I’ll try my ma’s trick on it.”

  He sat down beside her and went to work on that hand, rubbing the life back into her fingers one by one and shaking his head at her when she yelped.

  “It has to hurt some, sorry,” he said, not unkindly. “That’s just the blood coming back. Hey, wait—”

  He bent over her fingers.

  “What’s this?”

  Linny turned her head, trying to see what it was Elias had, but then the seasickness washed over her again.

  “A handkerchief? No. A flower? Why are you—”

  “Give that back!” said Linny. Because suddenly she remembered everything, and she knew what that must be: the wonderful silk rosebud Sayra had made for her from wrinkled silk. Her birthday present. “Sayra gave that to me.”

  “Sayra?” said Elias. “But what is it? Looks so strange.”

  Linny tried even harder to look: there were at least two silky rosebuds swimming before her eyes now. And when she made a heroic effort to bring the images together, the blossom still looked like something made of rose-colored smoke, transparent and insubstantial.

  “Give it back,” said Linny, closing her blurry-sick eyes. “Sayra gave it to me for my birthday, and then I gave it to her, to the shell of her, I mean, in her own room in Lourka, and then when I found her . . . almost found her . . . in Away, she kind of gave it to me again somehow . . . and I feel all spinny, Elias, like I’m about to fall off the world—”

  “Lie quiet,” said Elias. She felt him tucking the soft almost-nothing something back into her palm, and then she was dozing again.

  When she opened her eyes the next time, she felt a bit better. She opened her hand and looked again, and the smoky-delicate rosebud unfolded itself for her, like a breath of magic in her palm. Sayra must have held on to that silky bud so hard that it had ended up in Away with her—but the hours it had spent in that impossible place had changed it. She tucked it safely back into the sash, itself deep in her pocket, and turned her head to see what Elias was up to.

  He was scrabbling over to the left, messing with twigs and dry grass.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Making some supper,” said Elias. “Doesn’t look like you’re ready to walk home just yet.”

  “You can do that? Make a fire? Cook?”

  “’Course I can. You can’t?”

  Linny shook her head and winced. Elias was striking sparks off his flint, and then he knelt down and blew carefully on that little flame. She hadn’t ever seen that expression on his face, that quiet concentration—it looked like her father’s face, when he was polishing an especially nice piece of wood.

  “Ma says you’re not a full grown-up adult until you can feed yourself and at least six other people,” said Elias. He even almost smiled for a moment, as he fed twigs to the flame. “Number not chosen randomly! She has all of us taking turns on meals. Seven of us, so my day’s Wednesday. I’m good at it, too.”

  The baby fire was crackling now for real. Elias went back to rummaging around in Linny’s bundles, sorting out the edibles.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, Linny, why are you lugging a cookpot around, if you can’t cook? To whack people with?”

  She would usually have flared up at that, but she couldn’t get the energy together, somehow.

  It was a reasonable question, too. All that stuff in her bundles—what was the point of it, really? It was useless, maybe, like Linny herself. Making wicked instruments that brought doom down on the people she loved most. Not getting lost, except that here she was now, as good as lost. And what was the point of always knowing where you were, anyway, if you couldn’t find a way to find and save your best friend, really and truly lost somewhere beyond the edge of the world?

  What would be left of Sayra, after spending so much time in Away?

  “You all right?” said Elias.

  She must have made a pathetic little noise, right out loud. That made her mad enough that she pushed herself up from the ground and heaved her body into a semi-sitting position against the nearest tree. She had to pant for a minute or so after that, just to clear her head again, but the world made a lot more sense from this perspective. She could feel the contour of the hill underneath her. To one side, through the trees, she could see a wedge of far ridgeline.

  “Oh!” she said. “How’d we get down here?”

  “The hills spat us out, remember?” said Elias. “Something like that.”

  “It’s so far from the ridge,” said Linny. “I don’t remember doing that much walking.”

  It was way past the boundary trees. That was one thing.

  “Naw. I told you. We got spat out. It was pretty weird. And I had to lug you and all your things.”

  “Oh.”

  That wasn’t such a nice thought, having been lugged about by Elias. She tried to put it out of her head.

  “You got water from a creek over there,” said Linny. “Did you taste it? Is it ours?”

  “Have some. You should be drinking water anyway, so you mend. That’s what Ma always says.”

  He dug a bowl out of one of the bundles and gave Linny some water to sip. It was cold, with a sweet hint of pennyroyal and, beneath that, a whiff of buttered toast. The wrinkled creeks each favored certain flavors over others, though sometimes they experimented.

