by Anne Nesbet
“Anyway, I should have offered to come with you right away. Ma would be furious with me for even thinking about leaving you alone.”
“Why?” said Linny. “I’m fine on my own.”
“It’s too dangerous. Those people in gray! You’re going down all alone to a whole city filled with nasty people like that? No. Not by yourself. No way.”
That was Elias all over, yes? Linny had just set a whole camp on fire to rescue him from evil people in gray, and now he was saying she needed him to protect her!
“I can take care of myself,” she said.
“Until you hit your head on a rock or need to eat,” said Elias.
Oh, right. That.
But it was time for them to get farther away from those people in gray.
“All right, then,” said Linny. “Rest for five minutes. I’ll just scoot over to the campsite for our bundles. Be a shame to lose our nice cookpot. Then we’ll go.”
Elias looked a lot better when she came back—especially when he saw his lourka bouncing against her back next to hers. (Oh, come on! Did he really think Linny would have left a lourka behind in the woods? Lummox!)
“I’ve figured out how to go,” said Linny. It was showing off, a little, but she couldn’t help it. “We’ll angle over to the next valley, soon as the ridge lets us, and walk down to the Plain from there. That way we’ll keep a little more distance between us and those awful people. The trick is to keep moving.”
And so they set off together down out of the hills. It was walking away from Away, Linny knew, and that meant leaving Sayra farther behind, and that was hard. But it was going away in order to come back again, which is not the same thing as going away forever. She couldn’t risk being gobbled up by Away herself before she had that medicine for Sayra safely in her hands. That made it all clear: she would get that medicine from the Plain, and she would bring it back.
Linny had promised to save Sayra, and this was the only way she knew.
8
THE LAY OF THE LAND
Distances work differently in the most wrinkled parts of the hills than they do in the Plain, and as Linny and Elias came down out of the highest hills, they could feel the miles becoming more regular, and perhaps a bit longer, under their feet. Linny didn’t mind that feeling, but Elias got a slightly stretched look as they got closer to the Plain, the expression of a person with a mild but nagging headache.
“Something’s missing here, can’t you tell?” he said to Linny. They had been walking already for a long time, for days and days.
But to Linny it felt like a change, not a loss, and change is often very interesting. If it hadn’t been for the drone note in her brain—Sayra is fading, Sayra is fading—she might even have called herself happy, out here on the edges of an unknown world.
There started to be cottages from time to time. They scooted right past them, feeling shy. But in one tiny village, they passed by a piper playing by the edge of the road. Another man leaned over as he passed, and something round and metallic clink-clinked into the piper’s hat, set out like a bowl on the ground.
Linny gave Elias a very significant look. Their food supplies were getting low.
“That could be us,” she whispered. “We could play music, and people could give us things. Maybe something nice to eat.”
So now and then, they took an hour away from walking to work on their music, and soon they had passable versions of several songs. Elias played the fussy technical stuff, and Linny, with perhaps excessive satisfaction and pride, plucked out the melody line, as sweetly and ringingly as she possibly could. And since Linny and Elias had grown up in Lourka, where even the flowers hummed, they didn’t have much trouble cobbling together a couple of songs that sounded pleasant enough.
“All right,” said Elias one afternoon, after Linny showed the trilling notes she had just figured out how to play. “I’ll give you this: you learn fast, anyway.”
Then he narrowed his eyes.
“Might help if you didn’t look like a wild animal, though. Folks will run screaming. When did you last wash those clothes? Ma says—”
“Cobwebs to you!” said Linny. “You’re the one who looks like a muddy pig.”
But when she looked down at her skirt and the frayed strips of cloth dangling like ribbons from her sleeves, the rest of the insults she had all lined up in her mouth and ready to go vanished right away. She did look, pretty much, like a wild animal. Maybe worse than a wild animal, because even squirrels have too much dignity to go around wearing stinky rags. Did people offer metal coins or nice dinners to people who looked as unwashed and grubby as Linny and Elias? It might be a problem.
“All that stuff you’re hauling about, and you don’t have something cleanish to wear?” said Elias.
Linny did a fierce and symbolic show of digging through her bundles, even though she knew everything in there pretty much by heart.
“Wait,” said Elias over her shoulder. Linny’s hand was just squirming by the all-sewed-up package her mother had called her birthday present. “What’s in that? Looks like cloth.”
Good point. If it was cloth, she could maybe wear it as a shawl or something, and cover up some of her current ragged grime.
Linny didn’t stop to think—she just untied the ribbons and picked loose a couple of threads, and to her surprise a bright flood of cloth came tumbling loose out of that package.
A dress! And not any old dress, but a very funny one, with a red patterned skirt and a blue vest and silver buttons—too fancy to wear in the woods, too bright for everyday work, an old-fashioned-looking thing, really. The last dress Linny would ever have expected her own sensible mother, a woman who had come all the way up to the wrinkled hills from the Plain, to spend time piecing together. But a huge amount of care had gone into it, Linny could see. She knew something about sewing just from having watched Sayra at work all those years. She could see her mother must have been embroidering those leaves and vines up and down the sleeves for weeks and weeks, probably.
