The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  Her father was looking appalled.

  “Never mind all that now,” he said. “The important thing is here we are, and in an hour I will break the wax off a bottle of last year’s wine so we can be properly glad together. Our Linnet has made it through her child years without touching a lourka, despite the music fire being so fierce in her. Many said it couldn’t be done, that we would see her safely through, and keep lourkas out of her hand all that time, when she was born such a very hummy baby.”

  “Um,” said Linny, and she caught herself accidentally glancing over at the bag in the corner. Her father perhaps did not see her do that, but her mother certainly did.

  “What’s wrong, Linny?” she said. “Is there something we should know?” And there was worry in those questions.

  “But you don’t believe all those stories, do you, Mama? That a girl who even just by accident bumped into a lourka sometime—”

  The words kind of petered out in her head, because it turned out that her mother thinking it was all nonsense had been the ground under her feet. And a tremor had just gone through that ground.

  Her father took a breath that was meant to be calm but sounded rather gasping.

  “Did that happen to you, Lin? You’re remembering something now?”

  “No!” said Linny. Well, it wasn’t a lie, in the strict sense. But the fear she had been working so hard to keep at bay was beginning to trickle into her from all directions. “Anyway, in the Plain they know better, right, Mama?”

  Her mother shifted in her chair.

  “In the Plain they know differently,” she said. “That’s the thing. Here in the hills, stories make the world. You know that. Up here people see one of those owls with the crystal beak and the wings that shed ice when it flies, and they say, ‘Someone’s been telling stories about ice owls again.’ Right? That’s not the way things work in the Plain, that’s for sure. And yes, some part of me still thinks it’s nonsense. But another part knows better than anybody how stories can come true up here. Look at me! I came up here looking for a girl just like you, and here you are! So I’ll be glad when it’s safely tomorrow for real, and we can move on past all this, all this—”

  And this time she wouldn’t even say the word. Wouldn’t say “nonsense.” Under Linny’s feet there was only shadow, where not very long ago there had been everything solid. It was not a good feeling.

  “Now, now,” said her father. “I’m sure we’ll all be glad. Don’t let’s be worrying when we don’t need to. We’ve been so very careful, all this long time.”

  Linny’s heart was sinking lower and lower.

  “Linny,” said her mother. “Think hard, sweet girl, just to be extra cautious. Did you ever, even slightly, even completely by accident, even with one elbow, even sleepwalking, even because someone bumped into you on his way somewhere—did you ever touch or take some lourka? Your father’s or anybody else’s? Did you?”

  Hearing her sensible, Plain-spoken mother start talking this way . . . that put knobbles of fear in her stomach. Linny looked over at that bag in the corner. The fear knobbles rolled about like ice-cold marbles in her.

  “Mama, Papa,” she said in a whisper. “You’ll hate me.”

  “Never,” they both said.

  “Tell us, then, quick,” added her mother. “What have you done? What have you touched or borrowed or begged from someone?”

  It was like jumping from a cliff right into an icy pool. There was no going back now. Linny couldn’t even think right now, about what she should do or shouldn’t do or shouldn’t have done already long ago. She was at the bag in the corner before she knew what she was doing, unswaddling the lourka, turning around to face the stricken, horrified faces of her parents just as the clock in the corner ticked another minute closer to midnight.

  “I didn’t beg anything from anyone,” she said. “I didn’t have to. It’s my very own lourka. Made by me. I made it.”

  Which was the exact moment the wind rose up outside, blew the door right open, and came whistling through the room, so that the fire in the hearth threw out a fountain of sparks and then almost died away entirely, making everything terribly dim.

  Something was wrong in that dim light. Linny could see her parents leaping from their chairs, could hear them crying out in alarm, but the chill had wrapped itself right around her heart, like the coldest possible boa constrictor, and for a moment she could hardly move her own lips to shout. Then the cold air rushed out of the room again, taking her breath with it; it was the strangest thing.

