Authors: Anne Nesbet
“Awake from your naps?” he said. “Almost time for us to start walking.”
“You knocked us out,” said Linny. “We’re not going anywhere with you.”
“Oh, but you are,” said the Tinkerman. “You’ll come along like dutiful little children, I’m quite sure. Because I found some very interesting things, while you were sleeping.”
He swept his hand to the right, and Linny saw her own lourka sack and the little bag from around her neck (only one card left in it) spread neatly out on the ground. There wasn’t anything from Elias’s pockets, because the river must have eaten everything when he was almost drowning.
“So? You knew I had a lourka,” said Linny, but she saw immediately from the triumphant look on the Tinkerman’s face that she was forgetting something else, something truly important.
The Tinkerman leaned a little closer, pulling a hand out of some hidden inside pocket in his jacket—and in that hand was a crystal vial, filled with a teaspoonful of leaf-green medicine, green as Sayra’s eyes.
“What is this, you impossible girl?” he asked now. “Did you really think I wouldn’t find it?”
“Hey!” said Linny, sitting all the way up now. “That’s for Sayra!”
“Exactly,” said the Tinkerman. “Exactly. So you’d better guide me up to Away, then, hadn’t you? So we can see how powerful this antidote actually is. And maybe save your little friend. Who knows?”
“What about you?” said Elias. He no longer had any
illusions about the Tinkerman, Linny could tell. “You’ll be hillsick all the way up.”
“I’m tough,” said the Tinkerman. “With a guide leading me along, I guess I’ll manage.”
And he tucked the vial back into his jacket, out of sight.
Linny and Elias couldn’t think of anything to say. He had them. He really did. They wanted that medicine to get up to Away as much as he wanted to test his theory. And if the antidote was in the Tinkerman’s hands, then they had to lead him into the hills.
“Oh, and here,” said the Tinkerman, and he tossed Linny a handful of cloth—her birthday sash, with the silk rosebud still tucked into it. Linny felt her hand tremble as she hid it back in her pocket. “Just to show you how well-meaning I can be. Time for us to get going now, isn’t it?”
But first he handed around some biscuits that tasted as rectangular as they looked.
Soon they were walking uphill, into the woods. Linny had her lourka slung over her back, but the Tinkerman had kept everything else. Elias had nothing, because the river had taken it all. And the Tinkerman was weighed down not just by the knapsack holding all his mechanisms and wires, but by the sack with the Half-Cat tied in it.
“Why don’t you let the poor cat go, at least?” said
Elias, who had a soft spot for all creatures, no matter how wild or strange.
“That’s my insurance policy, right there,” said the Tinkerman. “Run away, and the cat gets one of those darts. You can imagine how lethal a human dose of that stuff would be for it, yes? A sad waste of a cat. But I think you’ll see the logic of the business and not run away.”
He held a spool of almost invisibly thin wire in his hands, and as he walked, he bent over every now and then to pound a metal stake as thin as a needle into the ground, so that the wire could run along almost, but not quite, touching the earth.
It would tire him out faster, that was the only positive side Linny could see. She didn’t like his pounding needles into the poor, wrinkled ground. But when she scowled at him, he jogged the sack with the Half-Cat in it up and down and waved a dart in the air, and she turned away, seething.
Meanwhile, however, the trees were looking ever more like real trees, the rocks getting wilder and rockier, and Elias and Linny felt the wrinkledness of everything around them, and their hearts, despite the bind they were in at the moment, rejoiced.
Elias, who had been so bent and wobbly down in the Plain, was soon dancing up granite boulders just for the thrill of leaping off them again, as if he were one of
the twins back in Lourka. Linny would have laughed at him if she hadn’t been so glad to see him at home in the world again. And she was determined to stay close to the Tinkerman, to keep her eye on him, on the poor Half-Cat in that sack, and on the jacket where, in some hidden pocket, the vial with Sayra’s antidote was traveling up the hills, ever closer to Away.
Linny was the guide. She couldn’t help it, really. She followed the wrinkles of those hills as easily as breathing. She couldn’t help knowing which way to go.
