IT CAN BE EASY, when hearing about someone else’s adventures in a far-off, magical land, to say “I would never choose the mundane world over the fantastical. I would run into rivers of rainbow as fast as my legs would carry me, and I would never once look back.” It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one’s answers. Reality, it must sadly be said, has a way of complicating things, even things we might believe could never be that complicated.
Lundy returned to her family. Celebrated her sister’s birthday. Her mother, whose eyes had lost some of their hollowness, baked a lemon cake, as she had so very long ago, when Diana had been a dream inside her stomach, and Lundy had been a quiet, reserved reality.
Daniel came home on leave from the Army. He stared at Lundy like she was some sort of miracle, and when he asked her if she’d be there when he came home for Christmas, she answered “yes,” before she could think twice.
Her seventeenth birthday came and went in a flurry of gifts and cards, in an increasing warmth that seemed to sweep through the house as every day took them further from the time when she had been a phantom, and not a figure.
Three times Lundy returned to the Market, slipping away on an unguarded afternoon—for they were less careful of her now than they had been, now that they were starting to accept the reality of her—and three times Lundy left the Market for the comforts of her childhood bed, for the companionship of her sister, who had grown in so many fabulous and unexpected ways, who needed to be protected from the rigidity of their father, from the hovering anxiety of their mother. Three times the Archivist met her at the end of the passage, reminding her each time that she would be eighteen sooner than she thought.
Three times Lundy said, “I know. I’m still trying to give fair value,” and walked back through the passage, back to the life she had willingly abandoned at eight, and eleven, and thirteen. She never made a choice. She never said “this is the day I settle forever in a world I said I didn’t want.”
She never needed to.
She was standing in the kitchen, looking at the calendar, counting the days before her eighteenth birthday, when her sister came charging into the room and stopped, looking from Lundy to the calendar.
Finally, in a small voice, Diana asked, “Are you going away again?”
“I have to.” Lundy turned to face her. “I don’t … I don’t belong here, Diana. Everything is wrong. The water and the air and the way people stand, the things they say … it’s like I’ve been on a very long journey, and it’s been splendid, it really has, I’ve learned so much, and I’ve loved getting to know you better, but I can’t stay. I miss my home.”
She had never been much of a storyteller. If she had been, she might have been able to explain a little better how many things went into the idea of “home.” Not just the taste of the water and the scent of the air, but the way the berries ripened, going from white to purple-black overnight, so the undergrowth was constantly changing. The sound of wings, and never knowing whether any bird was a citizen who’d gone too deeply into debt or something born to feather and sky. The security of understanding that the Market would correct any imbalances fairly and quickly, never privileging one side over the other.
Even the shapes of the people here were wrong. She was far from the only human in the Goblin Market, but it was so strange to walk down the street and see only bipeds, only people with two arms and two legs and a single head and no wings or tails. It was difficult not to yearn for comforting variety, rather than this sometimes-shocking homogeneity.
Diana’s eyes filled with slow and terrible tears. “I thought you loved me.”
“I do love you, Diana, I genuinely do, but the place I belong…” She hesitated. “If I don’t go back before I turn eighteen, I can’t go back at all. I can’t imagine growing old in this world. I’m sorry, I can’t. If I stay any longer, I could be trapped.”
“I wanted…” Diana shook her head. “I wanted you to see me go to high school. I wanted a sister. Can’t you stay and be my sister?”
Lundy hesitated. Then, finally, in a small voice, she said, “I can try.”
* * *
SEE HER NOW as she was then, almost a woman, still technically a child, running, running, through the trees, a shopping bag filled with everything she could grab—forks and spoons and candlesticks, lace doilies and roller skates—thumping against her hip as her feet pound against the soil. How she runs, Katherine Lundy, sweet seventeen and running out of time.
How she ran.
She reached the door, flung it open, flung herself inside, past the rules and through the passage, out into the evening air. It smelled sweet; it smelled like home.
She kept running.
The shutters were open at Vincent’s pie stand. Moon, who had somehow become a young woman while she wasn’t looking—while she was away doing the same in a foreign land—lifted her head from the dough she’d been kneading, surprise slowly bleeding into delight.
“Lundy!” she cried. “Are you home? Are you finally home? I was so worried, I thought—”
“I need to stop,” said Lundy.
Moon blinked. “What?”
