Authors: Anne Nesbet
That was an old joke of theirs, because getting lost was something Linny could pretty much not possibly do. It was one of her private wrinkles, quite separate from the music fire burning in her; Linny always knew where she was in the ups, downs, and side ways of the world. Other children get their eyes from some parent, their noses from some other parent. With her wild dark hair, Linny looked nothing at all like the rest of her family, but she had inherited humminess from her father and the gift of not getting lost from her mother. Her mother didn’t even like to call it a wrinkle, because down in the Plain, where she had come from, things and places and people were not wrinkled, and all the unmagical squirrels were the same shade of rock gray (said her mother) and stayed that color always, not winking from purple to green on a whim as the squirrels did here. It was hard for Linny to imagine what that would be like, the land of squirrels as gray and unchanging as rocks.
Linny had tried describing to Sayra how the not-being-lost wrinkle felt, but it was like explaining to a blind person what it means not to be blind. Most people were so awkward and helpless, the way they stopped halfway up a hill and looked around and didn’t know
which way to go or even which direction they had come from anymore. Sayra herself was slightly frightened of wild places, Linny could tell. That made another thought unfurl in Linny’s head, an unpleasant, icy thought:
Guess maybe you’ll never—
But she bit her own tongue, because it felt like those words fished too deep in her and might drag up things she didn’t really want to see. Awkward, sharp-edged thoughts, like
Maybe you’ll never come back out here again with me, Sayra, once you don’t have to.
Instead she gulped, and turned the gulp into “Thank you,” and skidded her palm across the top of Sayra’s smooth head, which was the fastest, fondest possible way to say good-bye to someone holding needles in her hands, and sped away into those trees, moving fast so that the sharp-edged thoughts couldn’t catch her. And sure enough, it worked, running off like that. Soon her head was humming with all the possible ways she could fill these last free hours—all those many familiar variants on “breaking the rules.”
Because she had spent her life breaking the rules, hadn’t she? Oh, yes.
If even Sayra knew . . . but she didn’t know.
Linny scrambled up the familiar slopes of the Upper Woods, to a fold in the hills where the old stone sheep shed stood, keeping its secrets. Keeping her secrets.
Nobody ever came here. Nobody ever pushed through this door, as Linny was doing now, or went over to that corner there and swept the hay off the wooden chest it was hiding.
And that meant nobody knew what Linny had gone and done, all those years when the whole village had been trying its absolute utmost to keep her safe.
I
t had started with a stolen ax, but it certainly hadn’t ended there.
The pilfering had been going on for years, by now. That first ax, years ago, had been the same one, not coincidentally, that her father had just used to fell Elias’s prentice trees: his maple and his pine. “Wood learns slow, like boys.” That was what Linny’s father liked to say. It was always a happy day in the village when a boy’s prentice trees came down: sun and wind and time would cure the wood, and when the boy was ready to start the work on his first real lourka, three or four good years later, his wedges of maple and pine would be waiting for him, sound and well seasoned.
All of Linny’s pilferings kept themselves safe and dry in a pair of old boxes. She even went to the bother of stealing some hay from the sheep to pile over the top of the boxes, as if anybody were likely to come up all this
way and find her out for the wicked girl she was.
But oh, if they had. They would have seen what Linny saw now, as she knelt at her old work chest and lifted the lid. A box, filled with awls and planers and knives and sandpapers that had gone missing from her father’s workshop, over all those years. And in that box, another newer box, and in it, wrapped in a swatch of stolen cloth and cradled in wood shavings and wool, the one thing a girl must never never go near, if she didn’t want her doom to come hunting for her, on her twelfth birthday.
Yes, a lourka.
So that’s how it was with Linny. She hadn’t just “gone near” a lourka or stolen a quick touch along the polished neck of one. Nothing so innocent as that! No, she had to go and
make
one.
