Lost in the Moment and Found (Wayward Children #8)(35)

“Teach it to me.”

Hudson huddled on his perch, feathers puffed out until he was almost a sphere, and said nothing.

“You have a little rhyme for everything, you’re the accountant, so why can’t you teach me this rhyme, huh? What’s so different about it that it needs to be a secret? Unless it’s full of things you decided I didn’t need to know. When did you stop telling us? When did you decide that since we were already lost, it didn’t matter if you used us up and threw us away? Huh? Huh?”

“Young lady, you will stop that at once,” said a voice from behind her. Antsy stiffened and turned, slowly, until she was facing Vineta. The old woman leaned on her cane and scowled at Antsy. “Hudson has done nothing to deserve your ire, and it is quite unfair of you to subject him to it.”

“Did you know?” demanded Antsy.

“When I first arrived? No. I didn’t. Elodina slipped me a note on what should have been my seventeenth birthday, but was actually closer to my twenty-third, and I found her shade walking the curator’s shelves, all but faded away. I thought the meddlesome thing had spent the last of her energy on trying to convince me to run. If I’d even suspected she might reach out to you, I would have done so many things differently. But we always see the past more clearly than we see the future, and she has done you no favors.”

Rage tightened Antsy’s skin and blurred her vision, making it difficult to focus on the old woman. “She told me the truth, which is more than I received from you. I don’t know why you weren’t told, but—”

“She wasn’t told because it changed nothing,” said Hudson miserably. “For two hundred years we’ve been here, helping the curators, making sure the Doors are cared for, making sure the wayfarers who came through them seeking what they’d already lost were seen to and seen home in short order. Two hundred years. Ten generations of magpies have lived and died and seen hundreds of curators come through here, and when Elodina demanded her promise from Eider, we were exempt. She left us out of what she asked him. We were animals to her, inconsequential, even as we brought her everything she needed, even though we had watched over the Doors for generations before she came, even though we’ll be watching them long after the last curator is gone. But he told Anya, and Anya told Basia, and on, and on, and every one of them made the same choices, made the same decisions, ran through the Doors with the careless abandon of the first curator. But you know what did change? What did become different?”

He hopped down from his perch, stalking toward the counter’s edge. Antsy couldn’t take her eyes off of him. “They were guilty. They felt like they were being punished. They used the Doors anyway, but because they understood the consequences, they suffered for what they did. And they stayed, and they traveled, and they suffered, because they knew.”

“They needed to know because a choice you make without knowing the consequences isn’t any choice at all!” snapped Antsy. “If they still used the doors, that was their decision. I didn’t know they were costing me anything.”

“You thought all this was free?” Hudson spread his wings, indicating the whole shop around them. “You should have known better. Nothing is free, no matter what world you’re in, or what world you’re from. Everywhere you’ve gone, you’ve paid for what you received.”

“But I…” Antsy stopped. The shop had taken care of her from the moment she arrived, hadn’t it? She’d always had a place to sleep and a belly full of food, and she’d never been sick, not even with a headache. The only times she’d needed to stay in bed, she’d been too tired from using the doors to get up, and on those days, soup and toast had been delivered to her room by unseen hands. The Shop Where the Lost Things Go took care of its contents, whatever their nature.

“I worked,” she said, finally. “From the day I got here, I worked, and I never had a salary from you. I never got a penny for everything I did. And you were stealing from me. You were stealing my time—and you might be right, I might have given it freely, the same way Elodina did after she realized what was happening every time she used a door. We’ll never know now.”

“You received barter for what you did.”

“That’s true. But we are damn well going to tell whoever comes here next what it costs to use the doors, and we are never going to let it be forgotten again.”

In the silence that stretched out after her proclamation, you could have heard ice melt. Finally, sounding dubious, Vineta asked, “You’re staying?”

“Of course I’m staying,” said Antsy. “Where would I go? If a door back to my original world opened, I couldn’t go home. My mother is expecting a child, not … not this.” She waved her hands, indicating the curve of her breast, the slope of her hip, and glared. “I may have been paid by your standards, but I’ve also been stolen from. I’m going to make damn sure we never do this to another child. It’s not right, and it’s not fair, and it’s not going to happen anymore.”

“The day’s … the day’s shopping…” began Vineta, and stopped as Antsy glared at her.

“No,” she said. “Not today. Maybe not tomorrow, either. I’m willing to pay the toll, but not the way I have been; I’m not giving up weeks every day because you want perfect peaches or more shiny stickers for your calendar. You will be patient. You will be the adults you should have been all along. We’ll go through the yard, we’ll sort the things already here, and we’ll travel when we don’t have any other options. Do you understand me?”