Authors: Anne Nesbet
0062104292 (8UP) (3 page)
Some kind of madness had come over Linny by then.
“You’re just jealous,” she said. “Because it’s a good one, and I made it myself. It took me years! It took me years, but listen!”
She played one note, and the sweetness of it hung like honey in the air. It was a very good note! But before she could get as far as note number two, Elias made a lunge at her new-made lourka, and Linny had to spin around and dodge back up to the top of the bank, out of reach. His eyes were furious and frightened under his mop of dark hair, Linny could see that clearly enough. But there was something else in them, too. He had heard that one golden note—he had seen that lourka—he knew it was good. He knew. She could read that in his eyes, and it satisfied some bitter, hungry part of her, seeing that.
Elias made another grab at her lourka, but Linny was smaller than he was—she was still pretty scrawny for someone almost no longer a child—and she danced out of his way.
“You can’t have it!” she said. “You can’t have it! You’re just jealous, that’s what!”
It was kind of exhilarating, being so angry and wild, but already Linny could feel the solid lump of bad feeling she was going to be left with, once all the anger burned off.
“But it’s awful. What will your father say?” said Sayra.
“It’s all my fault. He’ll hate me. He’ll be right to hate me. Oh, Linny. You couldn’t wait one more day?”
There was a moment of silence, there, with just the creek water rustling through it and the thin whistle of some bird in the bushes on the far bank. Linny couldn’t help thinking how much longer she had actually been working on lourkas than this “one more day” suggested. Then her mind shifted to thinking about her father, and the lump of bad feeling was soon getting lumpier in her belly. He could not actually hate Sayra, of course. No one could hate Sayra, who was kind and funny and could turn mere threads into a little person that actually looked like the floury baker.
But what would her father say? That was an icy sort of thought.
None of the daydreams she’d had all those years—of her father listening to a few sweet melodic lines played by his talented, talented daughter on some bright shining new-minted lourka and saying, full of pride, full of joy, “Oh, Linny!”—none of those dreams made any sense, out here in the late-afternoon light of real life. In fact, he would—
And Linny’s mind refused to go that way, too. Her mind just balked and sat down, like a sheep or a goat.
“No,” she said. “You can’t say anything to him.”
Sayra and Elias looked at her, one with sadness, the
other with—well, a kind word for Elias’s expression might be
disgust
.
Linny wrapped her lourka in its cloth and put it back safely away in her bag, turning to the side a little so they wouldn’t see her hands tremble.
“Honestly, Linny,” said Sayra, and she wiped the back of her hand across her eyes with a shuddering sigh. “It’s like you always have to do everything exactly the hardest possible way.”
It was too much for Linny to stand, hearing Sayra sound so unhappy.
“And what were you even thinking we would do,” Sayra went on, “if . . . if bad luck came for you? I would know, all my life, that it was my fault. Because it
would
be my fault. I was supposed to keep you safe. There’s more than a cord tethering us together, by now. Whatever happens to you, it might just as well happen to me instead. That’s how it feels.”
Linny didn’t even know what to do with her own face anymore. There was nowhere to look and no expression to make that could possibly fit. No, by this point she was just a sodden mass of ick and bad feeling. She would be actually crying in a moment—she was beginning to feel most peculiar around the eyes—and Linny never, ever cried. She was way too bad to
cry
.
Elias fortunately rescued her by snorting in scorn,
which of course made her want to smack him, and wanting to smack Elias pulled her right back from the brink of that cliff.
“Don’t worry too much, Linnet, you idiot,” said Elias. “We’ll know whose fault it really is, if the Voices come after you: your own fault and nobody else’s. So there. And I guess you’d better run home now, fast. Your mother wanted you home early today, she told me. I went looking for you earlier, but you were off in the woods.”
So Linny let Sayra tether her back up and take her home. She couldn’t think of anything else to say or to do.
All the gold of that day had evaporated. It was cold suddenly, too, as soon as the sun had vanished behind the brow of the hill. Linny wrapped her arms around her chest, letting the bag with the lourka in it bobble against her back, and she and Sayra made a pretty miserable home-going of it.
