The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  It was a picture of a slightly older Linnet, with Linnet’s own lourka.

  And yet this painting had the look of something a hundred years old. Maybe even more ancient than that.

  “You see the problem,” said the magician, standing up and brushing the crumbs from his lap. “That, dear children, is the Girl with the Lourka. The most famous girl in all the stories told in Bend, I might add. There are plenty of fakes, oh, yes, but you have the glow of authenticity about you. And that is why our madji will want to meet you, though you’re younger than anyone expected. So off I go, to arrange the terms of that meeting.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Elias. “How’d Linny get into that picture? Looking so grown-up and all?”

  The magician barked. Or laughed. It was a low and enormous sound.

  “My question, and the madji’s question—and quite possibly the Surveyors’ question, too, by the way—is how did the Girl with the Lourka start walking around outside her frame, pretending to be an ordinary flesh-and-blood person?”

  He was studying their faces as he said these things. Linny tried not to look anywhere near as puzzled as she felt.

  “Oh, you can be sure that won’t make the Surveyors happy,” he continued. “Thinking the madji have gotten themselves a real Girl with a Lourka. Spitting mad, I suspect they are going to be. Maybe paintings walk around on two legs all the time, where you come from, but wrinkled magic of that sort is quite rare down here. You’re quite the commodity, Linnet from the hills!”

  “I’m not anything but me,” said Linny with dignity. She didn’t understand the word the magician had just used, but it sounded (she thought) unpleasant. “And if magic is so hard to find around here, how can you be what you said you were—a magician?”

  “Magic is also a commodity, in places where it is rare,” the magician said. “A commodity is something with a price. And you, for instance, are definitely that, my dear. Just the price has yet to be fully determined.”

  He let his enormous hand settle again, for a few heavy seconds, on Linny’s head.

  “You behave, and no harm will come to you or that brother of yours. Got that? This is not a game, little girl from the hills. Lives hang in the balance, not to mention a great deal of money. So from now on, whoever else you think you may be, you are first and foremost her—”

  And he pointed at that old picture again, where the almost grown-up girl who looked so exactly like Linnet’s own self stood with such confidence, the lourka in her hand.

  Linny wanted to take that picture down from the wall and shake it until it explained itself to her.

  Wait. What was that behind the painted girl’s skirts? Linny squinted harder.

  “The inspiration of the madji!” The magician went on. “That’s you now: the Girl with the Lourka. The genuine article. The making of our fortune. And don’t you forget it.”

  Linny gave a fierce blink to clear her eyes. Yes, there it was, painted with the most amazing precision. It was the furry tail of a cat. And as she stared, the painted tail flicked itself lazily around the girl’s painted leg and changed color from tawny gold to silver gray. A wrinkled picture, then.

  The magician whistled happily through his teeth as he put away the remnants of the cheese and fetched his outside jacket from the coatracks in the hall.

  Not knowing exactly what the he might be up to, Elias and Linny sat as still as rabbits under a fox’s eye and watched the magician force his enormous arms into the enormous sleeves of that jacket. To be sure, he was watching them at the same time (with the self-satisfied half smile of a fox on the prowl around rabbits).

  And then he pounced. He clapped a huge hand, a giant’s vise, onto Elias’s shoulder, and steered him off toward the hall.

  “This one will come with me, I think,” he said. “The brother of the Girl with the Lourka! That will be my little gift to them. They’ll see I mean business when they meet you, boy. You reek most convincingly of the hills.”

  Elias yelped and twisted, but the magician’s hands were not to be squirmed out of.

  “Oh, no, my boy, surely it’s not such a bad fate as that!” he said, laughing his deep, resonant laugh. “That’s my business, after all: selling weapons to the madji. Some weapons are gray and go boom; some of them have hands and feet and tales to tell. How do you feel about those Surveyors, anyway, boy from the hills?”

  “I hate them,” said Elias with deep conviction. “They tied me up, back in the hills. Linny had to burn down their camp.”

