فصل 19

19.

In Which There Is a Journey to the Town of Agony

For the people who loved Luna, time passed in a blur. Luna, however, worried that she might never be twelve. Each day felt like a heavy stone to be hoisted to the top of a very tall mountain.

In the meantime, each day increased her knowledge. Each day caused the world to simultaneously expand and contract; the more Luna knew, the more she became frustrated by what she did not yet know. She was a quick study and quick-­fingered and quick-­footed and sometimes quick-­tempered. She cared for the goats and cared for the chickens and cared for her grandmother and her dragon and her swamp monster. She knew how to coax milk and gather eggs and bake bread and fashion inventions and build contraptions and grow plants and press cheese and simmer a stew to nourish the mind and the soul. She knew how to keep the house tidy (though she didn’t like that job much) and how to stitch birds onto the hem of a dress to make it delightful.

She was a bright child, an accomplished child, a child who loved and was loved.

And yet.

There was something missing. A gap in her knowledge. A gap in her life. Luna could feel it. She hoped that turning twelve would solve this—build a bridge across the gap. It didn’t.

Instead, once she finally did turn twelve, Luna noticed that several changes had begun to occur—not all of them pleasant. She was, for the first time, taller than her grandmother. She was more distractible. Impatient. Peevish. She snapped at her grandmother. She snapped at her swamp monster. She even snapped at her dragon, who was as close to her heart as a twin brother. She apologized to all of them, of course, but the fact of it happening was itself an irritation. Why was everyone vexing her so? Luna wondered.

And another thing. While Luna had always believed that she had read every single book in the workshop, she began to realize that there were several more that she had never read at all. She knew what they looked like. She knew where they sat on the shelf. But try as she might, she could not picture their titles, nor remember a single clue as to their contents.

And what’s more, she found that she could not even read the words on the spines of certain volumes. She should have been able to read them. The words were not foreign and the letters hooked into one another in ways that ought to have made perfect sense.

And yet.

Every time she tried to look at the spines, her eyes would slide from one side to the other, as though they were not made of leather and ink, but of glass slicked with oil. It did not happen when she looked at the spine The Lives of a Star and it did not happen when she looked at the beloved copy of Mechanica. But other books, they were as slippery as marbles in butter. And what’s more, whenever she reached for one of them, she would find herself unaccountably lost in a memory or a dream. She would find herself going cross-­eyed and fuzzy-­headed, whispering poetry or making up a story. Sometimes she would regain her senses minutes or hours or half a day later, shaking her head to un-­addle her brains, and wondering what on earth she had been doing, or for how long.

She didn’t tell anyone about these spells. Not her grandmother. Not Glerk. Certainly not Fyrian. She didn’t want to worry any of them. These changes were too embarrassing. Too strange. And so she kept it secret. Even still, they sometimes gave her strange looks. Or odd answers to her questions, as if they already knew something was wrong with her. And that wrongness clung to her, like a headache that she couldn’t shake.

Another thing that happened after Luna turned twelve: she began to draw. All the time. She drew both mindlessly and mindfully. She drew faces, places, and minute details of plants and animals—a stamen here, a paw there, the rotted-­out tooth of an aged goat. She drew star maps and maps of the Free Cities and maps of places that existed only in her imagination. She drew a tower with unsettling stonework and intersecting corridors and stairways crowding its insides, looming over a town drenched in fog. She drew a woman with long, black hair. And a man in robes.

It was all her grandmother could do to keep her in paper and quills. Fyrian and Glerk took to making her pencils from charcoal and stiff reeds. She could never get enough.

Later that year, Luna and her grandmother walked to the Free Cities again. Her grandmother was always in high demand. She checked in on the pregnant women and gave advice to the midwives and healers and apothecaries. And while Luna loved visiting the towns on the other side of the forest, this time the journey also vexed her.

Her grandmother—as stable as a boulder all of Luna’s life—was starting to weaken. Luna’s increasing worry for her grandmother’s health pricked at her skin, like a dress made of thorns.

Xan had been limping the whole way. And it was getting worse. “Grandmama,” Luna said, watching her grandmother wince with each step. “Why are you still walking? You should be sitting. I think you should sit down right now. Oh, look. A log. For sitting on.”

“Oh, tosh,” her grandmother said, leaning heavily on her staff and wincing again. “The more I sit, the longer the journey will take us.”

