In an Absent Dream

by Seanan McGuire

  Lundy nodded slowly. “All right.”

  “There is one more rule you must follow. It won’t seem very important to you right now, but you need to mind it anyway, for it’s the rule that can do you true and lasting harm if you’re not careful.” The Archivist leaned forward. “Do you remember what it was? Did you see it in the passage?”

  “Um … ‘remember the curfew,’” said Lundy, dutiful and dubious at the same time.

  “Yes,” said the Archivist. “There is a curfew, Lundy, and it comes for all of us. It’s not the kind of curfew you may know. It doesn’t mean ‘all good little children come inside at sundown.’ It means we must be sure no one is trapped here against their will. It means we want all those who crave citizenship in our admittedly unusual land to have chosen their way with care. The doors have found you now. They will open for you again and again, and you can take them or you can walk away, until the day you turn eighteen. On that day, arbitrary as it might seem, the doors will close. If you’ve kept fair value in mind, when you turn eighteen, you’ll be allowed to choose which side of the door you stand on. If you haven’t—if you’re too deeply in debt to one person or another—you won’t be allowed to stand on the side of the door you come from. It may seem unfair, but it’s necessary. Fair value says we don’t steal what isn’t ours. It also says that what we own, we keep.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Lundy.

  “Understanding is something that comes with time, I’m afraid, no matter how clearly we try to explain,” said the Archivist. “There are many good things here, Lundy. Many wonderful things. You could be happy here, if you wanted to be. But you don’t have forever to decide, and you must follow the rules, or you’ll surely pay the price.”

  Lundy frowned. “Does this mean I don’t get to go home?” she asked, finally.

  “You must not be too attached to your home, or you would never have found us in the first place,” said the Archivist. “But no. That isn’t what this means. You’ll be here for a time, and then you’ll find a door, and you’ll be able to return to the world you left. No one stays forever on their first visit. How could they? One visit isn’t long enough to be sure. The rules mean—only—that once your eighteenth birthday comes, there will be no more doors. For now, you have the freedom of the Market. Remember the rules. Try not to break them, unless you feel like paying the price. Enjoy yourself. There are many good things in the world, and each of them happens for the first time only once, and never again. Do you understand?”

  Lundy, who didn’t understand, but who had long since learned that adults were happier when they thought she needed no more guidance, nodded. “Can I come back here when you’re not teaching me?” she asked. “Only, you have so many books, and I love to read.”

  Adults also loved a scholarly child. The Archivist blinked once before she smiled, warm and suddenly accepting. “I would be happy to let you read my books, and the only price I would ask is that you treat them kindly, and tell me what you think of their contents.”

  Book reports were something Lundy had a great deal of experience with. “That seems like, um, fair value,” she said.

  The Archivist’s smile broadened. “You’re getting it already,” she said. “Run along and play now. Moon can show you the places children like to go, and I’ll let some of the others know that you’ve come. The rules apply from the moment you arrive, but we can choose to interpret them as generously as possible during your first visit, to make it easier for you to make a second one. Run along, now. See what the Goblin Market can offer you.”

  Lundy, who was not a fool, jumped off her rickety chair and dipped an impulsive curtsey before running to the door and out, into the clear, smoke-scented air. A raucous chorus of screams and warbles greeted her as the birds in the surrounding branches cried out, marking her arrival. She stopped to frown at one big pied crow.

  “Nobody gets to sneak around here, do they?” she asked.

  “Some of us do,” said a voice at her shoulder.

  Lundy shouted and jumped into the air, spinning around to find Moon standing behind her. The other girl had a small, smug smile on her lips, and her odd orange eyes were half closed, making her look sleepy and overly pleased with herself.

  “The birds don’t scream when they see me,” she said. “They remember. You all done with the Archivist? Did she teach you everything you need to know?”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to ask questions,” said Lundy.

  “You asked a question just a few seconds ago,” said Moon. “Some questions are okay. You can’t have people without questions. People are too curious for that, they’d get all gummed up and stop working right if you didn’t let them have questions once in a while. But there’s a big difference between asking for things and only asking. ‘Do you think there will be grapes sometime this week’ isn’t the same as ‘can I have some of those grapes.’ Do you understand?”

  “No,” said Lundy sullenly.

  “Then I guess you’ll have to do like the rest of us do, and figure it out as you go along.” Moon suddenly, impulsively seized her hands, orange eyes wide and bright. “I can help. I can take three debts for you, if you promise you’ll take them back from me if I ever need you to.”

  “What?”

  “Debts. When you don’t give fair value, you get debts. But you’re a first-timer, you don’t know how careful feels yet. So I can go with you, and if you get any debts, I can take three of them on your behalf. That’s allowed. Then, if I ever need it, you’ll agree to take them back, right? Once you know what you’re doing.”

  “That seems fair,” said Lundy slowly. She wasn’t actually certain that it did, but she couldn’t see a way around it that wasn’t cruel to the other girl.

  “Shake on it.” Moon stuck out one long-fingered hand. “Come on. Shake.”

  Lundy shook. Moon beamed.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you the Market.” She took off running and Lundy, not knowing what else to do, followed.

