The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  It made Linny shiver a little, seeing a picture of herself so much older than she was, and thinking that in some inexplicable way, her mother must have called her into existence. She must have had that picture so firmly in mind, Linny’s mother, that when she gave birth to a daughter, way up in the wrinkled hills, that child—Linny—made her mother’s story come true. And then how could someone who looked so much like that girl in the picture not end up making herself a lourka and causing all that trouble?

  And what exactly had her mother thought would happen, when Linny appeared in Bend wearing the dress her mother had made, the dress from the picture?

  No, it was too much of a tangle, and it made her feel all knotted up inside.

  She put that picture card back into the bag and looked at the smaller, thicker card there. Something seemed to be blooming on its surface, too, though it wasn’t perfectly clear yet. A face. Perhaps even—a familiar face. Her mother’s face. Yes, it was definitely her mother. And words were beginning to push their way to the surface as well: IRIKA PONTIS. Her mother’s own name. Carrying this card must be like carrying your name along with you.

  The Half-Cat startled Linny out of her musings with a sudden hiss. There were dizzy footsteps coming up the steps. Linny had just enough time to put the little bag back around her neck before the magician’s ancient ma skittered in through the door with a bowl of porridge in her hands.

  “Eat this,” she said, popping it into Linny’s hands. “Eat this and go to sleep.”

  “Tell me, please,” said Linny, as loud as she could without shouting or bringing the magician back up the stairs. “What’s this CAT?”

  And she pointed with her spoon at the Half-Cat, just to make her question clearer.

  “Ah!” said the old woman. “Special, special! All cats is special, says some, but this one extra so! Wandered in here long ago and stayed. Down from the hills, I guess, kiddie. Like you! To tell us you were on your way! Like the old stories! There’s always a cat in the old stories. There’s always a cat in the picture—”

  And she chortled and left.

  12

  THE PRICE OF A FANCY BREAKFAST

  Linny was awakened the next morning by bangings and hollerings in the kitchen below. The Half-Cat unfolded itself from the foot of Linny’s cot, stretched, eyed her with each of its strange eyes in turn, and swished through the door and down the stairs.

  “Naw, not that dull thing!” shouted the magician’s old ma when Linny showed up in the many-windowed room in the plain dress the magician had brought her. “Working today, you are, kiddie!”

  But there were unheard-of riches on the table: good bread, boiled eggs, and even a little bowl of jam. Linny went to work on the jam before anyone could notice its vulnerable position, just sitting out there on the table like that. It was made of some fruit she didn’t recognize, purple and sweet.

  By the time the magician came into the room, the jam was gone. But he was in a state of high excitement, all his colorful sashes and breeches practically crackling with energy.

  “It’s a big day for us, girl,” he said, as he peeled a couple of hard-boiled eggs with his thumbs. “We’ll be convincing a bunch of madji of what needs doing. So that’s delicate work.”

  “What did you do with Elias?” said Linny. “And how am I going to find medicines for my friend if you won’t let me out of this house?” Even though she tried to ask plainly, without sounding too snippy or rude, the magician gave her a very hard look.

  “No sass, no nonsense,” he said, waving a finger at her in warning. “It’s all very serious business. You see the house I have to keep up.”

  He waved a hand around, marking out the cracks in the walls, his redheaded ma snoozing on a chair, and the places where the paint was peeling.

  “Not that that’s even the main thing, by a long shot,” said the magician. “The main thing being, who deserves to run this world of ours? Not the bloodless Surveyors, I’m sure you’ll agree. But then again, the madji can get a little excitable in their own right. You don’t know that yet, maybe, but it’s true enough. The madji need some encouragement and direction, I’ve found. And of course it’s very encouraging to have a disorder bomb stuffed into your back pocket.” He chuckled.

