Page 17 of In an Absent Dream

9

WITH RIBBONS FOR HER HAIR

THE LUNDYwho 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.ThisLundy was thin, her arms and legs wiry with new muscle, rendered lean by physical labor and the rigors of questing.ThisLundy 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.

ThisLundy 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—thisLundy 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 SCHOOLfor 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.

(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 sofar. 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 hadunderstood.

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, hisrealworld, 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.

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