In an Absent Dream

by Seanan McGuire

  Lundy, who had not enjoyed the fight against the Wasp Queen or the death of her friend, frowned. “Moon was so close to becoming a bird. Her hands, and her eyes, and—I don’t understand how people can do that to each other.”

  “We don’t do it to each other, child. Can you not see that? We take so much care not to do that to each other that it’s a wonder we don’t all walk around with ledgers in our hands, measuring our breaths to be sure we’ve contributed enough to the world we live in to justify them. We make our bargains based upon an innate sense of fairness, and the Market listens when we say we’ve received the value we require. Because this is the Market at work, make no mistake of that. I told you when you were younger that we began with a single peddler’s son. Do you remember?”

  Lundy nodded silently.

  “He was lost and lonely and trying to survive, and the world saw something in him. The doors began to open more often, bringing him companions. The Market grew up around him as more people came, and stopped, and stayed. But there was no single currency everyone could agree upon, and hoarding any given sort of money was a gamble—maybe a door would open to a world where that kind of coin could spend and maybe it wouldn’t. Barter became the order of the day. The trouble is, barter opens questions of relative value. Do you understand?”

  This time, Lundy shook her head.

  “Consider your pies. You enjoy having a full belly, and you must like the taste of them, since you returned to the same food stall when it was time to make a new bargain. To you, the pies were worth whatever you paid for them. To the piemaker, whatever you offered was worth more than the pies. Now, imagine for a moment that you were so hungry you feared you might die. What would have stopped the piemaker from taking everything you had in exchange for a handful of crumbs?”

  “I wouldn’t have let him,” said Lundy firmly.

  “But again, imagine you were ravenous, you were starving, that hunger had wrapped its hands so tightly around your bones that you couldn’t think straight. There is wanting and there is needing, and when you want, you can make good choices, but when you need, it’s important the people around you not be looking to take advantage. When there are no clear prices, only the nebulous idea of ‘fair value,’ people get hurt. People get cheated. We had some bad bargains in the beginning, when folks looked at what we were building here and saw themselves as rich and powerful, while the rest of us existed only to fill their pockets with everything we had.”

  Lundy, who had met her share of bullies, said nothing.

  “One day, all those people who had started bargaining in bad faith, who had looked to take advantage or not fulfilled their agreements to the best of their abilities, woke up and found they wore the signs of their failures on their faces. They had feathers in their hair. They had beaks, or talons, or stranger. And the ones who realized they’d been negligent with their fellows, who worked to make things right, found themselves back the way they had been in fairly short order. The ones who didn’t…” The Archivist looked meaningfully toward the door, and through it toward the clearing where the birdcages hung.

  Lundy’s dinner—chicken pie in flaky pastry—seemed suddenly sour in her stomach. “What happened to them?”

  “Most flew away. Some had done things so terrible that they were locked up for the protection of those around them. A few stayed free, and worked their way back toward their original shapes. Most who become birds now follow their example. It takes a very long time. There’s not much a bird can do to provide fair value.” Seeming to catch the direction of Lundy’s thoughts, the Archivist smiled. “The chickens we raise are only that: chickens. You haven’t eaten the vicar.”

  “What’s a vicar?” asked Lundy, and sagged in relief.

  The Archivist ignored her question, which may have been for the best. “Most of the children who live at the Market spend at least some time as a bird. It teaches them to be frugal in their bargains and mindful of their obligations. Their parents are happy to help them find value that can be done on two good wings, unless they’ve become some sort of flightless bird, and then we find other ways. Moon doesn’t have a parent to step in for her. Had she made it all the way into her cloak of feathers, I would have been forced to stir myself to find her things an owl could do to buy the way back to girlhood. It’s only a permanent condition if the one transformed allows it to be, continuing to be indolent or greedy until their mind fades into the mind of a bird.”

