In an Absent Dream

by Seanan McGuire

  If the door was open, surely that was an invitation to go through it, wasn’t it? And she was already trespassing. It wasn’t like going through an open, unlocked door would mean she was trespassing more.

  Carefully, Katherine approached the door. It didn’t disappear, which had never been a concern before, but was now an all-consuming one. She nudged it with her toe. It swung a little farther open, and something new appeared: a beam of light too buttery and bright to be artificial. Sunlight. She had found the exit. She wasn’t going to get in trouble after all. Beaming, Katherine shoved the door open and stepped through, emerging, not into the fields along the path or even into the well-maintained yard of some stranger’s house, but into a dream. She stopped, trying to stare in every direction at once, until it felt like her eyes were going to cross in her head with the effort of taking it all in.

  If a carnival and a farmer’s market and a craft fair all decided to happen at the same time, in the same field, the result might have been something like what was in front of her. Everywhere she looked there were tents, and painted wagons, and little stalls with fabric walls and decorated awnings. Pens filled with animals—goats and chickens and pigs—stood side by side with rickety cases packed tight with leather-bound books whose spines glittered with gold leaf and what she thought might be real rubies. Figures moved by with sacks slung over their shoulders and yokes across their necks, the ends weighted down with buckets filled with mushrooms, or potatoes, or water that rippled from the motion of impossible fish.

  Figures, not people: she wasn’t sure the word “people” was big enough to encompass everything she was seeing. Some of them were no bigger than her hand, soaring along on green moth’s wings, their hair like candle flames that flickered in the sunlight. Others were so big she could have mistaken them for boulders, with skin as gray as granite and hands almost as large as her body. It was like there was some sort of spectrum, and she was right smack in the middle, neither big nor small, neither fair nor foul.

  A few of the figures moving by without giving her so much as a glance looked like they might have been human, and somehow they were the worst of all, because if they were human, this was really happening, and if this was really happening, then the rules she had known for her whole life were wrong. None of these things were covered. If nothing here was real, she was safe, but if any of it really existed …

  “First time, huh?”

  Katherine whirled and found herself eye to eye with a girl of her own height, with pale, dirty skin and small brown feathers tied in her long brown hair. The feathers only held Katherine’s attention for a moment before it switched, inevitably, to the girl’s eyes. They had no whites. The girl’s pupils were too big, surrounded by a dark orange iris that extended from corner to corner, lid to lid. Katherine did what was, under the circumstances, the only reasonable thing to do. She screamed.

  A few of the passing strangers looked over with vague interest, taking in the pair of them without slowing their strides. The girl with the feathers in her hair rolled her impossible eyes, which somehow made them seem even larger, and more orange.

  “You shouldn’t make so much noise,” said the girl, peevishly. “You’ll attract attention, and I don’t feel like putting on a panto right now, do you?” Her accent was plummy and strange, all out of keeping with her tatterdemalion appearance.

  Tatterdemalion. That was a good word. Katherine seized on to it, trying to smother her screams with intellectual curiosity. She had known the word for months, of course, had learnt it in a book she was supposed to be too young to read, but this was the first time she’d seen someone who looked like it could apply to them.

  The owl-eyed girl was wearing a patchwork vest bedecked with odd strips of ribbon and fringe over a cream-colored shirt in some rough fabric, with sleeves that had once been longer, before they’d been hacked off just below the shoulders. Her pants were funny, made of dark brown canvas with bright patches on the knees and cuffs, too tight to be fashionable, too short to fit right. She had no shoes, and her toenails were the longest and thickest Katherine had ever seen.

  “What’s a panto?” asked Katherine.

  “A pantomime, a performance, a play,” said the girl, looking pleased that Katherine was doing something other than screaming. “If we attract too much attention we’ll need to give fair value for it, and that means a performance or a promise. I don’t have any promises in me this week, and you’re so new you still have that new-penny smell all around you. You shouldn’t be making any promises until you know what they mean, and that’s going to take someone explaining the rules to you.”