  “Good,” said the magician, tightening his grip. “They’ll see you; they’ll hear our stories; they’ll know the product I’m offering is probably genuine. Good, good, good! And then they’ll take you away and train you up.”

  Linny squawked.

  “And you’ll each of you behave like a good child, won’t you?” said the magician. “Not wanting harm to come to your sweet brother or sister, as the case may be. Good-bye for now, Linnet. MA!”

  “Elias!” said Linny in alarm. “No. You can’t go off with him. What are you doing?”

  But really—and the glimpse of Elias’s shocked face underscored the problem—there was nothing he could do. The magician was moving him out of the room as easily as a mother cat carries a kitten. He was going to take Elias away; in a moment they would be gone.

  “TAKE THE GIRL UPSTAIRS, MA!”

  The merest fringe of bright red hair—and one eye—peeked out from among the coats.

  “It would be politer not to mumble,” said the magician’s ma. “Whaddayerwant anyhow?”

  “GIRL! UPSTAIRS! And you, girl, stop your fussing. You don’t want to make me mad. Or, I’m so very afraid to say, your brother will suffer. MA!”

  The ancient old woman sat up in her chair and pointed her finger (bony! knobbly at the joints!) right in Linny’s direction.

  “Girl’s not upstairs,” said the magician’s old ma, with a sly wink. “Girl’s right here. I can smell her. Lost your great big eyes, Roddy?”

  “Take her UPSTAIRS and keep her SAFE,” said the magician, but this time he said it more with gestures than words. “This boy and I have business to attend to. Urgent, important business. And I bid you good afternoon, ladies!”

  One second later the two of them—startled Elias and the enormous magician—had vanished into the front hall.

  “Oh, and don’t bother trying to run away, Linnet from the hills,” called the magician from the far end of that hall. “You’ll find I’ve bolted the door with tremendous care.”

  And then there was the great bang of the front door slamming shut—and Linny, whose friends kept being swallowed by dooms of her own making, found herself horribly, awfully alone.

  11

  LINNET ALONE

  No, not entirely alone.

  Already a small claw of a hand had clamped itself around Linny’s arm.

  “Yes yes yes yes,” the dandelion-headed old woman said as she gave Linny a tug in the direction of a rickety staircase. “Up this way, kiddie. What’s happened to the other one of you? My little Rodegar eat him up already? Heh heh heh . . .”

  The stairway was narrow and dim. Linny listened to every inch of that space, as much as she measured it with her eyes. The sound of their steps had a hollow undertone to them, for instance.

  There’s a basement, then, thought Linny. She was putting together all the parts of this house in her mind. This was not a place where she ever intended to get lost. Quite the opposite, in fact. She would find her way out of here, as fast as fast.

  Sayra was fading, way back in the hills. And now Elias being dragged off to the madji, wherever they were! Linny put her hands to her head in frustration, and then recognized the gesture as her mother’s (when the twins were being impossible wild things) and felt a sharp stab of homesickness on top of the worry.

  “In here, in here, kiddie,” said the magician’s ma, and she opened the door to a very small and narrow room with a simple cot set up against the wall and a wooden chair at the end
of the cot nearest the door. The saving grace of that room was a slightly larger window than you might expect, tucked in under the slanting roof and letting in four dusty panes’ worth of late-afternoon light.

  “Young, aren’t you?” said the old woman, out of the blue. She had made a quick job of covering the cot with the quilt and blanket, and now she perched a little shakily on the chair at the far end, her chin tucked on the back’s top rung.

  “Not particularly,” said Linny, looking longingly through the panes of that window. There was a walled-in courtyard out back there, with the scrawniest apple tree she’d ever seen. No, she wasn’t young. She had left her child years behind, hadn’t she, when she left the hills? But she did secretly feel not quite as old as she would have wanted to be, to be caught now in the fix she was in.

