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She smiled at the thought of it—and also because it was the late afternoon out here, and the light was golden and liquid and beautiful.

And there were people everywhere. Some of those people were on the bridge itself, on either side of her, but held back by temporary fences.

And they were all, the ones on the banks of the river and the ones on the bridge, looking up at her. Well, sort of at her. At a man standing in front of her now. She could
not see his face, since he was in front of her, but she could see how he leaned forward to speak into a round metal can on a tall stick.

“So there is no Girl with the Lourka this year, and will never be in any year to come. That is the way of progress,” the regent was saying into that metal can, and every word he spoke became, by some Plainish trick, immediately huge, gigantic, enormous, overwhelming:

P R O G R E S S

Linny shook herself and stepped forward to get a better view of the crowds everywhere, of the fairgrounds to the right (where the crowds were mostly in grays, dotted with colors) and the fairgrounds to the left (where the crowd was dressed in every imaginable color, and then dotted with the occasional Angleside gray), of the river rolling ahead and then to the left, of everything so beautiful because it wasn’t under the ground, because it was bathed in late-afternoon sun. She had never seen anything so lovely as this world unfolding in front of her eyes, which had been starved for a view like this for what felt like a very long time.

She took another step forward, out from the shadows, right into the light.

That was when the noise changed.

It had been an angry and complicated roar: angry on the left, where the wrinkled side of the fair was, and
complicated on the right, where the Plain’s half of the fair was laid out. Nobody on either side seemed particularly happy. But when Linny stepped into the light, the sound of both of those crowds swelled for a minute and then fell away.

The regent turned around from his tin can, saw Linny standing there, and spluttered.

In fact, as soon as he saw her, all of his angles seemed to sharpen, and his skin grew paler, and his eyes narrowed in displeasure.

“You!” he said. (He was facing away from the crowds and the tin can, but the word still echoed in the air a little, like the faint ghost of something large.) “What are—how did you even get here?”

“From underground,” said Linny. Her words became very large, too. What’s more, now she saw that on the Angleside bank of the river, there was a very large flat surface set up, like a giant picture, and in that picture was a moving image of Linny herself, at this very moment, only many times larger than she actually was, with the simply enormous key ring swaying back and forth in her hand. Enough to make you seasick. And the regent was up there, too.
Oh, horrors.
Linny tried to keep her eyes away from the thing. She still wasn’t comfortable with pictures of herself.

“What did you say?” said the regent, blinking his
narrow eyes. Behind him the river rolled around its corner—and then ran into the blank wall of the waterworks. And between here and there, so very many people, crowds on both sides of the river, balloons, flags, everything holding its breath.

“I came through those tunnels,” said Linny, and she pointed to the bluff over there, where her underground adventure had begun. “All the complicated tunnels, like a maze, underground. I got pretty muddy, see?”

The lab coat had done what it could, but still.

The regent looked like someone trying very quickly to reprocess shock into disdain.

“But you shouldn’t be here . . . we didn’t bring you here . . . you don’t even have a puppet,” he said, and his eyes flicked ahead and down.

Now that she had moved this far forward—and when she leaned over the edge a bit—Linny could see what he was looking at: a steeply tilted stage, with raised lines running and swirling across it.

“What’s that?” she said.

“The labyrinth, you foolish girl.”

A pretend labyrinth for puppets that dangled from strings. Wasn’t that what Elias had said? In the past, real girls had tried to get puppets through a labyrinth. How silly was that?

It was so much unlike the true labyrinth, so far from
being in endless darkness twisting through wormholes underground, that Linny laughed right out loud.

“Look at this!” she said, and held out her still quite muddy hands, one of them holding a now somewhat muddy key ring. When she did that, the Half-Cat jumped up very elegantly into her arms. “The Half-Cat and I came through the real labyrinth, the actual labyrinth, the horrible dark one that runs under the ground and up through the bridge, and it brought us all the way here.”

The regent looked more surprised than Linny had ever seen a grown person look. His jaw was open. The crowds were not just murmuring now; they were beginning to shout, especially the crowd to Linny’s left, on the wrinkled side of the bridge.

“The Girl with the Lourka!” they were shouting. “The Girl with the Lourka! Lourka! Lourka!”

“Hush!” said the regent to the crowds, but they didn’t hush. Now he was waking up from the surprise and getting angry, Linny noticed. He turned to hiss at her. “Do you think that’s all you have to do? Just waltz up here like that? What about the tests? What about the question? What about the lost crown? A know-nothing child can’t pretend to be fit to rule a whole world!”

That made Linny jut out her chin.

“I am not a child,” she said. “I’m already twelve. And you just said if a claimant had managed to pass your tests, she would be here. And I’m here. I didn’t even mean to
come here, but here I am. So I guess that means I passed.”

She was quite proud of having come up with such a good argument on the spot, and the crowd seemed largely to agree. There were roars of approval from the wrinkled side of the river, and even some applause from the Angleside.

All the sharp edges of the Chief Surveyor’s face became even sharper. He looked like one of the twins when the other twin had just stolen his nice toy horsey away.

“Don’t you try to play logic games with me, little girl,” he said.

The crowds were pointing and shouting many different things by this point. Most of the people out there, even the ones on the Angleside, did not seem very happy about the way the regent was conducting things. Some shouted for the question; some shouted for the lourka; others just shouted without particular words at all, they were so caught up in the thrill of the thing.

“What question do they mean?” said Linny, turning back to the regent.

“Someone who passes the preliminary tests properly is asked a question. She receives the question in an envelope after the tests are graded, and then she comes and answers it here, at the fair, in front of the people. If you think I’m going to make things easy for you, little girl, by just
handing
you the question—”

“Oh, I know what it is!” said Linny, interrupting.
Because all of a sudden she did. She was remembering the stone staircase, and the statue with the lines like wings.

