In an Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire Page 0,47

she had paid all debts. She would. No matter how difficult it was, she would do it.

She found her father in his study, which had been Daniel’s room when she’d last been in this house. Her room had remained untouched through her entire absence, both at the Chesholm School and in the Goblin Market. It was too small for her now, decorated for an eternal child, and it pressed in around her like the too-tight clothing she had worn home.

(Those clothes had been missing when she woke in the morning, and she suspected her mother had burned them. The clothes she had now were her mother’s hand-me-downs, worn soft and tattered by her mother’s body, and smelled faintly of lilac perfume. Lundy suspected she would never again smell lilacs without feeling her mother’s palm against her cheek, and she didn’t mind. Some forms of fair value are less tangible than others.)

“When do I begin?” she asked.

“I have copies of last year’s exams,” he said. “I’ve enrolled you. Said your reason for leaving boarding school was an illness that left you unable to handle being away from your family any longer. I also said you might require a bit more recuperation. As soon as you can pass these exams well enough not to attract attention or embarrass me, you’ll begin classes.”

How quickly he went from “we can be a family” to “don’t embarrass me.” Lundy looked at him levelly. “Remember our agreement,” she said. “One year.”

“I might remind you that I am your father, and you are still a child,” he said.

“If you did, I might remind you that I was able to escape from a supposedly inescapable campus. I might remind you, further, that you may have had the start of my education, but you haven’t had the parts that mattered. If you attempt to break our bargain, I’ll think nothing of taking my acquiescence back and running for the nearest place a door might hide. If you seem to be setting up circumstances so you can, I’ll be gone before your plan can be put into motion. I came back to pay my debts. Don’t cancel them all with cleverness.”

Her father looked at her wearily. “What didn’t we give you?” he asked. “Where did we fail you, that the Goblin Market seemed like the better answer? Please. I’ve wondered for years. How did we go wrong?”

Lundy paused before she said, “You knew who you were. You were so sure you’d gotten fair value for your life that you never asked what that was going to mean for the rest of us. You spent our happiness to secure your own. I never learned to make friends here. I never learned to be anything but rigid and lonely.”

“You’re still rigid. You went to a place that elevates rules to the status of holy law, and you quote those rules back at me now as if they have all the answers.”

“Because they do.” It was so simple. How could he not see it, when it was so simple? “If you give everyone fair value, no one wants. If no one wants, no one has to take. The Market makes sure we don’t take advantage of each other.”

“The Market doesn’t make you understand. With the hand of what might as well be a literal god to guide you, how can you go wrong? How can you learn to do better? The people who live there, fighting every day not to fly away on wings they never asked for, they’re no better than pets.”

“Were you ever dressed in feathers?”

Her father raised his chin, looked her in the eye, and said, “I would sooner have died.”

Lundy was silent. If her father guessed at what her silence contained, he gave no sign.

“A year is long enough to go to school,” he said. “You need to understand this world if you’re ever to consider choosing it over your beloved Market.”

Still Lundy was silent. Her father sighed.

“Don’t make me out to be a monster here, Katherine,” he said. “If I’d never been to the Market, if your father were some . . . some ordinary, hidebound man with no reason to believe in magic, do you honestly think I would have accepted the declaration of a year’s homecoming from my fifteen-year-old daughter without protest? You’d be locked up in someplace far less pleasant than that fancy boarding school, under constant surveillance, and you’d never have a chance to go back. I am trying to be fair with you.