“Because they do.” It was so simple. How could he not see it, when it was so simple? “If you give everyone fair value, no one wants. If no one wants, no one has to take. The Market makes sure we don’t take advantage of each other.”
“The Market doesn’t make you understand. With the hand of what might as well be a literal god to guide you, how can you go wrong? How can you learn to do better? The people who live there, fighting every day not to fly away on wings they never asked for, they’re no better than pets.”
“Were you ever dressed in feathers?”
Her father raised his chin, looked her in the eye, and said, “I would sooner have died.”
Lundy was silent. If her father guessed at what her silence contained, he gave no sign.
“A year is long enough to go to school,” he said. “You need to understand this world if you’re ever to consider choosing it over your beloved Market.”
Still Lundy was silent. Her father sighed.
“Don’t make me out to be a monster here, Katherine,” he said. “If I’d never been to the Market, if your father were some … some ordinary, hidebound man with no reason to believe in magic, do you honestly think I would have accepted the declaration of a year’s homecoming from my fifteen-year-old daughter without protest? You’d be locked up in someplace far less pleasant than that fancy boarding school, under constant surveillance, and you’d never have a chance to go back. I am trying to be fair with you. I’m trying as hard as I can, even though it feels like it might kill me. I’m your father. Believe it or not, I love you, and all I want to do is keep you from making a mistake that will tear this family apart.”
“Why would it be a mistake?”
It was his turn to be silent. Lundy scowled.
“If you know something, tell me,” she said. “Is this about the curfew? Do you know something about it? Can you tell me?”
“Of course they never told you,” he said bitterly. “Why should they? They already had you. It means once you turn eighteen, you’ve chosen by not choosing. You’ve been living out a countdown since the day you found your door. Unless you take the citizenship oath before your birthday, you can’t take it at all, and if you attempt to stay past the cutoff, you’ll be punished.”
“The Market has to let me stay if I’m in debt,” said Lundy. “We’d have heard about it if people with feathers they could never get rid of kept popping up.” Still, a worm of unease worked its way down the back of her neck. Feathers might be the way the Market tracked currency, but they weren’t exactly a punishment. She had no idea what a punishment might be.
“The Market doesn’t have to do anything,” corrected her father. “The Market is not the friend you think it is. If it were, why would it prey on children, instead of letting us keep coming into adulthood? It wants the young. It wants the malleable. If it wants you, it’s because it sees something in you that it can use. Your life is the biggest bargaining chip you have. Before you choose where to spend it, be sure you understand what you’re getting in return.”
For a moment, it looked like he was going to continue. Instead, he caught his breath, held up his hand, and said, “If you’ll excuse me, I took today off, but I still have to finish some paperwork before we go shopping. You’ll need new clothes before you can begin your classes.”
“What about the exam?”
“I’ll test you tonight,” he said, and turned back to his desk.
Understanding a dismissal when she saw one, Lundy walked away. She closed the door behind herself.
* * *
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN easy, standing alone in the front room, to keep going. To walk to the front door, open it, and head down the sidewalk toward the nearest copse of trees. It would have been easy to announce her sureness to the air and wait for the door to appear. Lundy bit her lip, looking at the window. Not many people knew she was back. It would be relatively easy to cover up another disappearance. The final disappearance. This time, she was going for good.
The door opened. “Katherine?”
Lundy jumped, unable to stop herself. Diana looked at her solemnly, the doorknob still in her hand.
“You’re thinking about leaving again, aren’t you?” she asked. “Where do you go? Why do you keep leaving me behind?”
Because if you were meant to find the Market, the Market would have found you, Lundy thought. Aloud, she said, “A place that’s not like this. D … Dad made me promise not to talk about it.” The word was slippery on her tongue. She hadn’t used it in so long. On the few occasions when she’d needed to discuss him in the Market, he had been “my father.” Nothing more personal.
“He doesn’t like it when people ask where you are,” admitted Diana. “I don’t like it either. It always makes me remember that you’re not here with me. Are you hungry? I usually make a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich when I get home. Mom says they’ll rot my teeth, but she’s still at work, so I don’t care.”
“Mom got a job?”
“After you went to boarding school. I was in kindergarten, and she said it would ‘take the edge off’ being alone in the house all day.” Diana shrugged. “She’s the secretary at the power plant. She likes it okay, or says she does, and she likes being able to buy the name brand stuff at the grocery store. Did you want a sandwich?”
“Sure,” said Lundy hollowly. She trailed Diana to the kitchen, watching as the familiar stranger who was her sister began pulling things out of cupboards. Everything was so different now, and so much of it looked the same, which somehow made the differences even worse. She couldn’t trust where her memory put things. Either they had been moved, or she had misremembered, but either way, this might as well have been her first time in this house.
She realized she was calculating the value of the knife Diana used to spread the peanut butter on the bread and turned her face away, ashamed. These things weren’t hers. She had come back to steal once, when she’d been younger and less equipped to understand that a thing being in her house didn’t mean she had a right to it. This time, she had come back to say goodbye. Fair value for robbing this family of a daughter was a year, nothing more. Certainly not a year and all the silverware.
