can delay yourself right over the edge of being sure.”
“I am sure,” Lundy protested. “I just need a little more time.”
“Good,” said the Archivist. “There is only a little time left.”
Lundy turned and walked back into the passage. The Archivist, who had seen this all before, watched her go.
15
FAIR VALUE
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