In an Absent Dream

by Seanan McGuire

  (When Lundy had been informed she’d be going away to boarding school “for her own good,” she hadn’t been surprised. She had, after all, disappeared twice to the sort of place that was only meant to exist in children’s books and fairy stories—a place that remembered her father by face, even if it never spoke his name. He had chosen to put the Goblin Market behind him as soon as he possibly could, and he wanted the same for her. The fear and yes, longing in his eyes when he looked at the feathers growing from the nape of her neck had only confirmed her calm, quiet belief that there had never been any other choice available to him.)

  (“The doors only find you when you’re alone, and since I can’t keep you safe here, I’m sending you someplace where you’ll never be alone,” he’d said, and that had been enough for him, even as it could never have been enough for her, even as it could never have been the answer.)

  Here at the Chesholm School, the student body wore uniforms designed to prevent feelings of inequality, masking all physical failings and advantages under layers of thick, shapeless cotton and regulation-length skirts. Some of the older girls had been sent away by their parents for harboring “unnatural urges”—one of many subjects the teachers refused to discuss in any detail with the younger girls, who were left to wonder whether their adored upperclassmen were secretly jewel thieves or necromancers—and had a tendency to disappear, hand in hand, around the edges of empty classrooms. Most of the younger girls had been sent away for truancy, or lying, or parental disobedience.

  Most: not all. Lundy was far from the only runaway, although a few days of careful inquiry had confirmed that she was the only one who’d run off somewhere that technically shouldn’t have existed. The others had run off to exciting, faraway places with names like “Cleveland” and “Bar Harbor,” chasing their dreams in the form of Greyhound buses and distant relatives who’d promised that a smart, savvy girl who didn’t mind getting her hands dirty could work on their ocelot farms, or in their herb gardens, or in their nurseries.

  Some girls fought the Chesholm methods, cutting up their uniforms with sewing scissors, going on health strikes against the perfectly nutritionally balanced, totally flavorless meals. Others sank into the school with what Lundy could only view as a full-body sigh of relief, the bruises on their wrists fading, the wariness in their eyes retreating, if never entirely going away.

  During her first term there, one of the girls had been removed from their shared dormitory when her belly, despite the careful portions and general lack of second helpings, had begun to swell all out of proportion to her slender frame. That girl had been gone for most of a semester, and when she had returned, she had been quiet, and whittled-down in a way Lundy didn’t have a name for, only the quiet, cruel awareness of its reality.

  She had slipped that girl her own desserts for the rest of the year, until summer break had come calling and cleared them all off-campus for a brief return to home and supposed normalcy. When the girl—whose name was something mild and ordinary, and which Lundy had never quite been able to trap on her tongue, having taken to regarding the use of other people’s proper names as uncouth—had asked her why, it had taken Lundy some time to find the words. Finally, in a faintly baffled tone, she had said, “The school took something away from you, and they aren’t giving you fair value. I just didn’t want you to think that no one cared about the debts.”

  That girl hadn’t returned to school at the end of break. Sometimes Lundy wondered about her, with her huge, sad eyes and her hollowed-out middle, not yet seventeen and already broken by people who thought children couldn’t be owed debts when things were done to them, when things were stolen. She wondered if there was a door somewhere, maybe labeled with an entreaty to be sure, that the girl could walk through and find herself finally safe, finally home.

  She hoped so.

  Lundy herself fit in reasonably well, once she understood what “fitting in” meant. Her love of rules was still intact, and while the school rules weren’t hung on the walls at regular intervals, they were printed in the student handbook, and they were discussed at mandatory assemblies. Girls were required to grow their hair to a certain length, which came with the convenient side effect of hiding the feathers: her father had plucked them one by one on the morning when he’d woken to find her curled in her bed, and every one of them had hurt, every one of them had bled, and every one of them had grown back. They represented a debt as yet unpaid to the Goblin Market; they wouldn’t go away so easily.

  It had been easy to return after her first trip, when she had been eight years old and easily forgiven for getting lost. The word “runaway” had never crossed anyone’s mind, at least so far as Lundy was aware. The truth had been a secret uneasily kept between her and her father, and it had burned, cast adrift in a space where there had never previously been any need for secrets. What should have brought them closer had instead pushed them incrementally further apart, unable to find the commonalities that had led them both to an impossible door, led them both through to the wonders on the other side.

  Returning from her second trip had been … harder. Everyone in her classroom had seen her fight with Mr. Holmen, had seen the way she looked at him, had heard her declare her intent to walk away. They had just never expected her to walk so far. Most of them had no idea how far she’d gone. Only her father had known, looking at the feathers growing soft and downy at the nape of her neck; only her father had understood.

  Only her father had had the authority to enroll her at the Chesholm School, with its narrow, uncomfortable beds, and its narrow, uncomfortable halls, and the narrow, uncomfortable eyes of authority staring at her from every nook and cranny. He had seen the leaving in her eyes, the desire to charge right back into her impossible adventure—had seen that somehow, his world, his real world, had become the way station, while the Goblin Market was fast becoming home—and he had done his best to keep her put by sending her away.

