In an Absent Dream

by Seanan McGuire

  A year. She was fifteen. The idea was ridiculous. How could she be fifteen? It didn’t make sense, but there it was, and Moon had never lied to her. Lundy took another bite of pie.

  She’d been almost thirteen when she’d gone through the door and back into the Goblin Market. Her family had been wondering where she was for two years. More and more, she thought—no, she knew—this was where she belonged, but somehow, disappearing on them without saying goodbye didn’t feel like fair value.

  “Fifteen,” she said. She put down the pie. She stood, wrapping the cloak around herself, and looked at the Archivist. “I have to go back. I have to say goodbye before it’s time for me to choose.”

  “Do you know what you’re choosing?”

  Lundy nodded. “I do.”

  “Your father came here before you. He chose differently. If you stay, he’ll know what happened. Fair value will be given. Your choice repays his.” Because the Market had paid into her, hadn’t it? Had fed and sheltered and taught her. By leaving—even if she was allowed to do so—she would take that value with her.

  But she had never asked them to make her an investment. She had just gone where the doorway took her. “I have to tell them,” she said. “I have to … maybe they won’t understand. Maybe they can’t. But I have to try, or else everything I’ve ever said to them becomes a lie, and I can’t live with that.” Her father would understand. Her mother, her siblings … they never would. They would keep looking at a hole where a girl should have been, and wondering.

  If she was choosing this—and she was choosing this—she needed to do it without debts, and without regrets. Anything else would be unfair.

  Moon burst into tears. Lundy held her tight, relishing the fact that she had arms to hold a friend, and her eyes were already on the horizon.

  She left at sunset. The clothes on her back were too small, and her skin felt too bare. She was no longer accustomed to shoes; she walked barefoot away from the Market stalls, walked until she found the door that had borne her from her childhood home into the home of her heart, and touched the wood.

  “I’m sure,” she whispered, and stepped through.

  The passage seemed smaller, the cross-stitched rules on the walls shabby and faded. She read them as she walked, until she reached the door and let herself out, into a world that stank of car exhaust and poisoned water. Lundy coughed, and kept coughing as she struggled to orient herself.

  When she turned, the tree was gone. That was no real surprise. She felt no real concern. The Goblin Market would come back for her when it was time, and she would return to her true home for the last time. She took another breath. This time, it barely burned her throat at all.

  It had been so long since she had been here that she no longer remembered the way. Her feet were another story. She closed her eyes and let them lead her, following their sure and steady tread down the path to the sidewalk, down the sidewalk to the street, one turn at a time until she was standing in front of an ordinary, half-familiar house. The car in the drive was unfamiliar, but the bike lying in the yard was her brother’s, older now, rusted, recognizable. She blinked. Her brother should have been far too old for that bike. How—

  Her sister. Of course. It had been so long, and Diana had always been so much younger, that she had almost forgotten her in the chaos of boarding schools and miraculous escapes and flying away. Diana would be nine years old now, barely older than Lundy herself had been the first time she’d seen a door that bid her to be sure. Old enough for bicycles. Old enough to have forgotten her older sister.

  The same age Mockery had been when she died.

  Lundy stepped onto the porch, feeling more out of place than she ever had before. She took a deep breath. She knocked.

  She waited.

  Footsteps approached on the other side of the door. Lundy tugged at the hem of her too-tight shirt, wishing she could make it larger. Large enough to cover her, large as a cloak of feathers. It wasn’t so long ago that she would have been able to fly away. It wasn’t too late. This had been a bad idea. She could turn, she could run, she could—

  The door opened. Her father appeared, haloed by the living room light. Lundy froze, struck silent by the enormity of the moment. They stared at each other, parent and child united for the first, and possibly only, time.

  “You came home,” he whispered.

  The words were a blow. She reeled, shook her head, and replied, “I came back. Home is not here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  So much came down to surety. She lifted her chin, looking her father squarely in the eyes, and said, “I was sure even before you sent me away.”

  They only had so long before her mother came to see what was going on, why the door was open, letting the night air in. Her father stood his ground, looking at her and saying, “It was for your own good, and I could send you away again. I’m your father. I have rights.”

  “Sending me away would not be giving me fair value.”

  He flinched: her words had struck home. But he rallied, shooting back, “Running away has not given this family fair value. Your mother cries herself to sleep every night. Every night. She’s done it for the last two years.”

  “Then we bear the debt together.” Lundy hesitated. “How do I repay my share?”

  “You stay.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “That’s asking me to bear the whole thing by myself, to say what you did wasn’t a part of it at all. Maybe you could have convinced me to be happy here, if you’d bothered to try, but you didn’t. I was lost and I was grieving and you sent me away. I reject your bargain, even as you’re trying to reject fair value. Do better.”

  He stopped, his breath catching, and seemed to look at her, really look at her, for the first time. Finally, in a voice as rough and dry as burning paper, he said, “One year. You stay for one year. After the year ends, if you choose to go, I won’t stop you. But for that year, you live here. You treat this as your home. You aren’t passing through, you aren’t killing time. You belong. I won’t send you away: you won’t run. Do we have an agreement?”

