In an Absent Dream

by Seanan McGuire

  She walked until she saw a tree that looked like it belonged to a different forest, twisted until there wasn’t a straight line anywhere in its trunk or in its branches, with leaves in a dozen delicate shades of green. Lundy’s breath caught. She did not hurry, but angled toward it as a flower angles toward the sun.

  When she drew closer, she saw that at the center of its trunk, there was a door, and that graven on the door were two simple words:

  BE SURE.

  “I am,” she whispered, and pushed the door open, and stepped through, and was gone.

  11 IN AIR AS CLEAR AS CRYSTAL

  LUNDY STEPPED OUT of the impossible hall and into the comforting, golden-lit darkness of the Market by night. Candles, paper lanterns, and colorful glass lamps hung from wagons and stalls, providing enough illumination to see by, if not to do fine needlework or read. She didn’t need to do either of those things. As if in a dream, she wandered toward the first rank of sellers.

  A few were still open, despite the lateness of the hour. They looked at her uniform, at her legs, long and gawky with the latest attack of puberty upon her frame, and politely looked away. The clothing booths were closed for the night, and she was dressed; there was no value to be had in pulling a seamstress or tailor from their bed and thrusting her at them.

  Surprisingly few of them recognized her, for she was a child no longer: her hair, which had never been very long before, or terribly well tended, hung loose down her back, secured with a ribbon tied just so, according to the exacting standards of the Chesholm School. Her skin, which had been dirty and bruised and freckled in the way of Market children, was clean. Even her uniform, too short and too tight in the chest, marked her as a teenager. It was rare for someone to begin visiting at such a late age. It was not unheard of. And so Lundy walked past the homes and businesses of people who had once brought her their laundry, or clucked their tongues when she tumbled into mud puddles in front of them, and not one of them stopped her, or said a word in greeting.

  Her progress was neither smooth nor steady. She tripped over the uneven ground, her heavy school shoes uniquely unsuited to the terrain. She stopped, over and over again, to gawk at things that had been familiar once and might be familiar again, after her heart had stopped pounding in her chest, after her head had stopped spinning with the intoxicating scents of night-blooming flowers and the ashes of the day’s food vendors.

  Vincent’s stall was closed up tight for the evening, the shutters sealed, but the scent of fresh-baked pie lingered, lifting her up and steadying her. No food she had eaten in her own world had tasted as good as his pies—no other food in the Goblin Market, either. There might be healthier meals, more balanced meals, more nuanced meals, but his pies were the first things she’d eaten upon finding this wonderful place, upon making her first real friend, and to her, they would always taste like coming home.

  She touched the weathered wood of his counter, thinking of the pencils in her pocket, and smiled to herself. Moon must have gone through the last of the pies Lundy had bargained for by now, even if she’d managed to talk Vincent around to giving her Lundy’s share after a “short visit” home had turned into more than two years. Lundy’s smile faded. More than two years. Who knew if Moon was even still here? So much had changed. She had changed. Who was to say anything was the same?

  Barely conscious of the decision, Lundy broke into a run. Her clumsiness fell away as she stopped focusing on her feet, until she was loping easy on her newly lengthened limbs, cutting across the Market toward the one place she was almost sure would still be there. The Archivist was a rock, a monument to stability in this place, where things changed every day, but the rules were immutable.

  “Be sure,” she whispered as she ran. “Be sure, be sure. I am sure, I swear I am.”

  The Market didn’t reply to her convictions. It surrounded her, engulfed her in the creak of wood and the rustle of canvas, in the slow settling of the dark, which had its own, subtle sound. That was the only reassurance it could give.

  Lundy ran down once-familiar trails turned strange by the passage of time, catching her toes on tree roots and stumbling through mud puddles. It was only the knowledge that without her shoes she’d have nothing to barter for a new pair that kept her from stripping the hated things off and throwing them away, to be found by one of the scavengers who worked the edges of the Market. She was no longer the tough-footed child she thought herself to be; if she wanted to be that girl again, she would need to change by stages, to have something thick and safe to fall back on. Not these shoes, perhaps, but another pair, one better suited to her feet, one she had chosen.