  It seemed like a terribly backward way of doing things, but what did she know? She was, as the world seemed to delight in reminding her, a child: ten years old when she had run away to the Goblin Market, and still ten years old when she had returned with no intention of staying.

  Eleven came to call while she was locked in orientation at the Chesholm School, bringing with it not lemon cake and streamers, but a lecture from the headmistress on the responsibility of young ladies to keep themselves above reproach, unsullied and untouchable by the world around them. Lundy listened politely, trying to hear the fair value in her words, which sounded like the screeching of so many birds, and when they were done she removed herself to her room, which she shared with three other girls—including the one with the sad eyes, whose belly had yet to begin to swell—and wept.

  Twelve followed a year later, falling predictably in line with all the birthdays that had come before it. The changes Lundy had been noticing in her body accelerated, aching hips spreading and breasts budding, until her family had to send money for a new set of uniforms, until the unasked-for indignity of change culminated in waking in a pool of her own blood, the feathers on her neck itching wildly. They, too, had grown in the night, and when she touched them, her baby feathers fell away in her hand, leaving adult plumage in their wake.

  She smuggled those fallen feathers to the library, where an afternoon’s research informed her that, were her debts to become too great, she would take to the air as a raptor of some kind, most likely a golden eagle, proud and wild and not subject to such mammalian cruelties. That night she dreamt of flying, soaring high and free above the land, and nothing could catch her, or touch her, or bring her back to earth. She dreamt of Moon and Mockery, standing beneath her, watching how she caught the wind.

  That night, Lundy began plotting her escape.

  It was not difficult to begin modifying the pattern of her days. The habit of friendship had never come easily to her, and while most of the other students thought reasonably well of her, when they thought of her at all, none of them counted h
er as a close companion. It was a small thing to withdraw, to choose the library over the gaming field, the empty classroom over the cafeteria. The staff at the Chesholm School were meant to ensure that every student had proper exercise and access to fresh air, but the reality of things was that the quiet girls, the patient girls, the girls who didn’t make waves or make trouble, could effectively do as they liked when not in class.

  Lundy did her lessons, did her chores, and watched the doors, waiting for one of them to shift in its frame, to become something it wasn’t intended to be. Weeks went by with no such transformation. She began to question whether it was ever going to happen at all.

  This, she finally realized, was the true intent of her banishment; she was meant to begin questioning what had happened to her, where she had gone, what she had seen. She was meant to forget Moon and Mockery, and the Archivist, and the taste of Vincent’s pies. And maybe she could have done it, maybe she could have left them behind, if not for the patch of impossible feathers on the nape of her neck. Children did not sprout feathers in this world. If she had sprouted feathers, she must have done it somewhere else. The only other world she could remember was the Goblin Market—which meant the Market was real, and this slow, grinding extinction of the child she had been was nothing more than an attempt to keep her away from it.

  She was staring at a closet door when she caught a flicker of motion and turned to see one of her classmates walking down the hall, a stack of books tucked under her arm. Lundy frowned.

  “Hello,” she said. The other girl looked up, apparently startled to hear herself addressed. “Do you come this way often?”

  “Every day,” said the girl, with a look on her face that clearly indicated she was questioning Lundy’s sanity. She hurried onward, not offering any further conversation.

  Still frowning, Lundy gave the closet another thoughtful look. The first door had been in a tree, and there had been no one else around. The second door had been in the school hallway, yes, but the hall had been empty, hadn’t it? The middle of the day meant people were locked in their classrooms, by and large, and there had been no one there to see her go.

  That was the reason her father had selected a school guaranteed to turn a rebellious child into an obedient one, promising an absolute absence of privacy. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been entirely unsupervised. She was never alone, and the doors couldn’t find her.

  That needed to change.

  Lundy looked over the school activities the next day, considering each of them in turn until she found one which seemed to fit her needs. Neatly, she put her name down on the list. The upperclassman who was meant to be supervising the signups looked at her quizzically.

  “Birdwatching?” she asked. “Really? You’ve never struck me as the naturalist type.”

  Having gone out of her way not to strike anyone as any type of anything, Lundy smiled politely. “I appreciate birds,” she said. “And my father’s latest letter said if he felt I was making more of an effort to participate in the life of the school, he might let me come home at the end of the term. I want to show that I’m willing.”

  The upperclassman smirked, as if to say that no one ever really left the Chesholm School behind. But she stamped Lundy’s application for the birdwatching club all the same, and handed her a notebook with an attached pencil, so she could start writing down the birds she saw.

  Birds I want to see, thought Lundy, dutifully recording sparrows and blackbirds and crows. Owl. Eagle. Moon. Me.

  She started slow, following the assigned trails, writing down the common birds that were too slow or too stupid to avoid the school. She showed her lists to their faculty advisor every other Tuesday, when the club held its official meetings. She sat at the back of the room and made notes, which she willingly shared with anyone who asked. She thought this was fair value for the freedom to rove farther and farther from the school building itself, following the promise of rare bird sightings away from the thick stone walls that held no future for her.