  “Mostly ours,” said Linny, recognizing the toast. “But some other creek’s joined it, I guess. We must be pretty far below the village now. Past the boundary trees, for sure.”

  “You’ll get us back, though, right? Bonked heads need rest, says Ma, but tomorrow you’ll be walking better. Finish that water.”

  How had he done that? The cookpot was already bubbling. Something was beginning to smell amazingly like soup. It actually made Linny’s stomach forget all about how sick it had just been feeling. Fickle stomach. It rumbled.

  “I’m not actually going back home right now,” said Linny.

  Elias curled his lip in disgust. He was definitely still a lummox, then, after all.

  “Running away?” he said. “That’s pretty stupid. That’s what little kids do when they’re mad about something.”

  “I’m not the stupid one,” said Linny, with as much dignity as her grogginess would allow. “I have something important to do. I have to go down to the Broken City.”

  “You mean the place they call Bend? Down all the way to the edge of the Plain? That’s a good one. Have some soup. It’s pretty basic, but it’s warm.”

  He didn’t believe a word she was saying, Linny could tell. But he poured some of his miraculous soup into her bowl, and for a few minutes, anyway, she had to forgive him.

  Then she said, “I’m going to the city to find medicine for Sayra. My mother says in the Plain they would cure her there with medicines. That gave me the idea.”

  That had Elias surprised. She could see him recalculating all sorts of things he was thinking.

  “You’re going to Bend on your own?” said Elias slowly. “That’s very far away. And you can’t make fires or cook or anything, you said so yourself. It’s a crazy idea.”

  “Sayra’s my almost-twin,” said Linny. “The Voices should have come for me, not her. You know that. I have to make things right. I promised her I’d save her. So now I have to.”

  “Hmm,” said Elias.

  He was letting the fire burn itself out now. The sky was getting dark around them already. How could a whole day have passed since their disastrous trip up to the edge of Away? Though it also felt like a million years ago.

  “Go to sleep,” said Elias. “Tomorrow you’ll have changed your mind, probably. Besides—oh, never mind.”

  “Never mind what?”

  “I promised her, too,” said Elias, looking away, and the fire hissed as he dumped creek water on it. They
both knew about being careful with fires, when you’re out in the woods.

  Linny was glad of the dark; she could roll her eyes without Elias, that lovesick lummox, having the faintest clue.

  Because really. Honestly. Who did he think he was?

  Everywhere all around, the trees were already dipping those points of theirs into a sea of bright stars. Elias rolled himself into a ball and fell immediately asleep, like one of the puppies that always seemed to be dozing in the corners of kind Molleen’s crowded house.

  Maybe she would just have to sneak off on her own the next morning. That’s what she thought, all drowsy-like, and when another part of her brain remembered the boundary trees, and where they were, and how maybe Elias wouldn’t be able to find his way home again, her thoughts muddled themselves up until in fact she wasn’t thinking at all.

  A mere moment later, however, or so it seemed, her eyes were flying open, her heart hammering like a woodpecker. Morning had rinsed the stars away, and somebody had just given a wild, frightened shout, not very far off. Down the slope that way, it sounded like: nearer to the creek.

  “What’s that? What’s that?” she said in alarm, turning to poke Elias awake.

  But the patch of ground where Elias had been sleeping was now only pine needles and brown earth. Elias himself was gone.

  That shout—Elias’s shout?—lingered in the air.

  She sprang to her feet, felt for the whittling knife in her pocket, and was halfway to the creek—slithering from tree to tree—before she even noticed that her head seemed to be feeling like itself again. Thank goodness! Sneaking through forests is hard without a clear and unspinning head.

  Linny knew how to move through the woods without making a racket, that was true. You couldn’t do as much sneaking around as Linny had done all her life and not learn how to avoid breaking twigs. She was careful to stay in the fringe of the forest and on the near side of the creek, keeping her eyes and ears open and slipping from tree to tree. She hadn’t gone too far when there was another bout of commotion ahead—a couple of quick shouts, and a protesting sound, and sounds that Linny could not make sense of at this distance. She scrambled through the trees as fast as she could go, her heart pounding, and as soon as she was over the next little rise of rocks, she saw a knot of people on the opposite bank. She counted them quickly: five, all in identical gray clothing without the slightest flash of color in it. Why a bunch of grown-ups would want to dress in exactly the same uninteresting, ugly clothing, Linny could not even guess.