  She ran, until the Archivist’s shack appeared in front of her like a promise fulfilled, lantern-light slipping out through the cracks in its roughly hewn walls. She stopped, gasping for breath, her heart hammering hard against her ribs. This was it, then; this was where she found out whether she had been gone too long to ever be welcomed home.

  “Be sure,” she whispered, and took a step.

  “Be sure,” she said, and took another.

  “Be sure,” she hissed, a command meant in equal parts for herself and for the night around her, and she was running again, running until she was almost at the door, until that door swung open and the Archivist was there, the Archivist was laughing in surprise and delight and spreading her arms to catch Lundy as the girl who was no longer a child flung herself into them.

  They held each other, both of them laughing and both of them weeping, and if this were a fairy tale, this is where we would leave them, the prodigal student and the unwitting instructor reunited after what should have been their final farewell. This is where we would leave them, and be glad of it, even as Lundy had long since left a girl named Katherine behind her.

  Alas, that this is not a fairy tale.

  “I made it, I’m sorry, it shouldn’t have taken so long, but I made it,” said Lundy, her voice muffled by the Archivist’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no need to apologize,” said the Archivist, and pushed her out to arm’s length, looking her thoughtfully up and down. “How old are you now?”

  “Twelve,” said Lundy. “About to be thirteen.”

  “Curfew is almost here, my pretty love,” said the Archivist. “But no matter now: you must be tired. I’m willing to accept two hours of cataloging tomorrow night in lieu of an hour tonight and an hour then, if you wanted a place to sleep.”

  Lundy, who had always understood the purpose of chores—even before she’d been sent away to the Chesholm School, where the things that were asked of her in exchange for the room and board that someone else had already paid for had been far from easy, and even further from reasonable—nodded slowly. “I am tired, and that would be very kind of you,” she said. “But I want to see Moon before I sleep. Please, where is she? Do you know?”

  The Archivist hesitated, and in that pause, Lundy heard everything she needed to know.

  “How long ago?” she asked.

  “Almost a year,” said the Archivist. “She didn’t pine for you, but she was still grieving dear Mockery, and with you gone as well, she lost a certain faith in the world’s ability to be fair. She thought if it could steal her closest friend, it could steal anything. She stopped believing in fair value, because how could there be fair value when nothing stayed? And when someone doesn’t believe in fair value…”

  The Archivist’s silence spoke worlds. Lundy swallowed heavily.

  “Is she in the wood?”

  “Yes.”

  Lundy looked toward the trees, which seemed darker and denser than they had only a few short years before. “Could I find her, if I looked?”

  “Yes. But without the credit to buy back her heart, it would do you no good at all. She’s a wild thing because she chose to be. If she’s too far gone to choose to come back again, that isn’t your fault. She wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Do the ones who chose feathers over fairness ever come back?”

 
“Sometimes. Not often, but sometimes.”

  Lundy felt her pocket, filled with pencils and erasers and ribbons; filled with bits of chalk and golden rings stolen from the locked lost-and-found box in the headmistress’s office. She had thought to pay for a lifetime. Now, it seemed, she might pay for a life instead. “Is there a place I can go to buy credit?”

  “Yes,” said the Archivist. “But first, sleep, and wake to a new morning. Fill your belly and negotiate its continued fullness. You can’t save anyone if you neglect yourself. All you can do is fall slowly with them. Come to bed.”

  Lundy bit her lip and nodded, and followed the Archivist inside.

  The shack had never been large, not even when Lundy herself was much smaller. Despite that, none of its dimensions felt like they had changed. The walls pressed in as much as they ever had; the ceiling was as far above her head as it had ever been. The whole thing seemed to have grown along with her, remaining too small for comfort, remaining large enough to house both her and the Archivist without piling them atop each other.