  “Can’t hear you so clear, kiddie,” said the old woman. “We thought you’d be older, if you see what I’m saying. You’re the one who is supposed to save us and lead us to victory, you know—oh, yes, I know the stories by heart. I would, wouldn’t I? So many fakes, but you smell real to me. Just didn’t know you’d be so puny.”

  The window was the kind that didn’t unlatch. Linny came back toward the door and the woman watching from the chair.

  “It’s hot,” said Linny, and she pulled the bedroom door right open.

  “Hey!” said the old woman. “Go sit on that nice bed there, kiddie! I’ll be minced if I lose you.”

  But she didn’t seem to notice the opened door.

  Linny listened to the subtle noises any house makes and to the silences that followed them and felt the distances of all of those walls and doors in the way the sound worked here. The old woman gave a little cough that tripped on itself and then kept tripping and rumbling until it was definitely no longer a cough but a snore. She had fallen asleep in her chair. Linny sat very quiet for a while, watching her tiny red puffball of a head loll against the back of the chair.

  She was trying to be careful, waiting for a few minutes while the magician’s ma snored herself deeper into her nap. Finally, when the light coming through the window at the end of the room began to dim, Linny stood up and sneaked past the end of the bed and out into the hall beyond.

  She needed to know more about this house and these people. And if the redheaded granny woke up and found her wandering, well, she needed to use the privy, didn’t she? That was ordinary enough.

  On the other side of the hall upstairs were two other rooms, very simple and plain, looking over the street in front of the house. Probably the magician and his mother slept in those.

  She was figuring all this out very fast as she sped as quietly as a breath of air down the narrow staircase to the ground floor. Her ears were stretched as wide as could be, to pick up any hint of enormous feet stomping back into the house, but she heard nothing.

  She opened three doors before she found the staircase that must lead down to the basement. There was a candle in a lantern set into a nook about halfway down, and the flicker of more candlelight from farther below, so it wasn’t completely dark, but it felt to Linny like there was something wrong down here, something wrong at the bottom of the stairs.

  Well, but she had to know.

  Linny took a deep breath and then darted down the stairs and into what she instantly recognized must be the magician’s workshop. It had sturdy tables like her father’s room, and storage cabinets along its sides, and shelves with tools and odd objects on them, which was also like any of the workshops she had ever caught glimpses of in her own village. But unlike the instrument-building workshops of Lourka, this basement room, lit by candle lamps, had one whole corner of it left not just undecorated, but actually blackened and barren, as if experiments there had gone terribly awry.

  Worse than blackened, to be completely honest: something was deeply, deeply wrong with the world over in that corner. It was a space that Linny’s mind could not make sense of, because the sense of that space had been utterly and violently undone. A part of the pattern of the world was simply missing. Melted away. Gone.

  Linny found herself shaking. That annoyed her mightily, so she made a show of walking closer to that blasted corner. “Blasted” was definitely the right word. Fireworks or explosions had scarred the floor and walls and even left some drippy spots of damage in the ceiling above.

  That’s when she remembered the strange pebbles the magician had flung into the ranks of the gray Surveyors, and the sickening sense then that some wrong thing was being done to the world. Weapons, he had said. On the shelves were sealed cylinders that Linny thought looked purely wicked. When he had thrown those little pebbles, they had exploded, as if they had a century’s worth of anger and bad feelings squeezed into them. If even a pebble could warp the world, what would these great canisters do? The back of her neck had gone all clammy.

  What kind of weapons was Rodegar Malkin selling to the madji, she wondered? Was Elias going to be carrying one of these awful cylinders in his hands? Oh, Elias! Appalled, she scampered back up the stairs to the main floor, tested the street door in that dim front hall (and yes, it was locked), and then went outside to make her cover story true by using the privy behind the apple tree.

  The walls of that courtyard were too high and too smooth to climb, even for a good climber like Linny. Elias would have to take care of himself for a little bit. And Sayra would have to keep holding on.