  In that hollow space left by the wind, there were voices.

  Not voices that you can hear—that would have been less terrible. But the shadow left by voices that you somehow knew had been jabbering at you a moment ago angrily, ironically, bitterly, and that now, in this moment here, were gone. Linny found herself on her feet, the lourka in her hand, but that hand, like her other one, was desperately and awkwardly trying to cover her ears, to block out all that sound that wasn’t there, the awful words that no one was saying.

  It was not an echo, because an echo is also a kind of sound; this was the ringing absence of something that had been there, in some impossible prior slice of time—the sense that a scream had filled the air just a second ago, had come ripping through the air, here and gone. This was the silence where a second ago there had been voices, and it was the worst thing Linny had ever heard (or not heard) in all her life.

  Her heart was fluttering in jagged bursts, and her ears straining after something that could not be heard, not with ordinary human ears. The room was completely silent, but the air trembled with all that unheard sound. Sound’s ghost.

  The spell of those silent, absent voices held them all in its fist. Linny was dimly aware that her parents had their hands at their ears as well, but she couldn’t move an inch.

  A nightmare’s got us, she thought, but even as she thought that, she realized she could feel the floorboards again, solid and real under her feet. And that was already the sign the spell was fading. She turned her head (she could turn it now), and she saw the ashen faces of her parents, both turning to look for her at the very same moment, both faces already shifting from fear to relief as they found her still there.

  “Linny!” said her mother (as if from very far away). “What—”

  But that’s when the real shouting started, far away at the end of the village. Not ghost noises anymore. Ordinary human cries. A wail of grief, outside and far away. Linny started noticing things again: how shiveringly cold she felt, how the lourka was still clenched in her hand, how her father must have dropped the bottle of wine (when?), because a puddle of dark liquid and broken glass stretched out around his feet. Outside, the wailing grew louder. Linny pulled at the quilt still draped around her shoulders with her cold, cold hands.

  “Oh, no,” she said, and the shaking started for real.

  She knew that voice. She had known it forever. It was the sound of a mother whose heart has been torn in two by something awful, awful, awful—

  “But that means, that means—Sayra!” said Linny, waking up, finally. The lourka fell out of her hands onto the cottage floor. And Linny flung herself across the room, through the door, and out into the chilly night, into a world where some story was coming true, apparently, in the worst possible way.

  4

  I WILL FIND HER

  There was a thin mist winding through the village and a round, shining moon beyond the mist, so that all eaves, corners, walls, and wells looked both brighter and fuzzier than they usually would. The hard-packed earth of the road was firm and cool under Linny’s bare feet. She felt a little as though she were still dreaming, running up alone through the village in the middle of the night this way, all the way up to the weatherworn cottage where Sayra lived with her mother. How many times had she come up this road? Hundreds or thousands—but never on her own.

  It was strange to be running through the village without Sayra. It was like being only a fraction of yourself. To te
ll the truth, Linny felt right without Sayra only in two places: her own home and deep in the woods. But not among the houses here. Not running up that road at night. It actually made Linny feel a little queasy inside, to be outside and visible like this. She was used to sneaking around and hiding. But now she sped along that road like a ghost, like a rumor, like trouble, and already she could see the slight figure of Sayra’s own mother, bent over in grief outside her own cottage, and hear the words in those awful keening sobs of hers.

  “Sayra! My Sayra!”

  The neighbors were already appearing from their houses, of course. Someone had put a sturdy arm around Sayra’s mother’s shoulders—that was kind Molleen, Elias’s mother. She was saying something that had no words to it, that was just a kind, wordless, broken-hearted murmur. There were other neighbors on the porch and in the door. But Linny was still running very fast, and now she ran right past Sayra’s grieving mother to the steps and up Sayra’s most-familiar steps to the door—where someone caught up to her, grabbed her arm, and whirled her halfway around.

  “You!” said Elias, as wild-haired and wild-eyed as a child with night fever (the twins had been through that not so long ago). “The Voices took Sayra. Why are you here?”

