Page 15 of In an Absent Dream

Moon, whose eyes were still orange, who still had feathers in her hair, but who otherwise looked like an ordinary child, beamed at her. “Look how much we did in a day!” she crowed. “You’re my lucky charm.”

Lundy, who had some questions about how Moon had been able to amass so much debt if she could pay it all off in a single day’s work, tucked the coin away in her pocket and smiled. “I guess somebody has to be,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

And so they did.

8

BY THE FIRE

MOON LAYin a heap next to the Archivist’s fire, snoring with openmouthed gusto. The Archivist looked at her, amused, before returning her attention to Lundy.

“You want to know about debt,” she said.

Lundy, who had raised no such questions, blinked. Then she nodded. “Yes. I do.”

“I told you it would be easier for you because you don’t belong here yet. As long as you’re a tourist, people will pay you generously. Your enjoyment is a part of fair value, until you make your mind up one way or the other.”

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 carenotto 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 wereravenous, 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 youneed, 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 Marketknows, 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 WOKEonce 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.

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