The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  “Hey!” said Linny. (Her father liked to say, “Are those important words, or just long ones?”)

  “I just mean the hills get infinitely wrinkled, and then the edge is past that. In the Plain they’d make a graph to show you. And that’s why the edge can’t be found.”

  “Mama,” said Linny. She almost put her hands to her ears to drown out those words. “No one can find Lourka, either, but you did. You came up into the wrinkled country, past all the other villages that there are, down there lower in the hills, and you got sicker and sicker from the magic, but you kept coming and you kept coming, and hillsick as you were, eventually you found us.”

  That was the story. Linny clung to it now with a desperate hope. It had been something practically impossible that her mother had done, but she had done it.

  “I did find you,” said her mother. “Thank goodness, yes. Well, first I found your father.”

  And even in the midst of this awfulness, a smile danced in her eyes for a moment, only to wink out again like a snuffed candle, soon as she looked back into Linny’s face.

  “Oh, Linny, I don’t even know anymore, what’s possible or impossible in this world,” she said. “And we all love Sayra.”

  Not as much as I do, thought Linny, and the stubbornness that was forming like a scab on top of all her fear and misery pushed her forward, forward, toward the places she knew she had to go.

  “Well, what I’m doing is possible,” said Linny. “The Plain’s a real place, right? A place a person can get to by walking? Downhill, that’s all. I’m going now, and I’ll get those medicines—don’t look like that, Mama!”

  Her mother had the strangest expression on her face, the expression of someone determined to fool the world into thinking she wasn’t miserable or afraid.

  “Not in rags and bare feet, surely, Linny?”

  “Oh!” said Linny, looking down at her toes.

  So while Linny put on layers of warm clothes and laced up her shoes, her mother hurried about the kitchen, putting together a proper traveler’s bundle.

  “There’ll be food in here,” she said to Linny. “And some things I’ve been waiting to give you for years and years. And even your birthday present—wrapped up in the cloth there. I made it myself, with Jenny’s help. Oh, poor Jenny!”

  (Jenny was Sayra’s mother.)

  “Well, you’ll look at it later sometime. But what you need to know most of all: that lourka, sweet girl—it’s not your fault.”

  The lourka was on the table, too, wrapped up neatly in a clean cloth sack. Linny shook her head when she saw it.

  “Of course the lourka’s my fault,” she said, and saw Sayra again, all curled up and fading on her bed. “I was the stupid one who made it.”

  Her mother shook her head.

  “Oh, but what you don’t know, Linny, is—well, there are a lot of things you don’t know. But one of them, maybe the most important fact of all, is that I came up here from the Plain looking for you. I mean, I came up here carrying the story that I would find her, the girl with a lourka. I thought the world needed her. And I had pictures in my head of what she might be like. But of course what I didn’t understand then was that I was coming up to a place where stories like that have a way of coming true. And here you are! Well, never mind now. The point is, it’s not all your fault. All right. Listen. You’ll need help there, finding what you need. So you’ll go to your aunt, my sister Mina, who lives down in the Broken City—”

  Broken City?

  Linny’s mother caught the question in her eyes.

  “They don’t get along, the people on either side of the river, so they broke their own city in two.”

  “Like an egg?” said Linny. She meant the soft-boiled kind, that the twins enjoyed knocking the tops off with their spoons.

  Her mother looked startled.

  “An egg? Not so much. The river runs down from the wrinkled hills and then makes a sharp turn so it can flow right between the wrinkled and Plain halves of the city—”

  “Right or left?”

  This unknown place was already wanting to take shape in her mind.

  “Turns left,” said her mother, who understood about directions. “Standing on the hills, looking down, you’d say it turns almost as sharp as a table corner. I’d draw you a map if I had more time—a map’s a sort of picture of a place. And then the river runs along through the middle of the city and then veers right again, maybe even sharper than the first time, so it can run into the Plain.”