  “Let me go,” said Linny. “I’ve got to go in.” Then she figured out what he really meant by that and could not say another word. It was true; she should not still be here if Sayra was not.

  They stood there, glaring at each other miserably in the relative dark, both of them, Linny knew, probably remembering Linny’s hands on the smooth neck of that lourka yesterday by the Rushing, and the stupid (but very pretty) notes she had insisted on playing. Both knowing it should have been Linny the Voices came after, if they came after anybody, not Sayra, the good one, the one they both loved.

  Why? Why? That’s what both those miserable, angry faces were asking as they glared at each other there.

  And then, as clear and cold as a blue wolf’s howl, as sharp as a snake’s fangs sinking venom into her veins, Linny remembered exactly what Sayra had said: “Whatever happens to you, it might just as well happen to me instead.”

  It had been enough. It had changed the story. Something bad had come, and it hadn’t happened to Linny—it had happened to Sayra instead. Horrible thought! Had Sayra maybe even known it might? The venom reached Linny’s heart and almost stopped it still.

  Surely the whole out-loud truth was about to come raining down on her then, like a ton of sharp stones, but Elias simply turned away and said to Sayra’s mother, “Where is she?”

  Sayra’s mother looked broken—that was the word that echoed in Linny’s head, broken, broken, broken—as she came up to the porch. Her eyes just flicked toward the door, behind which, as Linny knew well, the hall would lead a person right to Sayra’s room, and her shoulders sagged, and that was enough for Elias. He went stumbling off into the shadows to see for himself, to tell whatever was left of poor Sayra how it should have been Linny taken, not her, and probably something about his undying love and so on and so on, this being Elias.

  That woke the tiniest little flame in Linny, even as filled with guilt and self-loathing as she was.

  “I need to see her, too,” she said to the empty space where Elias had been.

  “She was thinking about you,” said Sayra’s mother dully. “She worried about you all evening, Sayra did.”

  Permission enough. Linny broke away and walked down the hall, quick as quick so her feet wouldn’t take fright and betray her.

  She wanted to see Sayra, but of course she didn’t want to, too.

  What could be left of a person, once the Voices had come and taken them off to Away?

  From the doorway she could see what looked like Sayra lying in her bed under the window, the lamp burning on the little table there, Elias kneeling on the floor beside her bed, his wild-haired head murmuring something to the girl sleeping (sleeping?) there, his hand holding her hand. Linny took another step through into the room, and Elias turned to look at her for a moment.

  “You go away,” he said. “You did this.”

  The little flame in Linny wavered for a moment and almost went out. But not quite.

  “Let me see her,” she said. “Elias, please.”

  “You did this,” he said. “It’s your fault. The men are going up into the hills to look for the edge of Away, to try to play her back. But they’ll never find it. Or her.”

  But Sayra just looked like herself, sleeping. Didn’t she?

  “Doesn’t look to me like she’s gone anywhere,” said Linny. “Let me see.”

  She pushed her way forward. She was not going to let Elias tell her what to do. She went right up to Sayra, her tethered twin, lying so strangely and quietly there, and she made that lummox Elias get out of the way. He always thought he loved Sayra more than anyone else could, but Linny knew better than that.

  The candle was doing something strange to the light in this room. She could not focus on Sayra’s hand somehow. She rubbed her eyes, and tried again.

  “Thinking of you, she was,” said Sayra’s mother from the doorway of that room. “Worried about you.”

  The hand was definitely blurry. Light didn’t respect its edges anymore. Linny took a deep breath and grabbed the hand, and it was still there, feeling just like Sayra. Warm like Sayra. It should not be fading away the way it was.

  “Sayra!” said Linny, beginning to panic, despite herself. “Please, Sayra!”

  “Don’t you get it?” said Elias. “She’s Away. Just the shell lying there now. She’ll fade to nothing here, eventually, my ma says. It may take days, it may take months, but we’ve lost her. We’ve lost Sayra. Because of you.”