  * * *

  THEY RAN THROUGH the golden afternoon like dandelion seeds dancing on the wind, two little girls with all the world in front of them, a priceless treasure ready to be pillaged. Moon was fast and light on her feet, sometimes looping back to circle around Lundy as they both ran, laughing at her companion’s slowness. Lundy tensed the first time she heard that laughter, but relaxed as she realized there was no meanness in it, no cruelty; Moon was playing with her.

  She couldn’t think of the last time someone had thought she was worth playing with.

  They ran all the way back to the impossible aisles of tents and stalls and wagons, and they kept running, Moon weaving around the shoppers and stall keepers, Lundy struggling to keep up. There were children in the Market, some of them manning counters or counting out apples, while others watched them longingly, tied to their posts with ribbons of silk, or braided steel, or living ivy. A group of boys threw a ball back and forth between them in one of the small open spaces scattered through the rows. They jeered at the girls as they went darting past, but made no effort to stop them.

  Moon wasn’t the only one with unusual eyes. Some of the children they passed had black eyes, like drops of oil. Others had eyes of yellow, or red, or a startling blue that was more like a fragment of the summer sky than anything that belonged in a human face. Lundy wanted to ask about it, but she wasn’t sure whether that would be the safe kind of question or not, and so she kept her mouth closed and her eyes open, drinking in everything around them.

  There was a woman in a wheelchair with a shaggy golden dog whose fur flickered around the edges, like it was burning without being consumed. There was a man with four arms, weaving ribbons into beautiful ropes with the speed and ease of a lifetime spent in long practice. There was a centaur of a sort, half human and half unicorn, a single spiraling horn rising from his forehead, taking a tray of meat pies out of an oven large enough to hold an entire bakery.

  Lundy’s stomach growled. Moon stopp
ed running.

  “You must be hungry, you poor thing!” she cried. “That’s barely fair value on me, showing you things without stopping to see if you needed. What do you have in your pockets?”

  Lundy blinked, thrown by what seemed to be a sudden change of subjects. “What?”

  “Your dress. I can see it has pockets. What’s in them? Anything?” Moon looked hopeful. “Rocks, maybe, or weird coins, or something like that?”

  “Um.” Lundy reached into her pocket, pulled its contents into the light. “I have two pencils, and a stick of chalk, and a quarter.”

  “Pencils!” Moon snatched them away before Lundy could protest, tugging her toward the stall where the unicorn was now setting the meat pies on a rack to cool. “Pencils are gold. Adults love writing things down. Come on.”

  She stopped in front of the stall, standing straight and smiling brightly. Lundy glanced at her and imitated her posture, trying not to look as lost as she felt. Everything was a dizzy, confusing whirl of rules and strangeness, and she wanted to go home and she never wanted to go home, not until she’d learned everything there was to know about this incredible, impossible place. It was a contradiction so intrinsic that it ached.

  Lundy wasn’t used to contradictions. She was used to making up her mind and sticking with whatever she decided, to knowing precisely how she was going to proceed from any given point. But she understood rules, and she understood loopholes, and she thought she could learn to enjoy looking for the places where these rules—fair value and not asking questions and all—collided and hence created gaps for her to squeeze through.

  The unicorn-centaur frowned. “Moon,” he said, dubiously. “What do you want?”

  “I have payment,” said Moon, holding out her hand to show the pencils she’d snatched from Lundy. “What would fair value be for these?”

  The unicorn-centaur’s eyes lit up in a way that seemed, to Lundy, entirely out of proportion with the two used, slightly chewed-on pencils. “More than I can spare, if you wanted it all at once. But I’d say ten meat pies and ten fruit pies apiece, delivered whenever you cared to claim them, as long as you promised no more than two of each per day.”

  “That sounds fair to me,” said Moon, and glanced at Lundy.

  Lundy sensed the silent question in that look. She nodded, her enthusiasm fueled by the promise of pies. “That sounds like fair value,” she agreed.

  The unicorn-centaur looked at her measuringly. “New one, aren’t you?” he asked.

  Lundy nodded again. “Yes, sir.”

  “Be careful with this one,” he said, hooking a thumb in Moon’s direction even as he deftly plucked the pencils from her palm. “She’s too smart for her own good, and not nearly careful enough for yours.”

  “Pies, please,” said Moon, with a bright grin.

  Lundy looked between the two of them. This was a choice that needed to be made, she could tell that much: who to trust was always a choice. But she had already made a bargain with Moon, and she already understood enough about this place to know that she’d be expected to hold up her end of it even if she chose to walk away and not receive the aid she’d been promised.

  “Pies, please,” she said, with a smile of her own.

  The unicorn-centaur rolled his eyes.

  Not long after, the two girls were seated under a tree, safely surrounded by other trees that kept them from the view of the market proper, sticky fruit juice on their chins and the crumbs of their meat pies scattered on their laps. The fruit was like nothing Lundy had ever tasted before, sweet and sour and sharp all at the same time, so that every bite was an education. The meat had been equally as good, chicken baked with peas and a delicate cream sauce. The memory was enough to make her mouth water.

