The Wrinkled Crown Read online

  DEDICATION

  For all those who would go down into the Plain

  for a friend, and, in particular,

  for Isa and Jayne.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  1. Never Touch a Lourka

  2. Some Things Nobody Knew

  3. What Doom Sounds Like

  4. I Will find Her

  5. That Lummox Elias

  6. Twists in the Path

  7. “Thank You, Brave Linnet!”

  8. The Lay of the Land

  9. A Door in the Wall

  10. In the House of the Magician

  11. Linnet Alone

  12. The Price of a Fancy Breakfast

  13. The Death and Dollop

  14. Race to the River

  15. The Bridge House

  16. The First Surveyor

  17. Strong Tea

  18. Locks and Latches

  19. Escaping into the Dark

  20. Deeper and Darker

  21. Doors and Keys

  22. The Girl from Underground

  23. The Thing about Crowns

  24. Unwrinkled!

  25. Disaster

  26. Into the Plain

  27. About Surveyors

  28. The Plain Sea

  29. Back to the Edge

  30. To the Edge

  31. Sayra

  32. Complications

  33. Ouch!

  34. Home Again

  35. Girl with Lourka

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Anne Nesbet

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  NEVER TOUCH A LOURKA

  It was maybe Linny’s last day of all—a pretty horrible thought—but the air in the meadow was humming with sunlight, as if nothing were the slightest bit wrong. Green and warm, the smell, with a tang to it that was all from the sheep: three parts wool, one part manure. Or maybe it was better to say the whole meadow smelled just slightly of sheep’s cheese—sheep’s cheese and hay. Hey!

  Linny gave her head a shake to get rid of the webs cobbing there. This was no time to be thinking about sheep!

  Tomorrow she would be twelve, no longer a child. Twelve was not any old ordinary birthday, not up in the wrinkled hills, not for a girl. It was a gate that didn’t let everyone through. Even Linny—who had once sucked actual real snake venom out of a friend’s arm and spat it boldly on the moss, where it sizzled like hot grease—even bold Linnet had to turn her mind away from the thought of the birthday coming for her, inching closer with every tick rattle tick of the village clock. Tomorrow is not now. Tomorrow is very far away.

  And to rub it all in, the faint sweet strum of a lourka rose up from the village behind them, making Linny’s heart sore.

  Round bellied, four stringed, golden voiced—there was nothing anywhere quite like a lourka from Lourka.

  Whether the village was named after the instrument or the instrument after the village, nobody knew for sure. What mattered was this: if a girl so much as touched a lourka during her child days—even by accident! even tripping over her own papa’s instrument in the dark!—then on her twelfth birthday, the Voices would come, and off they would take her soul to Away.

  “Oh, let’s go!” said Linny, tugging the cord that tethered her and Sayra together, the mismatched twins. “It’s late already, and there’s so much to do!”

  No one knew where Away was, up past the most wrinkled parts of the highest hills, but it didn’t sound like a place you could sneak home from.

  “You can’t get there from here, nor back again neither.” That was what the miller liked to say about Away. And there had been a girl taken when he was a boy, so he must know.

  It made Linny mad just thinking about it, so mad she kicked the ground—and Sayra stumbled. That’s the way tethers are. Cause and effect, always causing trouble.

  “No stomping!” said Sayra, but she laughed as she said it. “You’re the one with the birthday coming! You should be happy as a duckling. Tomorrow you get to throw this tether right into the creek, if you want to. Tomorrow you’ll be free.”

  Being Sayra, she didn’t point out that she, Sayra, would also be free from that tether tomorrow. Maybe she didn’t even think that thought, she was so good (but Linny thought it for her). No, Sayra just picked up a couple of spilled needles and tucked them cheerfully away:

  “And so I’d think you’d be starting to be happy already today, knowing it’s your birthday tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!” said Linny. She was grumbling, she knew it, but she couldn’t help it. “If I’m still here. If the Voices don’t come and—”

  “Don’t tell such stories!” said Sayra, and gave Linny’s hand a sharp tap for good measure. You had to be careful about the things you said, this high up in the wrinkled hills, where stories had a way of coming true. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. There’s been the tether protecting you in the village, and the woods keeping you safe out here. And tomorrow you won’t even have to worry anymore. A miracle, that’s what my mother says. A mi-ra-cle!”