It should probably have been the happiest day of her life, too, because, she had done what maybe no child had ever done so well before. She had made a real, singing lourka
with her own hands. In another place, surely she would have been as happy as happy!
But this was the village of Lourka, high in the wrinkled hills, and she, being a girl, was exactly the wrong sort of child.
L
inny slouched through the door of her house to find her mother had made broth and dumplings for dinner, her old favorite, the puffy dumplings that almost sing out in the mouth as the wind picks up outside the door.
But even puffy dumplings could not make Linny smile this evening, weighed down by worry as she was. She had sneaked her bag into her own corner, and there it lay, filled with the evidence of her enormous and unforgivable wickedness. This was probably the last hour of her parents not knowing just how wicked she had been. How the shock would climb into their faces when they saw the lourka there! That was the image that kept elbowing its way into Linny’s mind; it entirely ruined the taste of those dumplings.
She came back to herself about halfway through that meal, when she realized all four pairs of family eyes were leveled on her. Those eyes were full of worry, too, even
the ones belonging to the twins, who (she realized now) must have scrubbed clean for this occasion.
“What?”
she said impatiently to all of them at once.
“No need to bark, Linny,” said her mother. “You can’t be
that
gloomy and expect us all not to notice. What happened out there today? Did you quarrel with Sayra or something?”
The lightness in her voice was spread on thinly, like a very quick coat of paint.
“No!” said Linny. Then she realized that was a lie. “Yes,” she said, and scowled.
“Ah,” said her father. “And you two went home still all quarreled up, letting some little thing fester. That’s varnishing flies, Linny, and you oughtn’t do it.”
His wife looked at him. She hadn’t grown up in a place where lourka-making shaped even the words people used.
“Got to let each coat dry, Irika, when it gets to the varnishing stage,” he explained. (
Fifteen coats,
thought Linny, but she kept her lips pressed together, and the thought stayed put.) “Got to pick out any dust or little critters stuck there before the next coat goes on. Otherwise you’re just varnishing flies, see?”
“
Flies!
Well!” said her mother. “Normal enough for friends to bicker, I guess. These things happen. And everyone so tense these days, riled up about all that twelfth-birthday nonsense.”
“All that nonsense” was Linny’s mother’s phrase for stories she disapproved of, or maybe (the thought was a thin, thin sliver in Linny’s heart) feared.
Linny’s father opened his mouth to protest, but her mother interrupted him by standing up with a clatter of plates and noisily sending the twins off to bed.
“Tomorrow we’ll all feel better,” said Linny’s mother. “It really will be your birthday, Linny!”
“So long looked forward to,” said her father. He couldn’t even pretend to be anything but anxious. His hand shook when he put down his knife. “Our dear, wild, hummy Linnet, safe and grown.”
The twins—named after the lourka woods, maple and pine (but known since babyhood as Maybe and Pie)—were having one of their private, silly, twinnish conversations on their way up the loft ladder: “Grown up! Maybe tomorrow she’ll look, you know—”
“All completely different—”
“Tall, tall, and bumpy chested!” Giggles and whispers.
“You entirely ridiculous boys!” Linny heard her mother say, and that was comfortingly normal.
But when Linny put her own foot on the stairs, her father stopped her.
“We thought we’d sit up with you tonight,” he said. “We’ll just pull the chairs in front of the fire here.”
“We’ll have the quilts,” said her mother, adding a
gloss of brightness to her thin coat of good cheer. “It’ll be cozy.”
Not so very cozy if you happened to be Linny, however, whose stomach felt like it was tying itself in knots. The bag she had left in the corner began again to pull on her eyes, wanting her to look over at it and give herself away.
It was not the sort of secret that could stay a secret. Elias would tell on her for sure, and maybe that strand of goodness in Sayra would win out over her inner mischief and make her feel like she had no choice but to confess. Linny frowned to herself and picked at her fingernails for a while, feeling squirmy again under the concerned eyes of her parents.
