In an Absent Dream

by Seanan McGuire

  Vincent nodded slowly. “You’re bigger now. I assume you’d like more pies.”

  More pies would cost more, would leave her with less for buying Moon’s debt. Lundy was about to say that no, the old bargain would be fine, when her traitorous stomach grumbled loudly. She sighed. “What would it cost, do you think, to double what we had before?”

  “Four pies each, every day, for a year?” Vincent thought for a moment before saying, reluctantly, “We could do a straight double on both sides—six pencils for the pies—but it takes more than a year for me to go through that many pencils. You’d have to find another way to pay for a second year.”

  Lundy dipped a hand into her pocket, coming up with six pencils and offering them to him. “That’s still fair value. After a year, I’ll have something else I can barter with.” What it would be, she had no idea. That was a problem for the future. Right now, she needed to eat, and she needed to save her friend.

  “Then it’s done. Four pies a day for each of you, for the next year.” Vincent had the pencils out of her hand and gone behind the counter in an instant. Then, kindly, he asked, “Would you like to eat before you go to buy Moon’s debt?”

  “One pie, please. I’ll come back for the rest.”

  He nodded, and pushed a single butter chicken pie across the counter.

  It tasted like freedom. It tasted like coming home. Lundy offered her farewells around a mouthful of filling and turned away, scanning the market stalls for a blue flag with a white star in the corner. She didn’t see one. She began to walk.

  Maybe it was the daylight, and maybe it was the pie in her hand, but some of the stall keepers recognized her now. Their cries of greeting mingled with the cries of those who merely wanted to hawk their wares, and the sweet symphony of it all made her feet light and her heart calm. She ate as she walked, and when the last bite of pie slid down her throat she saw it, the blue banner, the white star. She walked faster.

  The stall was dark blue canvas, while the banner was the blue of a morning sky, bright and clean and yet untouched by the day. The flap was closed. Lundy hesitated before parting it, ever so slightly, and calling, “Hello?”

  “Enter,” said a voice, familiar and regretful.

  Lundy stepped inside. The Archivist, dressed in a velvet gown the color of her banner, looked up from the great ledger where she’d been writing sums. Her face, as ever, was kind.

  “Welcome,” she said. “Did you eat?”

  “You’re here,” said Lundy. “Why are you here?”

  “Because someone said they wanted to buy a debt, and I am the Market’s archivist in task as well as title,” the Archivist replied. “Someone has to be willing to check the sums, on the rare occasions when someone disputes fair value. Someone has to put a face to the balance of things. Why are you here?”

  “Because I’m someone,” said Lundy. “Moon. I want to buy Moon’s debt.”

  “She has quite a lot of it. Are you sure?”

  Lundy hesitated. What if she couldn’t afford the whole thing? What if she found herself covered in feathers, more bird than human, unable to leave the Market without putting herself in a zoo?

  And what kind of friend would she be if that mattered?

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”

  “Then show me what you have.”

  The things that had seemed so grand and clever when pilfered from the school seemed small and unremarkable now. The ribbons, the pencils, the pieces of copper wire, even the golden rings were lessened as she lay them out, one after the other, for the Archivist’s appraisal. Blank notebooks and spare socks and rocks she had found in the forest, she put them all down, until her bag was empty, and she put that next to the lot. For a moment, she considered removing her shoes, but decided against it. The Archivist would tell her if it was necessary.

  The Archivist looked thoughtfully at the pile, then back to Lundy. “It is enough,” she said finally. “But there will be another, less tangible cost.”

  “Anything,” said Lundy.

