Authors: Anne Nesbet
Her bones were being replaced by icicles in the shapes of bones, that’s how she felt just then. Why had she ever spoken of medicines to the Chief Surveyor? Now he just had that to use against her.
Could he block her from finding those medicines? She thought he probably could.
Could he actually get his hands on that antidote? He probably could.
Did she really want to stay here, with some crown on her head, trying to make this messed-up place better, while people like the regent pinched bruises into her?
In one very secret hidden-away cupboard of her heart of hearts, the answer welled up:
Not really. Not so much
.
“I just want to go home,” said Linny, without realizing she was speaking aloud.
“Exactly,” said the regent. “Then I think we’re agreed—”
But that was the very moment the magician swooped back into the picture.
“What are you doing to our Girl?” he said to the regent, huffing and puffing a little from his quick ascent of the bridge. “Back off. Keep away. She’s ours.”
“She just wants to go home,”
said the regent to the magician, triumph bubbling in his voice. “But thank you for coming. The symmetry is so beautifully improved when a barbarian joins the ceremony.”
And while the magician sputtered, the regent reached down and switched that tin can of his back on.
“We have a claimant”—the words thrummed hugely into the air—“and we have a crown.”
Absolutely vast amounts of noise from every part of the crowd! Cheering, sobbing, waving of ribbons in the air! A thousand people seemed to be chanting “Girl with the Lourka, Girl with the Lourka,” while a thousand other people (mostly on the Angleside bank of the river) shouted words that sounded a lot like “No more regents!”
So even in the Plain, they don’t much like this regent,
thought Linny. She was glad to find that out. He had been cruel to her and had tried to be cruel to the Half-Cat, and that probably meant he had been cruel to a lot of people before.
But then, on both sides of the river, the sound simply flooded over everything and everybody and drowned out all coherent thoughts.
In fact, the noise was so thick and so large that a person could almost have walked right out on top of it and not fallen into the river.
The sun was already just a hair’s breadth above the horizon and sinking fast. Its light came angling low across the fairs and the river between. Linny shaded her eyes to get a better look. The sunset light made all the wonders on either side of the river stand out as if carved from air and varnished fifteen times with the garnet-red stain made from the tears of the dragon tree: on one side, shining contraptions that jumped or flew or played music
or showed pictures on their sides; on the other side of the river, miniature orchards of miniature trees, wax candles growing like weeds into tall towers of silver and gold, jesters, kites, and satin banners—all on fire in the setting sun.
Linny looked at all of this, and something in her melted a little. If people at fairs could wander among Plain and wrinkled marvels, why couldn’t that be true all the time?
One display, on the wrinkled side of the bridge, did strike her as particularly strange: a rectangle marked out on the ground, like a large plot of kitchen garden, filled with all sorts of wrinkled things, twinkling and murmuring and unfolding themselves, piled around what even from this distance Linny could see was another statue of the Girl with the Lourka, whether made of plaster or pale stone, Linny couldn’t quite tell. Men in gray uniforms pounded metal stakes into the ground at the four corners of the rectangle.
That seemed a little odd, but there was mixing between the sides of the Broken City on a day like this one, of course. To judge from the sprinkling of gray in the wrinkled part of the fair and the colors among the gray on the Plain side, people must have been streaming back and forth across this bridge all day, before they had put up the barricades on either end of the bridge, for the regent’s speech.
“Claimant!” said the regent. “This is the moment where you do or do not accept this crown, so ancient and so lost to us for so long, and all the responsibilities that it represents.”
He reached forward with the crown, tucking it into Linny’s wild and (she realized) exceptionally muddy hair. It was that enormous image of her on that enormous screen that reminded her how wild and muddy her hair was, after her journey underground.
The crowd shrieked its approval. The sound went on and on. Loud waves of joyful, hopeful noise broke over Linny’s head, a flood of excitement and happiness. Even the people in gray were cheering, Linny saw. They too had felt the brokenness of their Broken City. They wanted to step outside their old fears and live ordinary, joyful lives.
Why not? Why not?
It made her gulp a little, even her, Linnet, who never cried.
Then the regent interrupted all that sound:
“What?” he said, as if Linny had spoken up in a voice too soft for human ears. “You have something, claimant, that you want to say?”
And his knobby finger poked her in the back, reminding her. He was waiting for her to hand him back that crown.
“You are so young,” he said into the tin can, prompting her. “You want to go home.”
“Wait, what is this about?” said the magician, suspicion rippling through him.
At Linny’s feet, the Half-Cat wrapped its tail around one of her shins, which was oddly steadying.
“Of course I do want to go home,” said Linny, and her words spread out over the fair. “And I also want to do the right thing.”
“Yes,” said the regent, and on the huge screen she could see him stretching his hand out, expecting her to reach up right this next minute and pull the crown off her head. And hand it back to him.
Then she would be free, he had said, to return to the hills, with the antidote in her hands, and never come back.
But there was a problem with this plan. Linny could not see how handing a crown to someone as cruel as the regent could ever be doing the right thing.
Oh, Sayra,
she thought. Everything had seemed so simple, long ago. And now nothing was simple.
“I don’t know what to do,” said Linny.
A moment of silence passed through that crowd, as if a thousand people had sucked in their breath all at once.
“You know perfectly well what to do, claimant,” said the regent.
“I don’t,” said Linny. “It’s ‘Which way?’ all over again. I don’t know which way this world should go. I
don’t even know yet which way I should go. All I can do is try my best, because wrinkled things are wonderful, wonderful—and so are maps and compasses and machines. All of you—”
There were so many people out there, and all of them hanging on to her every word.
“All of you will just have to help me figure out how we can do this impossible thing together, and go through both doors—”
Because she, Linny, was like this world. She was always going through both doors at once, wrinkled and Plain. She didn’t have the words to say this properly, but there are more ways to speak than words.