  Katherine hesitated. “Someone like you?”

  The girl’s eyes widened with alarm. “No! No-no-no, someone not like me! I’m not equipped for teaching someone how to give fair value, I mean, look at me.” She spread her hands, which were long-fingered and slim, indicating the sweep of her body. “If I told you what to do you’d wind up in the same boat I’m in, and it’s not a very big boat. Put two of us here and we might sink. No, no, I’ll leave the explaining to the Archivist. But you should come with me, and you should stop asking questions, before you ask the kind of thing with an answer that doesn’t come free.”

  “Where am—”

  Before Katherine could finish the sentence, the owl-eyed girl was standing nose to nose with her, one hand clasped across Katherine’s mouth. Her skin smelled like cinnamon, underscored with a sharp, unfamiliar herbal note.

  “You were about to ask where you were, even though I just told you to stop asking questions,” said the owl-eyed girl. Her voice was low, pleasant, and somehow dangerous. “You were going to keep going, and going, and dig a debt to bury yourself in. Be quiet. Didn’t you see the rules when you came through the passage? Didn’t you read? You can be happy here or you wouldn’t be here. But ‘happy’ doesn’t mean the rules don’t apply to you.”

  Katherine stared at her.

  “I’m going to take my hand away. You’re not going to ask any more questions. You’re going to follow me to the Archivist, and she can tell you what ‘fair value’ means, and we can be friends, you and me, if you want to be. All right?” The owl-eyed girl nodded firmly. “All right. I’m letting go now.”

  She did. Katherine took a step backward, out of reach, although she knew it wouldn’t do her any good: the girl had moved so swiftly and silently that there had been no evading her. “I didn’t say you could touch me,” she said, and her voice was shrill, edged with panic. “I want to go now.”

  The impossible people were still passing, the impossible tents and stalls and wagons were still there, and the air smelled like barbequing meat and sticky fruit pies and this was wrong, this was wrong, this couldn’t be happening—

  “Good,” said the owl-eyed girl brightly. “Let’s go.” She grabbed Katherine’s hand and dove into the crowd, dragging Katherine in her wake. Too surprised to struggle, Katherine found herself darting and weaving between the strange figures, most of whom spared the two girls little more than a glance. This sort of thing was apparently commonplace here.

  What Katherine had meant was that she wanted to go home, back to a world where things made sense and girls with orange eyes didn’t touch her without permission. But she hadn’t said that, had she? She’d said she wanted to go, and they were going. It was a loophole, one she’d created with her own voice, and she grudgingly respected it, even as she allowed herself to be pulled along.

  After a few seconds, she relaxed and started looking around, letting the owl-eyed girl lead the way. There was so much to see, so much to hear and smell and take note of to remember later. Not all the smells were pleasant ones—livestock and too many bodies saw to that—but there were more spices and sweet fruits than garbage piles and outhouses. A rooster crew in the distance. Someone played a fiddle, the tune dancing rapidly from one key to another, climbing like a boy in a fairy tale climbed a beanstalk.

  Yes. That was the answer, and Katherine seized on it with both hands
. If she thought of this as a fairy tale that she had somehow stumbled into, she could handle it. She knew the rules of fairy tales. Most importantly of all, she knew that fairy tales ended with “happy ever after” and everything being just fine. Better than fine: with everything being perfect. Perfect would be all right. She liked the idea of perfect.

  The owl-eyed girl ran until the crowd began to thin around them, until they were past the wagons and the tents and the stalls. She ran until the sounds of people passing were replaced by the warble and caw and screech of birds, until the branches of the trees that were closing in around them—big trees, climbing trees, patchwork trees that looked suspiciously like the one where the door had been—dripped with birdcages instead of fruit. They were filled with birds the likes of which Katherine had never seen before, birds in every color of the rainbow and a few the rainbow itself had forgotten about. The ones she did recognize seemed bigger and cleverer than the ones she knew, pigeons the size of chickens, eagles with wings whose span must have been measured in exclamations instead of inches.