  “I think we’re going to be very good friends,” said Moon.

  “I’ve never had a friend before,” admitted Lundy shyly. “I don’t know if I know how.”

  Moon beamed. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll teach you, and so will Mockery, and the Archivist, and everyone else who loves me. They’re going to love you, too. You’ll see.”

  Lundy smiled back, and thought that the Goblin Market was about the most wonderful place she’d ever been, and she never wanted to go home.

  5 A BEGINNING ENDS

  KATHERINE LUNDY HAD BEEN missing for eight days. Long enough that the police were starting to speak in hushed tones of calling off the search: they only had so many resources, after all, and while everyone agreed the girl was too young to have run off on her own, there was a point at which things would need to be turned over to the feds. They had the manpower and the training to pursue a kidnapping across state lines. They could find what the local authorities could not.

  At home, her mother wept, her big brother stared sleeplessly out his bedroom window, and her younger sister cried herself fitfully to sleep, unable to quite understand why everyone was so upset, knowing only that her sister—one of the few constants in her life—was gone.

  Only her father stayed dry-eyed and steady, standing at the back door, waiting. Even as the police said that they were sorry, they were running out of leads, and would he like to speak to someone higher up, he remained calm. He stood at the door, and he kept his eyes on the horizon, and he thought about a long hallway carved from a single piece of living wood. He thought about rules. They were always so careful with their rules in the Goblin Market. They never kept the children on their first visit. It wouldn’t have been fair. They wouldn’t have been sure.

  He thought about a golden hind with daisies and pomegranate blossoms in her hair, dancing under a midsummer moon. He thought about the way her kisses had burned when she tucked them into the corners of his mouth, telling him to store them up for the rest of his life, to only use them when he absolutely needed to. They had been barely sixteen on that moon-soaked night, and she had already known he was leaving, even though he himself had still believed that he might stay.

  He thought about choices—both the one he’d made and the one he knew his daughter was even now making, the choice that would define everything that came after. He had done his best by her, tried to raise her to live in books and quiet, safe rooms, rather than running wild through fields of gorse and heather. He had always assumed that, after Daniel had passed through his elementary school years without stumbling through any impossible doors, the chain had been broken. That it was over.

  He had been so wrong. And so he waited, until one evening, as the moon was rising, a bedraggled little figure came walking up the street toward their house.

  Katherine’s school bag was missing, as were both her socks, and the ribbons from her hair. She had a sharp knife of polished glass belted at her waist, its curved bone handle easy to her hand. She had feathers braided in her hair (and if her father’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of them, she wasn’t to know why; she didn’t yet understand). She had a smudge of fruit juice, dark and sticky as jam, drying on one cheek.

  Her father was out the door and down the front steps before her mother even noticed that he was moving, and in less time than it takes to say “home again, home again, she was finally home again,” he was on his knees on the sidewalk, holding her close, holding her tight, holding her like the world depended on his never letting go.

  Lundy sniffled. Lundy buried her face against the crook of his neck, inhaling that wool and paper and smoke scent that said “father” to her. And Lundy, brave Lundy, who had ridden alongside her friends Moon and Mockery to fight the wicked Wasp Queen for the safety of the pomegranate groves, who had seen that sometimes fair value wasn’t enough to prevent blood on the ground and a little girl with silver feathers in her hair lying broken in the leaves, never to mock or tease or mercilessly barter again, burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry,” she wailed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I won’t go back, I won’t.”

  She was lying, of course. But she wouldn’t understand that for two more years.

  PART II

  WE FIRS
T MUST SOW

  6 BACK THROUGH THE IMPOSSIBLE DOOR

  IF ANYONE HAD ASKED Katherine Lundy—who was happier these days going by her last name, which no one tried to twist or turn into something shorter, sillier, less tiresome for the tongue—she would have said being ten was substantially harder than being eight, and that she would be perfectly happy to go backward, returning to a time where her femininity had been an attribute rather than an expectation.

  At eight, she had been able to wear dresses or tie ribbons in her hair, or both, without anyone pointing to it as proof that she was growing up to be a beautiful little lady. She had been able to raise her hand in class without being skipped over in favor of the boys, whose answers, although often identical to her own, were somehow smarter, more thoughtful, more necessary. She had been able to eat sweets without being asked if she was worried about getting fat.

  She had been able to find a doorway and disappear into an adventure, instead of living in a world that told her, day after day after grinding, demoralizing day, that adventures were only for boys; that girls had better things to worry about, like making sure those same boys had a safe harbor to come home to.

  Now that she was ten, all of the things she’d thought she knew about girls and boys and herself and the people around her were changing. Family friends and distant relations bought her pretty bangles and new hairbrush sets for Christmas, instead of the books and educational toys she had so carefully requested. She supposed the reason girls were told the great secret of Santa Claus was because otherwise they would think the man had quite lost his marbles, to suddenly change the nature of presents that had been perfectly reasonable before.

  Her breaking point, when it came, arrived quite abruptly in the middle of her morning math lesson. One of the questions simply refused to provide the right answer, no matter how many times she twisted it around. Finally, in frustration, she put her hand up.