“The more you walk, the more pain you’ll be in,” Luna countered.

Every morning, it seemed, Xan had a new ache or a new pain. A cloudiness in the eye or a droop to a shoulder. Luna was beside herself.

“Do you want me to sit on your feet, Grandmama?” she asked Xan. “Do you want me to tell you a story or sing you a song?”

“What has gotten into you, child?” Luna’s grandmother sighed.

“Maybe you should eat something. Or drink something. Maybe you should have some tea. Would you like me to make you tea? Perhaps you should sit down. For tea.”

“I’m perfectly fine. I have made this trip more times than I can count, and I have never had any trouble. You are making a fuss over nothing.” But Luna knew something was changing in her grandmother. There was a tremor in her voice and a tremble in her hands. And she was so thin! Luna’s grandmother used to be bulbous and squat—all soft hugs and squishy cuddles. Now she was fragile and delicate and light—dry grasses wrapped in crumbling paper that might fall apart in a gust of wind.

When they arrived in the town called Agony, Luna ran ahead to the widow woman’s house, just at the border.

“My grandmother’s not well,” Luna told the widow woman. “Don’t tell her I said so.”

And the widow woman sent her almost-­grown-­up son (a Star Child, like so many others), who ran to the healer, who ran to the apothecary, who ran to the mayor, who alerted the League of Ladies, who alerted the Gentlemen’s Association and the Clockmakers Alliance and the Quilters and the Tinkers and the town school. By the time Xan hobbled into the widow woman’s garden, half the town was already there, setting up tables and tents, with legions upon legions of busybodies preparing themselves to fuss over the old woman.

“Foolishness,” Xan sniffed, though she lowered herself gratefully into the chair that a young woman placed right next to the herb garden for her.

“We thought it best,” the widow woman said.

“I thought it best,” corrected Luna, and what seemed like a thousand hands caressed her cheeks and the top of her head and her shoulders. “Such a good girl,” the townspeople murmured. “We knew she would be the best of best girls, and the best of best children, and one day the best of best women. We do so love being right.”

This attention wasn’t unusual. Whenever Luna visited the Free Cities, she found herself warmly received and fawned over. She didn’t know why the townspeople loved her so, or why they seemed to hang on her every word, but she enjoyed their admiration.

They remarked at her fine eyes, dark and glittering as the night sky, her black hair shot with gold, the birthmark on her forehead in the shape of a crescent moon. They remarked on her intelligent fingers and her strong arms and her fast legs. They praised her for her precise way of speaking and her clever gestures when she danced and her lovely singing voice.

“She sounds like magic,” the town matrons sighed, and then Xan shot them a poisonous look, at which they started mumbling about the weather.

That word made Luna frown. In that moment, she knew she must have heard it before—she must have. But a moment later, the word flew out of her mind, like a hummingbird. And then it was gone. Just a blank space was left where the word had been, like a fleeting thought at the edge of a dream.

Luna sat among a collection of Star Children—all different ages—one infant, some toddlers, and moving upward to the oldest, who was an impressively old man.

(“Why are they called Star Children?” Luna had asked possibly thousands of times.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about,” Xan answered vaguely.

And then she changed the subject. And then Luna forgot. Every time.

Only lately, she could remember herself forgetting.)

The Star Children were discussing their earliest memories. It was a thing they did often—seeing which one could get as close as possible to the moment when Old Xan brought them to their families and marked them as beloved. Since no one could actually remember such a thing—they had been far too young—they went as deep into their memories as they could to find the earliest image among them.

“I can remember a tooth—how it became wiggly and fell out. Everything before that is a bit of a blur, I’m afraid,” said the older Star Child gentleman.

“I can remember a song that my mother used to sing. But she still sings it, so perhaps it isn’t a memory after all,” said a girl.

“I remember a goat. A goat with a crinkly mane,” said a boy.

“Are you sure that wasn’t just Old Xan?” a girl asked him, giggling. She was one of the younger Star Children.

“Oh,” the boy said. “Perhaps you are right.”

Luna wrinkled her brow. There were images lurking in the back of her mind. Were they memories or dreams? Or memories of dreams of memories? Or perhaps she had made them up. How was she supposed to know?

She cleared her throat.

“There was an old man,” she said, “with dark robes that made a swishing sound like the wind, and he had a wobbly neck and a nose like a vulture, and he didn’t like me very much.”

The Star Children cocked their heads.

