Authors: Anne Nesbet
“And then . . .”
And then they walked and walked along the green bluffs at the end of the world.
“And then . . .”
And then they walked so far they finally, finally found their way home.
Stories can remake the world.
“Again!” said the ghost of Sayra, as greedy as one of the twins. “Tell it again!”
So Linny shifted her over to the other shoulder and told the whole story all over again, leaving nothing out, not the labyrinth, not the crown that she had found and
then given away to the crowd to keep safe, not even the tomatoes on the way to the Plain Sea, and when she got back to them walking along the green bluffs of Away until finally, finally they found their way home, Sayra smiled and said the exact same thing, pummeling Linny a little, just to make the point, with one of her not-very-solid fists. “Again!”
And they went on that way for almost ever, telling and retelling the story, and eventually Sayra got too heavy for Linny’s arms, and she had to put her down, but that was all right now, and they walked on along those endless bluffs, hand in hand, and under their feet a path formed in the world . . .
Until finally—
“Again!”
Finally—
“Again!”
They found their way—
Sayra and Linny saw it both at the same moment: the path brightening as if someone had thrown a door wide open. And they squeezed each other’s hands and grinned mischief at each other and ran forward, singing out the end of the story as a glorious, mismatched chord:
“HOME
AGAIN!”
G
oing through the door that led back into the world was like running into an enormous spiderweb in the air: it resisted, resisted, resisted. But Linny was stubborner than the air, and a moment later something had given way with a
pop
, and she had hit a different, rockier patch of ground with a splintering thud.
“Ouch!” said the ground. And the nearest tree hissed like a cat.
Because (Linny saw as she groggily pushed herself upright) the Half-Cat was clinging to that tree with its battered claws, and the ground that Linny had plummeted into was not ordinary leaf-and-turf ground at all, but rather Elias, who looked shocked as he scrabbled backward to get away from the person who had just clobbered him.
“What?” he said. “Linny! How’d you—”
But it wasn’t Elias Linny was worried about.
The Half-Cat was through; Linny had come through; where was—
“Can you please scootch off my leg?” said Sayra, and indeed, there she was. Sayra, herself, and not a ghost, pushing Linny off her ankle and grinning at everything in the world.
“Well, how about that!” said Elias. “This time I seem to have gone and rescued you both!”
“
You
rescued us?” said Linny. She was feeling very bruised and sore; the splintering sound when she landed had come from the bag with the lourka in it, and her hand was now throbbing with the sort of pain that makes your ears ring. She opened her mouth to say something sarcastic, and then she remembered Elias tackling the Tinkerman, and she snapped her mouth right back shut again.
Which was just as well, because when she looked again, there was light dancing in Elias’s eyes and actual tears on his eyelashes, and she saw, as any more reasonable person would have seen right away, that of course he had been kidding, about the rescuing thing.
She was so very glad he was alive, despite the Tinkerman’s darts.
“Is that Elias?” said Sayra, and then she shook herself. “He looks strange.”
She turned around and looked at Linny.
“So do you. You’re both sort of stretched out and ragged. What did they do to you? You look older. You both look older.”
She looked around at the tiny, very wrinkled valley, where red, feathery leaves were falling through the air like glowing ashes, and her eyes narrowed.
“What happened to me? How long was I gone?”
“Too long,” said Elias. “I mean, actually I have no idea how long it’s been. The Tinkerman jabbed me with one of his sleep needles, so I lost a bunch of time. And then I was looking for you up here—seemed like forever.”
He paused, and then smiled, a very sweet smile, without even a dash of lummox in it.
“So I guess we’re all a little older than we were.”
“And
hungrier
!” said Linny. “Aren’t you hungry, all of a sudden? Let’s go home.”
For a long moment Sayra and Elias just stood there staring at her.
“Don’t you know what that means,
home
?” said Linny again. “What’s wrong with you two?”
“You’ll have to show us the way, you know,” said Sayra gently.
So Linny took their hands and led them down the wrinkled valleys until they came to a bend in the hills that was already softer than the tight twists and strange turns near the edge of Away, and there below them were
the familiar roofs of Lourka.
The sun was low in the sky, and they had to shade their eyes to look down at the village.
“Look!” whispered Sayra, tugging on Linny’s arm.
A woman (very tiny indeed, from this distance) had just come around the corner of the house at the top of the village and was beckoning to someone—to two medium-little boys, running around like wild things, out there in the center of the lower meadow. Just the way that woman moved her hand through the air was as familiar to Linny as her own heartbeat.
And then she turned and looked up the slope, for all the world as if she had heard Sayra’s whisper, which was impossible. She gazed right up the hill at them, and a gulp of a sob hiccuped its way out of Linny’s throat.
The woman didn’t even wave, exactly. She turned toward them, and straightened up in recognition, and held out her arms.
That’s what joy looks like! If anyone ever asks you, now you know: it’s your own mother standing at the end of the lower meadow, still quite far away, holding out her arms to welcome you home.
They were all running down the hill by this point, even the Half-Cat, though, being a cat, it was trying to make its run look leisurely, unhurried, engaged in by choice.
The wrinkled country must have wriggled itself a little to make the path down the hill shorter than usual. After all that long way, it was only a few seconds until Linny was in the fierce, strong arms of her mother, and the people of Lourka gathering all around.
I
n the wrinkled parts of the world, people know how stories shape everything, so of course when the three children who had gone off to Away came dancing down out of the hills again, there was not only rejoicing. There was a pulling up of chairs and stools and a leaning in of the happy crowds and a posing of the old, powerful demand.
“Tell us what happened!”
They brought food, of course, as well as chairs, not to mention bandages for Linny’s poor wounded hand (she impressed the twins with that black stripe across her palm), and they set everything up very comfortably on the village green, and the littlest children ran about in the grass, trying to catch blue and pink and brightest-gold fireflies with their pudgy hands.
