Authors: Anne Nesbet
“We are off their grid here,” said Rodegar Malkin when he saw Linny looking at the cat. As if that were an explanation. Then he stamped his huge foot against the floor so hard the many odd-shaped windows rattled in their frames (and Linny and Elias jumped a few inches into the air). “MA! STRANGERS!”
“Speak up when you talk to me,” complained the pile of coats on the chair, and to Linny’s surprise, the pile of coats unfolded itself and became a tiny, withered old person, with pale eyes and a halo of bright red hair sticking straight out from her face.
The red of her hair was not the sort of red that people are sometimes born with. It was infinitely brighter than that.
“And who are these kiddies?” said the wrinkled old person in a plaintive voice. “I can smell them, you know. In from the woods, are they? Hungry, probably? Come here and let me see your faces, you!”
“Ma can’t see so well,” said the magician, and he gave Linny and Elias a shove toward the ratty chair.
“Stop telling lies about me!” said the old woman, her fingers greedily reaching out for Linny’s face. “I can smell them, you know. Lies!”
“Doesn’t hear so good, either,” said the magician.
The ancient old person’s fingers were cool and quick, as they scurried across Linny’s cheeks and took the measure of her eyes and nose. They were cleverer fingers, thought Linny, than the ancient, complaining person they now belonged to.
“Rodegar, this one is hungry. Isn’t this one hungry?”
The old woman gave Linny’s ear a little pull.
“Yes,” said Linny. “We were going to buy pasties.”
And medicines for Sayra
—but she didn’t say that aloud. Someone as good at sneaking around as Linny knew better than to tip her hand too soon. Oh, but she was still sad about the coin money left behind in the square.
“What’s that?” said the old woman. “What’s she
saying? She’s hungry. I can smell it. And the other one’s hungry, too. Kiddies is always hungry. Feed them, Rodegar. I’m napping.”
And she flopped back into a heap in the armchair and began to snore.
Rodegar Malkin made Elias and Linny sit at a wooden table in that strange-windowed room and brought them bread, which surprised Linny by being not bread-colored inside, but white, and also a slab of yellow cheese. Not as tasty as Lourkan cheese, but still pretty good. There was also an apple each, the green, tangy kind, and a few pieces of some kind of dried meat that needed a lot of chewing but was pleasantly salty if you could stand it.
They were really very hungry. They ate and ate. And while they ate, the magician took their bundles, and went through them, piece by piece.
Linny squawked about that, but the enormous man gave her a look that was very nearly as impressive as his fist, and she shut up again. The price of the food they were eating was apparently letting him examine their stuff.
Not that they had much. Soon there were little heaps of things on the table. The cookpot, blacker than it had been, but still perfectly functional. He put the flint in it, and the tin cups, and their pocket-knives—everything that had brought them safely through the wild places.
Then there was a second pile of dirty clothes and the filthy blanket and unspeakably awful socks. And the lourkas, of course, which he set to the side with great care. Only the little bag of things Linny’s mother had sent along missed his scrutinizing eyes, and that was because Linny was still wearing it around her neck, tucked away safely beneath her dress.
When he had examined everything to his satisfaction, he creaked back in his chair and looked at Linny.
“So, you. Who are you, strange girl? How’d you come by this instrument of yours? Who told you to wear such a dress, if you don’t know about the fair?”
“She made the lourka herself,” said Elias, taking Linny by surprise. “And it’s good. She shouldn’t have done such a wicked thing, but you can’t say she hasn’t got the talent for it.”
“And you say what, girl? What’s your name, anyway? I told you mine, and fair’s fair, you’ll agree.”
“I’m Elias, and she’s Linnet,” said Elias.
“Down from the hills, you two, obviously.”
“Yes.”
“Come down just now, for some reason.”
Elias and Linny looked at him. They weren’t sure how to explain themselves and (in Linny’s case, at least) weren’t even sure whether this astonishing person was someone you really should be explaining yourself to.
“Coming down from the hills right in time for the fair! To lead the revolution, maybe, am I right?”
He was staring at them very intently now, as if all the earlier questions had been for practice, and now he was reaching the crux of the matter.
“What’s that mean?” said Linny, squirming a little under the magician’s gaze.