The Tinkerman huffed and puffed the first hour or so, but he kept unrolling his spool of wire and pounding in his needles. Then periods of frantic coughing joined his hard breathing, making him stop to gasp for air at regular intervals, while Linny and Elias watched him. Not with much compassion, it must be said. Linny had never felt more like a vulture circling. Or a wolf. She narrowed her eyes and felt the wolfish sharp-toothed thoughts take shape in her. If he would just weaken enough for her to grab that antidote and run!
But the Tinkerman, just as he had said, was stronger than he looked. Or maybe it was his single-minded dedication to his theory that kept him slogging on and on, unfurling wire and pounding in needle stakes, as the hillsickness seeped into his legs and his belly and his lungs.
Eventually he was stopping every few paces to retch,
and then he went a new shade of green and staggered off into the bushes, looking so miserable that even Linny felt sorry for him, though the wolf in her kept calculating the time left before he could be toppled over with a Linny-sized shove.
He was in the bushes awhile, and when he came back, he looked sheepish and bedraggled, and Linny and Elias stayed silent, which was as close to compassion as they were willing to go. Soon enough he’d be on the ground for sure. They exchanged glances and nodded. Soon.
But after that near collapse, the Tinkerman seemed to get a second wind. He bent his face grimly toward the hillside ahead and marched on, perhaps even a little faster than before.
Sometimes nausea lifts for a while, after the worst has happened, so at first that was what Linny assumed was going on, but fifteen minutes passed, and he was still sticking to his pace, and whacking needles into the ground with verve. Maybe even slogging along a little bit faster. Some minutes later, Linny noticed it had been a very long time since he had had to stop to cough.
“Hunh,” she said under her breath, for only Elias to hear, and she jerked her chin at the Tinkerman, striding on ahead of them now. It was a question and a comment, both at once.
“I know,” said Elias. “Let me see something.”
He trotted up to the Tinkerman and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey. You feeling better?” he said.
The Tinkerman turned around and blinked a few times.
“Why, yes,” he said. “Now that you mention it. Must be getting used—”
But before he finished that sentence, Elias had done something entirely unlike himself: he had swung his fist right into the Tinkerman’s cheek.
Linny, for her part, cried out and clenched her hands so tightly together that her fingernails dug into her own palm.
What they had both seen was the change in the Tinkerman’s face. The green was entirely gone. His cheeks were slightly flushed, as you might expect from someone walking uphill for hour after hour, but he no longer looked ill.
“You lousy no-good thief,” said Elias. “You’ve gone and swallowed it, haven’t you?” And he reached quite roughly into the Tinkerman’s jacket, only to find, as by then they both knew he would—the empty vial.
The Tinkerman had drunk the antidote. They had taken their eyes off him only while he had been off in the bushes, and then only out of politeness, but it had been long enough.
“So there’s no point now,” said Elias, looking at Linny. “Right?”
How had she let this happen? How had she let this happen? They had been so close! They had come so deep already into the wrinkled places, almost as if the hills had been helping them along (distances stretched and shrank like toffee in the wrinkled hills). And now they were standing there with a vigorous, red-faced Tinkerman, stronger and younger looking than he had any right to be, and Sayra’s medicine, which they had suffered so much to find, was gone.
“Now, now, now,” said the Tinkerman, flexing his strengthened arms a little. Elias’s punch seemed to have left no trace of itself on his flushed cheek. “Don’t go overreacting. In any case, I don’t think you two are any match for me at the moment.”
Linny ignored him. She put her hand on Elias’s shoulder instead.
“I promised Sayra I’d come back,” she said. “So I have to, anyway. Medicine or no medicine. I’ll go there, and I’ll be keeping my promise, and maybe I’ll even think up something I can do for her, eventually. Can you keep him from following me?”
“Ha ha,” said the Tinkerman.
Ignore him,
she told herself.
Ignore him.
“I can try,” said Elias.
“I wanted to save her,” said Linny. She was holding on to his arm now, almost as if Elias were something strong and true, like a house or a tree, that could keep her standing.