  She was braced for even worse, but Elias choked on his words, and his shoulders started to tremble. He had to turn away very fast and struggle back out of the room.

  Peeking out from under Sayra’s pillow, what was that? The end of a cord Linny knew very, very well. Until that second she hadn’t known what she was going to do, but the tether decided things. Whatever happens to you, it might just as well happen to me instead. That went both ways, didn’t it? You can’t let your mismatched twin fade to nothing while her soul has been stolen off to Away just because of your own wild wickedness. Even wild and wicked people sometimes have to make things right again.

  Linny put her head down close to Sayra’s ear.

  “Sayra, listen,” she said, quiet enough for only Sayra to hear, if Sayra could still hear at all. “I don’t care where you are. Just wait for me, wherever you are. You have to wait. I’ll come find you, even in Away. I’m going to find a way to make you better and then I’m coming to Away to bring you back, Sayra. I’ll fix things, I promise. You stay put, wherever you are, and wait for me. . . .”

  Then she stopped. Her hand had just found the birthday sash, folded deep into her pocket. The sash that Sayra had made for her. Better than a tether. And what had she said? Her dreams had told her—to give it to Linny . . . today . . . not to wait—

  A howl of pain surged up from Linny’s heart. She couldn’t speak for a moment, it was so hard to keep that howl inside.

  Her fingertips had plucked the little silk rosebud out of the sash. It flickered in the dim light, warm in her hands, wanting to blossom, wanting to sing its marvelous wrinkled song all over again.

  “Sayra,” she whispered.

  Sayra had made this astonishing thing for her. It had a bit of both of them in it. She’d said that herself, hadn’t she?

  Before Linny knew what she was doing, she had tucked the flower right into Sayra’s fading hand.

  “Don’t let go,” said Linny. “Sayra, hold on. I’ll find you. Don’t let go.”

  And then there was nothing to do but to skim the palm of her hand across the top of Sayra’s still-smooth head and stand back up in a rush.

  “Sorry,” she said as she pushed past everyone who had by now gathered in the room, in the hall, on the porch. She was in a hurry now. She was beginning to see what s
he was going to have to do, to put things right.

  She ran back down the road, flying fast to hang on to that thread of certainty.

  Her mother was waiting for her at the door of their house, with tears in her eyes and a quilt to wrap around Linny’s cold shoulders.

  Linny didn’t remember dropping that quilt.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said to her mother, quickly so she wouldn’t lose her courage. “You said in the Plain there would be medicines, right? Then I’m going to find them. Because it’s my fault this happened. It should have been me, not Sayra.”

  “It shouldn’t be anybody!” said her mother, with a fierceness Linny wasn’t used to hearing.

  “But it’s Sayra, so that means I’ve got to go. I’ll find that stuff that can save her, and I’ll bring it back up here.”

  Easy-peasy when you said it that way: down to the Plain and then up to Away. If she paused even for a moment, she was afraid she would remember how impossible it all was. So she didn’t pause.

  She said instead, “You’ll tell me where to go in the Plain, won’t you, for the medicines?”

  She wasn’t a child anymore, right? Not being a child means doing the brave, scary things.

  Then she noticed how quiet it was in that house.

  “Where’s Papa?”

  “He went off right away with the others,” said her mother. “Taking their music up into the highest hills—looking for the edge of Away, that’s where he said they’d be going. That’s what they do, he says, trying to play the poor girl back.”

  “It never worked before, though,” said Linny. They would play music as beautifully as possible, trying to draw the wandering soul back into the world. It was a nice idea, sure, but Linny couldn’t remember any stories where it actually brought a lost girl home.

  “Maybe they didn’t find the edge,” said her mother. “It’s what you might call a topographical conundrum, the edge of Away.”

  Sometimes Linny’s mother still spoke like someone fresh up from the Plain.