In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children, #4)

by Seanan McGuire

A rooster crew in the distance.

what

eagles with wings whose span must have been measured in exclamations instead of inches.

THEY RAN THROUGH the golden afternoon like dandelion seeds dancing on the wind, two little girls with all the world in front of them, a priceless treasure ready to be pillaged.

Lundy tensed the first time she heard that laughter, but relaxed as she realized there was no meanness in it, no cruelty; Moon was playing with her. She couldn’t think of the last time someone had thought she was worth playing with.

He thought about choices—both the one he’d made and the one he knew his daughter was even now making, the choice that would define everything that came after. He had done his best by her, tried to raise her to live in books and quiet, safe rooms, rather than running wild through fields of gorse and heather. He had always assumed that, after Daniel had passed through his elementary school years without stumbling through any impossible doors, the chain had been broken. That it was over. He had been so wrong. And so he waited, until one evening, as the moon was rising, a bedraggled little figure came walking up the street toward their house.

Family friends and distant relations bought her pretty bangles and new hairbrush sets for Christmas, instead of the books and educational toys she had so carefully requested. She supposed the reason girls were told the great secret of Santa Claus was because otherwise they would think the man had quite lost his marbles, to suddenly change the nature of presents that had been perfectly reasonable before.

“Why did Mockery have to die?” “All things die, child. It’s part of giving fair value. Eventually, even the Market will die, and this world will become one more piece of the great graveyard that fills the walls between worlds.

“Sometimes ‘fair’ is bigger than just you,” said the Archivist. She handed Lundy a pillow. “Sometimes ‘fair’ has to think about what’s best for everyone.

The Market knows, 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.”

Her mother said she was growing up. Lundy was fairly sure there was no bargain in the world that could give her fair value for that.

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.

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 was meant to forget Moon and Mockery, and the Archivist, and the taste of Vincent’s pies. And maybe she could have done it, maybe she could have left them behind, if not for the patch of impossible feathers on the nape of her neck. Children did not sprout feathers in this world. If she had sprouted feathers, she must have done it somewhere else. The only other world she could remember was the Goblin Market—which meant the Market was real, and this slow, grinding extinction of the child she had been was nothing more than an attempt to keep her away from it.

Money would change hands—what the school would consider blood money, paid for silence, and Franklin Lundy would consider fair value for a daughter, and silently, secretly bill against the Goblin Market in his dreams.

She might not have become a better student during her time at the Chesholm School, but she had definitely become a better thief.

“Be sure,” she whispered as she ran. “Be sure, be sure. I am sure, I swear I am.” The Market didn’t reply to her convictions. It surrounded her, engulfed her in the creak of wood and the rustle of canvas, in the slow settling of the dark, which had its own, subtle sound. That was the only reassurance it could give.

“But first, sleep, and wake to a new morning. Fill your belly and negotiate its continued fullness. You can’t save anyone if you neglect yourself. All you can do is fall slowly with them. Come to bed.”

“A few feathers? That’s practically a reminder. A string around the thumb. It’s not until your toes go webbed or your eyes change colors that you have a lot to pay off. If you had decided your freedom to do as you liked mattered more than keeping your word to me, you might have received more than a few feathers. It’s the intent and the size of the debt that matters, as much as anything else.”

Fixed prices may be necessary in a world where there is no authority making sure we take care of each other, but here, with the Market to oversee us, we can relax knowing that fairness will be maintained.

Hunger makes us foolish, causes us to make poor decisions without realizing how poor they are. If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.

Fair value would be enforced. In a strange way, she found that reassuring. As long as she tried her best and paid attention to the cues the world was giving her, she would always be treating fairly with people, and wouldn’t need to worry they were taking advantage of her—that they were taking the only ribbon from her hair for not enough to eat. It was a strange system. It worked.

It was so nice to be back where people said what they wanted, where they trusted in fair value to see that they received it. They knew they couldn’t cheat each other without the Market becoming involved, and so they merely desired, openly and without shame.

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.

This time, she had come back to say goodbye. Fair value for robbing this family of a daughter was a year, nothing more. Certainly not a year and all the silverware.

“There will always be a birthday. There will always be a holiday, or a funeral, or a birth. If you delay, you can delay yourself right over the edge of being sure.”