فصل 17

17.

In Which There Is a Crack in the Nut

Luna thought she was ordinary. She thought she was loved. She was half right.

She was a girl of five; and later, she was seven; and later she was, incredibly, eleven.

It was a fine thing indeed, Luna thought, being eleven. She loved the symmetry of it, and the lack of symmetry. Eleven was a number that was visually even, but functionally not—it looked one way and behaved in quite another. Just like most eleven-­year-­olds, or so she assumed. Her association with other children was always limited to her grandmother’s visits to the Free Cities, and only the visits on which Luna was permitted to come. Sometimes, her grandmother went without her. And every year, Luna found it more and more enraging.

She was eleven, after all. She was both even and odd. She was ready to be many things at once—child, grown-­up, poet, engineer, botanist, dragon. The list went on. That she was barred from some journeys and not others was increasingly galling. And she said so. Often. And loudly.

When her grandmother was away, Luna spent most of her time in the workshop. It was filled with books about metals and rocks and water, books about flowers and mosses and edible plants, books about animal biology and animal behavior and animal husbandry, books about the theories and principles of mechanics. But Luna’s favorite books were the ones about astronomy—the moon, especially. She loved the moon so much, she wanted to wrap her arms around it and sing to it. She wanted to gather ever morsel of moonlight into a great bowl and drink it dry. She had a hungry mind, an itchy curiosity, and a knack for drawing, building, and fashioning.

Her fingers had a mind of their own. “Do you see, Glerk?” she said, showing off her mechanical cricket, made of polished wood and glass eyes and tiny metal legs attached to springs. It hopped; it skittered; it reached; it grabbed. It could even sing. Right now, Luna set it just so, and the cricket began to turn the pages of a book. Glerk wrinkled his great, damp nose.

“It turns pages,” she says. “Of a book. Has there ever been a cleverer cricket?”

“But it’s just turning the pages willy-­nilly,” he said. “It isn’t as though it is reading the book. And even if it was, it wouldn’t be reading at the same time as you. How would it know when to approach the page and turn it?” He was just needling her, of course. In truth, he was very impressed. But as he had told her a thousand times, he couldn’t possibly be impressed at every impressive thing that she ever did. He might find that his heart had swelled beyond its capacity and sent him out of the world entirely.

Luna stamped her foot. “Of course it can’t read. It turns the page when I tell it to turn the page.” She folded her arms across her chest and gave her swamp monster what she hoped was a hard look.

“I think you are both right,” Fyrian said, trying to make peace. “I love foolish things. And clever things. I love all the things.”

“Hush, Fyrian,” both girl and swamp monster said as one.

“It takes longer to position your cricket to turn the page than it does to actually turn the page on your own. Why not simply turn the page?” Glerk worried that he had already taken the joke too far. He picked up Luna in his four arms and positioned her at the top of his top right shoulder. She rolled her eyes and climbed back down.

“Because then there wouldn’t be a cricket.” Luna’s chest felt prickly. Her whole body felt prickly. She had been prickly all day. “Where is Grandmama?” she asked.

“You know where she is,” Glerk said. “She will be back next week.”

“I dislike next week. I wish she was back today.”

“The Poet tells us that impatience belongs to small things—fleas, tadpoles, and fruit flies. You, my love, are ever so much more than a fruit fly.”

“I dislike the Poet as well. He can boil his head.”

These words cut Glerk to his core. He pressed his four hands to his heart and fell down heavily upon his great bottom, curling his tail around his body in a protective gesture. “What a thing to say.”

“I mostly mean it,” Luna said.

Fyrian fluttered from girl to monster and monster to girl. He did not know where to land.

“Come, Fyrian,” Luna said, opening one of her side pockets. “You can take a nap, and I will walk us up to the ridge to see if we can see my grandmother on her journey. We can see terribly far from up there.”

“You won’t be able to see her yet. Not for days.” Glerk looked closely at the girl. There was something . . . off today. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

“You never know,” Luna said, turning on her heel and walking up the trail.

“ ‘Patience has no wing,’ ” Glerk recited as she walked.