  The fire crackled invitingly. Lundy moved toward it as if in a dream, stretching out on the warm brick of the hearth and closing her eyes. She thought she couldn’t possibly fall asleep, not with the Goblin Market all around her, familiar and strange and welcoming her home.

  She fell asleep in an instant.

  * * *

  WHEN LUNDY WOKE, the Archivist was standing by the table, chopping some long, thin-leaved herb that smelled sharp, bitter, and beguiling at the same time. Lundy sat up and yawned, stretching, feeling the knots in her back from sleeping on the stone.

  “You’ll need a proper bed if you’re to stay here,” said the Archivist. “You’re not a child anymore.”

  “I suppose not,” said Lundy. She touched the patch of feathers on her neck. They remained smooth and real as ever, anchoring her in her skin, in the moment. “I didn’t sort my books the last night I slept here. I thought I’d sort them when I got back.”

  “Then you owe me three hours,” said the Archivist mildly.

  “Did you know?” That was the question she had carried with her for two years and more in the “real” world.

  The Archivist shook her head. “I had no idea. We have a bargain: unless we’ve discussed modifying it, like we did last night, I trust you to take care of your side of things.”

  “If you didn’t know, how did the Market know? I was tired. I forgot.”

  “That’s why it was a small debt,” said the Archivist. “A few feathers? That’s practically a reminder. A string around the thumb. It’s not until your toes go webbed or your eyes change colors that you have a lot to pay off. If you had decided your freedom to do as you liked mattered more than keeping your word to me, you might have received more than a few feathers. It’s the intent and the size of the debt that matters, as much as anything else.”

  Lundy frowned. “So the Market did it.”

  “Yes,” the Archivist agreed. “The people who live here learned long ago that enforcing debts against one another only leads to inequality. An indulgent parent thinks it isn’t right to make their precious children pay their fair share, even though everyone else’s children pay. A cruel husband makes his wife bear his debts and runs about free of care while she goes draped in feathers. But if the Market, which knows everything done within its boundaries, wishes to keep the rules, there can be no cheating, no imbalance. Only the knowledge that all must contribute.”

  “It still feels…” Lundy paused, struggling with the concept, and finally said, “It feels wrong.”

  “That’s because you don’t know what fairness means. You’ve been in a place that wasn’t fair for so long that the things we’d been trying to teach you have been driven back into the shadows. How many ribbons do you have in your hair?”

  “One,” said Lundy, startled.

  “Imagine, for a moment, that I had a hundred ribbons. Now imagine we both wanted something to eat. Not something fancy or special, not something radiant or rare, just cheese and bread and a slice of mutton. Would it be fair to say the price was a single ribbon?”

  Lundy frowned. “I … I don’t know. Can’t the person who has the food decide?”

  “It’s their food, yes, so they get to set a price—but again, we’re not talking about a luxury. We’re talking about plain food, the sort of thing that keeps body and soul connected. Our imaginary merchant is getting fair value no matter what, because the Market will make sure of it. Is it fair to ask each of us to give a single ribbon?”

  “No,” said Lundy.

  “No,” agreed the Archivist. “It wouldn’t be fair, because you’d be paying so much more than I would. Fixed prices may be necessary in a world where there is no authority making sure we take care of each other, but here, with the Market to oversee us, we can relax knowing that fairness will be maintained. If our imaginary merchant asked us each for a ribbon, seeing I could pay so much more while you had so much less, the Market would remind them that fairness is a subjective thing, not a fixed target.”

  “Oh,” said Lundy.

  “Things will cost more for you now,” said the Archivist gently. “You’ve grown. You’re better able to contribute. We don’t ask babies to pay for their keep. We don’t ask children to do more than they’re capable of. We only ask that people respect the hand that feeds them.”

  “Everything?”

  “Not everything,” said the Archivist. “It will still only cost you an hour a night to stay here, because I’m accustomed to your company. The bed, however, you will need to buy or build for yourself. Do you remember what I said last night?”