“Taking things over. Changing things. Getting rid of the Surveyors forever. I’m in that noble business myself, you might say. Where would the
madji
get their weapons, if it weren’t for me?”
(Was that what a magician was? Someone who sold weapons?)
“Getting rid of the Surveyors sounds good to me,” said Elias in an almost inaudible mumble.
“Indeed,” said the magician. He stayed very calm, though. Unnervingly calm. He just stared and stared with those thoughtful eyes.
Linny popped right up out of her chair.
“Excuse me, but we’re not taking anything over. That’s ridiculous. That makes no sense. We are only twelve. I’m here to find medicines for someone who needs them. For my friend. There are supposed to be medicines, down in the Plain. And aren’t we near the Plain here?”
“
Our
friend,” said Elias. “We’re here to help
our
friend, and I’m not twelve. I am thirteen.”
“So old as that,” said the magician. He cut himself a piece of the yellow cheese and ate it, his eyes never quite leaving Linny’s face. “Sit down, young Linnet. We have only a few minutes here, before I’m off to chat with the
madji
. To tell them the good news.”
“What good news?” said Linny.
“You claim to be the Girl with the Lourka, yes?” said the magician. “Their hero and their emblem, you know, and et cetera and so forth. And you look astonishingly genuine, which is a pleasant change around here. The actual, real Girl with the Lourka! I’d say that counts as news.”
“I’m not claiming anything,” said Linny.
“You come into Bend with a lourka in your hands and those clothes on your body? That’s a claim, I think. Look! Explain that, girl from the hills.”
And he pointed with his enormous hand over Elias’s and Linny’s heads, to something on the wall behind them.
They turned around in their chairs and stared.
There was an old painting on the wall, with ancient, gold-tasseled velvet curtains framing it.
“Hey!” said Elias. It was his turn to jump to his feet. “How’d you do that?”
Linny couldn’t jump or speak, however. Anything she might say stuck like a bone in her throat.
The painting was of a girl of sixteen or seventeen or so,
standing. She had dark hair, the same color as Linny’s own and wavy at the ends, and her eyes looked right at you, wherever you were in the room, the way eyes in paintings sometimes do. Her dress had a red skirt with striped patterns on it, a blue vest, and silver buttons, not to mention the leaves and vines embroidered up and down the sleeves that must have taken somebody’s mother weeks to do. She had a tiny dark mole right there on her cheek, and another under her ear, and in her hand was a lourka. Not just any lourka, but the lourka Linny knew best in the world, because she herself had made it. Even the little linny flower she had worked into the wood was there, with its five pale petals.
It was a picture of a slightly older Linnet, with Linnet’s own lourka.
And yet this painting had the look of something a hundred years old. Maybe even more ancient than that.
“You see the problem,” said the magician, standing up and brushing the crumbs from his lap. “That, dear children, is the Girl with the Lourka. The most famous girl in all the stories told in Bend, I might add. There are plenty of fakes, oh, yes, but you have the glow of authenticity about you. And that is why our
madji
will want to meet you, though you’re younger than anyone expected. So off I go, to arrange the terms of that meeting.”
“I don’t get it,” said Elias. “How’d Linny get into that
picture? Looking so grown-up and all?”
The magician barked. Or laughed. It was a low and enormous sound.
“My question, and the
madji
’s question—and quite possibly the Surveyors’ question, too, by the way—is how did the Girl with the Lourka start walking around outside her frame, pretending to be an ordinary flesh-and-blood person?”
He was studying their faces as he said these things. Linny tried not to look anywhere near as puzzled as she felt.
“Oh, you can be sure that won’t make the Surveyors happy,” he continued. “Thinking the
madji
have gotten themselves a real Girl with a Lourka. Spitting mad, I suspect they are going to be. Maybe paintings walk around on two legs all the time, where you come from, but wrinkled magic of that sort is quite rare down here. You’re quite the commodity, Linnet from the hills!”
“I’m not anything but me,” said Linny with dignity. She didn’t understand the word the magician had just used, but it sounded (she thought) unpleasant. “And if magic is so hard to find around here, how can you be what you said you were—a magician?”