  “But until now they’ve been reluctant. They need the Girl with the Lourka, so it appears, to tell them to accept that encouragement before they’ll pay out coin for it. I explained it all to them yesterday, when I was handing over your dear brother. The Girl is finally among us, I told them, and she wants some changes around here. Such a piece of good luck, you showing up when you did! You see the advantages all around. You’re going to get them out of a silly stuck place—they’ll buy my good weapons now. And that means we can afford eggs in this house.”

  As far as Linny could tell, the magician’s only interest in the Girl with the Lourka was as a way to help him sell things to other people. As much as she had enjoyed the eggs (and the jam), she didn’t like the way they got mixed up in the magician’s thoughts with his “good weapons.”

  “What’s a disorder bomb?” she asked.

  “None of your business,” said the magician with a cozy smile. “Run upstairs and put on that fancy costume of yours. You will be coming out with me this morning, to meet some would-be clients. Don’t overthink this game, Linnet from the hills. All you have to tell them is this: you’re against the evil of the Surveyors. Time for the madji to rise up on your behalf. I have the weapons to make the rising possible. That’s all you need to know. Go, change!”

  As she was going up the stairs, he called up behind her, “And don’t get clever!”

  But I will be clever, thought Linny fiercely. I will, I will, I will.

  The Half-Cat came winding up between her ankles, purring a little. It seemed to have taken a liking to her, for some reason.

  “It’s all strings and sausages around here, have you noticed?” she said to the cat. It was a saying from home, used for things that are good and pleasant in themselves, but you don’t want to think too much about how they’re made. “You don’t know where lourka strings come from—well, never mind.”

  That lovely jam and those lovely eggs, paid for by the magician’s awful weapons! It made her determined, all over again, to find her way out of this house.

  As she was changing back into the dress her mother had made, she took a quick look inside the little sack she still wore around her neck. The card with the picture on it was there, and also the paper on which her mother had scribbled instructions for finding her mythical Aunt Mina: “315 West River Quadrant, Angleside; also called Bridge House, Bend.” And more numbers after that. Well, who knew what that meant? But Linny knew what a river was.

  And every hour she spent in Bend was another hour of Sayra fading away, far off in the hills.

  When she went back down the stairs, the magician’s redheaded ma was ensconced in her chair, watching with shining eyes as the magician moved crates up from the basement and down the front hall.

  “A coach waiting!” she squawked at Linny. “Ever been in a coach, kiddie? On your way to make them fight the war, finally! So don’t you be falling out or nothing!”

  “HUSH, MA,” said the magician from under the crate he was balancing on his massive right shoulder. Meanwhile his other hand pounced and settled firmly on Linny’s arm. “Come now, girl. Got your lourka there? Wrap up in this cloak, so you don’t stick out so much everywhere we go. Be quick and keep quiet. Your brother’s good health is depending on you, remember. And these will be very dangerous people we’re seeing. So be warned of that.”

  And he bundled her out through the front door and up into a closed box with seats inside, all bouncing slightly as the horses in front did nervous things with their hooves. It gave Linny’s stomach the wobbles. This must be what his dandelion-headed ma had called a coach.

  Piled in front of Linny’s feet were the crates the magician had been hauling up from his ruined basement room. She eyed them with distrust. T
here was nothing good in those boxes, she felt quite sure.

  Wait! Was that something furry poking up from behind one of the crates? Yes—the tips of a couple of pointy ears, one golden and one silver.

  “Half-Cat?” said Linny in a whisper. A golden eye rose up under the ears and stared at her for a moment, before all signs of cat vanished behind the boxes.

  The magician was swinging his enormous body into the coach, and the whole vehicle swayed and sagged as he did so, making Linny grab the side of the bench to steady herself.

  It would have been more interesting, this first ride through the Bend side of the Broken City, if Linny hadn’t been so queasy. She tried to steal glimpses through the window of the coach, to help her mind figure out the pattern of the streets in the neighborhood, but her body was unhappy about all the swaying and bouncing and wobbling the carriage was doing. It wasn’t natural for human beings, who have their own perfectly fine legs and feet and everything, to be dragged through bumpy streets in wheeled boxes.