You grow up knowing there is ONE THING you must never ever do, and then you go and do that one thing. Why? Linny had thought about this about a hundred or a thousand times while she worked, and every answer she came up with fell apart when she poked at it. It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid of what might happen. Although her mother had come up from the Plain, where they scoffed at things like curses and dooms, when Linny heard people talk about the Voices coming to carry girls off to Away, she didn’t scoff—no, her heart wrung itself
out in her chest like a wet rag. Sometimes she thought her ribs must be made half of fear, and only half of bone.
But still she could not help it; she
had
to make herself a lourka
.
She did. So maybe it was the force of the music fire in her, that so many children born in Lourka carried in them.
There had been this raw, jealous place in her heart ever since Elias started spending his days in the workshop of Linny’s own father, back when they were eight or nine. She had thought then, and still thought it:
unfair
. She was the one, of all of them, who truly cared about music, about instruments, about making up songs. It should have been her, being taught how to shape a lourka, not that lummox Elias. And so on and so on and so forth, all her angry thoughts just running in tighter and tighter circles in her head.
She had begun running in circles too—or rather sneaking in circles, around and around the outside of her father’s workshop (where she, of course, as a girl—
unfair unfair
—was strictly not allowed), looking for chinks in the walls and windows best suited for spying. And she found them, yes, and haunted them, and learned as much as she could from watching her father teach Elias how to choose a good wedge of wood, even grained and knot free, gleaming like silk when the blade splits it—how to season it and then shape it. She was a very good spy. If
they had found her like that, untethered, all her freedom would have been taken away that very instant; she knew that well, and it made her extra sneaky. She let them think all she cared about was trees and woods and being outdoors. She kept them all fooled, even Sayra. But what she really cared about, all that time, was this: the lourka she brought out of its wrappings now and cradled with such love in her hands.
All the other instruments she had tried to make over the years had come to nothing in the end. The neck had warped because she’d calculated the tensions wrong, or a flaw in the glaze had eaten a hole in the wood, or her unpracticed hands had slipped and something had splintered. That’s how learning is, and she had seen the same and worse happen to Elias, as she spied, like a sneaky, greedy shadow, through the workshop windows. But now, finally, just at the very tip end of her child days, guess what? She had made a lourka that looked like a lourka. So there! There was even a pretty five-petaled linny flower on the front as decoration, to be a secret reminder both of the lourka’s making and its maker—linseed oil was the heart of the varnish, after all, and since linnet birds are harder than flowers to draw, Linny figured the compromise was fair.
The last of the fifteen coats of varnish had finally dried, so she took out the old discarded strings she had
been scrounging the past few months and wound them (her fingers trembling a little) through the lourka’s pegs. And it was marvelous. She could feel the tensions in the wood all balancing out just so; the lourka coming to life in her arms; her fingers plucking round, sweet notes from the strings as she tried to tune them.
Linny had even made up a special song in her head for this occasion, a birthday song for this amazing instrument she had finally managed to bring into the world.
It won’t be easy,
she told herself as she took up the lourka, the proper way, tucked under her right arm so her left hand could shape the notes. But this was a golden day, and her fingers remembered the shapes they had seen her father’s fingers make, as he played the songs Linny loved best, and it
was
almost easy.
She felt her way along the path the melody made for her, and it was a little like climbing up a hill through the woods: she could sense the direction that music wanted to go.
When she next looked up, it was midafternoon already, the sun low in the sky, and her stomach was growling and her head was light. She could play her song, though, more or less. She could do it.
If she had had the sense to stop for a moment and eat something, maybe her head would have cleared and she wouldn’t have done the foolish thing she did do. But her
mind was one gleaming fog of amazement and pride.
She was thinking,
Now someone has to hear my song, or it won’t really be real.
Of course it was impossible. How could Linny go around showing off her beautiful lourka, when everything about it was forbidden, against the rules, and wicked? But the longing to have someone hear that song was so large already, so vivid and large, and getting larger every moment. The golden haze of longing filled Linny up and left no room at all for logic or thinking.