  Somewhere on their journey through the impossible market, they had stepped onto a narrow ribbon of a path that wound and twisted through those bird-laden trees. At its end was a house. Katherine supposed it was a house, at least; it could also have been called a hut, if she was being charitable, and a shack, if she wasn’t. It was too small to be more than one room no bigger than her own, with mossy shingles on the roof and bright geometric designs painted on the walls. A porch ran all the way around it, groaning under the weight of the container gardens stacked from wall to edge, each of them brimming with herbs.

  The owl-eyed girl came to a sudden stop a few feet from the door, dragging Katherine to a halt. Katherine stumbled, glaring at the owl-eyed girl, who didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she dropped Katherine’s hand in order to cup her own hands around her mouth.

  “Hello, the house!” she shouted. “It’s Moon! I’m outside! I found a new girl! She doesn’t know the rules!”

  “I read them,” said Katherine peevishly. “One of them was ‘names have power.’ Should you really be shouting your name like it isn’t anything?”

  “That isn’t my name, new girl,” said the owl-eyed girl. She did look like someone who could be called “Moon” without anyone laughing at her. Her face was narrow and her cheeks were flushed, but there was something about her that spoke of midnights and secrets and things no one dared to say during the day. “That’s just what people say when they want to talk about me. Whatever your name is, you don’t give it to anyone you meet here. Promise me.”

  “I don’t—”

  Once again, Moon was in her face too fast and too silently to have been seen in motion. It was like she’d foregone one place for another without traveling the distance between. “Promise me,” she hissed. “Your name is your heart, and you don’t give your heart away. Promise.”

  “I promise,” said Katherine, wide eyed and suddenly, inexplicably afraid.

  “Good.” Moon stepped back.

  The door swung open. A woman stepped out.

  She was tall. Taller than Katherine or Moon; taller even than Katherine’s father, who was the yardstick she used to measure out the world. Her hair was the color of freshly grated cinnamon, and her skin was the pleasant brown of a sparrow’s feathers. She wore a long white dress with a red shawl tied around her shoulders, and she was beautiful, and she was terrible, and Katherine couldn’t decide whether she wanted to love her or leave her as fast as she could.

  She walked toward the two girls, head cocked gently to the side as she took them in. “Who have you brought me, Moon?” she asked, and her voice was rough, rough as granite, rough as the bark of a tree.

  “I don’t have her name and she knows better than to give it,” said Moon. Turning to Katherine, she said, “This is the Archivist. That’s not her name, either, but she knows the rules better than anybody, and she’s allowed to teach them to you, if you come to her without a debt on you. I saw you come and you’ll see me go, and you’re free and clear. Ask her what you need to know.”

  “The first rule was ‘ask for nothing,’” said Katherine. Her body felt heavy, like she was wrapped in fog. It was becoming harder and harder to dismiss this as a dream, and if it wasn’t a dream, it was really happening, and if it was really happening, she was standing and talking to people who called themselves “Moon” and “the Archivist,” and she was awfully far from home.

  “I waive the first rule for the duration of this conversation and no further,” said the Archivist. “There will be no debt incurred by any questions you may ask: the only fair value I need is your understanding, so that your future debts will not come to darken my door. Moon, you may go.”

  “Don’t need to tell me twice,” said Moon. She tipped a wink at Katherine. “See you around, new girl.” Then she was gone, running off into the trees with that preternatural speed, disappearing among the branches and the birds.

  “Come with me,” said the Archivist, and offered Katherine her hand.

  Lacking any other choice, Katherine took it. The Archivist led her into the house, as the birds in their cages shrieked and sang their mournful, captive songs.

  4 FAIR VALUE

  THE INSIDE OF THE Archivist’s house was as small as the outside, which came as something of a relief to Katherine, who had already encountered one major violation of the laws of physics since school let out, and wasn’t sure she could handle another one so soon. Every surface that could be commandeered to hold a bookshelf had been, and every shelf was packed to the point of bursting. Stacks of books covered the floor, too numerous to be contained. The only other furniture was a small wooden table with spindly legs and two matching chairs, tucked into the far corner of the room.