  Every time she went out, she carried a handful of potential trade goods with her, hiding them in the hollow of an old hickory tree. By the end of six weeks, she felt rich from all the pencils and buttons and bright-colored ribbons she had hidden there, enough to pay for food and lodging for an entire season at the Market.

  Only once did another student catch her in the act of accessing her cache, another upperclassman, this one an exile for “unnatural urges,” a phrase Lundy still didn’t quite understand. The teen stared at her across the clearing. Lundy froze with her hand inside the hickory, barely daring to breathe.

  “They won’t announce it, but Miss Henley who does the Thursday night patrol has the flu and no one wants to take her shift, so there’s not going to be a Thursday night patrol,” said the older girl, voice low, in case someone might come along and overhear her. “If you’re going to run, you should do it then, when there’s nobody looking.”

  The teen walked away, leaving Lundy’s head spinning. This could be a trap. It didn’t feel like a trap, but the good traps never did, did they? If every trap felt like a trap, they’d never catch anyone.

  But the woods at night, with a full bag and no one to stop her … it was a temptation too great to be denied. Lundy swallowed her fear and her concern and returned to the classroom, sitting with her hands folded in her uniformed lap, listening as the teacher droned on about comportment and manners and the importance of not bringing shame to the family, and her thoughts were full of beating wings and the sweet smell of impossible fruits.

  Later—when her parents were summoned to the school in the wake of her disappearance, when her father and the headmaster were flinging accusations back and forth like a golden ball—her teachers would say she’d been attentive and polite during her last days with them, that she had listened more closely than ever before, participating in class discussions with the passion of the converted. “We felt like we were finally reaching her,” they would say, and their words would be defensive apology and lament at the same time, because the teachers of the Chesholm School truly believed in the work they were doing, truly believed they could, with hard work and strict discipline, lead the children in their care to a better life.

  Later, the school would say she’d run away, and her father would point to the literature where they bragged about their unclimbable fence, their professional security teams, and ask how that was possible. He would say she must have been taken, telling a little lie to cover the huge, inconvenient truth that she had run so far that she might never be recovered, so far that she had crossed into another, impossible world rather than spend one more minute in this one. The authorities would become involved. Money would change hands—what the school would consider blood money, paid for silence, and Franklin Lundy would consider fair value for a daughter, and silently, secretly bill against the Goblin Market in his dreams.

  But that is all later.

  When Thursday arrived, creeping into the present one day at a time, as days are wont to do, Lundy rose, dressed, and went about her day as she always did. No one noticed her slipping an extra apple into her pocket at lunch, or taking a handful of pencils from the supply cupboard in her English class. She might not have become a better student during her time at the Chesholm School, but she had definitely become a better thief. She counted off the minutes of her classes with her hands folded on her desk and her eyes on the teachers, giving no outward sign that anything was wrong. She needed, more than anything, to be seen as normal.

  The feathers on the back of her neck itched, edges brushing against her skin until it was almost maddening, and she didn’t scratch, and she didn’t draw attention to herself. She was going back where they could be paid off, where fair value could be achieved—or its opposite, where she could allow herself to slide peacefully into debt and feel the sky stretched out around her in a loving embrace, talons spread and wings bearing her ever on. She was going home.

  The final bell rang. She rose with the
others, and returned to her dorm to collect her birdwatching things. Her active and enthusiastic club participation was well known within her dorm. No one questioned her planning an after-dinner excursion. She had filed all the appropriate forms, gathered all the appropriate permissions.

  No one questioned anything, until she walked into the woods and did not come back.

  * * *

  LUNDY WALKED THROUGH the trees with a spring in her step and the weight of her bag hanging against her hip, every pilfered pencil and stolen scrap of ribbon reassuring her that she was going, she was on her way. There was no turning back now. Evening walks were allowed for birdwatchers, but they were logged out and logged back in, and by now the upperclassman in charge of watching the register would surely have noticed that she was running late.

  She’d been walking for more than an hour, heading deeper and deeper into the trees surrounding the campus. Strange sounds called to her from out of the foliage, the cries of owls and the rustling of nocturnal animals. She ignored them. Nothing here could frighten her, not after the things she’d seen and done and faced in the Goblin Market. What did a few noises have on the Bone Wraiths, on the Wasp Queen? This was a test at most, a distraction at least, and so she walked on.

  Her feet hurt. Her legs, no longer accustomed to traveling miles in a single session, ached, and her thighs chafed where they rubbed together. If not for the feathers on the back of her neck, she might have started to believe what her father had said before committing her to boarding school—that she had had a dream, wonderful and terrible and untrue, and now was the time to wake up. She might have turned back.

  But the feathers on the back of her neck were real. It hurt when she tugged on them, and as her mammalian body had undergone puberty, they, too, had changed, growing longer and stronger and darker. Even for a bird, she was no longer a fledgling. And if she wasn’t a fledgling, she could walk.