The minutes ticked away, slow as tree sap. Linny counted cracks in the wooden walls. She did that trick with her eyes to make her brown hand turn into two hands in the firelight. She waggled all those extra fingers. Still time refused to budge.
She wasn’t the only one suffering. Her father shifted in his chair for the tenth or twentieth time.
“There’s something I have to say to you, Linny,” he said suddenly. He was too earnest—Linny found herself wanting to be somewhere far away. “I’m sorry we had to be so tough on you, all these years. It’s not natural, is it, to keep children tethered together! But you know it was
out of love we did it, Linny. Keeping you safely away from music and all that, for the twelve years. I know it’s been hard as hard—”
“Doesn’t matter now,” said Linny’s mother more brightly. “Another couple of hours and we’ll be past all that foolishness finally, won’t we? I don’t so often miss the Plain, you know, but at times like these—”
“Irika,” said Linny’s father, almost pleading.
“No, it should be said!” said Linny’s mother. “After all, for all the troubles down there, at least in the Plain stories stay stories, you know that. In the Plain there wouldn’t be some doom that strikes girls just because they touch some foolish musical instrument. If you get sick in the Plain, there are medicines no one uses here. That work on the cells of the body to fix them, when they don’t work as they ought. There are
doctors
.”
Her father was looking appalled.
“Never mind all that now,” he said. “The important thing is here we are, and in an hour I will break the wax off a bottle of last year’s wine so we can be properly glad together. Our Linnet has made it through her child years without touching a lourka, despite the music fire being so fierce in her. Many said it couldn’t be done, that we would see her safely through, and keep lourkas out of her hand all that time, when she was born such a very hummy baby.”
“Um,” said Linny, and she caught herself accidentally glancing over at the bag in the corner. Her father perhaps did not see her do that, but her mother certainly did.
“What’s wrong, Linny?” she said. “Is there something we should know?” And there was worry in those questions.
“But
you
don’t believe all those stories, do you, Mama? That a girl who even just by accident bumped into a lourka sometime—”
The words kind of petered out in her head, because it turned out that her mother thinking it was all nonsense had been the ground under her feet. And a tremor had just gone through that ground.
Her father took a breath that was meant to be calm but sounded rather gasping.
“Did that happen to you, Lin? You’re remembering something now?”
“No!” said Linny. Well, it wasn’t a lie, in the strict sense. But the fear she had been working so hard to keep at bay was beginning to trickle into her from all directions. “Anyway, in the Plain they know better, right, Mama?”
Her mother shifted in her chair.
“In the Plain they know differently,” she said. “That’s the thing. Here in the hills, stories make the world. You know that. Up here people see one of those owls with
the crystal beak and the wings that shed ice when it flies, and they say, ‘Someone’s been telling stories about ice owls again.’ Right? That’s not the way things work in the Plain, that’s for sure. And yes, some part of me still thinks it’s nonsense. But another part knows better than anybody how stories can come true up here. Look at me! I came up here looking for a girl just like you, and here you are! So I’ll be glad when it’s safely tomorrow for real, and we can move on past all this, all this—”
And this time she wouldn’t even say the word. Wouldn’t say “nonsense.” Under Linny’s feet there was only shadow, where not very long ago there had been everything solid. It was not a good feeling.
“Now, now,” said her father. “I’m sure we’ll all be glad. Don’t let’s be worrying when we don’t need to. We’ve been so very careful, all this long time.”
Linny’s heart was sinking lower and lower.
“Linny,” said her mother. “Think hard, sweet girl, just to be extra cautious. Did you ever, even slightly, even completely by accident, even with one elbow, even sleepwalking, even because someone bumped into you on his way somewhere—did you ever touch or take some lourka? Your father’s or anybody else’s? Did you?”
Hearing her sensible, Plain-spoken mother start talking this way . . . that put knobbles of fear in her stomach. Linny looked over at that bag in the corner. The fear
knobbles rolled about like ice-cold marbles in her.
“Mama, Papa,” she said in a whisper. “You’ll hate me.”
“Never,” they both said.
“Tell us, then, quick,” added her mother. “What have you done? What have you touched or borrowed or begged from someone?”
