by Anne Nesbet
“I came through those tunnels,” said Linny, and she pointed to the bluff over there, where her underground adventure had begun. “All the complicated tunnels, like a maze, underground. I got pretty muddy, see?”
The lab coat had done what it could, but still.
The regent looked like someone trying very quickly to reprocess shock into disdain.
“But you shouldn’t be here . . . we didn’t bring you here . . . you don’t even have a puppet,” he said, and his eyes flicked ahead and down.
Now that she had moved this far forward—and when she leaned over the edge a bit—Linny could see what he was looking at: a steeply tilted stage, with raised lines running and swirling across it.
“What’s that?” she said.
“The labyrinth, you foolish girl.”
A pretend labyrinth for puppets that dangled from strings. Wasn’t that what Elias had said? In the past, real girls had tried to get puppets through a labyrinth. How silly was that?
It was so much unlike the true labyrinth, so far from being in endless darkness twisting through wormholes underground, that Linny laughed right out loud.
“Look at this!” she said, and held out her still quite muddy hands, one of them holding a now somewhat muddy key ring. When she did that, the Half-Cat jumped up very elegantly into her arms. “The Half-Cat and I came through the real labyrinth, the actual labyrinth, the horrible dark one that runs under the ground and up through the bridge, and it brought us all the way here.”
The regent looked more surprised than Linny had ever seen a grown person look. His jaw was open. The crowds were not just murmuring now; they were beginning to shout, especially the crowd to Linny’s left, on the wrinkled side of the bridge.
“The Girl with the Lourka!” they were shouting. “The Girl with the Lourka! Lourka! Lourka!”
“Hush!” said the regent to the crowds, but they didn’t hush. Now he was waking up from the surprise and getting angry, Linny noticed. He turned to hiss at her. “Do you think that’s all you have to do? Just waltz up here like that? What about the tests? What about the question? What about the lost crown? A know-nothing child can’t pretend to be fit to rule a whole world!”
That made Linny jut out her chin.
“I am not a child,” she said. “I’m already twelve. And you just said if a claimant had managed to pass your tests, she would be here. And I’m here. I didn’t even mean to come here, but here I am. So I guess that means I passed.”
She was quite proud of having come up with such a good argument on the spot, and the crowd seemed largely to agree. There were roars of approval from the wrinkled side of the river, and even some applause from the Angleside.
All the sharp edges of the Chief Surveyor’s face became even sharper. He looked like one of the twins when the other twin had just stolen his nice toy horsey away.
“Don’t you try to play logic games with me, little girl,” he said.
The crowds were pointing and shouting many different things by this point. Most of the people out there, even the ones on the Angleside, did not seem very happy about the way the regent was conducting things. Some shouted for the question; some shouted for the lourka; others just shouted without particular words at all, they were so caught up in the thrill of the thing.
“What question do they mean?” said Linny, turning back to the regent.
“Someone who passes the preliminary tests properly is asked a question. She receives the question in an envelope after the tests are graded, and then she comes and answers it here, at the fair, in front of the people. If you think I’m going to make things easy for you, little girl, by just handing you the question—”
“Oh, I know what it is!” said Linny, interrupting. Because all of a sudden she did. She was remembering the stone staircase, and the statue with the lines like wings.
“Enough!” said the regent. “You can’t possibly know what the question is, because I wrote it out myself this morning.”
Linny shook her head. Everything was so clear, so clear, all of a sudden. It was the sunlight that did it. Or maybe the view from this bridge. It was spread out before her now, plain as plain, how everything fit together.
“Oh, I don’t care a fig about your question,” she said, somewhat carelessly, perhaps. “I know what the real question is, the labyrinth’s question—”
Half the crowd was jumping and shouting; the other half was hushing the first half and leaning forward, holding its breath.
“It’s written over the doors, down there underground. Here’s what it says: ‘WHICH WAY?’”
Linny spoke right into the tin can when she said that, and on one side of the river the Plainish machine made the words as huge as giants, while on the other side of the river the words rolled through the crowd like the tide, passed from neighbor to neighbor, on and on.
And as that question rippled outward through the crowd, the people fell silent, waiting for something. It was a question, apparently, that had the power to change the world.
23
THE THING ABOUT CROWNS
Linny heard the enormous words hovering in the air, and she remembered how small the earthwormy tunnels were, in the underground places she had had to travel through to get here, and a laugh bubbled up in her.
Which way? Which way?
“I guess when you think about it, it’s the kind of question a maze would ask,” she said into the tin can. “It had me crawling through a lot of mud, looking for the right way to go, but the real answer was in the doors at the end.”
“This is absolutely not the correct question,” said the Chief Surveyor somewhere behind Linny’s back, but she didn’t care what he had to say anymore.
“Two doors,” said Linny. “Side by side. And two keys on the key ring, one wrinkled and one Plain.”
