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Let us pull back for a moment and see things through her eyes — for while this is Lundy’s story, Lundy’s cautionary tale, it might as easily have been Moon’s. Pretty, pithy, petty Moon, born to a woman who had left the Market for the comforting climes of a world where fair value was something each person could negotiate for themselves, rather than having it imposed from without by an unimpeachable force of nature. Sweet, sharp, sour Moon, whose true name could never be given because it had been lost, who had seen her world narrow to an owl’s understanding of hunt and hole and hover. This story could have so easily belonged to her.
Perhaps it is a pity it did not. It might have had a kinder ending.
No Mama.
There is no Mama anymore. There are only the people around her, the ones who have so many shapes and so many rules, and the tall lady whose knee she barely reaches.
Mama went away and she went without Moon.
Where did she go? How did she leave? Moon doesn’t know.
Above her head, they talk of ‘fair value’ and of ‘debt’, the words that Moon has heard as long as she has been Moon, but all Moon knows, all she can offer, is that there is no Mama anymore. Mama went away.
“Are you going to send me away?” Moon asks, voice as small as she is, and there is a break in the babble.
Her eyes are watering, tears spilling in slow tracks down her cheeks and falling to the dirt. Watering it, giving value unasked for, and her words are a negotiation she is too young to know she’s beginning. Her breathing is coming, the air too dear for her for her to afford, and her distress demands comfort.
“No,” the tall lady says and strokes her hair, “Never.”
No Mockery.
15 and 7 aren’t that far apart. Not for best friends, not for first friends.
Mockery was the first friend Moon ever had, a girl who could be a swan just as Moon could be an owl, and sharing her with Lundy (sharing Lundy with her) was one of the bravest things that Moon had ever done.
But Moon was brave, had always been brave, and she was bravest of all when she was with Mockery whose honed tongue sharpened Moon’s courage into recklessness. She let her friends meet and because the two of them became friends, they became a three. A trio.
Threes were special in the stories that Lundy loved so much. Threes had power. Threes could defeat the Wasp Queen and win back the Pomegranate Groves.
But they weren’t a three now, a trio. They were two, a duo. There was only Lundy and Moon, and Moon had lost her mother first but Moon had known Mockery far longer and better than her mother.
“It has to be fair value,” she says quietly to Mockery’s grave. The head of the Wasp Queen had paid for a funeral and a marking both. “Because otherwise the Market wouldn’t allow it.”
But it isn’t a trade she’d known she was making. It isn’t a trade she would’ve ever made.
There’s no more Mockery, only a lifetime’s worth of pomegranates, and no matter how often Moon tells herself it’s a fair trade, it feels unfair.
No Lundy.
Lundy turns 16 and doesn’t come back to stay.
Lundy turns 17 and comes back for 3 short visits, snatched out of time. Guilty, ashamed, and not long enough for Moon.
Moon’s working at the bakery, her pies now as good as the ones she used to trade for, and every time Lundy comes, Moon looks to see what she’s carrying. Is she preparing for a lifetime at the Market? Is she caching tradeable goods, things from her homeworld that she’s slowly amassing there?
Please let Lundy’s short visits be because she’s accumulating goods back home. Let them be transitory because she’s not yet done transferring over her hoard.
Let them not be signs that she’s choosing her first world over the Market.
Then Lundy comes with a jingling bag that’s packed full of treasure and Moon’s heart leaps before it breaks.
Lundy wants to cheat the Market itself.
“You were my best friend ever,” Moon tells Lundy in front of the Archivist’s shack, in front of the home Lundy had lived in for long, in front of the start and the end. “Remember that, okay? I loved you a lot. Even if you did build a boat big enough to bury yourself in.”
A handful of words, a declaration of love, a surrender of their future together— none of those are fair value for their friendship. Not when Lundy took on Moon’s debt and paid for it with a year of feathers.Not when Moon can’t take Lundy’s debt this time because there is no fair value for what Lundy wants.
There won’t be a grave for Lundy in the Market, not like Mockery.
Moon looks at Lundy for a long moment and buries Lundy in her heart.
Then she turns and walks away.