  It was a miracle because there hadn’t been a girl born as hummy as Linny in a hundred years. Linnet’s father had even made a cage to clamp over the top of her cradle, though how could a cage do much to protect a child so hungry for music? Oh, but the whole village loved Linnet and had been willing to take desperate measures to keep her safe.

  Which was why she was tethered to Sayra during most of every day.

  No music fire in Sayra! Her talents were the safer ones of needle and cloth, and she had a quicksilver smile and green eyes and a face that could play tricks on you, shifting from sweetness to monster scowl in less than a blink. And back again. With eyes that sparked and laughed, sparked and laughed, the whole time.

  Linny and Sayra knew each other far better than even the best of friends usually do, because Linny had been tethered to Sayra since she had learned to crawl.

  “You are a good girl,” the grown-ups had said to Sayra then, who was only a toddler herself at the time. “You will not let your friend Linny get near a lourka. We have all promised to keep her safe.”

  Sayra was a good girl, but she wasn’t that good, thank goodness. Here’s a secret: sometimes she let Linny run free in the woods, and both of them were happy, and nobody else could ever, ever know.

  “Tomorrow you’ll be free like a rabbit! Wait . . . stand still—you’ve got a thread loose there.”

  Sayra hated loose threads.

  “Free to hop around Lourka,” said Linny, making a face. While Sayra tied off that thread, Linny shuffled from foot to foot and thought grumbling thoughts about hopping around Lourka.

  Lourka was a very small world, as far as Linny was concerned. The village; the meadows; the woods; the hills. And everyone knew that if you walked away too far downhill—if you went past the boundary trees or around one too many bends in the creek—you would never ever find your way back.

  You were born in Lourka, or you had wandered there, but it was not a place you could return to by choice, once you had left. That was the story. Once in a blue moon a breathless stranger might wander in from elsewhere, as Linny’s own mother had long ago done, all footsore, hillsick, and amazed, but no one Linny had heard of had ever left, striding off past the boundary trees, and then actually returned.

  “Don’t grumble,” said Sayra. “You’ll be free to hop anywhere you want, I guess. And to make music, too, once you’re officially twelve and it’s safe. That should make you happy! Not to mention—now I can give you your birthday present! Which I made myself, you know, so you’d better like it.”

  Sayra could make anything (anything) with ne
edle, thread, and a scrap of cloth.

  “My birthday’s tomorrow, not today,” said Linny.

  “I dreamed I shouldn’t wait. I dreamed I should give it to you today,” said Sayra, and she looked with her green eyes right at Linny, trying very hard to keep her gaze steady. But the blinking gave her away, and the wobble at the corner of her mouth. Linny felt the worry surge up in her again.

  “Anyway,” said Sayra. “Tomorrow they’ll all be fussing over you, and I won’t get a word in edgewise.”

  They were settled comfortably on the rocks they liked best, in a clearing nobody else ever came to, high in the Middle Woods. Sayra reached into her sewing bag and opened her hands so carefully that Linny thought the gift must be something living, a new-hatched chick or even a frog.

  But no, it was a wonderfully wrinkled gift: a band of cloth, all embroidered with pictures of things they knew from their woods, and tucked into a little pocket in the middle, there was a bright bud of a flower, sewn from the prettiest scraps of satiny cloth. The best of all possible birthday sashes, with satin ribbons to keep it safely tied around Linny’s waist.

  “Oh!” said Linny, delighted, as she was always delighted by the things Sayra’s thin, clever fingers made. “It’s got the wolf and the snake!”