She held the key ring out to the crowd. On the Plain side it appeared, as huge as could be, on that screen high above the crowd. On the wrinkled side of the river, the wave of rumor spread across the crowd again, a growing murmur of excitement.
“And the answer was both. Both doors at once. Both keys.”
Both halves of the world. Both sides of my Half-Cat.
“Don’t tell us stories,” said the regent scornfully. “A person can’t go through two doors at once. That’s impossible.”
“Well, I don’t know whether it’s impossible or not, but that’s what I did,” said Linny.
The crowd was getting louder and louder. They were looking up at the huge image hovering there, of that enormous Linny holding out her enormous hand with the enormous key ring, and they were shouting another word, which Linny didn’t understand at first, until the Chief Surveyor stepped down closer to her and tried to grab the key ring from her hand.
She dodged out of his grasp right in time.
“Give me that,” he said. “It’s not for you.”
The crowd gave an enormous shout.
The word they seemed to be shouting was—
“Crown?” said Linny into the tin can. “What crown?”
There was a great chaos of jumping and yelling as thousands of people tried to explain something to her all at once.
While she was trying to make sense of the noise, the regent leaped forward again and grabbed her wrist.
“I’ll take that now, thank you,” he said, through tight lips, and he pried the key ring—the key ring!—out of her hand. “For safekeeping.”
Linny hardly had enough time to say, “Oh!” She was filled with two kinds of surprise—not merely the unpleasantness of the regent’s grasping, bony fingers, which had probably just left bruises on her poor wrist, but also, at the same time, the shock of understanding that something you thought was one thing had actually been something quite different all along.
The ring holding those keys was so large (for a key ring) because it wasn’t actually a key ring at all. It was silver, it was graceful, it was round. Of course, of course: the long-lost crown! The crowd had recognized it before
she had herself. She had had the crown in her hands, only to let it be stolen away by the regent—who now snapped the keys into position (how had she not noticed that the keys snapped together, into a silvery-black X), and twirled the crown thoughtfully in his own thin and greedy hands.
From both sides of the river, people were now raging and surging toward the bridge, shouting at the regent and shouting out to Linny.
At the wrinkled end of the bridge, the line of fences temporarily holding people back was being overcome by a surge of bodies. And at the forefront of that crowd was an enormous and colorful mountain of a person. That magician!
The regent had seen him, too. He drew in his breath with a hiss. For a moment he turned his sharp-boned face around to look at the howling, angry crowds on either side of the river. Linny could feel the gears in his cold, angular brain making some quick adjustments to his calculations.
He reached forward, pressed a switch at the base of the tin can, and turned around to Linny, his hand held up to hush her.
“Listen to me, little girl,” he said. The words stayed very small and did not travel anywhere. “And listen fast. You said it yourself—you did not come here for crowns and powers, but for medicines for your poor, fading friend. Or that was all a lie?”
Linny shook her head, so angry she couldn’t think of the right words to say. This man was the liar, standing here before her.
“Not a lie?” said the regent. “Then the truth is, this key ring is better off with me. We both know that. And on the subject of medicines—”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the magician, striding now up along the bridge, pushing gray Surveyors aside as if they were rag dolls or the merest folds of gray draperies getting in his way. The regent’s voice had softened to a shadow, icy and urgent:
“I can find you something, little girl, that should work against wrinkled ailments. Against all magic. I have just such a thing in preparation, hidden well away somewhere. You leave this silver trinket with me, and I can find that something for you. Your friend could still be saved, despite all the time you have wasted causing trouble here.”
“I could find the medicines myself,” said Linny, but even to herself she sounded less than perfectly certain.
“Really?” said the regent. “I don’t think so. You overestimate yourself, and you definitely underestimate me. No. Here’s what you will do. When it comes time for you to have this crown put onto your far-too-young head, you will hand it back to me instead. That will make me your continuing regent, and all will be well. The crowds will be content, order will be maintained, and you will be free to go back up into your hills. With the antidote, yes. Oh, and then, of course, the other part of our bargain: you will not come back. But why would you want to?”
Her bones were being replaced by icicles in the shapes of bones, that’s how she felt just then. Why had she ever spoken of medicines to the Chief Surveyor? Now he just had that to use against her.
Could he block her from finding those medicines? She thought he probably could.
Could he actually get his hands on that antidote? He probably could.
Did she really want to stay here, with some crown on her head, trying to make this messed-up place better, while people like the regent pinched bruises into her?
In one very secret hidden-away cupboard of her heart of hearts, the answer welled up: Not really. Not so much.
“I just want to go home,” said Linny, without realizing she was speaking aloud.
“Exactly,” said the regent. “Then I think we’re agreed—”
But that was the very moment the magician swooped back into the picture.
“What are you doing to our Girl?” he said to the regent, huffing and puffing a little from his quick ascent of the bridge. “Back off. Keep away. She’s ours.”
“She just wants to go home,” said the regent to the magician, triumph bubbling in his voice. “But thank you for coming. The symmetry is so beautifully improved when a barbarian joins the ceremony.”