  Just to make things worse, the magician kept sending grins in her direction, as if this torture were actually some very special treat.

  Linny did not meet his gaze; she kept her eyes on the world outside. What’s more, she did not actually lose any of her fancy breakfast, so that was a triumph right there. No jam wasted! She hung on, and made it through.

  13

  THE DEATH AND DOLLOP

  “Ah, here we are,” the magician said finally, as the coach lurched around some last corner and quivered to a halt before a sullen-fronted tavern, its windows painted black to fend off curious eyes. “The good old Death and Dollop!”

  Linny was already reaching in some desperation for the door of the coach, but the magician’s enormous hand got to the latch first. He wasn’t going to let her out until he had had his say.

  “Listen up a minute, girl,” he said. “It’s not complicated, the task you have here. You tell these people they need to arm themselves with the tools I have conveniently brought along. As far as they are concerned, you are the Girl with the Lourka, and you want the Surveyors brought down. That’s simple enough, I guess. Otherwise, stay mum. Behave yourself, and nothing bad will happen, to you or your dear brother. Am I clear?”

  He hopped out first and had a conversation with the man in front who drove the coach. Only then did he help Linny out of the conveyance, which apparently was going to wait in place for a while, with the magician’s boxes tucked away in it.

  Inside the tavern, Linny had a sense of tables and stools and smoke and shadows, and perhaps of curious pairs of eyes staring her way, but the magician hurried through the dim space to another room in the back, where four men and a woman around a table all looked up at once when the magician guided himself and Linny through the door.

  Linny took a breath to steady herself. These must be madji.

  They stared in silence. Linny could tell they had been talking something over in low voices and were now feeling interrupted. She stared right back at them, not wanting to seem intimidated. Pipe smoke circled lazily about the room.

  “Good morning, all!” said the magician with outsized good cheer. “A pleasure to be doing business with you on such a happy occasion and such a fine morning.”

  “Don’t know about the happiness of the occasion, Mr. Malkin,” said one of the pipe-smoking men. “But I see you’ve brought the new stray of yours along.”

  For a moment Linny thought he must be talking about the Half-Cat, and looked around to see where the animal had gotten to, but there was no sign of so much as a whisker, golden or silver, and then she realized the man was just referring to her, Linny. Which made her a little mad—that, and the fact she still felt ill from the coach and the pipe smoke.

  “I’m not a stray,” she said, pinching her lips together. “Strays are lost.”

  A couple of the others laughed out loud, and one of them punched the man who had spoken on the shoulder.

  “And you’re not lost?” said the man. “You don’t seem to be home where you belong.”

  “I left home to come here, on purpose,” said Linny with stiff dignity. “I’m not lost. I’m never lost. I would like to know where Elias is, though. Are you the ones who have him?”

  The magician gave the back of her arm a little pinch.

  “Your brave brother is proud to be doing his bit for the cause, I’m sure, my girl,” he said. “For your cause! After all, it is your will that the madji finally rise up against the Surveyors.”

  “Well, it’s true that I don’t like the gray people much,” said Linny. “But that doesn’t mean I like the nasty things in your crates.”

  The pinch became much stronger then. It hurt.

  “Useful things,” said the magician, and every word was a warning. “Necessary things. Sometimes you have to destroy in order to heal. Your wish is that we undo the grid of the Plain, to save the wrinkled hills.”

  “Um—” said Linny, and the pinch became really almost unbearable. She tried to twist her arm free from those pinching fingers, but it couldn’t be done.

  “The Girl is tired, of course,” the magician said. “Having just come such a very long way, down from the hills. But I promised I’d show her our brave madji. Fighting for her.”

  Fighting for me? thought Linny, and her stomach twisted.

  “How can we be sure she’s real?” said the woman on the far side of the table. She had fiercely braided hair held back with a band; she looked like someone you would not want to run into out in the woods on your own.