Sayra sat on her mother’s lap, her arms around her mother’s neck. Her mother was still too much in the grip of shock and joy to say much in her own right, but the
neighbors said what had been left of Sayra had finally faded completely away, just some hours before. That very day. And Sayra’s poor mother had slipped to the floor, as if she, too, could think of nothing better to do than to fade away . . . only that was when the shouts had come from outside her cottage, and when she had opened her door—
But words alone have trouble with such things.
Each one of the three who had come down out of the wrinkled hills told the story as it had played out for her or for him, and the villagers hung on every word. They wanted to know more about Away, which was the strangeness that was nearest to them, and they were very curious, too, about the people, like Linny’s aunt, who lived out their lives down on the Plain. And there was much headshaking and worry about the way the two halves of the Broken City kept trying to do harm to each other.
“
Madji
and Surveyors!” said Elias’s mother in disgust. “Madmen and surlyfaces, more like!”
But they liked the description of the Bridge House (Linny’s mother turned her head away, though, and Linny remembered that that was the house her own mother had grown up in, so long ago); they approved of the fair; they admired the wrinkled/machine-driven Half-Cat, frizzle-frazzled though it was by its encounter
with the old man’s dreadful wire. It wound through the legs of the crowd, showing off its gorgeous, bedraggled halfness, and pretending not to need or notice human beings of any kind.
Finally the baker dusted the flour off his hands and said, “She may be a wicked thing sometimes, our Linny, but seems like she’s our door out and back, if you see what I mean. She could take a trader down to the Plain, y’ know, and bring back all the various wonders—”
“Except that she’s never leaving Lourka again!” said Linny’s mother, with a sobbing gulp of a laugh. “How can you even suggest—no, I absolutely forbid it.”
The silence that followed that was a very complicated silence. You could almost hear the thoughts of these people going in different directions all over the place.
Sayra raised her head off her mother’s shoulder and said, “What about those people and their awful war? Linny said she’d come back to them, didn’t she? They’re holding her crown for her, and she’s the Girl with the Lourka.”
The older people in the village shifted their weight from foot to foot or scratched their arms inside their elbows. They were still (even after all of these marvels) made a little nervous by anything that linked girls and lourkas. Even though that had been the first thing Linny had said, and Sayra and Elias had said something like it,
too: “The story has changed.”
Weren’t the three of them living proof of that?
The people of Lourka had been as trapped in the rut of the old story as they were lost in the wrinkle separating their village from the world.
Linny had had a long time to think over how it all must have happened, long, long ago. “The first Girl with the Lourka—the one they painted those pictures of—went down to the Plain, and the people here called that being taken off to Away, and they told the story that way for so long that it came true, of course, the way stories do up here, and that’s eventually what happened to poor Sayra.”
All right, makes sense. Even the eldest elders in the village could see how that might have happened, because anyone who lives in the wrinkled country knows how a story can sometimes surprise you by becoming real.
“Well, anyway,” said Linny. “I can’t go anywhere until I fix this.” And she pulled the damaged lourka out of its grubby, tattered bag to show them all.
Some people still flinched for a moment, it’s true, to see a lourka in a girl’s hands, but the story had changed, the story had changed, and soon the lourka was being passed from hand to hand—even Sayra took it for a moment! Even Elias’s mother!—and being not just pitied for its bangs and scrapes, but also (which swelled the heart of Linny, after all this time)
admired
.
“Child did this without a master’s guiding!” said one of the oldest lourka makers. “Never seen such a thing.”
“I’ll help you mend it, Linny,” said Linny’s father. “Or I’ll watch you mend it, maybe. Doesn’t seem you need much help from me.”
“But I learned everything by watching you,” said Linny, her heart pounding and melting, both at once, under her thin ribs. No moment was ever as sweet as this: her own father, pleased to have her fixing her lourka. Welcoming her not just home, but into the workshops, where she had always been so unwanted!
Surely if
that
story could change, so could the story of the broader world, all that struggling between the wrinkled and Plain sides of the river.
“And what’s this?” said Linny’s father, running a finger over Sayra’s sash, tied now like a headband, bright and bedraggled, about Linny’s ears.
“Her wrinkled crown,” said Sayra, with mischief back in her leaf-green eyes. The only thing still half-transparent about Sayra was that winged blossom of hers, and it fluttered now, up from her hair, and did a dance above their heads.
“It started the story that brought us all home,” said Linny.
“And now let’s get some sweaters on you tired young people,” said Elias’s mother. “Getting chilly out here!”
But none of them wanted to go home to their separate houses, on a day as extraordinary as this. So they made a fair of it, right there on the village green. The various households brought out food of different kinds, and someone built up a fire in the old stone ring, and the whole village sat around and laughed and ate together.
As the shadows lengthened across the green, even Sayra’s mother finally began to believe that Sayra was truly back, and let her leave her arms (though not her sight) for a few minutes.
Sayra and Linny ate nutcake after nutcake, and smiled at each other like fools.
Then Elias leaned over them from behind and said, “Hey, what d’you think they’re all talking about?”
And when Linny followed his pointing finger, she could see that some sort of conversation was winding its way through the grown-ups. They were gathering in little groups and getting into earnest discussions and then reshuffling themselves again.
“They don’t seem mad or anything,” said Sayra, licking sugar off her fingers. “I wouldn’t worry about it. You know, I don’t think I ever had one single thing to eat, when I was off in Away. What kind of strange place is that, where you would never have a nutcake and not even notice?”
“I’m not worried about what they’re saying,” said Elias. “I’m curious.”
Then the smith banged some pieces of iron together,
and the crowd pulled itself together around Linny and Sayra and Elias.