“Really?” one of the boys said. “Are you sure?” They stared at her intently, curling their lips between their teeth and biting down.

Xan waved her left hand dismissively while her cheeks began to flush from pink to scarlet.

“Don’t listen to her.” Xan rolled her eyes. “She has no idea what she’s talking about. There was no such man. We see lots of silly things when we dream.”

Luna closed her eyes.

“And there was a woman who lived on the ceiling whose hair waved like the branches of the sycamore trees in a storm.”

“Impossible,” her grandmother scoffed. “You don’t know anyone that I didn’t meet first. I was there for your whole life.” She gazed at Luna with a narrowed eye.

“And a boy who smelled like sawdust. Why would he smell like sawdust?”

“Lots of people smell like sawdust,” her grandmother said. “Woodcutters, carpenters, the lady who carves spoons. I could go on and on.”

This was true, of course, and Luna had to shake her head. The memory was old, and faraway, but at the same time, clear. Luna didn’t have very many memories that were as tenacious as this one—her memory, typically, was a slippery thing, and difficult to pin down—and so she hung on to it. This image meant something. She was sure of it.

Her grandmother, now that she thought about it, never spoke of memories. Not ever.

The next day, after sleeping in the guest room of the widow woman, Xan walked through the town, checking on the pregnant women, advising them on their work level and food choices, listening to their bellies.

Luna tagged along. “So you may learn something useful,” her grandmother said. Her words stung, no mistake.

“I’m useful,” Luna said, tripping on the cobblestones as they hurried to the first patient’s house on the other edge of town.

The woman’s pregnancy was so far along, she looked as though she might burst at any second. She greeted both grandmother and grandchild with a serene exhaustion. “I’d get up,” she said, “but I fear I may fall over.” Luna kissed the lady on the cheek, as was customary, and quickly touched the mound of belly, feeling the child leap inside. Suddenly she had a lump in her throat.

“Why don’t I make some tea?” she said briskly, turning her face away.

I had a mother once, Luna thought. I must have. She frowned. And surely, she must have asked about it, too, but she couldn’t seem to remember doing so.

Luna made a list of what she knew in her head.

Sorrow is dangerous.

Memories are slippery.

My grandmother does not always tell the truth.

And neither do I.

These thoughts swirled in Luna’s mind as she swirled the tea leaves in the boiling water.

“Can the girl rest her hands on my belly for a little bit?” the woman asked. “Or perhaps she could sing to the child. I would appreciate her blessing—living as she does in the presence of magic.”

Luna did not know why the woman would want her blessing—or even what a blessing was. And that last word . . . it sounded familiar. But Luna couldn’t remember. And just like that, she could barely remember the word at all—and was only aware of a pulsing sensation in her skull, like the ticking of a clock. In any case, Luna’s grandmother hastily shooed her out the door, and then her thinking went fuzzy, and then she was back inside pouring tea from the pot. But the tea had gone cold. How long had she been outside? She hit the side of her head a few times with the heel of her hand to un-­addle her brains. Nothing seemed to help.

At the next house, Luna arranged the herbs for the mother’s care in order of usefulness. She rearranged the furniture to better accommodate the growing belly of the expectant lady, and rearranged the kitchen supplies so she wouldn’t have to reach as far.

“Well, look at you,” the mother said. “So helpful!”

“Thank you,” Luna said bashfully.

“And smart as a whip,” she added.

“Of course she is,” Xan agreed. “She’s mine, isn’t she?”

Luna felt a rush of cold. Once again, that memory of waving black hair, and strong hands and the smell of milk and thyme and black pepper, and a woman’s voice screaming, She’s mine, she’s mine, she’s mine.

The image was so clear, so present and immediate, that Luna felt her breath catch and her heart pound. The pregnant woman didn’t notice. Xan didn’t notice. Luna could feel the screaming woman’s voice in her ears. She could feel that black hair in her fingertips. She lifted her gaze to the rafters, but no one was there.

The rest of their visit passed without incident, and Luna and Xan made the long journey home. They did not speak of the memory of the man in the robes. Or of any other kind of memory. They did not speak of sorrow or worries or black-­haired women on ceilings.

And the things that they did not speak of began to outweigh the things that they did. Each secret, each unspoken thing was round and hard and heavy and cold, like a stone hung around the necks of both grandmother and girl.

Their backs bent under the weight of secrets.