She swung her lourka off her shoulder and held it out to the crowds.
“See?” she said. “The whole world is in here: measurement and magic, both at once.”
And she shook the stiffness out of her fingers and played that for them as a song, simple and sweet.
T
he hush after the last note seemed itself to be part of the music. A pause as the world peered around a corner and glimpsed something wonderful there.
And then that silence turned into noise, enormous noise—tumultuous cheers and hullabaloo!
Linny could feel the regent’s eyes digging angry holes into her shoulder blades. He said, once the noise had abated a bit, with his frigid voice, “I see. You will regret this, sooner or later. But on with our program now.”
He pointed. In front of the tin can on the stick, there was now a table with a lever machine, connected to many wires heading off to the right; a long wick, leading off to the left; and a flickering candle.
“Two sides to every world,” he said. Those were ceremonial words, apparently. He said them with such a flat voice, almost as if he didn’t believe what he was saying. But Linny knew the flatness hid anger.
He put the candle into Linny’s hand and pointed at the wick, and a moment later fire was racing quietly down the long fuse and along the balustrade of the bridge, where the wick string was cleverly held up by a series of little metal rings.
The sun melted at the horizon line, became a molten puddle of gold, and was gone, leaving a sky as brilliantly rose and gold as the belly of a wrinkled trout.
As the sun vanished, the Angleside half of the fair sparkled into light, all at once. Small globes of glass were strung like drops of dew on a spider’s web, a web of beaded glass that ran around the booths of that fair and on high poles along its paths, and when Linny pressed the lever the regent pointed to, a miniature star began to shine in each one of those little glassy spheres. In places, whole clusters of lights drew pictures in the air, of towers and trees and flying machines, and some of the strands of the lights were colored green and blue and red and purple and yellow—like strings of jewels, only brighter than jewels ever could be.
And just as Linny was smiling at the bright, jewel-like Angleside lights, the long fuse she had lit with the candle reached its endpoint, and there was a screaming cacophony of lights and thunder as fireworks blossomed over the wrinkled side of the fair. The fireworks exploded in every possible fiery shape and pattern, and the last of the
rockets released a great flock of tiny paper lanterns that flickered as they drifted down from the heights—flickered and then floated, hovering and bobbing, just above the heads of the fairgoers on the Bend side of the river.
Linny saw children—not just children, no, grown men and women—jumping up into the air to try to catch one of those pretty peach-colored flames in paper, but the lanterns bobbed gently out of reach each time. They were wrinkled lanterns, and did not care to be caught by human hands too soon, but each time they swam a little ways out of reach, they made a pretty little sound, like a ringing bell.
Some of the fireworks settled on the head of that statue of the Girl with the Lourka, over there in the square the gray men had been marking off with their spikes, and a fountain of sparks danced into the air now from her head, like a feathery crown made of fire. Worlds of light on both sides of the river! Linny’s eyes soaked up the beauty of it, of all of it, the electric brightness of the Plain side, and the wilder lights dancing over there on the wrinkled side of things.
There were
ooh
s and
aah
s from the crowds on either end of the bridge, not to mention the people now crossing the bridge itself (the barricades must have been trampled right down). And Linny could not have said which display she liked better, the one on the Plain side made
possible by machines and glass, or the wrinkled mystery of the other fairground’s bobbing, chiming lanterns.
The regent tapped her on the arm.
He had switched off his tin can again.
“I will ask you one more time. Will you be sensible and responsible, and put this crown into my care?”
“But I don’t think I can,” said Linny. It was that business of doing the right thing.
“The choice is on your head, then,” he said, and he switched the machine back on that made voices so large.
“One more remark, if I may—”
“Hey,” said the magician, in mild protest, from Linny’s other side.
“One more remark, I say, before we go about joyfully stuffing food into our happy, happy mouths—”
His voice boomed out over everywhere, an inexorable tide of sound. Linny shrank back an inch from that oversize sound, but there was nowhere soundless to shrink into. She could sense the whole crowd shrinking with her, as if they were all, all the thousands of them, children who had been caught red-handed, who had smiled when they had not been given permission to smile.
“We must keep clear minds even as we rejoice. A successful claimant has come down from the wrinkled hills—that is very good news. But it should not blind us to facts. Only a child or a fool would argue that the
halves that make up our world are the same in worth or value. Why, even here, at the bridge that crosses our river, we cannot help but see the past on one side and the future on the other.”
The cheers had died off, and the crowds shifted nervously from foot to foot, waiting to see what this man who had been regent so long, whose eyes and hands still radiated power,
would say.
“The future lies with those who have the power to reshape the world. To help us all keep that in mind, we have set up one last display on the Bend side of the fair—there!”
He pointed at that odd, small rectangle filled with wrinkled things—with floating books and growing miniature trees and singing flowers and toys that could walk or dance or laugh on their own, thanks to their wrinkled natures—that crowded patch of wrinkled ground, with, at its heart, the statue of the Girl with the Lourka still streaming sparks from its hair.
“A representative assortment, as you can see, of the most wrinkled things we could find. And we have marked out that rectangle by means of a set of grid stakes linked to the waterworks, just by way of experiment and example. The wrinkled hills have stayed backward so long, because hillsickness hobbled us and kept civilization limited to the Plain. But I tell you now, we are on the
brink of a new age, when wrinkled places will no longer make anyone sick. We have found an antidote to hillsickness, and the antidote will allow us to cure the deeper disease. And now our newly found claimant will do us the honor of pressing this other lever here, so that the lesson may be made clearer. The power behind the cure. A new beginning for us all.”
It was something glittering in his voice, something eager in his eye, that made Linny shake her head.
“No,” she said. “What are you doing?”