She put the lourka
back into its (stolen) soft cloth bag, her fingers tripping over themselves a little, now that the wild thought had swallowed up all the sensible parts of her brain.
I’ll be very careful,
she thought.
I’ll just show Sayra. Just to play her the song.
Sayra always liked Linny’s songs, didn’t she? Sometimes a wild thought will do that—scatter all good sense.
Linny put all her tools away and tucked the lourka into her carrying bag, next to her uneaten lunch, and set off back to the place she knew Sayra would be waiting for her, down by the creek they called the Rushing.
It was still a beautiful day, but the sun was low, and there was a hint of a chill waiting in the shadows of the trees.
Linny poked her head over the bank, and there Sayra was.
“Sayra!” she almost said. But the word died in her mouth. Sayra wasn’t there alone—hunkered against the creek bank next to her was Elias, hunched over and clutching his own knees. They were in the middle of some weighty conversation, looked like. Linny’s chest burned with indignation. She never liked the thought of the two of them doing anything that left no room in it for her. And the woods, the untethered woods, that was her secret, hers and Sayra’s. Elias was certainly not supposed to know.
“Sayra!” she said again, this time for real. Her voice sounded kind of silly and high-pitched to her ears, and that just made her madder. “Elias! Why are you hiding here?”
Their heads whipped around to look at her: two faces, each one wearing an expression that brought Linny no particular joy. Elias looked irritated and angry. And even Sayra, though her face brightened eventually, once she was looking her way, seemed distinctly worn down.
“Hiding?”
said Elias, almost spitting, he was so full of scorn. “
You’re
the one hiding. How many hours have you been running around loose out there? On the last day, too! And Sayra—”
It made Linny want to scratch him, when Elias
sounded like that. All the same, she did notice that he seemed to think this was a one-time crime.
“Leave Sayra alone,” she said quickly. “It’s not her fault. I made her do it.”
“Linny,” said Sayra. “
Please
, Linny.”
Sayra hated lying. And she hated being lied about. Her eyes were full of sparks and warning.
“What’s that you’re holding?” said suspicious, unwanted Elias.
“Nothing,” said Linny. “I mean, something I was going to show Sayra. But now—”
But now she was beginning to come back to her senses. Frowning faces, like splashes of cold water, have a way of waking a person up. Linny turned around, confused, and her feet took half a step back to the woods. But by then Elias had jumped in front of her.
“No, really. What have you got there?”
“Just something I made,” said Linny, trying to step to the side, to get away from him. Two fires were burning in her at the same time: the music fire and plain old smoldering jealousy. “Something better than you could make.”
“Oh, right,” said Elias, turning away in disgust. “What could you possibly make, out in the woods? A flower necklace, maybe? Acorns with cute little smiles painted on them?”
“Elias!” said Sayra. She had not moved her eyes from Linny’s face, and she was probably reading disaster there, because disaster was definitely on its way. The fires burning inside Linny were jumping up and consuming everything. There was nothing of her left that wasn’t on fire.
“Acorns!” she said. “Ha about
acorns
!
Look at this, Elias! I happen to know you’ve NEVER finished anything as good as THIS!”
And she whipped her brand-new lourka out of its bag and held it up in the air in front of her: her revenge, finally, on Elias, for every day he had gone happily off to Linny’s own father’s workbenches, leaving Linny behind, just because she was a girl.
His head snapped back around to see, and the color drained from his face when he saw that lourka in her hands, and then flooded back with his anger, all salmony pink.
And Sayra put her hand to her mouth. She went pale and stayed pale.
“Where’d you steal that from?” said Elias. “Put it
down. Are you crazy?”
“I didn’t steal anything,” said Linny. “I made it. It’s my own. And I can play it, too.”
“Oh, Linny,” said Sayra.
“You went and stole a lourka!” said Elias. “You raving
idiot
! On the day before your birthday!”