by Anne Nesbet
All the other instruments she had tried to make over the years had come to nothing in the end. The neck had warped because she’d calculated the tensions wrong, or a flaw in the glaze had eaten a hole in the wood, or her unpracticed hands had slipped and something had splintered. That’s how learning is, and she had seen the same and worse happen to Elias, as she spied, like a sneaky, greedy shadow, through the workshop windows. But now, finally, just at the very tip end of her child days, guess what? She had made a lourka that looked like a lourka. So there! There was even a pretty five-petaled linny flower on the front as decoration, to be a secret reminder both of the lourka’s making and its maker—linseed oil was the heart of the varnish, after all, and since linnet birds are harder than flowers to draw, Linny figured the compromise was fair.
The last of the fifteen coats of varnish had finally dried, so she took out the old discarded strings she had been scrounging the past few months and wound them (her fingers trembling a little) through the lourka’s pegs. And it was marvelous. She could feel the tensions in the wood all balancing out just so; the lourka coming to life in her arms; her fingers plucking round, sweet notes from the strings as she tried to tune them.
Linny had even made up a special song in her head for this occasion, a birthday song for this amazing instrument she had finally managed to bring into the world. It won’t be easy, she told herself as she took up the lourka, the proper way, tucked under her right arm so her left hand could shape the notes. But this was a golden day, and her fingers remembered the shapes they had seen her father’s fingers make, as he played the songs Linny loved best, and it was almost easy.
She felt her way along the path the melody made for her, and it was a little like climbing up a hill through the woods: she could sense the direction that music wanted to go.
When she next looked up, it was midafternoon already, the sun low in the sky, and her stomach was growling and her head was light. She could play her song, though, more or less. She could do it.
If she had had the sense to stop for a moment and eat something, maybe her head would have cleared and she wouldn’t have done the foolish thing she did do. But her mind was one gleaming fog of amazement and pride.
She was thinking, Now someone has to hear my song, or it won’t really be real.
Of course it was impossible. How could Linny go around showing off her beautiful lourka, when everything about it was forbidden, against the rules, and wicked? But the longing to have someone hear that song was so large already, so vivid and large, and getting larger every moment. The golden haze of longing filled Linny up and left no room at all for logic or thinking.
She put the lourka back into its (stolen) soft cloth bag, her fingers tripping over themselves a little, now that the wild thought had swallowed up all the sensible parts of her brain.
I’ll be very careful, she thought. I’ll just show Sayra. Just to play her the song.
Sayra always liked Linny’s songs, didn’t she? Sometimes a wild thought will do that—scatter all good sense.
Linny put all her tools away and tucked the lourka into her carrying bag, next to her uneaten lunch, and set off back to the place she knew Sayra would be waiting for her, down by the creek they called the Rushing.
It was still a beautiful day, but the sun was low, and there was a hint of a chill waiting in the shadows of the trees.
Linny poked her head over the bank, and there Sayra was.
“Sayra!” she almost said. But the word died in her mouth. Sayra wasn’t there alone—hunkered against the creek bank next to her was Elias, hunched over and clutching his own knees. They were in the middle of some weighty conversation, looked like. Linny’s chest burned with indignation. She never liked the thought of the two of them doing anything that left no room in it for her. And the woods, the untethered woods, that was her secret, hers and Sayra’s. Elias was certainly not supposed to know.
“Sayra!” she said again, this time for real. Her voice sounded kind of silly and high-pitched to her ears, and that just made her madder. “Elias! Why are you hiding here?”
Their heads whipped around to look at her: two faces, each one wearing an expression that brought Linny no particular joy. Elias looked irritated and angry. And even Sayra, though her face brightened eventually, once she was looking her way, seemed distinctly worn down.
“Hiding?” said Elias, almost spitting, he was so full of scorn. “You’re the one hiding. How many hours have you been running around loose out there? On the last day, too! And Sayra—”
It made Linny want to scratch him, when Elias sounded like that. All the same, she did notice that he seemed to think this was a one-time crime.
“Leave Sayra alone,” she said quickly. “It’s not her fault. I made her do it.”
“Linny,” said Sayra. “Please, Linny.”
Sayra hated lying. And she hated being lied about. Her eyes were full of sparks and warning.
“What’s that you’re holding?” said suspicious, unwanted Elias.
“Nothing,” said Linny. “I mean, something I was going to show Sayra. But now—”
But now she was beginning to come back to her senses. Frowning faces, like splashes of cold water, have a way of waking a person up. Linny turned around, confused, and her feet took half a step back to the woods. But by then Elias had jumped in front of her.
“No, really. What have you got there?”
“Just something I made,” said Linny, trying to step to the side, to get away from him. Two fires were burning in her at the same time: the music fire and plain old smoldering jealousy. “Something better than you could make.”
“Oh, right,” said Elias, turning away in disgust. “What could you possibly make, out in the woods? A flower necklace, maybe? Acorns with cute little smiles painted on them?”
“Elias!” said Sayra. She had not moved her eyes from Linny’s face, and she was probably reading disaster there, because disaster was definitely on its way. The fires burning inside Linny were jumping up and consuming everything. There was nothing of her left that wasn’t on fire.