  “Oh,” said Linny, drinking it all in. She had known their little creeks joined up with a river eventually, of course, but she hadn’t known where the river went, once it was out of the hills. “So it’s the river that makes the city broken.”

  “The river runs through it, yes, but it takes people to break things,” said her mother, and there was an edge of bitter sorrow in those words that Linny hadn’t heard from her mother before. “Bend, they call the city on this side, the wrinkled side, of the river. And on the other bank, in the Plain, is the part we always called Angleside. It’s been a long time since I’ve used those names!”

  She pushed a scrap of paper (made by her own hand, that paper, and with the tiniest flowers caught in its creamy surface) toward Linny.

  “So. You must go to your aunt in the Broken City. She will take care of you, and she knows about medicines. Here, I’ve written her address down for you—carry this close, Linny. I’m putting it in this little sack here, with some other things that will make more sense to you later, I think. Whatever you do, don’t lose it.”

  Linny looked at the scribbled words and numbers on that slip. Her mother had worked hard to teach her to read, but these words swam about in her eyes like little fish. And the piece of paper went into the sack too fast for Linny really to make much sense of it.

  Her mother hesitated for a moment, then leaned closer and spoke almost under her breath, as if the world might pounce on her words if it caught wind of them.

  “And Linny, what about when you want to come home? It’s not an easy place to find, Lourka, even if I was lucky enough to find it. They say it hides itself, or the hills hide it.”

  “I can find my way home,” said Linny, with more confidence than she really felt. “Anyway, I have to bring the medicines back for Sayra. That’s the whole point. I bet I can come back. I think so, anyway.”

  A dog howled, rather far off. That snapped Linny’s mother right out of some kind of spell.

  “I don’t want you to go,” she said. “But if you are going, it had better be now. Linny, my dearest girl! You’re good in wild places. We know that.”

  “And I can’t get lost,” said Linny.

  “No,” agreed her mother, arranging the bundles over Linny’s shoulders. They weren’t too heavy, the way her mother fixed them up. “Like me, you can’t easily get lost. But if you’re really like me, Linny, that won’t always save you from feeling lost. Kiss me, sweetheart. You are brave. Oh, you shouldn’t have had to be so brave when you were still this young!”

  “Twelve,” said Linny pointedly. Her mother kept forgetting. Not young!

  “Years younger than you should be, dear one, that’s all. Well, it can’t be helped. Remember you carry all my love with you, wherever you go. You are truly the girl I came looking for, when I came up into these wrinkled hills.”

  And Linny was out in the night again. Her mother had opened the door. No, they were already through the door and across the yard, and her mother was opening the gate with a hand that couldn’t keep itself from shaking.

  “Quickly, safely, quickly!” her mother was saying, and now Linny was already out the gate, and had she even said good-bye? Had she?

  But she was already almost around the corner by the time that thought had risen up in her bewildered brain, and it was too late to do anything about it.

  5

  THAT LUMMOX ELIAS

  She walked, stunned, for maybe five minutes down the road; then the dog barked again, perhaps l
ess far away than the first time, and she decided it might be more discreet to be in the woods, where she wouldn’t stick out so much like a sore thumb (the sort of sore thumb that wears traveler’s bundles over its shoulders). And maybe if she hid, if she was properly sneaky, she could even steal a last look at her father, before she walked all the way down out of the wrinkled country and into the Plain. She would have liked to have been able to say good-bye to her father. That made her heart twist, thinking that. She had to walk faster, just to get those thoughts out of her mind.

  She hadn’t gone twenty steps into the woods, however, when something near her stubbed its toe on a tree root, stumbled forward with a loudish, but somehow familiar “Oof!” and ran (to judge from the sound) right into a tree. Linny whipped her head around, and sure enough, she had known that “Oof.”

  It was that lummox Elias.

  She jumped back out of his path, but a sliver of moonlight had already found its way through the branches overhead and betrayed her.