Elias’s jaw had dropped when Linny shook the dress out from the shoulders to show him its glory, silver buttons and all.
“Good grief, Linny, what’s that for?” he said.
“Well, I guess you might call it ‘something cleanish to wear,’” said Linny, as smug as could be.
“It’s not yours!”
“Is so. My mother sewed for me. It was supposed to be my birthday present.”
Elias frowned. He put out a finger to touch that fabric and frowned again.
“Odd sort of present. I mean, for a girl like you. What’s in that tiny pocket bag there?”
“The address of my aunt,” she said, feeling a little odd about both of those words, “address” and “aunt.”
Elias was already laughing as he reached for the bag.
“What else are you carrying with you, anyway? Soft pillows? Maple candy? A few sheep? Hey! Look at this!”
Two blank cards, one smaller and thicker than the other—except that when Elias held the larger one up, it was easy enough to see that it wasn’t actually blank. There was the faint trace of a picture hiding there, the picture of a girl who looked quite a bit like Linny, in a dress that looked more than a little like the dress Linny had just unfolded from her bag.
Elias turned the picture this way and that in the sunlight, trying to see it more clearly. Then they puzzled over it together. On the back side there were those few words in Linny’s mother’s handwriting: “I will find her.” But the front of the card, where the shadow of the girl had shown up, was oddly smooth and shiny. Neither Linny nor Elias had seen any drawing quite like this before.
“That’s a strange kind of picture,” said Linny. She looked at it for another short minute and then put both cards back into the bag her mother had sent along with her. Just to be cautious, she hung that little bag around her neck, tucking it away so that it would remain unseen. “Things that will make more sense to you later.” That was what her mother had said about the
things in that sack. And “Whatever you do, don’t lose it.”
Thinking about her mother opened a large and hollow space in her heart. Enough! Linny jumped to her feet to clear her mind again.
“We’re almost at the end of the hills,” she said. “I’ll put the fancy dress on now, so we can play for our supper as soon as we enter the Broken City. Aren’t you hungry?”
The dress turned out to be more comfortable than she had expected. The sash Sayra had given her, and the half-invisible rosebud in the center of it, slipped like silk (since they were silk) into a nice deep pocket on the side seam. Even disguised under her ragged sweater, it was the sort of dress that made a person feel lighter on her feet.
What’s more, the green hill they had just left behind was really the last of the hills, and as they moved out into the farmland below, bigger houses began to pop up here and there, and then whole little towns, and then they were walking through a town that didn’t end, and that was the wrinkled half of the Broken City, the half called Bend.
There were many people, an ever-increasing stream of people, a flood of people. It was astonishing to think that each one of these people felt as much alive, and as vividly and unmistakably himself or herself, as Linny. She was so amazed as to be almost shy, faced with so much eager, busy human life. And Elias stayed very close by her side, so perhaps he was feeling some of that shyness, too.
“My head aches down here,” he said at one point. That was all. But he had been more and more out of sorts the farther down from the hills they came. That was nothing very new.
Linny, on the other hand, was taking in all the clutter and clamor with great big happy gulps. Her head, unlike Elias’s, didn’t seem to suffer from being out of the hills. She had never been in a place with so many streets and alleys—it was different from feeling the slope of a hill, noticing which way a street went winding off and what its name was (in the few cases when a street name was splashed in paint across the wooden boards of a building), but it was as satisfying as scratching an itch or figuring out what note a song should end on.
“Let’s try going this way,” she kept saying to Elias. “Oh, and look at that house there—it’s in three layers!”
Elias kept up with her, but his head stayed low, and his footsteps were all dogged determination. Every now and then, he leaned closer to Linny and said something quick and worried under his breath, like “Shh,” or “They’ll hear you,” which made little sense to Linny. Everyone else in the street certainly seemed to be making as much noise as they wanted!
It was the pasty wagon that reminded her of what they really should be doing. A woman stood behind a cart, arrayed on which were a steaming pile of turnovers, stuffed (the air betrayed this piece of good news) with meat and herbs. Linny’s stomach rumbled with longing.
“Hey, Elias,” she said. “I’m hungry, aren’t you? We need to find a free corner somewhere and start our playing!”
Whether it was coincidence or fate, who knows, but around the next corner, the road opened into a great square, absolutely filled with wagons and stands and displays of the most jewel-like vegetables and pipers and people walking on their hands before knots of lookers-on.
“Oh, wow,” said Linny. She had never in all her wildest dreams imagined such a place could exist. She was hungry now, for real. She dragged Elias over to a clear stretch of wall, took off the ratty old sweater protecting the birthday dress, and then she and Elias unwrapped their lourkas and tuned up.
“Now then!” said Linny to Elias, once everything was ready. “Keep your mind on those pasties—gorgeous, gorgeous things.”
Elias nodded to her, his lips thin and white. But he was born in Lourka, so no matter how his head might be feeling, the instrument he held sounded tuneful enough under his fingers.