  Lundy frowned deeply. “My grandpa was sick for a long time before he died,” she said. “What happens if someone’s too sick to give fair value?”

  “Health is a thing that can be bought, as can everything worth bartering,” said the Archivist. “But if someone truly cannot give fair value—if they are undergoing childbirth, for example, or if the health they need must be purchased by someone else, because they were injured or sickened too quickly to make their own bargain—the world is forgiving. This is the Market acting, to balance itself, to keep us happy and hale and working together, not draining one another dry in the name of personal enrichment. A new parent, weary from bringing a life into the world, may be waited upon hand and foot for weeks, their every need met, their every desire catered to, and still be seen as owed something, for the great good they have done us. How do you balance out the fair value of a life? And it’s true that sometimes, one who has lived long enough to feel themselves finished will allow their health to decline, so they might slip away quietly. The ones who choose to care for such individuals will also find their needs met, without any exchange other than their compassion. The Market knows, you see, when someone is acting to the best of their ability. The Market doesn’t punish us for having limitations. It only reminds us that fair value applies to everyone.”

  “Oh.” Lundy sat quietly for a time, considering all these things, before she stood. “So I should do my sorting for the night, before I go to sleep.”

  The Archivist smiled. “Yes,” she said. “You should.”

  * * *

  LUNDY WOKE ONCE again to sunlight streaming through the cracks in the walls, but more, to a feeling of deep contentment that began at the soles of her feet and spread all the way through her body, filling her. She stretched and the contentment stretched with her, purring like a cat, reassuring her that everything that could possibly be well was well, and would remain so.

  Moon was still asleep, curled into a tight ball. Some of the feathers had fallen out of her hair in the night. Lundy picked up one of them, turning it over in her hand before tucking it behind her ear. It tickled. She left it there, standing and stretching again, this time with her feet flush to the ground. The motion brought a whiff of sour skin-smell up to tickle her nose. She grimaced. Her clothes were mostly clean, thanks to spending a whole day doing laundry and soaking herself in soapy water, but the soap had never quite reached most of her skin. She needed a bath in the very worst of ways.

  The last time she’d been here, she had been eight years old and perfectly content to bathe in the chilly stream, laughing and splashing at Moon as they scrubbed themselves clean. Later, Mockery had joined them, older and wilder and bringing a measure of obedience in her wake. Now, though … even at ten, her body was beginning to do things she wasn’t sure she appreciated, widening in places and narrowing in others, while her chest ached at odd hours and in ways that she didn’t have the proper words for. Her mother said she was growing up. Lundy was fairly sure there was no bargain in the world that could give her fair value for that.

  So no, she didn’t want to bathe in the stream, naked and exposed to anyone who came along. But she remembered seeing a bathhouse on the far side of the Market, with tubs of hot water and soap for the asking. It seemed like something worth exploring further. She considered Moon for a moment before nudging the other girl with her toe.

  “I want a bath,” she said. “Wake up.”

  Moon grumbled.

  “I want a bath, and you need a bath. Do birds not bathe? You smell like a henhouse. Wake up.
”

  Moon rolled over and cracked open one owl-orange eye. Lundy found herself obscurely glad that even though Moon’s fingers were now of an ordinary length, and Moon’s eyes were now of an ordinary size, they were still orange. She wasn’t sure she would have been able to see her friend looking out of any other color.

  “You’re mean,” Moon said. “I’m not a chicken.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t smell like one,” said Lundy primly. “Come on. Let’s go get baths.”

  “Don’t wanna pay for a bath.”

  It was becoming clearer how Moon was able to keep getting herself into debt. If she didn’t seek out baths on her own, someone would eventually chuck her into a lake to stop the smell, and then there was every chance the Market would punish her for not giving fair value to the noses around her. Lundy rolled her eyes. “I have my whole schoolbag still, and it’s full of things,” she said. “I can buy you a bath. But then you have to do something to get me back. I don’t care what. We have to give fair value to each other.”