  They had saved each other’s lives three times already. There was the sinewy blue wolf with huge teeth, way back when they were still very small, that Sayra had thrown pinecones at and somehow driven away (and the grown-ups had gone looking afterward and seen no trace of it, so Linny had been unfairly warned against telling stories, which is such a dangerous business up in the hills), and there was, of course, the snake that had casually sunk its fangs into Sayra’s arm. They never told anyone about that.

  And right there on that embroidered sash was also the tree Linny had fallen out of, when she had climbed up to get a sense of the hills. Sayra had retethered her, picked her up, and carried her all the way down to the village, which goes to show how much stronger Sayra was than you might think, just by looking at her. And that had been the third time.

  “Shh, silly, that’s not all,” said Sayra, narrowing her leaf-colored eyes. “Watch now. I put some of you and some of myself right into it, because it’s your birthday.”

  The threads that ran through that rosebud must have been spun from wrinkled silk, magic in every fiber, because the bud was already blushing a deeper pink as Sayra held it on her palm. (Sayra’s mother had a glass-walled warm room where little silkworms spun their amazing cocoons.) Oh! And now it began to open up, blossoming into a red rose flower. Linny clapped her hands in wonder, but Sayra put her finger to her lips: there was more. The rose darkened and purpled and changed, until it was a butterfly of silk, fluttering its pretty wings—and the wings of the butterfly had pictures sewn on them in threads of many colors, and those pictures shifted as Linny watched. She saw herself, Linny, running under the trees, and a tiny Sayra bent over her sewing while a few blue stitches flowed by, to make a thready creek, and there was Sayra’s house, and Linny’s, and even Linny’s young brothers, waving the tiniest of little silk hands. And then the butterfly curled up into itself and became a flower bud again, and Sayra tucked the bud into the pocket on the cloth band there, and folded that whole incredible silky present right into Linny’s amazed hand.

  It was like a song, inside a story, made out of silk.

  There was no one like Sayra.

  Sayra gave Linny’s shoulders a hug.

  “Want to spend the day quietly singing to me? Wouldn’t that be the safest safest thing to do? No, no, all right. Look at you twitching at the thought of it. Go run wild in the woods, then, like you always do. But don’t mess up!”

  “Mmm,” said Linny, made frankly itchy by the worry that wouldn’t get out of her head.

  “I’m serious: one more day! Don’t even go near the village where a lourka might grab you. Don’t get caught, and don’t get lost,” said Sayra.

  That was an old joke of theirs, because getting lost was something Linny could pretty much not possibly do. It was one of her private wrinkles, quite separate from the music fire burning in her; Linny always knew where she was in the ups, downs, and side ways of the world. Other children get their eyes from some parent, their noses from some other parent. With her wild dark hair, Linny looked nothing at all like the rest of her family, but she had inherited humminess from her father and the gift of not getting lost from her mother. Her mother didn’t even like to call it a wrinkle, because down in the Plain, where she had come from, things and places and people were not wrinkled, and all the unmagical squirrels were the same shade of rock gray (said her mother) and stayed that color always, not winking from purple to green on a whim as the squirrels did here. It was hard for Linny to imagine what that would be like, the land of squirrels as gray and unchanging as rocks.

  Linny had tried describing to Sayra how the not-being-lost wrinkle felt, but it was like explaining to a blind person what it means not to be blind. Most people were so awkward and helpless, the way they stopped halfway up a hill and looked around and didn’t know which way to go or even which direction they had come from anymore. Sayra herself was slightly frightened of wild places, Linny could tell. That made another thought unfurl in Linny’s head, an unpleasant, icy thought:

  Guess maybe you’ll never—

  But she bit her own tongue, because it felt like those words fished too deep in her and might drag up things she didn’t really want to see. Awkward, sharp-edged thoughts, like Maybe you’ll never come back out here again with me, Sayra, once you don’t have to.

  Instead she gulped, and turned the gulp into “Thank you,” and skidded her palm across the top of Sayra’s smooth head, which was the fastest, fondest possible way to say good-bye to someone holding needles in her hands, and sped away into those trees, moving fast so that the sharp-edged thoughts couldn’t catch her. And sure enough, it worked, running off like that. Soon her head was humming with all the possible ways she could fill these last free hours—all those many familiar variants on “breaking the rules.”