They played one of the easier songs, and then tried the harder ones, all in a sweet, braided tangle, one after the next. It was a way to forget the strangeness of the city itself, to be standing here playing their music together.
A strange thing happened as they played.
At first, not so much. City markets have seen everything in their day, haven’t they?
But then a couple of people came by, gawked, and nudged each other with their shoulders. Oh, and pointed, too!
The people’s voices said things to each other:
“She looks so real,” they said in whispers and behind fanned hands. And also: “Just in time for the fair!”
Linny felt strange when she first looked up and saw fingers pointing at her, but it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant feeling. She figured she must be playing better than she had thought.
Then gradually the whole market square, with all its hustle-bustle, fell silent. Not right at once, mind you. Not suddenly or out of the blue. But bit by bit, like waves traveling out from where a stone plonked into the water of a pond, the music reached yet another round of people, and those people stopped what they were doing and turned their heads and became quiet.
“Psst, Elias,” said Linny between songs. She was whispering, and she covered up her whisper by pretending to have dropped something close to Elias’s feet. “Why are they so quiet?”
“Guess they’re listening.”
“Then they’re listening too hard.”
Not just listening. Staring, too. There was a crowd now, pressing forward, watching them. It was almost unbearable to be watched by so many eyes, whenever they stopped playing for a moment. Sometimes someone bent forward and put something on the cloth stretched in front of them, and every time that happened, Linny thought of meat pasties and became a little more encouraged again.
A woman brought a little bunch of flowers.
Linny was trying to pay attention only to the music, but the flowers worried her. What use were flowers? You couldn’t eat them or trade them.
Then more flowers appeared: Long green stalks with blue blossoms at the top. Little red carnations tied together with a string. White, snowy flowers brought in the hands of a very small child, urged on by his mother.
Elias wasn’t looking up. He was just soldiering through his music, thinking of food. But Linny took peeks between notes. There were tears on the cheeks of that tiny old woman over there. That seemed wrong. And the flowers were causing trouble, too. They were piling up too high, now—you could hardly see the cloth where the coin money was supposed to fall. More blossoms than coins! It was some kind of disaster, for sure. They would never get their pasties at all.
“Elias!” she said again. This time he did look up, but as soon as he did, his eyes traveled way past Linny, toward the edge of the market square, and then widened.
“Get behind me, quick!” he said, and actually pushed Linny to one side a little.
She was caught by surprise but found her balance fast and craned her neck to see what it was that had spooked Elias so. In that instant she saw them, too: the band of people in gray. The very same ones they had had their run-in with up in the hills, days before. They were standing straighter now, the hillsickness no longer doubling them over. One of them looked ahead and pointed—oh, no!—right at them, at Elias and Linny.
The crowd made a very strange sound. It was somewhere between a grumble and a growl, and Linny found it a little unnerving, to tell the truth. They did not move out of the way to let that group of people in gray easily by. But the gray people came through, all the same, the way that a heavy liquid will pour right through a lighter one and settle at the bottom of the jar, and as they came, the crowd’s hissing noise of disapproval grew and grew, not that you could tell which mouths in particular were making the sound. And through that disapproving crowd, the gray people kept coming closer and closer.
Linny did not like the looks of them.
“Elias—run!” Linny whispered.
“Where to?” he said, trying to keep his shoulder between Linny and those implacable people coming toward them now.
He had a point. There was a wall behind them, and the people in gray before them, and�
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“Oh, now who’s that?” said Linny, nudging Elias.
9
A DOOR IN THE WALL
The most enormous man Linny had ever seen had just appeared out of something like nowhere. He must have been part of the general crowd, but since he was about a foot taller and a couple feet wider and several colors brighter than anyone else in that square, it was hard to imagine how he had managed not to stick out like a sore thumb. He had as many colors on him as you might see on the wildest bird, way up in the most wrinkled folds of the hills: a green belly, brown sleeves, a red sash around his waist, vast purple trousers billowing out from his legs. A black hat of an indescribable shape on his head, with papers pinned to it. Plus there was a beard large enough to serve as a nest for a dozen actual birds.
Linny was too dazzled to be afraid as he strode up close (close enough she could see the wild glint of gold in his ears), but she completely forgot to breathe. Only a foot or two away, though, he swung more gracefully around than Linny had imagined a man of that size could possibly do and put his hands on his hips—how could a single human being, even such an enormous and bright-colored one, feel so much like a boulder, a blockade, an impenetrable wall? Peeking around the side of the man, Linny could see the gathered crowd, and the people in gray pushing their way closer and closer.
The enormous man cleared his throat and spoke, and his voice was as low and rough as a growl. What he said was peculiar, too. He said, “What do you want now, you cursed grayling Surveyors, with our children?”
Linny was, of course, nervous about the people in gray who had treated Elias so badly back there in the hills, but on the other hand, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be claimed by this intensely bearded man in his green and red and purple, either, whoever he might be.
She looked over at Elias, to try to see what he was thinking, and he gave her a little warning shake of the head. No sudden moves, that was what everything in his face was saying.