In An Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire

Author:Seanan McGuire
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

9 WITH RIBBONS FOR HER HAIR

THE LUNDY WHO had stepped through the door for her second visit to the Goblin Market would barely have recognized the one who came stumbling through it for her second return to the world of her birth. This Lundy was thin, her arms and legs wiry with new muscle, rendered lean by physical labor and the rigors of questing. This Lundy had bruises on her ribs and a narrow scar down the middle of her back, tracing the outline of her spine, where the Bone Wraiths had tried to set their captive countryman free of the fetters of her flesh.

This Lundy was dressed in patchwork and tatters, with her hair cut short in a pageboy bob and thin leather straps wrapped around her fingers to protect them. But most of all—oh, most of all—this Lundy had feathers in her hair, short bronze feathers that glimmered when the light hit them. They grew at the nape of her neck, exposed by the shortness of her haircut, and it would have been possible for the casual observer to tell themselves she had merely tied them there, the fashion stylings of a child.

She had earned each of them with a debt as yet unpaid to the Goblin Market, and she had done so intentionally. They were a mark of promises as yet unkept, and they were, in their own way, a promise entirely on their own. She would return. She would go back to the Market with fuller pockets and a firmer plan, and perhaps this time, she would stay forever, as she had promised a girl with owl-orange eyes that she would one day do. With feathers in her hair she walked through the darkened school to the doors, and out into the evening. She looked at the empty parking lot with quest-wearied eyes. How small the world she’d come from looked now! How narrow and gray!

Home always shrinks in times of absence, always bleeds away some of its majesty, because what is home, after all, apart from the place one returns to when the adventure is over? Home is an end to glory, a stopping point when the tale is done. Lundy walked across the parking lot with the smooth, easy stride of a predator, and no one came to challenge her or ask her where she’d been.

She walked down the moonlit streets of her home town, and everything was peaceful, and everything was still. Somewhere in the distance an owl cried. If she went after it, found it perched in some high tree or in the eaves of some old house, it would look at her with avian incomprehension, incapable of seeing her as a human being, as a friend. A bird in this world was only a bird.

Lundy walked on.

On an ordinary street sat an ordinary house, the windows dark, the occupants still. Lundy plucked the spare key from behind a loose brick in the decorative flowerbed and let herself in, closing the door silently in her wake.

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