“I know,” said Elias.
“If I get stuck there, tell my mother—”
“I won’t go back to Lourka without you,” said Elias grimly. “I’ll find you.”
They looked at each other.
Won’t,
he had said. Not
can’t
. But
won’t
.
“All right,” said Linny. “Don’t let him hurt you too much. He has darts.”
And she turned and ran up the hill while Elias tackled the Tinkerman.
S
he ran and ran, while the world folded and refolded itself around her. A dragonfly changed its color from blue to red as it wobbled by. The water she scooped up from little streams sometimes had a hint of vanilla or cloves or something bright and indescribable. Home! It was beginning to feel like home.
As the sun slowly rolled toward the horizon, she found herself clambering over a wall of rocks, and a narrow valley opened before her, filled with golden trees. Not just yellow-orange-red, as trees sometimes are, even far from the wrinkled edges of the world; trees that actually glittered in the sun.
She ran a fingertip along one of those golden leaves, and it made a faint tinkling sound, like a bell. When the wind picked up, the whole grove chimed in for a moment, and as Linny hurried up the green grass of that valley, her head tipped a little back so she could see the sunlight
playing on the golden leaves above her; for a moment it seemed impossible that there could be gray Surveyors anywhere eager to undo the wrinkledness of the world, or a Tinkerman with one greedy thought in his head and a bag full of darts.
At the top of the golden woods, she turned a kind of corner and found herself in a very wrinkled valley, not much bigger than she was. A pine tree with needles of many different colors stretched above her head, and there was a rock underneath it, suitable for sitting on, so she did.
Linny watched it for a while, still catching her own breath, and then she swung her bag around in front and got out her poor old lourka. It was a lot more battered-looking than it had been when she had first come up to the edge of Away, but it was still beautiful. And it was the way in. It was an instrument and a doorway, both at once.
“Sayra,” she said aloud.
The word hovered there in that sliver’s worth of valley. Where else could it go, after all?
Linny strummed the strings of her lourka, thinking of the songs that Sayra used to like most. The song about wind in summer trees, for instance—Sayra was fond of that one. She picked out the first notes, thumbing a kind of drone on the lowest string, underneath the music. Oh,
it felt good to have the lourka out, even if her hands were so stiff and clumsy after her adventures that she dropped half the notes.
The leaves unfold
Their green and gold . . .
(Though to be singing that under a pine tree was funny!)
She thought of Elias, wrestling with the Tinkerman so she could run away, and she thought about the Half-Cat, trapped for way too long in the Tinkerman’s sack, and for a moment worry almost hushed her.
But then, without even noticing what she was doing, she had started putting music to that worry, finding notes that sounded right for Elias—not as much a lummox as he used to be, after all—and then falling into riffs that seemed right for the Half-Cat, a tune that would be half one thing and half another, and in more than one way, just as the Half-Cat was both silver and gold, and both wrinkled and Plain.
The music hovered all around her, singing out her longing. And pulling some on the world, as a true song will do. For a time, Linny was as lost in her own song as another person would have been in the Upper Woods—
And then a rustling crash of a sound woke her up, and even though the noise was not “here,” wherever here was,
but quite some wrinkled distance away, Linny’s head cleared.
How had she let herself get distracted like that? She had to keep her mind on Sayra. It was Sayra she wanted to play back into the world. She dug through her pockets and found the wrinkled sash Sayra had sewn for her, with its half-transparent flower that was also (as Linny’s notes were transformed by Sayra’s magic with stitches and silk) a song.
The lourka and the silk flower had come through the blackness of tunnels with her; they had been underground and locked up in fancy buildings and even to the edge of the Plain Sea. It was not surprising that they would look so bruised and scraped and battered—almost as battered as Linny herself! But here they all were, and all bent on remembering Sayra, who had always looked at Linny and seen a good person and a friend, when most of the rest of the world had seen only mischief and trouble.
She put the silk flower on the rock facing her and put her whole heart into the silly song that had inspired it.
Rose, rose, rose in the sun,
Fly away fast before the long day’s done!