  There was a trick there, a trap; there had to be. Lundy tried to see his words from all angles, looking for danger. She was tired and everything around her was terrible and strange; she couldn’t find it. Finally, grudgingly, she nodded.

  “We do,” she said.

  He stepped back, holding the door wider to let her pass. There were tears shining in his eyes. Out of kindness, she said nothing, but stepped into the house that had been her home, looking around with open curiosity. So much had changed. So much was the same.

  “Daddy, Mom says you need to—” The child who ran into the room could have been Lundy herself, recast in miniature. She stopped dead when she saw that her father wasn’t alone, her eyes going wide and round. Finally, carefully, she asked, “Katherine?”

  Lundy blinked. Even at the Chesholm School, she had been Lundy, Miss Lundy there and Lundy alone in the Market, but not Katherine. Katherine was the girl she’d left behind.

  But she had promised; this was how she paid her debt. She nodded stiffly, and said, “Hello, Diana.”

  Diana’s eyes remained huge. “Daddy?”

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’m going to fetch your mother.” He rushed away with a speed that could only have been born from the sudden, burning need to put distance between himself and his impossible daughter, the one who lacked the good grace to stay gone.

  Lundy looked at Diana. Diana looked at Lundy. Diana spoke first.

  “Are you staying?” she asked. “Because I miss having a sister, but I don’t want to forgive you if you’re not going to stay.”

  “I am,” said Lundy. Not quite the truth: not quite a lie. It would do. For now, it would do.

  Diana nodded gravely and walked across the room to fling her arms around Lundy’s waist. Lundy gasped, too startled to pull away.

  “You left,” said Diana, voice tear-filled and accusing at the same time. She pressed her
face to Lundy’s middle. Lundy felt her too-small shirt growing damp. “You went away and you left me, they said you got kidnapped but everybody knew you ran away because no one wants to be friends with the principal’s daughter, you could have stayed and you could have helped me, you could have been my friend and you left.” Her last word broke into a wail, and then she was sobbing, holding Lundy so tightly that it felt like there wasn’t any chance of her ever letting go.

  She could have been Mockery; she could have been Moon. A tear ran down Lundy’s cheek. As if that were the signal, more followed, until she was sobbing too, bending near-double to wrap her arms around her little sister and hold her with equal, if less crushing, closeness.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to. I wasn’t thinking about you. I’m so sorry. I’m staying.”

  “Forever?” asked Diana, finally letting go enough to pull back and look at her with enormous, hopeful eyes.

  Lundy sensed the trap that was preparing to snap shut around her, keeping her here, betraying the people who were waiting for her back in the Market. “No,” she said. “Not forever. I’ve promised our father I’ll stay for a year before I leave again.” A year was safe. A year would make her sixteen, still young enough to take the citizenship oath, still young enough to go home. Any longer than that …

  She was gambling on her father’s lingering memory of fair value, on the fact that he wouldn’t make a bargain and then break it. If he sent her back to the Chesholm School, or to something else like it, she was finished. The trouble with having a parent who’d used the same impossible door as she had was that he knew how to play the rules against her.

  She had agreed to a year. If he didn’t let her go, she would escape. She had flown over the Market, catching fish for the fishmongers and gathering rare herbs for the chemist, she had gathered wood in her talons and hunted rabbits and small deer and other prey for the butcher. She had made bargains and kept bargains and earned the trust and friendship of the Archivist, a woman who was almost as old as the Market, or seemed that way. She could do this.

  Diana sniffled. “Why don’t you want to stay with us?” she asked.

  “I’ll stay for a year,” Lundy repeated. “Isn’t that better than nothing?” Was it fair value for a sister’s love? She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. She’d never tried to make this bargain before.

  Diana was still crying when their father returned, their mother trailing, tired and confused, in his wake. She gasped when she saw Lundy, her hands flying to cover her mouth. Lundy, who would have sworn she was done crying, that she had no tears left, began to weep again. Her mother ran to her, and wrapped her arms around her shoulders, crushing Diana between them. For her part, Diana began to cry again in earnest, and the three of them stayed that way, never letting go, for what felt like forever.

  Then, with all the speed despair and anger could imbue, Lundy’s mother pulled away, raised her hand, and slapped her across the face. The pain was immediate and intense. Lundy gasped and reeled backward, clapping a hand against her reddening cheek.

  “How dare you?” hissed her mother. “How dare you run—run away? Twice? Or is it three times? Were you ever kidnapped to begin with?”

  Lundy stared at her, wide-eyed, too stunned to speak.

  “I gave you everything, Katherine! I gave you life, and a home, and everything that should have made you happy, and you left us! Why? Did someone offer you more?” Her mother shook her head, eyes red and wet from weeping, hands clenched into fists at her sides. “How could anyone ever offer you more?”

  Lundy, hand still clasping her cheek, said nothing. There was nothing to say. She had been young and innocent and selfish the first time she’d gone to the Market: she’d never intended to run away. It had been an accident. But the second time hadn’t been an accident, and the third time hadn’t been an accident, and even if it was all right for her to go and keep going—even if she belonged in the Market all the way down to the bottom of her bones—there hadn’t been anything forcing her to stay gone.