  “Linny?” he said. “Linny, is that you? What are you doing out here?”

  “Strolling in the woods,” said Linny. Part of her being bad was that she could never help needling Elias. “What are you doing?”

  “But how’d you get up here? You shouldn’t be up here.”

  That had Linny fairly puzzled.

  “Up here?” she said. “What’s that mean? We’re not up anywhere. We’re about twenty feet into my papa’s piece of forest. That tree over there is the one he took the limb from last year for lourka pegs. You don’t remember it?”

  Elias sagged to the ground and put his hands to his head. Maybe he had hit that tree harder than Linny had thought.

  “I’ve been walking for hours,” he said. He was too tired even to be his usual tiresome self. Linny appreciated that. “All uphill. How can I still be way down here?”

  Linny squatted down beside him, the bundles bouncing awkwardly against her back. When people get lost, it squashes their spirits somehow. Linny had seen that happen before.

  “Where did you think you were going?”

  Then she saw the lourka on his back and knew.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Up to Away. Hoping to find the place that wouldn’t let itself be found, up where the wrinkled hills met their limit and became some kind of edge. To try to play some song so sweetly that Sayra’s captured soul would be called right back into this world (though it had never been actually done). The men had left him behind, of course. What possible use was that lummox Elias?

  But she knew how it must have felt to him. He was a lummox, but even lummoxes are probably stung when everyone goes off to rescue the girl the lummox thinks he loves best of all. That made Linny feel needle-ish again, though. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t even thought of the most obvious thing.

  “Hey, Elias!” she said. “The only one who could ever play Sayra’s soul out of Away is me! I know her best, and I bet I can find her. She likes my songs. She’ll come if I play. I should have thought of that right off the bat. I should have tried that first.”

  She expected Elias to say something rude or swat her or something, but he just looked at her in the dark, tiredness weighing him down.

  “I got lost,” he said. “I was trying to follow your father, but the hills got strange, and I ended up here. It’s hopeless, anyway. The hills won’t let people get that far. I heard the men talking, when they first set off. They said nobody really knows how to get to Away, not really. It’s like living in a saucer with slippery edges. That’s what they said. Nobody knows where Away even is, up at the top of the hills.”

  “I do,” said Linny. “I could get there.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Elias.

  It was, too. Elias was right enough about that. But Linny weighed that thought in her head a moment and decided maybe it was more a hopeful lie than a crazy one. She had gone pretty far up into the hills before. She knew how they tried to shrug a person off her path. But Linny was the one who never got lost.

  And if she could find Sayra in Away and get her back, then she wouldn’t have to leave everything behind and go down all alone into the Plain, would she? That touched some funny nerve in her throat—she had to catch her breath very fast to keep the sound she was making from becoming a sob.

  And that was that. She popped back onto her feet, already running her mind’s eye over the lay of the land. Thinking about the way the hills went, and the way the wrinkles thickened. Somewhere up in the wrinkliest part of the wrinkled hills was the edge of Away. All right, she could find that. She would go uphill and keep going, and then eventually somehow she’d be there.

  “Hey,” said Elias, that lummox. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  She just kept walking, measuring the slopes of things in her head and heading up.

  But Elias crashed along behind her. He was never as good at walking quietly through the woods as Linny or Sayra. The deer always ran off in fright when Elias came blundering through the bushes, and Elias would just stand there looking hurt, because he liked deer. He liked all living creatures, really. Lambs came up to him to rub their furry faces against his shins. He just wasn’t any good at being quiet or finding his way.

  “Walk quieter,” said Linny over her shoulder. “You’ll mess me up.”

  That was another lie, actually. But Elias’s crashing footsteps became a little less noisy behind her.

  “Hey, Linny,” he said, panting as he came along after her. “What’s all that stuff on your back?”