  “That word, that promise, strike it from your tongue,” said the Archivist. “With that word, I could ask for the heart in your chest and the blood in your veins and you could not stop me. There is no value fair enough to warrant an open check. Fortunately, I have no interest in taking advantage of children, especially not children who have entrusted themselves to my care. Here is the price. Listen well, and if you will accept it, sign my book:

  “All you have offered, I will have, but I will also have your friendship with Moon. I won’t take it right away. I won’t need to. You’re not children any longer, Lundy, and even if you never say a word, never even imply that a debt exists—even if the Market itself says this was fair value intended and given—Moon will read the debt into your silences. She will create it, and in its creation, create the imbalance that accompanies it. She won’t see you as her boon companion anymore, but as someone who owns her. Friendship will fall away, drowned in the sea of her resentment. That is what you will pay to save her. Do you accept?”

  Lundy stared at her, stricken. “What? No! We’ve always taken debts for each other. We’ve always … we’ve always given fair value. You said a single ribbon didn’t have to mean the same thing to different people. This is my single ribbon. It doesn’t mean anything near as much as she does. Why do you have to take her away from me if I bring her back?”

  “I don’t. I won’t. Not even the Market will. But she’ll take herself, and if you accept that fact now, it will be part of the payment, and she’ll owe you nothing when she goes.”

  “Does it have to happen?”

  The Archivist, who had seen a thousand friendships become unbalanced by assumptions about who owed who, even when no one walked cloaked in feathers, was silent for a moment. Then, finally, she said, “No. It doesn’t have to. You can gamble, if you like.”

  “Gamble with what?”

  “A year. If at the end of a year, you’re still friends despite everything, you’ll be gowned in feathers and will have to buy your own way back to humanity. If I’m right, and she can’t love you innocently once she feels there is no balance between you, you’ll owe nothing more.”

  Lundy stood straighter, squared her shoulders, and said, “I’ll sign.”

  “Yes,” said the Archivist. “I knew you would.”

  12 ON WINGS SO WIDE

  WE MUST MOVE ON, we must move on, for time grows short and there is so much left to do, but first we will stop to see something of terrible importance. So:

  Lundy expected to feel Moon’s debt settle on her shoulders when she signed the book, expected it to press in on her and weigh her down. She felt nothing. She looked quizzically at the Archivist, who smiled.

  “It’s done,” she said. “Go to the wood.”

  Lundy turned and fled, running out of the tent and into the Market, weaving between shoppers and sellers with quick, remembered speed. How easy it was to fall back into the good old patterns, to read the movement of the crowd and know how to dance through it like a dream, causing no one any harm, incurring no unexpected debts! She had been away far longer than expected, but in many ways, this was where she had grown up, and would always, always be her home.

  At the edge of the Market was the wood. Lundy plunged into it, letting her feet choose the way, until she came to the stream where once she had found a girl with owl-orange eyes weeping by the water. She looked up. She saw neither owl nor girl. She turned in a slow circle, searching still, and so she chanced to see the first feather fall.

  This time, when she looked up, it was at a specific tree, and so it was that she saw the feathers falling faster and faster, as what she had taken for a part of the trunk unfolded into a great brown owl, and then unfolded further into a naked, shivering girl.

  “Moon!” cried Lundy in delight.

  The girl opened her eyes, which were the color of sanded pine, and not owl-orange at all, and stared at her. “Lundy?” she asked finally, in a voice that rasped and croake
d and creaked like an unoiled hinge, too long allowed to go unused. “You came back?”

  “Can you climb down?” Lundy looked around for something that might soften Moon’s fall, if it came to that. All she saw was the stream, which she was fairly sure she couldn’t move. “Be careful. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  “How … how am I human?” Moon raised one hand, staring first at it, and then at Lundy. “What did you do?”

  Fear uncurled in Lundy’s stomach, venomous and cold. “I brought you back,” she said uneasily. “I’m sorry I was gone so long. You wouldn’t have gone to feathers if I hadn’t gotten caught and kept in the other world. So I bought your debt and brought you back.”

  Moon blinked at her. “I owe you now?”

  “No. No! I bought your debt and I let it go. You don’t owe anybody. We get to be human together, we get to be here together, so come down from the tree, okay? I’ve missed you. Please?” Lundy looked at her hopefully, waiting to see what Moon would do.