  “Come,” said the Archivist, and walked to the table, settling herself in one of the chairs. She gestured to the other. “Sit.”

  Katherine sat. The chair groaned under her weight, slight as it was. She thought the Archivist must have been the lightest person in the world to sit so comfortably on something so breakable.

  “This is my home, and you are safe here, for now,” said the Archivist, in a calm, clear voice. “Do you know your name?”

  Katherine started to answer. Then she caught herself, remembering her promise to Moon. She closed her mouth and nodded.

  “Excellent,” said the Archivist. “Keep knowing it. If you forget or lose your name, you do the same to your self, and there are consequences for such things. But you’ll need a name you can use here, something that lacks the teeth of the name you wear every day. Something you’ll answer to that’s harder to use against you. It could be an attribute, or a thing you like very much, or a family name that isn’t exclusively yours. I can choose one for you, if you’d like.”

  “Lundy,” said Katherine.

  “Lundy.” The Archivist cocked her head again. “You’re not the first of that name to wander here. I can see him in the corners of your eyes. Welcome, Lundy, to the Goblin Market.”

  Katherine—Lundy—who had never considered that her father must have been young once, might have gone on adventures of his own, frowned. “What’s the Goblin Market?”

  “It is a place where dreamers go when they don’t fit in with the dreams their homes think worth dreaming. Doors lead here. Perhaps you found one.”

  Lundy bit her lip, and said nothing.

  “We began with a single peddler’s son who lost his way. He decided to set up camp and wait for his mother to come back. She didn’t. He found me, instead, and we were happy, for a time. But others came after him, and others after them, until we had a community. Until we needed rules—and borders, of a kind, since our doors are the type that may open a dozen times for the same person, rather than only once.” The Archivist leaned forward. Her face was kind. “Did you see the rules, when you came through the passage?”

  “Yes,” said Lundy. Then, in a rush, “But I didn’t understand them. How can I follow them if I don’t unders
tand them?”

  “A complicated question, to be sure, especially since the rules have a way of enforcing themselves. Moon pays some of her debts through me by watching for children like you. She wasn’t careful when she first started needing to provide fair value—she got here too young, and spent too long in a state of grace to understand what consequences were.”

  “What happens if you don’t provide fair value?”

  “Nothing you’d care to experience. Now. We’ve covered the second rule, but not the first. While you are here, you must ask for nothing. Work around the question. If you desire a drink of water, don’t say ‘may I have some water,’ say ‘I would like some water,’ or ‘I’m thirsty.’ Be prepared to hear a price quoted in return. It will take you a while to decide which prices are fair, so ask yourself, every time, whether the water is worth the loss of a sock, or a strand of hair, or a secret. One of those is fair value.”

  “The sock?” guessed Lundy.

  “The hair,” said the Archivist. “A strand isn’t enough to do anything to you, and some people enjoy weaving with it. Socks, unless you have a very strange schoolbag, only come two to a person, and your feet will get cold.”

  It was a refreshingly logical way of looking at things. Lundy nodded. “What happens if I ask for something?”

  “The way you’re doing now? Don’t look so alarmed; I gave you permission. If you ask outside this house, anyone you talk to could decide that you’re offering them a purchase, and once you’ve asked directly, it’s not a negotiation. Do you understand? Say ‘can I have a glass of water’ and I can say ‘that will be one sock,’ and if you don’t pay, you’ve broken rule three. You haven’t given fair value. Debt will follow.”

  “What does debt mean, if you don’t pay for things with money?”

  The Archivist pursed her lips. “You’ll learn soon enough, little girl. When someone offers you something free of charge—as I’m doing now—you follow rule four. You take it, and you be grateful, because something that is free for you may be very expensive for someone else. People will remember if you’re not grateful. People will stop offering.”