  “Stuff,” said Linny. The bundles did feel heavier, now that she was lugging them uphill. But if she had left them in a heap under a tree somewhere, she would have to get back to that tree before running off to the Plain. If she couldn’t find the edge of Away, that is.

  These were still the familiar woods. Linny didn’t really have to think yet, not down here. She just angled up the slope on a line that skirted by her old workshop, not close enough that Elias would see it, though, and start asking questions about that, too.

  When she paused to change course slightly to the right, looking for the likeliest place to cross the little creek that whispered along nearest to them, she noticed that the sky was beginning to gray up already. It was no longer the deep middle of the night. That took her by surprise, somehow. Time was still padding along, then! Somehow it felt like time should have stopped, the very minute the Voices came for Sayra. Everything else had been cut short then; why should the clocks keep moving?

  She shook her head roughly to get the tangles out of her brain, and pressed on up the far bank of the creek even faster than she had been going, with Elias struggling on after.

  As soon as they crossed the creek, Linny could feel the ways the wrinkles of those hills began to grow thicker and deeper all around them. Elias gave a new kind of groan.

  “Head hurts,” he said. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

  “Shh,” said Linny. “Of course I do.”

  The nice thing about lying is that it gets easier, the more you do it. She did not know where Away was, of course. Not ever getting lost is not the same thing as knowing where every possible place—even the ones you’ve never seen—might be. What Linny did know was what it felt like to follow the land’s wrinkles as they became ever more complicated and deeper.

  “Weren’t we already here before?” said Elias. He had almost caught up with her when she paused to let the tug of the land tell her which way to go next.

  “Here?” said Linny. “No.”

  “I don’t like it. All the little valleys look the same.”

  Linny looked around. She was taken by surprise by Elias’s words, because she hadn’t really been using her eyes at all. She had been feeling her way.

  The world around them was a deep, in-between gray, too light for stars but much too dark for true morning. They were standing in a very small ravine. A miniature valley. And other little canyons ran out from this one in every direction, so that the whole world seem
ed to be fracturing all around them. When she looked with her eyes, Linny could see how strange this place could be to a person who could, unlike Linny, get lost. She didn’t usually try to imagine herself in those shoes, and for one brief moment the effort to see the world as Elias must be seeing it actually made her dizzy. She blinked to get her balance back, and Elias himself said, quietly and very nearby, “I can’t see which way is up or down anymore. Can you?”

  “Shh. I was fine until you distracted me. This way.”

  But when she moved on, Elias yelped, and she had to go back for him.

  “You turned a corner,” he said. His eyes were very wide. “I couldn’t see where you went.”

  “Hang on, then,” said Linny. There was no help for it, even though it slowed everything down. Elias put his hand on her shoulder, and at least he knew how to rest a hand on a person lightly, because with the bundles already weighing her down, Linny was in no mood to carry even part of a lummox.

  She forged on. Elias had called it “turning a corner,” and maybe his words had been powerful enough to reshape Linny’s view of things, because the little canyons all around did become more like corners. You pushed past one tree, and the world turned a corner, and there were other, completely different trees, one absolutely filled with little golden birds, just beginning to chatter their welcome to the morning that was not there yet. And then you turned around another corner, and there was a creek again, taking up most of that canyon, if you could call such a tiny rift a canyon. And then a corner, and another tree, this one tall and narrow.

  “Oh, help,” said Elias, his hand trembling on her shoulder. “Please help. We’re lost. We’re so lost.”

  But he didn’t seem to be talking to Linny exactly, so she put him back out of her mind. The world was so wrinkled all around them that she had to focus very hard to feel which way still led deeper in (and higher up).

  And then finally they clambered up another set of rocks, and turned another corner, and the canyon that held them now was no larger than a closet. If you reached out a hand, you could almost feel the sides of it. But (Linny felt this in her gut) if you took another step, you’d be somewhere else. And ahead something happened to the light. Ahead there was a blur, as if they were catching a glimpse, here, of the world before it had decided how it wanted to be.