And while the magician sputtered, the regent reached down and switched that tin can of his back on.
“We have a claimant”—the words thrummed hugely into the air—“and we have a crown.”
Absolutely vast amounts of noise from every part of the crowd! Cheering, sobbing, waving of ribbons in the air! A thousand people seemed to be chanting “Girl with the Lourka, Girl with the Lourka,” while a thousand other people (mostly on the Angleside bank of the river) shouted words that sounded a lot like “No more regents!”
So even in the Plain, they don’t much like this regent, thought Linny. She was glad to find that out. He had been cruel to her and had tried to be cruel to the Half-Cat, and that probably meant he had been cruel to a lot of people before.
But then, on both sides of the river, the sound simply flooded over everything and everybody and drowned out all coherent thoughts.
In fact, the noise was so thick and so large that a person could almost have walked right out on top of it and not fallen into the river.
The sun was already just a hair’s breadth above the horizon and sinking fast. Its light came angling low across the fairs and the river between. Linny shaded her eyes to get a better look. The sunset light made all the wonders on either side of the river stand out as if carved from air and varnished fifteen times with the garnet-red stain made from the tears of the dragon tree: on one side, shining contraptions that jumped or flew or played music or showed pictures on their sides; on the other side of the river, miniature orchards of miniature trees, wax candles growing like weeds into tall towers of silver and gold, jesters, kites, and satin banners—all on fire in the setting sun.
Linny looked at all of this, and something in her melted a little. If people at fairs could wander among Plain and wrinkled marvels, why couldn’t that be true all the time?
One display, on the wrinkled side of the bridge, did strike her as particularly strange: a rectangle marked out on the ground, like a large plot of kitchen garden, filled with all sorts of wrinkled things, twinkling and murmuring and unfolding themselves, piled around what even from this distance Linny could see was another statue of the Girl with the Lourka, whether made of plaster or pale stone, Linny couldn’t quite tell. Men in gray uniforms pounded metal stakes into the ground at the four corners of the rectangle.
That seemed a little odd, but there was mixing between the sides of the Broken City on a day like this one, of course. To judge from the sprinkling of gray in the wrinkled part of the fair and the colors among the gray on the Plain side, people must have been streaming back and forth across this bridge all day, before they had put up the barricades on either end of the bridge, for the regent’s speech.
“Claimant!” said the regent. “This is the moment where you do or do not accept this crown, so ancient and so lost to us for so long, and all the responsibilities that it represents.”
He reached forward with the crown, tucking it into Linny’s wild and (she realized) exceptionally muddy hair. It was that enormous image of her on that enormous screen that reminded her how wild and muddy her hair was, after her journey underground.
The crowd shrieked its approval. The sound went on and on. Loud waves of joyful, hopeful noise broke over Linny’s head, a flood of excitement and happiness. Even the people in gray were cheering, Linny saw. They too had felt the brokenness of their Broken City. They wanted to step outside their old fears and live ordinary, joyful lives. Why not? Why not? It made her gulp a little, even her, Linnet, who never cried.
Then the regent interrupted all that sound:
“What?” he said, as if Linny had spoken up in a voice too soft for human ears. “You have something, claimant, that you want to say?”
And his knobby finger poked her in the back, reminding her. He was waiting for her to hand him back that crown.
“You are so young,” he said into the tin can, prompting her. “You want to go home.”
“Wait, what is this about?” said the magic
ian, suspicion rippling through him.
At Linny’s feet, the Half-Cat wrapped its tail around one of her shins, which was oddly steadying.
“Of course I do want to go home,” said Linny, and her words spread out over the fair. “And I also want to do the right thing.”
“Yes,” said the regent, and on the huge screen she could see him stretching his hand out, expecting her to reach up right this next minute and pull the crown off her head. And hand it back to him.
Then she would be free, he had said, to return to the hills, with the antidote in her hands, and never come back.
But there was a problem with this plan. Linny could not see how handing a crown to someone as cruel as the regent could ever be doing the right thing.
Oh, Sayra, she thought. Everything had seemed so simple, long ago. And now nothing was simple.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Linny.
A moment of silence passed through that crowd, as if a thousand people had sucked in their breath all at once.
“You know perfectly well what to do, claimant,” said the regent.
“I don’t,” said Linny. “It’s ‘Which way?’ all over again. I don’t know which way this world should go. I don’t even know yet which way I should go. All I can do is try my best, because wrinkled things are wonderful, wonderful—and so are maps and compasses and machines. All of you—”
There were so many people out there, and all of them hanging on to her every word.
“All of you will just have to help me figure out how we can do this impossible thing together, and go through both doors—”
Because she, Linny, was like this world. She was always going through both doors at once, wrinkled and Plain. She didn’t have the words to say this properly, but there are more ways to speak than words.
She swung her lourka off her shoulder and held it out to the crowds.