  Because she had spent her life breaking the rules, hadn’t she? Oh, yes.

  If even Sayra knew . . . but she didn’t know.

  Linny scrambled up the familiar slopes of the Upper Woods, to a fold in the hills where the old stone sheep shed stood, keeping its secrets. Keeping her secrets.

  Nobody ever came here. Nobody ever pushed through this door, as Linny was doing now, or went over to that corner there and swept the hay off the wooden chest it was hiding.

  And that meant nobody knew what Linny had gone and done, all those years when the whole village had been trying its absolute utmost to keep her safe.

  2

  SOME THINGS NOBODY KNEW

  It had started with a stolen ax, but it certainly hadn’t ended there.

  The pilfering had been going on for years, by now. That first ax, years ago, had been the same one, not coincidentally, that her father had just used to fell Elias’s prentice trees: his maple and his pine. “Wood learns slow, like boys.” That was what Linny’s father liked to say. It was always a happy day in the village when a boy’s prentice trees came down: sun and wind and time would cure the wood, and when the boy was ready to start the work on his first real lourka, three or four good years later, his wedges of maple and pine would be waiting for him, sound and well seasoned.

  All of Linny’s pilferings kept themselves safe and dry in a pair of old boxes. She even went to the bother of stealing some hay from the sheep to pile over the top of the boxes, as if anybody were likely to come up all this way and find her out for the wicked girl she was.

  But oh, if they had. They would have seen what Linny saw now, as she knelt at her old work chest and lifted the lid. A box, filled with awls and planers and knives and sandpapers that had gone missing from her father’s workshop, over all those years. And in that box, another newer box, and in it, wrapped in a swatch of stolen cloth and cradled in wood shavings and wool, the one thi
ng a girl must never never go near, if she didn’t want her doom to come hunting for her, on her twelfth birthday.

  Yes, a lourka.

  So that’s how it was with Linny. She hadn’t just “gone near” a lourka or stolen a quick touch along the polished neck of one. Nothing so innocent as that! No, she had to go and make one.

  You grow up knowing there is ONE THING you must never ever do, and then you go and do that one thing. Why? Linny had thought about this about a hundred or a thousand times while she worked, and every answer she came up with fell apart when she poked at it. It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid of what might happen. Although her mother had come up from the Plain, where they scoffed at things like curses and dooms, when Linny heard people talk about the Voices coming to carry girls off to Away, she didn’t scoff—no, her heart wrung itself out in her chest like a wet rag. Sometimes she thought her ribs must be made half of fear, and only half of bone.

  But still she could not help it; she had to make herself a lourka. She did. So maybe it was the force of the music fire in her, that so many children born in Lourka carried in them.

  There had been this raw, jealous place in her heart ever since Elias started spending his days in the workshop of Linny’s own father, back when they were eight or nine. She had thought then, and still thought it: unfair. She was the one, of all of them, who truly cared about music, about instruments, about making up songs. It should have been her, being taught how to shape a lourka, not that lummox Elias. And so on and so on and so forth, all her angry thoughts just running in tighter and tighter circles in her head.

  She had begun running in circles too—or rather sneaking in circles, around and around the outside of her father’s workshop (where she, of course, as a girl—unfair unfair—was strictly not allowed), looking for chinks in the walls and windows best suited for spying. And she found them, yes, and haunted them, and learned as much as she could from watching her father teach Elias how to choose a good wedge of wood, even grained and knot free, gleaming like silk when the blade splits it—how to season it and then shape it. She was a very good spy. If they had found her like that, untethered, all her freedom would have been taken away that very instant; she knew that well, and it made her extra sneaky. She let them think all she cared about was trees and woods and being outdoors. She kept them all fooled, even Sayra. But what she really cared about, all that time, was this: the lourka she brought out of its wrappings now and cradled with such love in her hands.