  Moon hesitated. Let us pull back for a moment, and see things through her eyes—for while this is Lundy’s story, Lundy’s cautionary tale, it might as easily have been Moon’s. Pretty, pithy, petty Moon, born to a woman who had left the Market for the comforting climes of a world where fair value was something each person could negotiate for themselves, rather than having it imposed from without by an unimpeachable force of nature. Sweet, sharp, sour Moon, whose true name could never be given because it had been lost, who had seen her world narrow to an owl’s understanding of hunt and hole and hover. This story could so easily have belonged to her.

  Perhaps it is a pity it did not. It might have had a kinder ending.

  She looked at Lundy, who had come to the Market from a world Moon had never seen and never wanted to see, and she asked herself a simple question: could friendship alone be fair value for a debt deep enough to make an owl of a girl? Could friendship balance the scales between them, or would they poison each other, a drop at a time, Lundy trying not to resent what she had spent, Moon trying not to read every request as a command?

  Could they ever truly know, if they didn’t at least try?

  Carefully, Moon unbent limbs that no longer remembered how to be anything but silent and graceful and now lacked the anatomy for what she wanted them to be. With shaking hands she gripped the tree and began descending. She was almost to the ground when she lost her grip, slipped, and fell, only to find her landing softened by Lundy, who dove to save her friend.

  Moon blinked at Lundy. Lundy blinked at Moon. Both of them burst out laughing, huge, relieved laughter, the kind of laughter that seemed like it ought to be big enough to fill the world. They clung to each other, and they laughed, and it seemed, for a time, as if they were going to be all right: nothing was going to change, even as everything around them was changing. Lundy removed her school jacket and draped it around Moon’s shoulders, giving her a scrap of privacy, and the two girls walked hand in hand to the Archivist’s shack, ready to face the future, so long as they could face it together.

  The year that followed was a good one, maybe the best Lundy had spent within the Market, which had always been such a source of joy and wonder for her. Every life should contain one perfect year, if only to throw the rest of it into sweet relief, and this was Lundy’s. She sorted books for the Archivist; she filled her belly with berries from the forest and pies from the stall. She covered Mockery’s grave with flowers, she quested and she questioned and she grew. She listened, she looked, she learned. She paid attention as if it were the dearest coin in all the land, and everyone who spoke to her, even for a moment, said she offered fair value with her listening, which was as canny and clever as the rest of her.

  Some in the Market began murmuring about apprenticeships when they saw her walking through the stalls on some errand or the other, having purchased a bedframe with her stockings and school blazer, having purchased the right to store it in the Archivist’s shack with two additional hours a week. It was a small thing, to have a safe place to spend the night, to know that she and Moon were warm and well protected.

  Moon, seeing the growing closeness between the Archivist and Lundy, seeing the way Lundy could tease meaning from books that seemed like so much useless scribbling to her, considered the merits of jealousy. The Archivist had been her friend and surrogate parent first, after all: Lundy was stealing moments of praise and affection that should have belonged to her. Only it wasn’t theft, not really, because the moments Lundy took were the moments Moon had never wanted. No words on a page could hold her interest the way the wide world could, and even if Lundy stayed forever—and more and more, it felt like Lundy was going to stay forever—she would never really understand fair value, not all the way down into the marrow of her bones. One of them needed to find a profession that let her bring home material things, food and clothes and maybe, someday, a place to live that wasn’t shared with the Archivist.

  Moon spoke to Vincent halfway through the year, asking whether he’d ever considered the virtues of an apprentice, someone to sweep the floors and trim the piecrusts. To her surprise, he took her on. To his surprise, she proved to be a quick study and an efficient worker, those clever hands pinching pies closed and learning the intricacies of folding dough. Inside of a month, the pies Lundy had bargained for were supplemented with other rewards, little things to give fair value for Moon’s labor, with the understanding that, if she continued as she was, one day she’d be able to feed her entire small, strange family through her efforts alone.