“Do they have peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches where you’ve been?” asked Diana casually.
Lundy raised her eyebrows. “You’re trying to trick me into telling you.”
“Well, yeah.” Diana slapped creamy goo onto the right sides of two pieces of white bread. “I don’t like secrets. Everything’s been secrets, all the time, since you disappeared. Where’s Katherine, where’d she go, did she run away or was she kidnapped, oh she’s back, where’s she been, now she’s off to boarding school, why, why, why?” She stabbed the knife back into the jar with more force than strictly necessary. “I guess it’s good, since I was so small when you went, and this way I never got to forget you. But it’s stupid. We’re a family. I should have been allowed to know stuff. I should be allowed now.”
Lundy looked at her, seeing the similarities between them, seeing the differences. Diana was sharper than she’d been at that age, a knife poised to slice into the world and keep slicing until it gave her what she needed. Lundy had always been more of a needle, careful and precise, following the lines laid out by the rules, never stepping over them. Perhaps that was why the Market had come for her, and not for her sister. Perhaps it had known it could never give Diana fair value.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I promised.”
“Like you promised to stay for a year?” Diana dropped the knife and folded the pieces of bread viciously in half, pressing the marshmallow hard against the peanut butter. “That’s nothing. You won’t see me get to high school, or be there to talk to me about boys, or nothing. You might as well not have come back at all if you’re only going to come back for a year.”
“It’s what I have,” said Lundy weakly.
“No, it’s not.” Diana turned, thrusting one of the folded-over sandwiches at her
like an accusation. Lundy took it. “You have your whole life. You have my whole life. Two whole lives that we could spend being sisters, and you’re going to give me a year. That’s not fair.”
“You don’t really know me.”
“You’ve never let me.” Diana glared. “A year isn’t anything.”
“Tell that to the calendar,” said Lundy. The sandwich was heavy in her hand, weighted down with sweetness. “Are we going to spend the whole year fighting? Is that what’s going to make it okay for you to let me go?”
“I don’t want to.” Diana nibbled on the edge of her sandwich. “I’d rather be sisters.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” Diana shrugged. “I’ve never had one before.”
Lundy smiled. “So let’s find out.”
* * *
THE EXAMS WERE easier than Lundy had feared. Either her halting patchwork education in the Archivist’s shack had been more extensive than she’d realized, or the schools of this world were woefully unchallenging for their students. Whatever the explanation, she passed them all, save for the history exam—and as her father had been expecting that, she was already set to be nestled snugly in the bosom of the remedial history class, where her lack of knowledge about current and past events wasn’t as likely to trip her up.
Monday morning, she found herself bundled into the back of her father’s car, belted in next to Diana, who was fiddling with her slide rule. She didn’t object to the seating arrangement. She had never, in all her life, been allowed to ride up front, which was a privilege reserved for adults and older brothers. It would have seemed too strange to be seated there now. It would have seemed like she was claiming an adulthood she didn’t really want.
The school, which was dauntingly, terrifyingly full of bodies—other students, some of whom remembered her as “Katie from my second-grade class,” more of whom remembered her as “that girl who disappeared,” and most of whom didn’t remember her at all; teachers who’d been told to treat her gently after her recent, if fictional, illness—and hallways and classrooms, all of which seemed to be the wrong one.
But there were also books, and lessons, and rules. Rules she could learn and, after learning, follow. Diana was still at their father’s school, enduring the scorn of students who didn’t want to be seen with the principal’s daughter, but here, at high school, Lundy could finally move among her peers without being singled out. She was another student, strange, unfamiliar, but one of them. Ordinary. Normal.
She had been extraordinary as a child, when she had too much authority hanging around her solitary shoulders, and extraordinary in the Market, where she was a summer person and a quester and the girl who’d helped to slay the Wasp Queen, who’d fought for the safety of their borders even before she was a citizen. Ordinary was a novel experience for her. In what felt like the blink of an eye, she had been attending school for weeks, learning her lessons and the nature of her peers, finding the rules that bound them as well as the rules that bound her education.
At the same time, she was learning her sister.
Let us speak, for a moment, on the matter of sisters. They can be enemies to fight or companions to lean upon: they can, at times, be strangers. They are not required to be friends, or to have involvement in one another’s lives, or to be anything more than strangers united by the circumstances of their birth. Still, there is a magic in the word “sister,” a magic which speaks of shared roots and hence shared branches, of a certain ease that is always to be pursued, if not always to be found.
Even more adroitly than she studied her lessons and the rules of this familiar, suddenly strange world, Lundy studied her sister.
Diana didn’t care much for reading, but she had a deft hand with a pencil, and her pastel drawings were years ahead of anyone else in her class. She liked to ride her bicycle, and had chafed for years under restrictions that hadn’t existed when Lundy was a child—restrictions she suspected were her fault. Diana had a sweet tooth, didn’t enjoy beets, loved to paint her toenails brighter red than her father approved of, and did the dishes without complaining, but hated to wash the windows. She was a person. Lundy supposed she always had been. It was just the difference in their ages that had kept her from seeing it before.