“Acorns!” she said. “Ha about acorns! Look at this, Elias! I happen to know you’ve NEVER finished anything as good as THIS!”
And she whipped her brand-new lourka out of its bag and held it up in the air in front of her: her revenge, finally, on Elias, for every day he had gone happily off to Linny’s own father’s workbenches, leaving Linny behind, just because she was a girl.
His head snapped back around to see, and the color drained from his face when he saw that lourka in her hands, and then flooded back with his anger, all salmony pink.
And Sayra put her hand to her mouth. She went pale and stayed pale.
“Where’d you steal that from?” said Elias. “Put it down. Are you crazy?”
“I didn’t steal anything,” said Linny. “I made it. It’s my own. And I can play it, too.”
“Oh, Linny,” said Sayra.
“You went and stole a lourka!” said Elias. “You raving idiot! On the day before your birthday!”
Some kind of madness had come over Linny by then.
“You’re just jealous,” she said. “Because it’s a good one, and I made it myself. It took me years! It took me years, but listen!”
She played one note, and the sweetness of it hung like honey in the air. It was a very good note! But before she could get as far as note number two, Elias made a lunge at her new-made lourka, and Linny had to spin around and dodge back up to the top of the bank, out of reach. His eyes were furious and frightened under his mop of dark hair, Linny could see that clearly enough. But there was something else in them, too. He had heard that one golden note—he had seen that lourka—he knew it was good. He knew. She could read that in his eyes, and it satisfied some bitter, hungry part of her, seeing that.
Elias made another grab at her lourka, but Linny was smaller than he was—she was still pretty scrawny for someone almost no longer a child—and she danced out of his way.
“You can’t have it!” she said. “You can’t have it! You’re just jealous, that’s what!”
It was kind of exhilarating, being so angry and wild, but already Linny could feel the solid lump of bad feeling she was going to be left with, once all the anger burned off.
“But it’s awful. What will your father say?” said Sayra. “It’s all my fault. He’ll hate me. He’ll be right to hate me. Oh, Linny. You couldn’t wait one more day?”
There was a moment of silence, there, with just the creek water rustling through it and the thin whistle of some bird in the bushes on the far bank. Linny couldn’t help thinking how much longer she had actually been working on lourkas than this “one more day” suggested. Then her mind shifted to thinking about her father, and the lump of bad feeling was soon getting lumpier in her belly. He could not actually hate Sayra, of course. No one could hate Sayra, who was kind and funny and could turn mere threads into a little person that actually looked like the floury baker.
But what would her father say? That was an icy sort of thought.
None of the daydreams she’d had all those years—of her father listening to a few sweet melodic lines played by his talented, talented daughter on some bright shining new-minted lourka and saying, full of pride, full of joy, “Oh, Linny!”—none of those dreams made any sense, out here in the late-afternoon light of real life. In fact, he would—
And Linny’s mind refused to go that way, too. Her mind just balked and sat down, like a sheep or a goat.
“No,” she said. “You can’t say anything to him.”
Sayra and Elias looked at her, one with sadness, the other with—well, a kind word for Elias’s expression might be disgust.
Linny wrapped her lourka in its cloth and put it back safely away in her bag, turning to the side a little so they wouldn’t see her hands tremble.
“Honestly, Linny,” said Sayra, and she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes with a shuddering sigh. “It’s like you always have to do everything exactly the hardest possible way.”
It was too much for Linny to stand, hearing Sayra sound so unhappy.
“And what were you even thinking we would do,” Sayra went on, “if . . . if bad luck came for you? I would know, all my life, that it was my fault. Because it would be my fault. I was supposed to keep you safe. There’s more than a cord tethering us together, by now. Whatever happens to you, it might just as well happen to me instead. That’s how it feels.”
Linny didn’t even know what to do with her own face anymore. There was nowhere to look and no expression to make that could possibly fit. No, by this point she was just a sodden mass of ick and bad feeling. She would be actually crying in a moment—she was beginning to feel most peculiar around the eyes—and Linny never, ever cried. She was way too bad to cry.
Elias fortunately rescued her by snorting in scorn, which of course made her want to smack him, and wanting to smack Elias pulled her right back from the brink of that cliff.
“Don’t worry too much, Linnet, you idiot,” said Elias. “We’ll know whose fault it really is, if the Voices come after you: your own fault and nobody else’s. So there. And I guess you’d better run home now, fast. Your mother wanted you home early today, she told me. I went looking for you earlier, but you were off in the woods.”
So Linny let Sayra tether her back up and take her home. She couldn’t think of anything else to say or to do.
All the gold of that day had evaporated. It was cold suddenly, too, as soon as the sun had vanished behind the brow of the hill. Linny wrapped her arms around her chest, letting the bag with the lourka in it bobble against her back, and she and Sayra made a pretty miserable home-going of it.
It should probably have been the happiest day of her life, too, because, she had done what maybe no child had ever done so well before. She had made a real, singing lourka with her own hands. In another place, surely she would have been as happy as happy!