  Her mother raised her hand again, and her father, surprisingly, was there to catch it and pull it down.

  “She’s home,” he said. “We can be a family again. You get to be angry. We all get to be angry. But first, can’t we be together? For just five minutes, can’t we be together?”

  Lundy’s mother folded in on herself, almost falling to the floor. Lundy and her father were there. Together, they caught her before she could hit her head, and they held her, four people weeping in the aftermath of adventure, with so much road ahead of them. So much terrible, unavoidable road.

  14 PROMISES AND PAPERWORK

  PAPERWORK IS A magic in and of itself. It makes spouses out of strangers, makes homes out of houses … and makes students out of runaways. Lundy’s father left the house the morning after her return, remaining gone for several hours before he came back with a folder in his hand and a pinched expression on his face. He dropped the folder on the table in front of Lundy without saying a word, walking out of the room, leaving her to pick it up and flip through its contents on her own.

  Inside, she found a full set of records for the Chesholm School, beginning with her enrollment and ending mid-semester, presumably to reflect her arrival on her family’s doorstep. Her grades had remained excellent during this fictional school career, she noted; as her father’s child, she supposed he could have envisioned nothing less for her. Not perfect, which would have been noticed—this fictional version of Lundy had a tendency to daydream during history class, a fact that was reflected in her low marks, and did not enjoy physical education—but high enough to command respect.

  There were several student IDs for the years she had missed, her name neatly typed and covered by a layer of lamination. Lundy looked at them, feeling disconnected from her own life, and wondered whether the lack of pictures on the school IDs might have been one of the factors that motivated her father to choose it in the first place. He had traveled to the Goblin Market, even if he had rejected it; he knew its temptations, and its consequences.

  For the first time, Lundy wondered about her grandparents. She knew her mother’s parents were long dead, but what about her father’s? Was the door a thing which called to each generation of the Lundy family in turn, bidding them to be sure even before they knew what certainty was? Were they Moon’s opposite, the descendants of a Market child who had been cast out, rather than being kept inside?

  As a question, it was a good one, and pondering it helped somewhat with stepping back from the reality of the papers in her hands and the promise she had made. Everything was a story, if studied in the right fashion. She resumed her paging-through, and stopped dead as she found a new student ID, this one clipped to a class schedule. Her class schedule, for the local high school.

  The reason for the high marks was immediately clear. She had been enrolled in all the classes that would be expected for a young lady of impeccable schooling, including home economics and calisthenics. Everything would have seemed perfectly in order, if not for the remedial history class right before lunch. Which made a certain sense: she could explain the history of the Market, but the history of this world remained a mystery to her.

  Grimly, she closed the folder and stood. A year. She had promised him a year. She had promised Diana a year. She would keep her word; she would give fair value to this family, and she would return to the world where she belonged with a clear conscience, able to say that she had paid all debts. She would. No matter how difficult it was, she would do it.

  She found her father in his study, which had been Daniel’s room when she’d last been in this house. Her room had remained untouched through her entire absence, both at the Chesholm School and in the Goblin Market. It was too small for her now, decorated for an eternal child, and it pressed in around her like the too-tight clothing she had worn home.

  (Those clothes had been missing when she woke in the morning, and she suspected her mother had burned them. The clothes she had no
w were her mother’s hand-me-downs, worn soft and tattered by her mother’s body, and smelled faintly of lilac perfume. Lundy suspected she would never again smell lilacs without feeling her mother’s palm against her cheek, and she didn’t mind. Some forms of fair value are less tangible than others.)

  “When do I begin?” she asked.

  “I have copies of last year’s exams,” he said. “I’ve enrolled you. Said your reason for leaving boarding school was an illness that left you unable to handle being away from your family any longer. I also said you might require a bit more recuperation. As soon as you can pass these exams well enough not to attract attention or embarrass me, you’ll begin classes.”

  How quickly he went from “we can be a family” to “don’t embarrass me.” Lundy looked at him levelly. “Remember our agreement,” she said. “One year.”

  “I might remind you that I am your father, and you are still a child,” he said.

  “If you did, I might remind you that I was able to escape from a supposedly inescapable campus. I might remind you, further, that you may have had the start of my education, but you haven’t had the parts that mattered. If you attempt to break our bargain, I’ll think nothing of taking my acquiescence back and running for the nearest place a door might hide. If you seem to be setting up circumstances so you can, I’ll be gone before your plan can be put into motion. I came back to pay my debts. Don’t cancel them all with cleverness.”

  Her father looked at her wearily. “What didn’t we give you?” he asked. “Where did we fail you, that the Goblin Market seemed like the better answer? Please. I’ve wondered for years. How did we go wrong?”

  Lundy paused before she said, “You knew who you were. You were so sure you’d gotten fair value for your life that you never asked what that was going to mean for the rest of us. You spent our happiness to secure your own. I never learned to make friends here. I never learned to be anything but rigid and lonely.”

  “You’re still rigid. You went to a place that elevates rules to the status of holy law, and you quote those rules back at me now as if they have all the answers.”