“I need to stop,” repeated Lundy. “My sister, she’s not ready to let me go, and the Archivist said I had to take the oath before I turned eighteen. If I can stop getting older, I won’t turn eighteen. I need to stay where I am for a little while, until Diana can let go, and I can come home. Please, will you help me?” She held up her bag. “I’m prepared to give fair value.”
“I—”
“Please.”
Moon stopped. In a small voice, she said, “Follow me.” Then she turned, not bothering to remove her apron, and walked away from the dough on the counter.
Lundy followed. Together, not quite side by side, they walked the length of the Market, until they reached a familiar trail, until a small, rickety shack came into view. Moon stopped. Lundy looked at her curiously.
“This is as far as I go,” said Moon. “You were my best friend ever. Remember that, okay? I loved you a lot. Even if you did build a boat big enough to bury yourself in.” Then she turned and walked away.
Lundy blinked after her for a moment before she started, cautiously, toward the shack. The door was closed. Opening it seemed wrong; instead, she raised her hand, and knocked.
The door swung open. The Archivist was there. Wearily, she looked at Lundy, and asked, “It’s to be this, is it? What have you come to ask me for?”
“I…” Lundy took a breath. “My sister needs me. I don’t want to turn eighteen. I need to wait. Can you help me wait?”
“Lundy—”
“Please.”
“What you’re asking for isn’t what you want. Come home. Stay with us. Be safe and happy and stay.”
Lundy, lover of rules, lover of loopholes, shook her head. Like a dog with a bone, she had found her solution. “No. If I don’t turn eighteen, the curfew doesn’t apply. I can stay. Please.”
The Archivist closed her eyes for a long moment. When she opened them again, the weariness was gone, replaced with sorrow. “Can you give fair value?”
Silently, Lundy held out her sack of stolen trinkets. The Archivist took it, ran her hand through its contents, and sighed.
“Wait here,” she said, and vanished into the shack. When she returned, she no longer held the sack. Instead, she held a small vial the color of a ripe strawberry, carved from a single bright crystal. She offered it to Lundy.
Lundy took it.
“If you drink this,” she said, “you will not turn eighteen. But it isn’t … Please. You asked a question, and you paid the price of it, but please. There will be consequences if you do this. Stay. Please. Just stay.”
“Whatever the consequences are, I’ll pay them,” said Lundy, and opened the vial, and drank.
It tasted like water. It tasted like nothing. It tasted like tears. Again, the Archivist sighed. Lundy looked at her. She was crying.
“The rules are the rules,” said the Archivist. “They were set for a reason. I set them for a reason.”
Lundy’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Names have power, child,” said the Archivist. “Titles, too. They call me ‘the Archivist’ because it would be an insult to call me by my name. But I was here first, and I will be here last, and the Market lives because I am its heart. I loved you so much. I truly did.”
“I don’t…”
“I asked you to remember the curfew, and you did, you did, but you didn’t give me fair value for it, because you forgot Mockery.” The Archivist—the Market—seemed to shimmer, and for a moment she was a girl with white feathers tangled in her hair, a sign of the swan she could have been, if she had lived, if she had been given time enough to grow. “You forgot that sometimes, fair value comes from change, and death, and sacrifice. You can’t have everything and give fair value. You can’t stop your clock and expect to stay a part of the world. You’ve followed the rules, my love, my little Lundy, but you’ve betrayed them at the same time, and your punishment is the punishment that has awaited all rulebreakers, for a broken rule pains us all. Banishment. Go.”
Lundy’s eyes went wide. “How will I get the potion to start me aging again?”
The Market smiled, heartbroken. “You don’t.”
She closed the door.
Lundy tried to reach for it, and found she couldn’t move; couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t do anything but stand there, struggling against the air, until she turned on her heel and fled, running back the way she had come.
None of the people she passed would look her in the eye. Vincent’s stall was shuttered; Moon was nowhere to be seen. Lundy ran on, fighting against the ache in her lungs, the rejection she could feel from every side, until the door was there, slamming open to admit her.
There was no release even in the passage, which pressed down against her like it was trying to force her out. She stumbled to the final door, tumbled out into the dust, and fell to her hands and knees, gasping.
When she had her breath back, she looked behind herself. The door was gone.
“I was sure,” she whispered, and all was silence.