  “I’ll show you where the best berry bushes are,” said Moon, climbing to her feet, suddenly interested now that the bill would be going to someone else. “They weren’t blooming last time you came, but they’re so good now, we can even pick and bring them back and sell them for something to drink with our dinner.”

  “It’s a deal,” said Lundy. She beamed at Moon, and Moon beamed back, and she couldn’t remember why she had ever thought leaving this wonderful place was a good idea. She’d been sad, yes, but she’d been sad at home, too, and no one there had understood why. Here, at least, she was among people who could see her. Who might listen.

  They left the Archivist’s shack and took each other’s hand, running side by side down the path that ringed the Market, Lundy’s schoolbag banging against her hip with every step, Moon pulling her onward. Lundy allowed herself to be led, paying attention to everything around her for the day when she would be making her own way.

  In a distant way, she realized she was making plans for the future. A future here, in the Goblin Market. Maybe that would change. Maybe she would remember the husband she had always assumed would one day come along, would remember the library she had imagined herself organizing, would find something to love and live for in the world where she’d been born … but more and more, none of those things felt likely.

  “I have to go home soon,” she said, and her words were hollow, obligations spoken where the wind could hear them, and not things that lingered in the chambers of her heart.

  “Soon isn’t now,” said Moon, and hauled her onward, onward, ever onward.

  Two buttons and a spool of thread bought them all the hot water and soap and privacy they could want. Moon stripped without shame once they were in their shared room, letting Lundy—who was still a little shy about the idea of being naked in front of someone else—do the same. Feathers grew out of Moon’s shoulder blades, a long row of white and gold that pressed close down against the skin but fluffed out when she settled down into the water of her tub.

  “Ah,” said Moon, sinking deeper and closing her eyes. “That’s good. You’re smart, Lundy. You have good ideas.”

  “Thank you,” said Lundy primly, and stepped into her own tub. The water was so hot it stung her skin, leaving it tingling. She sank slowly onto her butt, letting her legs float up until her ankles were almost level with her knees. What would it be like, to have feathers, to get them wet? Did Moon feel trapped by the knowledge that she couldn’t fly away, or did she feel free because she was more human than she’d been? “Can I ask you something?”

  “You paid for the baths,” said Moon. “You can ask me anything.”

  It was a grand offer, one that made the air feel as tingly as the water. Lundy shifted a little, uncomfortable. How was it that Moon could live here, could feel the power of a Market debt tugging and transforming her skin, but not understand how big an answer that was? It didn’t seem right.

  “Do you ever wish you hadn’t chosen the Market?”

  Moon opened one eye, looking thoughtfully at Lundy. “You mean because of the feathers?”

  “Yes.” The feathers, and other things. She thought of Moon’s bleak eyes, of her saying that the only fair value left would be the kind that flew away. “You were … you were so sad, and you looked so strange, like you were forgetting who you were.”

  “It was the fingers.” Moon held her ordinary hands up for Lundy to see. “I’ve been pretty tapped out before, but I was always young enough that the Market left me with hands. I think it doesn’t want to make birds out of the really little kids, because they might forget to be human and just fly away. These days, there’s enough for me to care about that I don’t want to fly off and be an owl forever. That happens sometimes, with people who go too deep into debt. The Market dresses them in feathers, and they forget they were ever anything else, and they can be happy. It only happens to little kids if they’re so sad being people that being birds is better. The rest of us get feathers in our hair, and maybe mouths that don’t move right, and we try harder, because it’s not fun to have a beak when you don’t want to. This was the first time I was old enough for the Market to start taking away my hands.”

  She pulled them back into the water with the rest of her, sighing.

