Page 23 of In an Absent Dream

The Archivist, who had seen a thousand friendships become unbalanced by assumptions about who owed who, even when no one walked cloaked in feathers, was silent for a moment. Then, finally, she said, “No. It doesn’t have to. You can gamble, if you like.”

“Gamble with what?”

“A year. If at the end of a year, you’re still friends despite everything, you’ll be gowned in feathers and will have to buy your own way back to humanity. If I’m right, and she can’t love you innocently once she feels there is no balance between you, you’ll owe nothing more.”

Lundy stood straighter, squared her shoulders, and said, “I’ll sign.”

“Yes,” said the Archivist. “I knew you would.”

12

ON WINGS SO WIDE

WE MUSTmove on, we must move on, for time grows short and there is so much left to do, but first we will stop to see something of terrible importance. So:

Lundy expected to feel Moon’s debt settle on her shoulders when she signed the book, expected it to press in on her and weigh her down. She felt nothing. She looked quizzically at the Archivist, who smiled.

“It’s done,” she said. “Go to the wood.”

Lundy turned and fled, running out of the tent and into the Market, weaving between shoppers and sellers with quick, remembered speed. How easy it was to fall back into the good old patterns, to read the movement of the crowd and know how to dance through it like a dream, causing no one any harm, incurring no unexpected debts! She had been away far longer than expected, but in many ways, this was where she had grown up, and would always, always be her home.

At the edge of the Market was the wood. Lundy plunged into it, letting her feet choose the way, until she came to the stream where once she had found a girl with owl-orange eyes weeping by the water. She looked up. She saw neither owl nor girl. She turned in a slow circle, searching still, and so she chanced to see the first feather fall.

This time, when she looked up, it was at a specific tree, and so it was that she saw the feathers falling faster and faster, as what she had taken for a part of the trunk unfolded into a great brown owl, and then unfolded further into a naked, shivering girl.

“Moon!” cried Lundy in delight.

The girl opened her eyes, which were the color of sanded pine, and not owl-orange at all, and stared at her. “Lundy?” she asked finally, in a voice that rasped and croaked and creaked like an unoiled hinge, too long allowed to go unused. “You came back?”

“Can you climb down?” Lundy looked around for something that might soften Moon’s fall, if it came to that. All she saw was the stream, which she was fairly sure she couldn’t move. “Be careful. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“How . . . how am I human?” Moon raised one hand, staring first at it, and then at Lundy. “What did you do?”

Fear uncurled in Lundy’s stomach, venomous and cold. “I brought you back,” she said uneasily. “I’m sorry I was gone so long. You wouldn’t have gone to feathers if I hadn’t gotten caught and kept in the other world. So I bought your debt and brought you back.”

Moon blinked at her. “I oweyounow?”

“No. No! I bought your debt and I let it go. You don’t owe anybody. We get to be human together, we get to beheretogether, so come down from the tree, okay? I’ve missed you. Please?” Lundy looked at her hopefully, waiting to see what Moon would do.

Moon hesitated. Let us pull back for a moment, and see things through her eyes—for while this is Lundy’s story, Lundy’s cautionary tale, it might as easily have been Moon’s. Pretty, pithy, petty Moon, born to a woman who had left the Market for the comforting climes of a world where fair value was something each person could negotiate for themselves, rather than having it imposed from without by an unimpeachable force of nature. Sweet, sharp, sour Moon, whose true name could never be given because it had been lost, who had seen her world narrow to an owl’s understanding of hunt and hole and hover. This story could so easily have belonged to her.

Perhaps it is a pity it did not. It might have had a kinder ending.

She looked at Lundy, who had come to the Market from a world Moon had never seen and never wanted to see, and she asked herself a simple question: could friendship alone be fair value for a debt deep enough to make an owl of a girl? Could friendship balance the scales between them, or would they poison each other, a drop at a time, Lundy trying not to resent what she had spent, Moon trying not to read every request as a command?

Could they ever truly know, if they didn’t at least try?

Carefully, Moon unbent limbs that no longer remembered how to be anything but silent and graceful and now lacked the anatomy for what she wanted them to be. With shaking hands she gripped the tree and began descending. She was almost to the ground when she lost her grip, slipped, and fell, only to find her landing softened by Lundy, who dove to save her friend.

Moon blinked at Lundy. Lundy blinked at Moon. Both of them burst out laughing, huge, relieved laughter, the kind of laughter that seemed like it ought to be big enough to fill the world. They clung to each other, and they laughed, and it seemed, for a time, as if they were going to be all right: nothing was going to change, even as everything around them was changing. Lundy removed her school jacket and draped it around Moon’s shoulders, giving her a scrap of privacy, and the two girls walked hand in hand to the Archivist’s shack, ready to face the future, so long as they could face it together.

The year that followed was a good one, maybe the best Lundy had spent within the Market, which had always been such a source of joy and wonder for her. Every life should contain one perfect year, if only to throw the rest of it into sweet relief, and this was Lundy’s. She sorted books for the Archivist; she filled her belly with berries from the forest and pies from the stall. She covered Mockery’s grave with flowers, she quested and she questioned and she grew. She listened, she looked, she learned. She paid attention as if it were the dearest coin in all the land, and everyone who spoke to her, even for a moment, said she offered fair value with her listening, which was as canny and clever as the rest of her.

Some in the Market began murmuring about apprenticeships when they saw her walking through the stalls on some errand or the other, having purchased a bedframe with her stockings and school blazer, having purchased the right to store it in the Archivist’s shack with two additional hours a week. It was a small thing, to have a safe place to spend the night, to know that she and Moon were warm and well protected.

Moon, seeing the growing closeness between the Archivist and Lundy, seeing the way Lundy could tease meaning from books that seemed like so much useless scribbling to her, considered the merits of jealousy. The Archivist had been her friend and surrogate parent first, after all: Lundy was stealing moments of praise and affection that should have belonged toher. Only it wasn’t theft, not really, because the moments Lundy took were the moments Moon had never wanted. No words on a page could hold her interest the way the wide world could, and even if Lundy stayed forever—and more and more, it felt like Lundy was going to stay forever—she would never really understand fair value, not all the way down into the marrow of her bones. One of them needed to find a profession that let her bring home material things, food and clothes and maybe, someday, a place to live that wasn’t shared with the Archivist.

Moon spoke to Vincent halfway through the year, asking whether he’d ever considered the virtues of an apprentice, someone to sweep the floors and trim the piecrusts. To her surprise, he took her on. Tohissurprise, she proved to be a quick study and an efficient worker, those clever hands pinching pies closed and learning the intricacies of folding dough. Inside of a month, the pies Lundy had bargained for were supplemented with other rewards, little things to give fair value for Moon’s labor, with the understanding that, if she continued as she was, one day she’d be able to feed her entire small, strange family through her efforts alone.

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