Page 27 of In an Absent Dream

PAPERWORKis a magic in and of itself. It makes spouses out of strangers, makes homes out of houses . . . and makes students out of runaways. Lundy’s father left the house the morning after her return, remaining gone for several hours before he came back with a folder in his hand and a pinched expression on his face. He dropped the folder on the table in front of Lundy without saying a word, walking out of the room, leaving her to pick it up and flip through its contents on her own.

Inside, she found a full set of records for the Chesholm School, beginning with her enrollment and ending mid-semester, presumably to reflect her arrival on her family’s doorstep. Her grades had remained excellent during this fictional school career, she noted; as her father’s child, she supposed he could have envisioned nothing less for her. Not perfect, which would have been noticed—this fictional version of Lundy had a tendency to daydream during history class, a fact that was reflected in her low marks, and did not enjoy physical education—but high enough to command respect.

There were several student IDs for the years she had missed, her name neatly typed and covered by a layer of lamination. Lundy looked at them, feeling disconnected from her own life, and wondered whether the lack of pictures on the school IDs might have been one of the factors that motivated her father to choose it in the first place. He had traveled to the Goblin Market, even if he had rejected it; he knew its temptations, and its consequences.

For the first time, Lundy wondered about her grandparents. She knew her mother’s parents were long dead, but what about her father’s? Was the door a thing which called to each generation of the Lundy family in turn, bidding them to be sure even before they knew what certainty was? Were they Moon’s opposite, the descendants of a Market child who had been cast out, rather than being kept inside?

As a question, it was a good one, and pondering it helped somewhat with stepping back from the reality of the papers in her hands and the promise she had made. Everything was a story, if studied in the right fashion. She resumed her paging-through, and stopped dead as she found a new student ID, this one clipped to a class schedule.Herclass schedule, for the local high school.

The reason for the high marks was immediately clear. She had been enrolled in all the classes that would be expected for a young lady of impeccable schooling, including home economics and calisthenics. Everything would have seemed perfectly in order, if not for the remedial history class right before lunch. Which made a certain sense: she could explain the history of the Market, but the history of this world remained a mystery to her.

Grimly, she closed the folder and stood. A year. She had promised him a year. She had promisedDianaa year. She would keep her word; she would give fair value to this family, and she would return to the world where she belonged with a clear conscience, able to say that she had paid all debts. Shewould. No matter how difficult it was, she would do it.

She found her father in his study, which had been Daniel’s room when she’d last been in this house. Her room had remained untouched through her entire absence, both at the Chesholm School and in the Goblin Market. It was too small for her now, decorated for an eternal child, and it pressed in around her like the too-tight clothing she had worn home.

(Those clothes had been missing when she woke in the morning, and she suspected her mother had burned them. The clothes she had now were her mother’s hand-me-downs, worn soft and tattered by her mother’s body, and smelled faintly of lilac perfume. Lundy suspected she would never again smell lilacs without feeling her mother’s palm against her cheek, and she didn’t mind. Some forms of fair value are less tangible than others.)

“When do I begin?” she asked.

“I have copies of last year’s exams,” he said. “I’ve enrolled you. Said your reason for leaving boarding school was an illness that left you unable to handle being away from your family any longer. I also said you might require a bit more recuperation. As soon as you can pass these exams well enough not to attract attention or embarrass me, you’ll begin classes.”

How quickly he went from “we can be a family” to “don’t embarrass me.” Lundy looked at him levelly. “Remember our agreement,” she said. “One year.”

“I might remind you that I am your father, and you are still a child,” he said.

“If you did, I might remind you that I was able to escape from a supposedly inescapable campus. I might remind you, further, that you may have had the start of my education, but you haven’t had the parts that mattered. If you attempt to break our bargain, I’ll think nothing of taking my acquiescence back and running for the nearest place a door might hide. If you seem to be setting up circumstances so you can, I’ll be gone before your plan can be put into motion. I came back to pay my debts. Don’t cancel them all with cleverness.”

Her father looked at her wearily. “What didn’t we give you?” he asked. “Where did we fail you, that the Goblin Market seemed like the better answer? Please. I’ve wondered for years. How did we go wrong?”

Lundy paused before she said, “You knew who you were. You wereso sureyou’d gotten fair value for your life that you never asked what that was going to mean for the rest of us. You spent our happiness to secure your own. I never learned to make friends here. I never learned to be anything but rigid and lonely.”

“You’re still rigid. You went to a place that elevates rules to the status of holy law, and you quote those rules back at me now as if they have all the answers.”

“Because they do.” It was so simple. How could he not see it, when it was so simple? “If you give everyone fair value, no one wants. If no one wants, no one has to take. The Market makes sure we don’t take advantage of each other.”

“The Market doesn’t make youunderstand. With the hand of what might as well be a literal god to guide you, how can you go wrong? How can you learn to do better? The people who live there, fighting every day not to fly away on wings they never asked for, they’re no better than pets.”

“Were you ever dressed in feathers?”

Her father raised his chin, looked her in the eye, and said, “I would sooner have died.”

Lundy was silent. If her father guessed at what her silence contained, he gave no sign.

“A year is long enough to go to school,” he said. “You need to understand this world if you’re ever to consider choosing it over your beloved Market.”

Still Lundy was silent. Her father sighed.

“Don’t make me out to be a monster here, Katherine,” he said. “If I’d never been to the Market, if your father were some . . . some ordinary, hidebound man with no reason to believe in magic, do you honestly think I would have accepted the declaration of a year’s homecoming from my fifteen-year-old daughter without protest? You’d be locked up in someplace far less pleasant than that fancy boarding school, under constant surveillance, and you’d never have a chance to go back. I am trying to be fair with you. I’m trying as hard as I can, even though it feels like it might kill me. I’m yourfather. Believe it or not, I love you, and all I want to do is keep you from making a mistake that will tear this family apart.”

“Why would it be a mistake?”

It was his turn to be silent. Lundy scowled.

“If you know something,tellme,” she said. “Is this about the curfew? Do you know something about it? Can you tell me?”

“Of course they never told you,” he said bitterly. “Why should they? They already had you. It means once you turn eighteen, you’ve chosen by not choosing. You’ve been living out a countdown since the day you found your door. Unless you take the citizenship oath before your birthday, you can’t take it at all, and if you attempt to stay past the cutoff, you’ll be punished.”

“The Market has to let me stay if I’m in debt,” said Lundy. “We’d have heard about it if people with feathers they could never get rid of kept popping up.” Still, a worm of unease worked its way down the back of her neck. Feathers might be the way the Market tracked currency, but they weren’t exactly a punishment. She had no idea what a punishment might be.

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