“Enough!” said the regent. “You can’t possibly know what the question is, because I wrote it out myself this morning.”

Linny shook her head. Everything was so clear, so clear, all of a sudden. It was the sunlight that did it. Or maybe the view from this bridge. It was spread out before her now, plain as plain, how everything fit together.

“Oh, I don’t care a fig about
your
question,” she said, somewhat carelessly, perhaps. “I know what the real question is, the labyrinth’s question—”

Half the crowd was jumping and shouting; the other half was hushing the first half and leaning forward, holding its breath.

“It’s written over the doors, down there underground. Here’s what it says: ‘WHICH WAY?’”

Linny spoke right into the tin can when she said that, and on one side of the river the Plainish machine made the words as huge as giants, while on the other side of the river the words rolled through the crowd like the tide, passed from neighbor to neighbor, on and on.

And as that question rippled outward through the crowd, the people fell silent, waiting for something. It was a question, apparently, that had the power to change the world.

23

THE THING ABOUT CROWNS

L
inny heard the enormous words hovering in the air, and she remembered how small the earthwormy tunnels were, in the underground places she had had to travel through to get here, and a laugh bubbled up in her.

Which way
?
Which way?

“I guess when you think about it, it’s the kind of question a maze
would
ask,” she said into the tin can. “It had me crawling through a lot of mud, looking for the right way to go, but the real answer was in the doors at the end.”

“This is absolutely not the correct question,” said the Chief Surveyor somewhere behind Linny’s back, but she didn’t care what he had to say anymore.

“Two doors,” said Linny. “Side by side. And two keys on the key ring, one wrinkled and one Plain.”

She held the key ring out to the crowd. On the Plain side it appeared, as huge as could be, on that screen high
above the crowd. On the wrinkled side of the river, the wave of rumor spread across the crowd again, a growing murmur of excitement.

“And the answer was
both
. Both doors at once. Both keys.”

Both halves of the world. Both sides of my Half-Cat
.

“Don’t tell us stories,” said the regent scornfully. “A person can’t go through two doors at once. That’s impossible.”

“Well, I don’t know whether it’s impossible or not, but that’s what I did,” said Linny.

The crowd was getting louder and louder. They were looking up at the huge image hovering there, of that enormous Linny holding out her enormous hand with the enormous key ring, and they were shouting another word, which Linny didn’t understand at first, until the Chief Surveyor stepped down closer to her and tried to grab the key ring from her hand.

She dodged out of his grasp right in time.

“Give me that,” he said. “It’s not for you.”

The crowd gave an enormous shout.

The word they seemed to be shouting was—

“Crown?” said Linny into the tin can. “What crown?”

There was a great chaos of jumping and yelling as thousands of people tried to explain something to her all at once.

While she was trying to make sense of the noise, the regent leaped forward again and grabbed her wrist.

“I’ll take that now, thank you,” he said, through tight lips, and he pried the key ring—
the key ring!
—out of her hand. “For safekeeping.”

Linny hardly had enough time to say, “Oh!” She was filled with two kinds of surprise—not merely the unpleasantness of the regent’s grasping, bony fingers, which had probably just left bruises on her poor wrist, but also, at the same time, the shock of understanding that something you thought was one thing had actually been something quite different all along.

The ring holding those keys was so large (for a key ring) because it wasn’t actually a key ring at all. It was silver, it was graceful, it was round. Of course, of course: the long-lost crown! The crowd had recognized it before she had herself. She had had the crown in her hands, only to let it be stolen away by the regent—who now snapped the keys into position (how had she not noticed that the keys snapped together, into a silvery-black X), and twirled the crown thoughtfully in his own thin and greedy hands.

From both sides of the river, people were now raging and surging toward the bridge, shouting
at
the regent and shouting out
to
Linny.

At the wrinkled end of the bridge, the line of fences temporarily holding people back was being overcome by
a surge of bodies. And at the forefront of that crowd was an enormous and colorful mountain of a person. That magician!

The regent had seen him, too. He drew in his breath with a hiss. For a moment he turned his sharp-boned face around to look at the howling, angry crowds on either side of the river. Linny could feel the gears in his cold, angular brain making some quick adjustments to his calculations.

He reached forward, pressed a switch at the base of the tin can, and turned around to Linny, his hand held up to hush her.

“Listen to me, little girl,” he said. The words stayed very small and did not travel anywhere. “And listen fast. You said it yourself—you did not come here for crowns and powers, but for medicines for your poor, fading friend. Or that was all a lie?”

Linny shook her head, so angry she couldn’t think of the right words to say. This man was the liar, standing here before her.

“Not a lie?” said the regent. “Then the truth is, this key ring is better off with me. We both know that. And on the subject of medicines—”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the magician, striding now up along the bridge, pushing gray Surveyors aside as if they were rag dolls or the merest folds of gray
draperies getting in his way. The regent’s voice had softened to a shadow, icy and urgent:

“I can find you something, little girl, that should work against wrinkled ailments. Against all magic. I have just such a thing in preparation, hidden well away somewhere. You leave this silver trinket with me, and I can find that something for you. Your friend could still be saved, despite all the time you have wasted causing trouble here.”

“I could find the medicines myself,” said Linny, but even to herself she sounded less than perfectly certain.

“Really?” said the regent. “I don’t think so. You overestimate yourself, and you definitely underestimate me. No. Here’s what you will do. When it comes time for you to have this crown put onto your far-too-young head, you will hand it back to me instead. That will make me your continuing regent, and all will be well. The crowds will be content, order will be maintained, and you will be free to go back up into your hills. With the antidote, yes. Oh, and then, of course, the other part of our bargain:
you will not come back
. But why would you want to?”