But this was the village of Lourka, high in the wrinkled hills, and she, being a girl, was exactly the wrong sort of child.
3
WHAT DOOM SOUNDS LIKE
Linny slouched through the door of her house to find her mother had made broth and dumplings for dinner, her old favorite, the puffy dumplings that almost sing out in the mouth as the wind picks up outside the door.
But even puffy dumplings could not make Linny smile this evening, weighed down by worry as she was. She had sneaked her bag into her own corner, and there it lay, filled with the evidence of her enormous and unforgivable wickedness. This was probably the last hour of her parents not knowing just how wicked she had been. How the shock would climb into their faces when they saw the lourka there! That was the image that kept elbowing its way into Linny’s mind; it entirely ruined the taste of those dumplings.
She came back to herself about halfway through that meal, when she realized all four pairs of family eyes were leveled on her. Those eyes were full of worry, too, even the ones belonging to the twins, who (she realized now) must have scrubbed clean for this occasion.
“What?” she said impatiently to all of them at once.
“No need to bark, Linny,” said her mother. “You can’t be that gloomy and expect us all not to notice. What happened out there today? Did you quarrel with Sayra or something?”
The lightness in her voice was spread on thinly, like a very quick coat of paint.
“No!” said Linny. Then she realized that was a lie. “Yes,” she said, and scowled.
“Ah,” said her father. “And you two went home still all quarreled up, letting some little thing fester. That’s varnishing flies, Linny, and you oughtn’t do it.”
His wife looked at him. She hadn’t grown up in a place where lourka-making shaped even the words people used.
“Got to let each coat dry, Irika, when it gets to the varnishing stage,” he explained. (Fifteen coats, thought Linny, but she kept her lips pressed together, and the thought stayed put.) “Got to pick out any dust or little critters stuck there before the next coat goes on. Otherwise you’re just varnishing flies, see?”
“Flies! Well!” said her mother. “Normal enough for friends to bicker, I guess. These things happen. And everyone so tense these days, riled up about all that twelfth-birthday nonsense.”
“All that nonsense” was Linny’s mother’s phrase for stories she disapproved of, or maybe (the thought was a thin, thin sliver in Linny’s heart) feared.
Linny’s father opened his mouth to protest, but her mother interrupted him by standing up with a clatter of plates and noisily sending the twins off to bed.
“Tomorrow we’ll all feel better,” said Linny’s mother. “It really will be your birthday, Linny!”
“So long looked forward to,” said her father. He couldn’t even pretend to be anything but anxious. His hand shook when he put down his knife. “Our dear, wild, hummy Linnet, safe and grown.”
The twins—named after the lourka woods, maple and pine (but known since babyhood as Maybe and Pie)—were having one of their private, silly, twinnish conversations on their way up the loft ladder: “Grown up! Maybe tomorrow she’ll look, you know—”
“All completely different—”
“Tall, tall, and bumpy chested!” Giggles and whispers.
“You entirely ridiculous boys!” Linny heard her mother say, and that was comfortingly normal.
But when Linny put her own foot on the stairs, her father stopped her.
“We thought we’d sit up with you tonight,” he said. “We’ll just pull the chairs in front of the fire here.”
“We’ll have the quilts,” said her mother, adding a gloss of brightness to her thin coat of good cheer. “It’ll be cozy.”
Not so very cozy if you happened to be Linny, however, whose stomach felt like it was tying itself in knots. The bag she had left in the corner began again to pull on her eyes, wanting her to look over at it and give herself away.
It was not the sort of secret that could stay a
secret. Elias would tell on her for sure, and maybe that strand of goodness in Sayra would win out over her inner mischief and make her feel like she had no choice but to confess. Linny frowned to herself and picked at her fingernails for a while, feeling squirmy again under the concerned eyes of her parents.
The minutes ticked away, slow as tree sap. Linny counted cracks in the wooden walls. She did that trick with her eyes to make her brown hand turn into two hands in the firelight. She waggled all those extra fingers. Still time refused to budge.
She wasn’t the only one suffering. Her father shifted in his chair for the tenth or twentieth time.
“There’s something I have to say to you, Linny,” he said suddenly. He was too earnest—Linny found herself wanting to be somewhere far away. “I’m sorry we had to be so tough on you, all these years. It’s not natural, is it, to keep children tethered together! But you know it was out of love we did it, Linny. Keeping you safely away from music and all that, for the twelve years. I know it’s been hard as hard—”
“Doesn’t matter now,” said Linny’s mother more brightly. “Another couple of hours and we’ll be past all that foolishness finally, won’t we? I don’t so often miss the Plain, you know, but at times like these—”
“Irika,” said Linny’s father, almost pleading.
“No, it should be said!” said Linny’s mother. “After all, for all the troubles down there, at least in the Plain stories stay stories, you know that. In the Plain there wouldn’t be some doom that strikes girls just because they touch some foolish musical instrument. If you get sick in the Plain, there are medicines no one uses here. That work on the cells of the body to fix them, when they don’t work as they ought. There are doctors.”