  When she left the privy, just the last ruddy glimmers of sunset were bouncing about the yard. Time to get back upstairs before old redheaded Ma woke up from her nap and started having fits.

  As she sneaked back through the many-windowed room (where the painting was now too buried in shadows to be properly seen) and up the staircase again, something warm and furry snaked up the steps, right through her legs, making her jump. It was the wrinkled cat, mysterious and self-contained, as all cats are, and on its own path.

  “You’re in that picture, too,” whispered Linny after the cat. “Wish you could tell me why.”

  Cats usually skip explanations, however. By the time Linny was slipping through the bedroom door, the cat was curled up on her bed, the golden tabby side wrapped around the silver one, and its golden eye wide open and staring at Linny. The cat was not the only one staring: the magician’s old ma was sitting bolt upright in her chair, running a hand through her bright red dandelion hair and frowning.

  “No giddying about, kiddie!” she said crossly. “You heard my Rodegar bark about that. You’re to stay up here, like a good girl.”

  “PRIVY,” said Linny, as loud as she could manage.

  Maybe the old woman heard that—hard to tell. In any case, there was a big, distracting ruckus downstairs as the enormous magician came back into the house from wherever he had gone. He bounded right up the steps and peeked his huge head in through the door of Linny’s narrow room.

  “Hunh! Not sleeping yet?” he said. “Well, here’s something reasonable to sleep in. We’ll be wanting to keep that dress of yours looking nice and bright, get the most use out of it.”

  He tossed a package onto the narrow bed, which made the cat open its other, silver eye, and hiss.

  “COME ALONG, MA,” he said. “LET THE GIRL GET SOME SLEEP. BUSY DAY TOMORROW!”

  And the ancient woman pattered out the door behind him, pausing to give Linny what was probably meant to look like a wink.

  “Not to worry, kiddie,” she said. “I’ll bring you some porridge anyway, to put some meat on your twiggy little bones.”

  The magician looked disgruntled.

  “Well, porridge. All right. But no tricks from you now!” he said. “I have very good hearing; you need to know that. And the front door is always kept locked, don’t worry about that. I’m a very cautious man. Mess up, and that brother of yours is the one who’ll suffer. He’s all right for now. The madji were glad enough to have him. But you’d better stay well in line.”

  So then for a while it was just Linny and the cat.

  She unwrapped the package and found a
plain and sturdy shift to sleep in, and another plain dress, only a little bit too big for her. And stockings without holes. How long did he mean to keep her here, then? Because Linny wasn’t willing to be kept. She had her Aunt Mina to track down, and the medicines to beg, buy, or borrow, and Elias to kidnap back from those madji, and—oh so above all!—Sayra to find, wherever she was, and to bring home, safe and whole, from Away. She had a lot to do, when you made a list of it that way.

  But for this moment, when she could do no rescuing of anyone, she couldn’t help but notice that the clothes were new, and the material they were sewn from was softer than the homespun Linny was used to, so this was luxury. Changing out of her birthday dress, she found again the little bag hanging around her neck.

  The cat peeked out with its enigmatic silver eye from under a curled paw.

  “My private business, Half-Cat,” said Linny, and she shifted around to put her back in between that bag and the cat’s eyes.

  She was remembering the image of the girl that had come creeping into view on that card, the last time she and Elias had taken a look. The light was dim in the room already, but she could see the picture had kept blossoming, somehow, in the dark. Why, even the tiniest of cat tails was there, though in a different part of the picture, waving from behind the vase in the background. It was, in fact, a miniature version of that painting downstairs. How that could be, Linny didn’t know. But it was. And indeed, right there on the bottom, letters as fancy as you might see on the front of a store spelled out a few words: THE GIRL WITH THE LOURKA.

  It was an echo, a picture echo, of that painting, which was in turn an echo of Linny’s own self. So her mother must have known this picture, long ago when she came up from the Plain. And then, for some reason, she had written on the back, “I will find her.” Find who? The Girl with the Lourka? Linny herself?