Authors: Anne Nesbet
“Walk quieter,” said Linny over her shoulder. “You’ll mess me up.”
That was another lie, actually. But Elias’s crashing footsteps became a little less noisy behind her.
“Hey, Linny,” he said, panting as he came along after her. “What’s all that stuff on your back?”
“Stuff,” said Linny. The bundles did feel heavier, now that she was lugging them uphill. But if she had left them in a heap under a tree somewhere, she would have to get back to that tree before running off to the Plain. If she couldn’t find the edge of Away, that is.
These were still the familiar woods. Linny didn’t really have to think yet, not down here. She just angled up the slope on a line that skirted by her old workshop,
not close enough that Elias would see it, though, and start asking questions about that, too.
When she paused to change course slightly to the right, looking for the likeliest place to cross the little creek that whispered along nearest to them, she noticed that the sky was beginning to gray up already. It was no longer the deep middle of the night. That took her by surprise, somehow. Time was still padding along, then! Somehow it felt like time should have stopped, the very minute the Voices came for Sayra. Everything else had been cut short then; why should the clocks keep moving?
She shook her head roughly to get the tangles out of her brain, and pressed on up the far bank of the creek even faster than she had been going, with Elias struggling on after.
As soon as they crossed the creek, Linny could feel the ways the wrinkles of those hills began to grow thicker and deeper all around them. Elias gave a new kind of groan.
“Head hurts,” he said. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”
“Shh,” said Linny. “Of course I do.”
The nice thing about lying is that it gets easier, the more you do it. She did not know where Away was, of course. Not ever getting lost is not the same thing as knowing where every possible place—even the ones you’ve never
seen—might be. What Linny did know was what it felt like to follow the land’s wrinkles as they became ever more complicated and deeper.
“Weren’t we already here before?” said Elias. He had almost caught up with her when she paused to let the tug of the land tell her which way to go next.
“Here?” said Linny. “No.”
“I don’t like it. All the little valleys look the same.”
Linny looked around. She was taken by surprise by Elias’s words, because she hadn’t really been using her eyes at all. She had been feeling her way.
The world around them was a deep, in-between gray, too light for stars but much too dark for true morning. They were standing in a very small ravine. A miniature valley. And other little canyons ran out from this one in every direction, so that the whole world seemed to be fracturing all around them. When she looked with her eyes, Linny could see how strange this place could be to a person who could, unlike Linny, get lost. She didn’t usually try to imagine herself in those shoes, and for one brief moment the effort to see the world as Elias must be seeing it actually made her dizzy. She blinked to get her balance back, and Elias himself said, quietly and very nearby, “I can’t see which way is up or down anymore. Can you?”
“Shh. I was fine until you distracted me. This way.”
But when she moved on, Elias yelped, and she had to go back for him.
“You turned a corner,” he said. His eyes were very wide. “I couldn’t see where you went.”
“Hang on, then,” said Linny. There was no help for it, even though it slowed everything down. Elias put his hand on her shoulder, and at least he knew how to rest a hand on a person lightly, because with the bundles already weighing her down, Linny was in no mood to carry even part of a lummox.
She forged on. Elias had called it “turning a corner,” and maybe his words had been powerful enough to reshape Linny’s view of things, because the little canyons all around did become more like corners. You pushed past one tree, and the world turned a corner, and there were other, completely different trees, one absolutely filled with little golden birds, just beginning to chatter their welcome to the morning that was not there yet. And then you turned around another corner, and there was a creek again, taking up most of that canyon, if you could call such a tiny rift a canyon. And then a corner, and another tree, this one tall and narrow.
“Oh, help,” said Elias, his hand trembling on her shoulder. “Please help. We’re lost. We’re so lost.”
But he didn’t seem to be talking to Linny exactly, so she put him back out of her mind. The world was so
wrinkled all around them that she had to focus very hard to feel which way still led deeper in (and higher up).