“ ‘Patience does not run

Nor blow, nor skitter, nor falter.

Patience is the swell of the ocean;

Patience is the sigh of the mountain;

Patience is the shirr of the Bog;

Patience is the chorus of stars,

Infinitely singing.’ ”

“I am not listening to you!” Luna called without turning around. But she was. Glerk could tell.

By the time Luna reached the bottom of the slope, Fyrian was already asleep. That dragon could sleep anywhere and anytime. He was an expert sleeper. Luna reached into her pocket and gave his head a gentle tap. He didn’t wake up.

“Dragons!” Luna muttered. This was the given answer to many of her questions, though it didn’t always make very much sense. When Luna was little, Fyrian was older than she—that was obvious. He taught her to count, to add and subtract, and to multiply and divide. He taught her how to make numbers into something larger than themselves, applying them to larger concepts about motion and force, space and time, curves and circles and tightened springs.

But now, it was different. Fyrian seemed younger and younger every day. Sometimes, it seemed to Luna that he was going backward in time while she stood still, but other times it seemed that the opposite was true: it was Fyrian who was standing still while Luna raced forward. She wondered why this was.

Dragons! Glerk would explain.

Dragons! Xan would agree. The both shrugged. Dragons, it was decided. What can one do?

Which never actually answered anything. At least Fyrian never attempted to deflect or obfuscate Luna’s many questions. Firstly because he had no idea what obfuscate meant. And secondly because he rarely knew any answers. Unless they pertained to mathematics. Then he was a fountain of answers. For everything else, he was just Fyrian, and that was enough.

Luna reached the top of the ridge before noon. She curled her fingers over her eyes and tried to look out as far as she could. She had never been this high before. She was amazed Glerk had let her go.

The Cities lay on the other side of the forest, down the slow, southern slope of the mountain, where the land became stable and flat. Where the earth no longer was trying to kill you. Beyond that, Luna knew, were farms and more forests and more mountains, and eventually an ocean. But Luna had never been that far. On the other side of her mountain—to the north—there was nothing but forest, and beyond that was a bog that covered half the world.

Glerk told her that the world was born out of that bog.

“How?” Luna had asked a thousand times.

“A poem,” Glerk sometimes said.

“A song,” he said at other times. And then, instead of explaining further, he told her she’d understand some day.

Glerk, Luna decided, was horrible. Everyone was horrible. And most horrible was the pain in her head that had been getting worse all day. She sat down on the ground and closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she could see a blue color with a shimmer of silver at the edges, along with something else entirely. A hard, dense something, like a nut.

And what’s more, the something seemed to be pulsing—as though it contained intricate clockwork. Click, click, click.

Each click brings me closer to the close, Luna thought. She shook her head. Why would she think that? She had no idea.

The close of what? she wondered. But there was no answer.

And all of a sudden, she had an image in her head of a house with hand-­stitched quilts draped on the chairs and art on the walls and colorful jars arranged on shelves in bright, tempting rows. And a woman with black hair and a crescent moon birthmark on her forehead. And a man’s voice crooning, Do you see your mama? Do you, my darling? And that word in her mind, echoing from one side of her skull to the other, Mama, mama, mama, over and over and over again, like the cry of a faraway bird.

“Luna?” Fyrian said. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” Luna said, wiping her tears away. “And anyway, I just miss my grandmama, that’s all.”

And that was true. She did miss her. No amount of standing and staring was going to change the amount of time that it takes to walk from the Free Cities to their home at the top of the sleeping volcano. That was certain. But the house and the quilts and the woman with the black hair—Luna had seen them before. But she didn’t know where.

She looked down toward the swamp and the barn and the workshop and the tree house, with its round windows peering out from the sides of the massive tree trunk like astonished, unblinking eyes. There was another house. And another family. Before this house. And this family. She knew it in her bones.

“Luna, what is wrong?” Fyrian asked, a note of anguish in his voice.

“Nothing, Fyrian,” Luna said, curling her hands around his midsection and pulling him close. She kissed the top of his head. “Nothing at all. I’m just thinking about how much I love my family.”

It was the first lie she ever told. Even though her words were true.