Page 26 of In an Absent Dream

He stepped back, holding the door wider to let her pass. There were tears shining in his eyes. Out of kindness, she said nothing, but stepped into the house that had been her home, looking around with open curiosity. So much had changed. So much was the same.

“Daddy, Mom says you need to—” The child who ran into the room could have been Lundy herself, recast in miniature. She stopped dead when she saw that her father wasn’t alone, her eyes going wide and round. Finally, carefully, she asked, “Katherine?”

Lundy blinked. Even at the Chesholm School, she had been Lundy, Miss Lundy there and Lundy alone in the Market, but not Katherine. Katherine was the girl she’d left behind.

But she had promised; this was how she paid her debt. She nodded stiffly, and said, “Hello, Diana.”

Diana’s eyes remained huge. “Daddy?”

“Stay here,” he said. “I’m going to fetch your mother.” He rushed away with a speed that could only have been born from the sudden, burning need to put distance between himself and his impossible daughter, the one who lacked the good grace to stay gone.

Lundy looked at Diana. Diana looked at Lundy. Diana spoke first.

“Are you staying?” she asked. “Because I miss having a sister, but I don’t want to forgive you if you’re not going to stay.”

“I am,” said Lundy. Not quite the truth: not quite a lie. It would do. For now, it would do.

Diana nodded gravely and walked across the room to fling her arms around Lundy’s waist. Lundy gasped, too startled to pull away.

“Youleft,” said Diana, voice tear-filled and accusing at the same time. She pressed her face to Lundy’s middle. Lundy felt her too-small shirt growing damp. “You went away and youleftme, they said you got kidnapped but everybody knew you ran away because no one wants to be friends with the principal’s daughter, you could have stayed and you could have helped me, you could have been my friend and youleft.” Her last word broke into a wail, and then she was sobbing, holding Lundy so tightly that it felt like there wasn’t any chance of her ever letting go.

She could have been Mockery; she could have been Moon. A tear ran down Lundy’s cheek. As if that were the signal, more followed, until she was sobbing too, bending near-double to wrap her arms around her little sister and hold her with equal, if less crushing, closeness.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I had to. I wasn’t thinking about you. I’m so sorry. I’m staying.”

“Forever?” asked Diana, finally letting go enough to pull back and look at her with enormous, hopeful eyes.

Lundy sensed the trap that was preparing to snap shut around her, keeping her here, betraying the people who were waiting for her back in the Market. “No,” she said. “Not forever. I’ve promised our father I’ll stay for a year before I leave again.” A year was safe. A year would make her sixteen, still young enough to take the citizenship oath, still young enough to go home. Any longer than that . . .

She was gambling on her father’s lingering memory of fair value, on the fact that he wouldn’t make a bargain and then break it. If he sent her back to the Chesholm School, or to something else like it, she was finished. The trouble with having a parent who’d used the same impossible door as she had was that he knew how to play the rules against her.

She had agreed to a year. If he didn’t let her go, she would escape. She had flown over the Market, catching fish for the fishmongers and gathering rare herbs for the chemist, she had gathered wood in her talons and hunted rabbits and small deer and other prey for the butcher. She had made bargains and kept bargains and earned the trust and friendship of the Archivist, a woman who was almost as old as the Market, or seemed that way. She could do this.

Diana sniffled. “Why don’t you want to stay with us?” she asked.

“I’ll stay for a year,” Lundy repeated. “Isn’t that better than nothing?” Was it fair value for a sister’s love? She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. She’d never tried to make this bargain before.

Diana was still crying when their father returned, their mother trailing, tired and confused, in his wake. She gasped when she saw Lundy, her hands flying to cover her mouth. Lundy, who would have sworn she was done crying, that she had no tears left, began to weep again. Her mother ran to her, and wrapped her arms around her shoulders, crushing Diana between them. For her part, Diana began to cry again in earnest, and the three of them stayed that way, never letting go, for what felt like forever.

Then, with all the speed despair and anger could imbue, Lundy’s mother pulled away, raised her hand, and slapped her across the face. The pain was immediate and intense. Lundy gasped and reeled backward, clapping a hand against her reddening cheek.

“Howdareyou?” hissed her mother. “How dare you run—run away?Twice? Or is it three times? Were you ever kidnapped to begin with?”

Lundy stared at her, wide-eyed, too stunned to speak.

“I gave you everything, Katherine! I gave you life, and a home, and everything that should have made you happy, and youleftus! Why? Did someone offer you more?” Her mother shook her head, eyes red and wet from weeping, hands clenched into fists at her sides. “How could anyone ever offer you more?”

Lundy, hand still clasping her cheek, said nothing. There was nothing to say. She had been young and innocent and selfish the first time she’d gone to the Market: she’d never intended to run away. It had been an accident. But the second time hadn’t been an accident, and the third time hadn’t been an accident, and even if it was all right for her to go and keep going—even if she belonged in the Market all the way down to the bottom of her bones—there hadn’t been anything forcing her tostaygone.

Her mother raised her hand again, and her father, surprisingly, was there to catch it and pull it down.

“She’s home,” he said. “We can be a family again. You get to be angry. We all get to be angry. But first, can’t we be together? For just five minutes, can’t we be together?”

Lundy’s mother folded in on herself, almost falling to the floor. Lundy and her father were there. Together, they caught her before she could hit her head, and they held her, four people weeping in the aftermath of adventure, with so much road ahead of them. So much terrible, unavoidable road.

14

PROMISES AND PAPERWORK

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