And then finally they clambered up another set of rocks, and turned another corner, and the canyon that held them now was no larger than a closet. If you reached out a hand, you could almost feel the sides of it. But (Linny felt this in her gut) if you took another step, you’d be somewhere else. And ahead something happened to the light. Ahead there was a blur, as if they were catching a glimpse, here, of the world before it had decided how it wanted to be.
“Don’t move,” said Linny to Elias, and very carefully, without letting her feet shift an inch, she shrugged one bundle off her shoulder, the one with the lourka in it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” said Elias in a whisper. His teeth chattered a little on the last word.
“Shh,” said Linny.
She wriggled the lourka into place under her right elbow. Her left hand, the fingering hand, hesitated over the strings a little, thinking about notes she might be able to play. And then her other hand plucked a string, and the sound filled that tiny corner’s worth of canyon, filled it and filled it and spilled over its edges.
“You can’t do that!” said Elias into her ear. “You crazy thing! What are you
doing
?”
But Linny was squinting into the vague places in front
of them. The note had changed something in the rock just ahead. She was sure it had. She played another couple of notes, just to see what happened.
What happened was the wind kicked up around them, as if the air had perked up its ears and taken interest. And the rocks trembled a little in the wind. They shuddered. They thinned.
Elias’s hand trembled on her shoulder.
Linny was still trying very hard to ignore him. She frowned down at her strings. She was trying to put those notes back together into the pattern of her song. She had known it so well, yesterday afternoon. It must be there somewhere.
A few sweet notes in a row—so it was still there! She looked up in triumph, and for a moment the rocks right in front of her eyes faded right away and became part of a different place, a hazy place, hard to see, where on the edge of something someone was sitting, someone was turning her head—
But several things happened at once just then, while her fingers stumbled on, plucking out the notes of that first song. The wind that had come back again to whip itself right around her head, chattering, fell away from one instant to the next, into that complete silence that was somehow worse than noise. The Voices were back. Or had just been back.
The someone in the different place turned and maybe held out one hand, but everything shimmered, so that it was hard to see. And it was hard to focus on anything, with the ghostly Voices still trembling in the air. They had just been jabbering everywhere all around, insisting on something. Insisting and insisting. The shadows of all those Voices made it hard to think, and harder still to see. Linny wanted very much to see clearly, because there was someone there, she was almost certain, past the shimmer.
She took a step forward, elbowing her way through the last traces of the rocks, reaching out toward that not-quite-there shape that was also reaching, reaching toward her.
“Sayra?”
she whispered, even that much of a sound intruding rudely into the silence carved out for themselves by all those Voices.
For one instant, she felt—she was almost sure she felt—thin fingers brushing against hers, pressing something soft and cool into her hand, like a message, and she thought all in a joyful rush,
I’m doing it I’ve done it it’s Sayra Sayra—
And then something or someone grabbed her from behind, shouting out as he did so—it was Elias, why? What was he doing? There was a struggle of some kind going on between him and things that could not be seen nor heard, and Linny was in the middle of it like
a flaxseed caught in a whirlwind. The wind was back again, and screaming.
Meanwhile Elias, that lummox, had grabbed Linny’s lourka right out of her hands and was waving it around in the air. And he was shouting nonsense, too. “Go away! Go away! You can’t have her! It was me! I was the one playing!”
“You were not,” mumbled Linny, but it made no difference, Elias was making so much noise. And she pulled hard on something, on the beautiful lourka that was hers because she had made it, and there was a struggle, and something gave way with an awful cracking sound, and something else clonked her on the head, and the rocks at the end of the canyon became hard again and indeed scraped themselves painfully against her outstretched hands, and she would have cried from the pain of that, but the world was spinning, she was losing her balance, she was tipping over some edge while the wind screamed at her, she was gone. . . .