More importantly, Lundy liked her. Diana was blunt and funny and pointed when she needed to be; she reminded Lundy of Mockery, only younger, and still alive, and gloriously here. She planned to be an artist, to travel the world and see her work hanging in the finest galleries, in the most prestigious museums.
Her face had fallen after the first time she’d admitted her goals, and the look she’d given Lundy had been half love and half loathing.
“I guess that won’t happen, though,” she’d said. “Once your year’s up, you’re gone, and I’m back under lock and key.”
“Sixteen isn’t eighteen,” Lundy had replied. “They’ll understand.”
And they did, that was the beauty of it: when her year ran out and she went looking for the door she knew was there, she found the Archivist and Moon waiting for her at the portal’s end. Moon was smiling when Lundy stepped through. Then she looked at Lundy’s clothes—clean and tight and ill-suited for running through the trees—and her empty hands, and her smile dimmed, and died.
“Oh,” she said, softly. “So that’s how it’s going to be.” She handed Lundy the pie she’d been holding, and turned, and walked away.
Lundy, stunned into silence, watched her go. Only when Moon was out of sight did she look to the Archivist, and say, “Her eyes. They’re almost brown.”
“She’s giving and getting fair value, every day,” said the Archivist. She looked carefully at Lundy. “Sixteen years. Are you here for good?”
Lundy looked down at the pie in her hands. “My sister’s birthday is next week,” she said. “I promised her I’d come to the party. But I’ll come back afterward.”
“Oh, child.” The Archivist reached out and touched her cheek, gentle as a whisper, so far from her mother’s slap. “There will always be a birthday. There will always be a holiday, or a funeral, or a birth. If you delay, you can delay yourself right over the edge of being sure.”
“I am sure,” Lundy protested. “I just need a little more time.”
“Good,” said the Archivist. “There is only a little time left.”
Lundy turned and walked back into the passage. The Archivist, who had seen this all before, watched her go.
15 FAIR VALUE
IT CAN BE EASY, when hearing about someone else’s adventures in a far-off, magical land, to say “I would never choose the mundane world over the fantastical. I would run into rivers of rainbow as fast as my legs would carry me, and I would never once look back.” It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one’s answers. Reality, it must sadly be said, has a way of complicating things, even things we might believe could never be that complicated.
Lundy returned to her family. Celebrated her sister’s birthday. Her mother, whose eyes had lost some of their hollowness, baked a lemon cake, as she had so very long ago, when Diana had been a dream inside her stomach, and Lundy had been a quiet, reserved reality.
Daniel came home on leave from the Army. He stared at Lundy like she was some sort of miracle, and when he asked her if she’d be there when he came home for Christmas, she answered “yes,” before she could think twice.
Her seventeenth birthday came and went in a flurry of gifts and cards, in an increasing warmth that seemed to sweep through the house as every day took them further from the time when she had been a phantom, and not a figure.
Three times Lundy returned to the Market, slipping away on an unguarded afternoon—for they were less careful of her now than they had been, now that they were starting to accept the reality of her—and three times Lundy left the Market for the comforts of her childhood bed, for the companionship of her sister, who had grown in so many fabulous and une
xpected ways, who needed to be protected from the rigidity of their father, from the hovering anxiety of their mother. Three times the Archivist met her at the end of the passage, reminding her each time that she would be eighteen sooner than she thought.
Three times Lundy said, “I know. I’m still trying to give fair value,” and walked back through the passage, back to the life she had willingly abandoned at eight, and eleven, and thirteen. She never made a choice. She never said “this is the day I settle forever in a world I said I didn’t want.”
She never needed to.
She was standing in the kitchen, looking at the calendar, counting the days before her eighteenth birthday, when her sister came charging into the room and stopped, looking from Lundy to the calendar.
Finally, in a small voice, Diana asked, “Are you going away again?”
“I have to.” Lundy turned to face her. “I don’t … I don’t belong here, Diana. Everything is wrong. The water and the air and the way people stand, the things they say … it’s like I’ve been on a very long journey, and it’s been splendid, it really has, I’ve learned so much, and I’ve loved getting to know you better, but I can’t stay. I miss my home.”
She had never been much of a storyteller. If she had been, she might have been able to explain a little better how many things went into the idea of “home.” Not just the taste of the water and the scent of the air, but the way the berries ripened, going from white to purple-black overnight, so the undergrowth was constantly changing. The sound of wings, and never knowing whether any bird was a citizen who’d gone too deeply into debt or something born to feather and sky. The security of understanding that the Market would correct any imbalances fairly and quickly, never privileging one side over the other.
Even the shapes of the people here were wrong. She was far from the only human in the Goblin Market, but it was so strange to walk down the street and see only bipeds, only people with two arms and two legs and a single head and no wings or tails. It was difficult not to yearn for comforting variety, rather than this sometimes-shocking homogeneity.
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