the stream. There, a man so old and weathered that he could have been grandfather to them all was stirring great wooden tubs full of laundry with a stick.
He wrinkled his nose when he saw them coming, and said, “It’s two buttons a load for something as soiled as what you’re wearing, and I can’t promise you’ll have all the ribbons back when I’m finished.”
“We’re not here to ask you to do more work,” said Lundy, who had always been good at being polite to adults, and could see that this wasn’t a man who often had children seek him out for kindness. “We were hoping we could do some of the work for you. If you wouldn’t mind.”
The old man lifted his eyebrows, looking first at Lundy, and then at Moon’s impossible fingers. “I’m too tired to be taking on debts for foolish little girls who couldn’t mind fair value,” he grumbled. “You’d have to accept the laundry yourself, not do what’s already here, and you’d have to do it proper, no slacking off or lollygagging. It’ll be hard and tiresome and not as fun as running wild in the woods all day.”
“Yes, but at the end of it, we won’t fly away,” said Lundy. “I think we can tolerate a little hard work if it means we keep our feet on the ground.”
Moon, who was closer to being a bird, and hence closer to the sky, looked unsure, but said nothing. She was still human enough to want to stay that way. The tipping point of her heart, if it existed, had not yet been reached.
The old man looked between them, and sighed. “All right,” he said. “I could do with a rest. You can use my supplies, and in exchange you’re to give me half of what you make. Soap doesn’t grow on trees, you know, not unless the weather’s gone strange.” He went back to stirring his pot of laundry, which didn’t feel much like resting to Lundy, but what did she know? She wasn’t an old man, and she didn’t operate her own business. She couldn’t call it “owning,” because there was no building, or sign, or business card—all the things she had learned to associate with the idea of owning a thing.
She and Moon sat on some rocks off to the side, and waited for people to bring their washing.
The first to arrive was a beleaguered-looking man with a long cow’s tail and four children trotting along behind him. All of them had tails like his, and the two girls had curving horns growing from their foreheads, on which they had tied a remarkable number of bows. His arms were full of clothes, which he tried to thrust at the old man.
“Not me, not today,” the old man said, and hooked a finger at Lundy and Moon. “These clever young things are working off a spot of debt. Give what wants doing to them. Payment’s as standard, and their work will be up to snuff or I’ll take fair value out of their hides.”
The cow-man—or bull-man, Lundy supposed—looked dubious, but handed his washing over anyway. “It all needs to be clean by high-sun,” he said. “The children will have found a mud puddle or something of the like by then, and we’ll have to start all over again.”
“You can count on us, sir,” said Lundy brightly. “It’ll be clean as anything.”
The bull-man still looked dubious. But one of the children had found a frog and was on the verge of pursuing it into the stream, and two more of them were already halfway up a tree, and the fourth was poking a stick into a hole, and it was clear he didn’t have the time to argue about laundry.
“Fine,” he said. “But I won’t pay until I’m back, and I won’t pay for anything I don’t receive.”
“Fair value,” agreed Lundy, and smiled prettily as the bull-man rounded up his children and ushered them away, to potentially less muddy climes.
When she turned, the old man was looking at her. “Well?” he said. “Get washing.”
Doing laundry by hand was even harder and less pleasant than Lundy, who had grown up with a washing machine, could ever have imagined. First they had to wet the clothes all the way down, and it seemed like the fabric fought this process, refusing to soak through even though she knew, just knew that everything would have been drenched in an instant if she hadn’t wanted it to be. Then they