E
ach of the first few times Linny tried to open her eyes, she caught a different glimpse of the world: a pool of trees, their pointy tops dipping into a blue sky . . . an ant climbing with enormous, heartbreaking patience up a tree trunk . . . a bruised and anxious face looking at her and saying something she couldn’t hear. She knew if she were just a little more awake, she would recognize that face, and for a moment she tried to figure out why she had been asleep and where she was, but thinking made her head hurt, so she let her eyelids close again and just hid in the darkness until everything stopped spinning.
“Linny,” said someone later.
It was not the voice she was expecting. It wasn’t Sayra, and it wasn’t her mother. She forced her eyes open again and saw that the light had changed, that it was late in the day, and that the face looking with such worry and
confusion at her belonged to that lummox Elias. Only at the moment he didn’t look as much like a lummox. He looked worn out and dusty. She also realized, all of a sudden, that her body felt like it had just been popped over a cliff with a river of rocks. She was pummeled all over, and her hands stung.
“Ow,” she said, trying to get a look at her hands. Someone had wound strips of cloth around her left palm. And her right hand was clenched very tightly around something. Something small and soft. “Elias?”
“Is that you? Are you back?”
He sounded so incredibly relieved and exhausted. It was all very disconcerting. It was not like Elias to be worried about Linny.
I must have been nearly dead or something,
thought Linny. It was the only explanation that made sense.
“Where are we?”
She asked because she really could not tell. Which was a strange feeling all in itself. She must not have been awake when they came here.
“I don’t know,” said Elias. “When those awful Voices grabbed at you up there, I went kind of nuts, I think. And then there was a big shaking, and I lost my balance, and we sort of rolled around a lot of corners at once. I don’t know where we ended up, but I think we’re pretty far below Lourka. Someplace I never even saw before.”
It was all coming back now. Linny scowled at Elias, and then had to wince, because her head was too sore for scowling.
“I almost had her,” she said, remembering. The fingers of her right hand had memories of their own: they were still clenching, clenching, as if holding on now could change the past. “She was right there. I think I touched her. But then you grabbed at me and ruined it.”
“You didn’t have anyone, you idiot,” said Elias. That was more his regular voice. “You took out that stupid lourka, and in like one minute
they
almost had
you
. I should have stopped you faster, but my head was all confused. Should have been me playing. Too late now. We messed up. And now she’s really, truly gone.”
He stood up with an angry, dismal jerk and walked off into the woods. Linny turned her head to watch him go, and the slightly spinny feeling she got from moving her head added to all the other bad feelings in her, until she worried she might actually be sick. But by lying very still until Elias came back, with a cookpot’s worth of water sloshing around in his hands, she made it past that bad moment.
She recognized the cookpot. That made her wonder how the rest of her stuff was doing. But she wasn’t really ready to look around for it yet.
So she lay there, thinking uncomfortable thoughts.
Was it true? Had she almost been trapped in Away, like Elias said? It was hard to remember the details.
Her left hand throbbed. The fingers of her right hand clenched and clenched, holding on to—whatever that was. Something almost like nothing.
“What’s wrong?” said Elias, looking over at her. It was part of his being good with lambs and kittens, she figured—noticing when creatures were twitching.
“Something’s in my hand,” she said. “But my fingers won’t move so I can see what it is.”
“Hand’s been cramped up all day,” said Elias, poking gently at her fingers. “Fools you into thinking it’s got something inside. Here, I’ll try my ma’s trick on it.”
He sat down beside her and went to work on that hand, rubbing the life back into her fingers one by one and shaking his head at her when she yelped.
“It has to hurt some, sorry,” he said, not unkindly. “That’s just the blood coming back. Hey, wait—”
He bent over her fingers.
“What’s this?”
Linny turned her head, trying to see what it was Elias had, but then the seasickness washed over her again.
“A handkerchief? No. A flower? Why are you—”
“Give that back!” said Linny. Because suddenly she remembered everything, and she knew what that must be: the wonderful silk rosebud Sayra had made for her
from wrinkled silk. Her birthday present. “
Sayra
gave that to me.”