“Magic is also a commodity, in places where it is rare,” the magician said. “A commodity is something with a price. And you, for instance, are definitely that, my dear.
Just the price has yet to be fully determined.”
He let his enormous hand settle again, for a few heavy seconds, on Linny’s head.
“You behave, and no harm will come to you or that brother of yours. Got that? This is not a game, little girl from the hills. Lives hang in the balance, not to mention a great deal of money. So from now on, whoever else you think you may be, you are first and foremost
her
—”
And he pointed at that old picture again, where the almost grown-up girl who looked so exactly like Linnet’s own self stood with such confidence, the lourka in her hand.
Linny wanted to take that picture down from the wall and shake it until it explained itself to her.
Wait. What was that behind the painted girl’s skirts? Linny squinted harder.
“The inspiration of the
madji
!” The magician went on. “That’s you now: the Girl with the Lourka. The genuine article. The making of our fortune. And don’t you forget it.”
Linny gave a fierce blink to clear her eyes. Yes, there it was, painted with the most amazing precision. It was the furry tail of a cat. And as she stared, the painted tail flicked itself lazily around the girl’s painted leg and changed color from tawny gold to silver gray. A wrinkled picture, then.
The magician whistled happily through his teeth as he put away the remnants of the cheese and fetched his outside jacket from the coatracks in the hall.
Not knowing exactly what the he might be up to, Elias and Linny sat as still as rabbits under a fox’s eye and watched the magician force his enormous arms into the enormous sleeves of that jacket. To be sure, he was watching them at the same time (with the self-satisfied half smile of a fox on the prowl around rabbits).
And then he pounced. He clapped a huge hand, a giant’s vise, onto Elias’s shoulder, and steered him off toward the hall.
“This one will come with me, I think,” he said. “The brother of the Girl with the Lourka! That will be my little gift to them. They’ll see I mean business when they meet you, boy. You reek most convincingly of the hills.”
Elias yelped and twisted, but the magician’s hands were not to be squirmed out of.
“Oh, no, my boy, surely it’s not such a bad fate as that!” he said, laughing his deep, resonant laugh. “That’s my business, after all: selling weapons to the
madji
. Some weapons are gray and go boom; some of them have hands and feet and tales to tell. How do you feel about those Surveyors, anyway, boy from the hills?”
“I hate them,” said Elias with deep conviction. “They tied me up, back in the hills. Linny had to burn down their camp.”
“Good,” said the magician, tightening his grip. “They’ll see you; they’ll hear our stories; they’ll know the product I’m offering is probably genuine. Good, good, good! And then they’ll take you away and train you up.”
Linny squawked.
“And you’ll each of you behave like a good child, won’t you?” said the magician. “Not wanting harm to come to your sweet brother or sister, as the case may be. Good-bye for now, Linnet. MA!”
“Elias!” said Linny in alarm. “No. You
can’t
go off with him. What are you doing?”
But really—and the glimpse of Elias’s shocked face underscored the problem—there was nothing he could do. The magician was moving him out of the room as easily as a mother cat carries a kitten. He was going to take Elias away; in a moment they would be gone.
“TAKE THE GIRL UPSTAIRS, MA!”
The merest fringe of bright red hair—and one eye—peeked out from among the coats.
“It would be politer not to mumble,” said the magician’s ma. “Whaddayerwant anyhow?”
“GIRL! UPSTAIRS! And you, girl, stop your fussing. You don’t want to make me mad. Or, I’m so very afraid to say, your brother will suffer. MA!”
The ancient old woman sat up in her chair and pointed her finger (bony! knobbly at the joints!) right in Linny’s direction.
“Girl’s not upstairs,” said the magician’s old ma, with a sly wink. “Girl’s right here. I can smell her. Lost your great big eyes, Roddy?”
“Take her UPSTAIRS and keep her SAFE,” said the magician, but this time he said it more with gestures than words. “This boy and I have business to attend to. Urgent, important business. And I bid you good afternoon, ladies!”
One second later the two of them—startled Elias and the enormous magician—had vanished into the front hall.
“Oh, and don’t bother trying to run away, Linnet from the hills,” called the magician from the far end of that hall. “You’ll find I’ve bolted the door with tremendous care.”