  Everyone should have a perfect year. The two girls fell in and out of minor debts, with the Market and with each other; they laughed when they found feathers curving along the lines of their hips or tangled in their hair, they scowled when their lips hardened, and always, they worked and they played and they gave fair value as best they could, until there were more debtless days than otherwise, until it seemed like things would be good forever.

  Until the day Lundy rose and started for the door, intending to go to the stream and wash her face before she started making plans for breakfast, and the Archivist called, “Wait.”

  Lundy turned obediently to face her. It was the two of them alone: Moon had left them at dawn, off to help Vincent prepare for the day. “Yes?”

  “Do you know what today is?”

  Lundy frowned thoughtfully. “It isn’t my birthday,” she said. “It isn’t Moon’s finding-day, either, and if you have a birthday, you’ve never told me what it is.”

  “It’s been a year and a day since you came back to us,” said the Archivist. Then, with deep sorrow, she said, “It’s been a year since you bought Moon’s debt.”

  Fear uncurled in Lundy’s stomach. Feathers were only funny when they were something to be set aside. “Already?”

  “Already, and she still loves you.” The Archivist looked at her sadly. “You know what that means.”

  Lundy wanted to argue, wanted to say it wasn’t fair, that she wasn’t ready, that she had offered fair value each and every day since her return, and she should have earned herself free. But that wasn’t the bargain, and a bargain was like a rule, wasn’t it? Rules existed to be obeyed, to protect people from a world where no one knew what to do or how to do it.

  “What happens now?” she asked.

  “It will be easier if you undress,” said the Archivist.

  Lundy did, removing each article of clothing and setting it aside, until she stood naked in the middle of the room. She looked at the Archivist.

  “Will it hurt?”

  “No,” said the Archivist, and held out her arm, as a falconer might hold out their glove. Lundy felt a sudden burning need to go to it, to follow this rule as she had followed all the rules before—because there had never been a specific rule against going through an impossible door into a world that wasn’t, had there? She had always been a good girl, even when it hurt her. Now, being a good girl meant going to that hand.

  So she did. Flight came naturally, and when sh
e landed, she grasped the Archivist’s wrist with as much delicacy as her talons allowed. The Archivist stroked her beak and sighed.

  “You can carry messages; you can catch fish,” she said. “You can buy your way back. If someone asks if you’d like them to keep your credit, tell them yes however you can and collect it all at once, to shed feathers and find feet, not be caught in the in-between. Do you understand?”

  Lundy screeched agreement. The Archivist walked to the door, opened it, and held out her arm. The sun was warm, oh, the sun was warm on Lundy’s feathers. She shrieked, once, and she was gone, wings beating at the air, all the sky below her.

  “Try to remember you want to come home,” said the Archivist, and closed the door.

  PART IV

  WE FIRST MUST GO

  13 ONE MORE DOOR

  LUNDY COLLAPSED, UNFAMILIAR legs shaking, unfamiliar hands clutching at the dirt as she tried to remember what it meant to have fingers, to have thumbs, to manipulate the world with something other than beak and talons. The Archivist spread a blanket over her narrow, naked shoulders; Moon put a plate with two small pies down in front of her.

  “Welcome home, Lundy,” she said, her voice full of tears. “I’m sorry.”

  “How … long?” rasped Lundy. Time had been strange to the eagle she had been, seeming to ebb and flow according to its own whims, and not to any logical progression.

  “A year,” said Moon. “You were gone for a year.”

  A year was a very long time. Lundy picked up a pie, noting that her fingers were longer, not because she owed anything, but because her hands were longer, because everything about her had stepped closer to adulthood while she was flying above her own life. She took a bite. Her stomach, no longer accustomed to cooked food, attempted to revolt. She swallowed anyway, forcing the food to stay down.