  “You were gone, and Mo … Mockery was gone, and I wanted to pretend I was special, I guess,” she said, stumbling over their lost friend’s name. “That I was the one the Market loved so much that it would let me bend the rules more than it let anyone else. The one it would take care of and protect. It was silly of me? But I don’t have any parents to tuck me in or tell me to brush my hair, and I wanted to believe the Market loved me. The Market does love me. It loves us all. It just … loves the rules more. It doesn’t let any of us break them. It punishes us when it has to, because the rules have to be for everyone if they’re going to be for anyone.”

  “Even for kids,” said Lundy.

  “Even for kids and tourists,” said Moon. “I’ll work off the rest of my debt, and then we can practice not going into debt together, you and me. Soon isn’t now. Soon doesn’t have to be ever. You’re going to stay this time, right? I feel like we’d be best friends, if you stayed.”

  “I’m going to stay,” said Lundy, and she was lying, and neither of them knew it then, but both of them would know it soon enough.

  9 WITH RIBBONS FOR HER HAIR

  THE LUNDY WHO had stepped through the door for her second visit to the Goblin Market would barely have recognized the one who came stumbling through it for her second return to the world of her birth. This Lundy was thin, her arms and legs wiry with new muscle, rendered lean by physical labor and the rigors of questing. This Lundy had bruises on her ribs and a narrow scar down the middle of her back, tracing the outline of her spine, where the Bone Wraiths had tried to set their captive countryman free of the fetters of her flesh.

  This Lundy was dressed in patchwork and tatters, with her hair cut short in a pageboy bob and thin leather straps wrapped around her fingers to protect them. But most of all—oh, most of all—this Lundy had feathers in her hair, short bronze feathers that glimmered when the light hit them. They grew at the nape of her neck, exposed by the shortness of her haircut, and it would have been possible for the casual observer to tell themselves she had merely tied them there, the fashion stylings of a child.

  She had earned each of them with a debt as yet unpaid to the Goblin Market, and she had done so intentionally. They were a mark of promises as yet unkept, and they were, in their own way, a promise entirely on their own. She would return. She would go back to the Market with fuller pockets and a firmer plan, and perhaps this time, she would stay forever, as she had promised a girl with owl-orange eyes that she would one day do. With feathers in her hair she walked through the darkened school to the doors, and out into the evening. She looked at the empty parking lot with quest-wearied eyes. How small the world she’d come from looked now! How narrow and gray!

/>   Home always shrinks in times of absence, always bleeds away some of its majesty, because what is home, after all, apart from the place one returns to when the adventure is over? Home is an end to glory, a stopping point when the tale is done. Lundy walked across the parking lot with the smooth, easy stride of a predator, and no one came to challenge her or ask her where she’d been.

  She walked down the moonlit streets of her home town, and everything was peaceful, and everything was still. Somewhere in the distance an owl cried. If she went after it, found it perched in some high tree or in the eaves of some old house, it would look at her with avian incomprehension, incapable of seeing her as a human being, as a friend. A bird in this world was only a bird.

  Lundy walked on.

  On an ordinary street sat an ordinary house, the windows dark, the occupants still. Lundy plucked the spare key from behind a loose brick in the decorative flowerbed and let herself in, closing the door silently in her wake. In the morning, there would be screams of joy and shouts of accusation. In the morning, her father would see the feathers in her hair and weep. Here, however, now, there was only the night, and her own bed, too soft and too big, like a cotton-wrapped cloud, and she had come a very long way. She was very tired. She had only intended to stop long enough to fill her pockets, but she was so tired, and surely a brief nap couldn’t hurt?

  Lundy slept. The tale continued.

  PART III

  WHERE WE WOULD BE

  10 IN WHICH A QUEST BEGINS AND ENDS

  THE CHESHOLM SCHOOL for Girls was considered a jewel in the crown of private education: expensive, exclusive, and capable of taking the most misguided of young women and turning them into the most proper of young ladies. Tuition was steep, of course, but every penny was justified by the rigorous nature of the curriculum and isolated location of the campus. There would be no shenanigans here, not under the watchful eye of the professionally trained staff.