  “What do you think?” said the magician with an enormous shrug. “You know the painting. Look at her. We wished and wished for the Girl with the Lourka to come back to us, and here she is.”

  The eyes of all those people became even more like screws twisting into soft wood. Linny wanted to duck, to turn away, to hide behind a chair, but she had learned patience while making the varnish for her lourka. Varnishes can’t be hastened. Linny knew from sad experience. If you got impatient and added the juniper gum to the kettle before the linseed oil was really, truly burning hot, unusable glop would be the result.

  Any child of Lourka had heard the expression a million times: “Not until the feather scorches.”

  Linny sat tight.

  Hang on, hang on, she told herself.

  “Well, well,” said one of the men. “She’s kind of young looking, isn’t she? And there’s costumes and wigs these days, we all know that.”

  Somebody guffawed, Linny was glad to notice. Her hair might be messy, and perhaps not very clean, but surely it didn’t look like a wig.

  “They waste our time doubting,” said the magician with extra-elegant contempt. “You demand action, and they quibble. You are the Girl with the Lourka. So go ahead, play them something.”

  Her hands were a little shaky and damp. No wonder! Anyone who has been kidnapped by a magician is liable to have sweaty palms and fingers that tremble some. But her lourka was familiar; the wood of its neck was smooth and warm.

  She played them a tune she had just made up herself in her head that morning, a song about leaving things behind, about Sayra fading and her mother waiting and her brothers splashing about in the creek. It didn’t have any words, but she was proud of the way she had put hints of these things into the music, all the same. The quaver that was Sayra fading came out, she thought, especially well.

  There was an impressed silence in the room while Linny tucked the lourka back into its sack and slung the sack over her shoulder. They couldn’t argue with that, thought Linny. Whoever she was or wasn’t, this lourka she had made was the truest thing about her.

  “So there it is,” said the magician finally. “Enough of this dithering. There is work to be done, the Girl with the Lourka wants it done now, and I have the tools to help you do it.”

  Linny had to keep herself from looking around for this strong-opinioned, willful Girl the magician seemed to want her to be.

  “But it’s a bad idea you’ve been pushing, Rod
egar Malkin,” said a man with a dark brown beard. “And pushing it, you certainly have been, long before the stray girl showed up. Why should we mess with their water?”

  “They mess with our land,” said another fellow.

  “They do, they do, don’t they?” said Rodegar Malkin. “They won’t be content before they’ve put every last inch of the world on their grid, and taken all the wrinkles out of everything. I see how it is. The wrinkled hills cry out to us to do something to protect them. Enough, already!”

  And his huge hands made a large gesture that was a kind of silent explosion: KABOOM!

  “Ha!” said one of the others. “Tempting thought, of course.”

  “Let me remind you that I offer all you need to make it happen,” said the magician. “And by way of providing a public service, as you might say, the prices for my, ahh, special tools are set, I think you’ll find, at very reasonable levels.”

  He leaned forward with what his size made an impressive show of drama.

  “Think! All that wicked waterworks machinery gone, in one sweet moment! That building that chokes our poor river now! Gone! The Surveyors would never recover from that blow.”

  “What does our Girl say?” interrupted the brown-bearded man, turning to stare at Linny some more.

  “She agrees completely, of course,” said the magician. “She is tired of waiting around for the madji to become bolder in their dealings with the Surveyors.”

  “But—” said Linny, and the magician pinched her again.

  “Remember your brother, out there with the madji, trying to undo the harm of the Plain,” said the magician pointedly. “Don’t say anything your brother might not be happy to hear you say. Sometimes you have to destroy what you want to heal, you know.”

  “Hey there, ease up on the girl,” said the bearded man to the magician, with something almost like disgust. “What I don’t understand is why she would throw her lot in with a two-faced old arms dealer like you. Malkin, stay calm there, man! Just stating the bald truth, as you know well enough.”