  “That I needed to feed myself before I tried to buy Moon’s debt,” said Lundy. Her jaw set stubbornly. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Doesn’t it? Hunger makes us foolish, causes us to make poor decisions without realizing how poor they are. If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”

  Lundy wanted to argue, to say that sacrifice was as important as playing fair, but she couldn’t find the words. Finally, she huffed softly and asked, “How do I buy debt?”

  “There is a stall. You won’t have seen it before, because you’ve never needed it before. Look for a blue flag with a white star in the lower left-hand corner. The person working there will be able to tell you how much it will take to buy Moon back. Even after you’ve asked for and received the figure, you’re under no obligation to pay, or to pay in full.”

  “I’ll pay,” said Lundy stubbornly.

  The Archivist sighed. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose you will. Run along now, and I’ll see you when you return for your three hours’ sorting before sleep.”

  That was a debt that felt increasingly stiff against her skin, making the feathers on the back of Lundy’s neck prickle and rise. An hour a night was manageable; three hours would be exhausting. But she owed it, and the Market wouldn’t allow her to leave her debts unpaid. Fair value would be enforced.

  In a strange way, she found that reassuring. As long as she tried her best and paid attention to the cues the world was giving her, she would always be treating fairly with people, and wouldn’t need to worry they were taking advantage of her—that they were taking the only ribbon from her hair for not enough to eat. It was a strange system. It worked. Lundy nodded to the Archivist and left the shack, starting down the path toward the Market.

  Seen by day, the woods were the riot of growth and color they had always been, flowers twining around tree trunks and fruit heavy on the vine. That, too, was fair value, she supposed. Even with as much time as she’d spent here, she had never seen the winter come, never seen a season where the forest wasn’t so filled with good things to eat that it was almost like a grocery store. A grocery store where the honey was full of bees and sometimes opossums chittered at you for stealing their fruit, but still. As long as everyone only ate what they needed, there was always enough. Payin
g someone like Vincent for pies or stews or other things was a matter of wanting, not need.

  Birds sang in the foliage, and the air was sweet, and Lundy walked with an unconscious spring in her step, the strain of playing normal child in a normal school sloughing away like mist burning off in the sun.

  When she came to the Market’s edge she hesitated before she turned and made her way toward Vincent’s stall, remembering the Archivist’s instructions. He was already there, feeding pies into the oven with practiced efficiency. She stopped and leaned against the counter, watching him work.

  Some of the girls at school had been obsessed with unicorns, calling them beautiful and perfect and pure. She supposed she understood why. Vincent was a very pretty man, as long as she only looked at his top half, and a very pretty horse-thing when she looked at his bottom half. Most of the girls at school probably wouldn’t have been able to cope with the combination. That made her feel a little smug, like she was appreciating something they couldn’t.

  Vincent turned, and nearly dropped his tray of pies. “Lundy! You’re back. We thought…”

  “I came as fast as I could,” she said. “I’m staying for a while. I wanted to talk to you about pies.”

  “I don’t need another sharpener,” said Vincent. “But I could do with more pencils, if you have them.” He made no effort to conceal the greed in his voice.

  It made Lundy want to laugh. It was so nice to be back where people said what they wanted, where they trusted in fair value to see that they received it. They knew they couldn’t cheat each other without the Market becoming involved, and so they merely desired, openly and without shame.

  Then Vincent sobered. “I assume you’re only buying for yourself this time.”

  Lundy shook her head. “No. I’m going to buy Moon’s debt after this. She’s coming home.”

  “Are you sure? She wasn’t careful after you left.”

  “That means the debt is partially mine. I didn’t give her fair value as a friend. What kind of person goes off ‘for a minute’ and then doesn’t come home?” But her bed had been so tempting in the moonlight, white and clean and so much softer than the floor in front of the fire. The bed had welcomed her, and she had been lost.