The Wishing Coin

The border of a dead kingdom is the strangest thing I've seen in two worlds, and I say that having met a bureaucrat with ledgers.

There's no wall. No line. Just: at some point in the afternoon, the land below the clouds starts having smoke again.

Chimney smoke. Cookfire smoke. The lazy, ordinary breath of villages doing village things. Roads with carts on them. A field with actual tiny people in it, haying, like the world is allowed to just — continue.

The five of us hang on the rail of the tower fields and watch life come back like color returning to a limb.

"That's it?" Alex says. "That's the border? Smoke?"

"Life is the border," Nemo says, passing behind us with a watering can he definitely doesn't need for anything. "Everything else is cartography."

⁂

We anchor above the hills at dusk — anchor being my word for whatever it is when the tower stops and the clouds around it get territorial. Tomorrow, the twins say, there's a town. Supplies, news, and "a lesson in being nobody," which Nihil pronounces with relish and refuses to explain.

Tonight, the tower's fields are warm and loud with crickets the tower keeps somewhere, for reasons I've stopped billing my sanity for.

Marla sets dinner outside, on the long table dragged onto the grass. And after, while the light goes plum-colored, she does something I've never seen.

She takes out a copper coin, kisses it, holds it up at the huge pale ghost of Mystral hanging in the day's last sky — and flicks the coin into the grass without looking where it lands.

"Don't pick that up," she says, to Alex, whose hand had already started moving. "It's spent."

"Spent on what?"

"A wish." She sits back down, wipes her hands on the ceremonial apron, which apparently is also the wishing apron. "You give the day moon a coin you can afford to lose, and a wish you can't afford to say out loud. Old Gloovian habit. Older than Glooven, probably."

"Why the day moon?" Helena asks. "Why not the night ones?"

"Argentia keeps accounts and Umbral keeps secrets," Marla says, in the tone of someone reciting a thing their grandmother said in a kitchen, four streets from a plaza that's a lake of dead light now. "But Mystral keeps wishes. Everyone knows that."

"Everyone knows that," Nihil echoes, from down the table, dry as paper.

"You have your books, Mr. Nihil. I have my coins." Marla pours him tea like a threat. "Three kingdoms, and I'm still here. My method works."

Nobody can argue with the data.

⁂

Later, the coins come out.

Not planned. Nothing tonight is planned. But Marla leaves the little copper pile on the table like an offering plate, and one by one, we drift back to it.

Clara goes first. Kisses her coin quickly, embarrassed, flicks it — a doctor's flick, precise. Doesn't say what she asked. Rule's a rule.

Joseph turns his coin over for a long time, inspecting it like a clause. Then up at Mystral, then flick, and something in his shoulders unclenches half an inch. Twenty-three days of names, and nowhere to put them. Maybe the moon has room.

Helena kisses hers with her eyes open, looking at the pale moon the whole time, businesslike, like she's making sure it knows she expects delivery.

Then Alex.

He stands apart, at the edge of the lamplight, coin in his fist, and he doesn't throw it.

"My sister's in a hospital," he says.

The table goes quiet, the good kind of quiet, the kind we've all learned to hold for each other.

"Back home. She got worse right before — before the circle took us. I was supposed to visit her that day. That's where I was going after class." He turns the coin in his fingers. "First weeks here, that was the whole thing. That was the reason I wanted to go home. And Evelyn said 'that's impossible,' with that smile, and everyone just — moved on."

"Alex—" Clara starts.

"I'm not sad," he says, which is the kind of lie nobody corrects because it's load-bearing. "I just do this thing where I— she doesn't know. Whatever happened to her, happened already, weeks of it, and she doesn't know about any of THIS. The spider. Dan. She doesn't know there's a version of me that punches things now. She's in a bed with tubes, thinking her brother didn't visit."

He looks at the coin.

"So I can't wish for her to get better. It already happened, whatever it is. Time doesn't— it doesn't work." His voice does something small. "There's no wish with a shape."

The crickets fill in for everyone who doesn't know what to say, which is everyone.

It's Helena who moves. She doesn't hug him — Alex isn't huggable when he's like this, we've learned the edges — she just picks a coin off the table and holds it out.

"Then wish something with a shape," she says. "Wish that she's the kind of person who's okay. You knew her. Is she?"

Alex looks at the coin.

"...She's tougher than me," he says. "She'd have punched the spider twice."

"That sounds like a yes."

He takes the coin. Kisses it. And he throws it further than anyone — a real throw, shoulder in it, the kind his dawn trainers would applaud — up at the big pale moon that keeps wishes and doesn't explain the terms.

Nobody claps. Everyone breathes.

⁂

I go last, when the others have drifted toward the lights of the tower.

Copper coin. Warm from sitting on the table all evening. The moon of wishes hangs over the hills of a country that's still alive, and I stand there like an idiot, a dead man in a borrowed body under a moon with a filing system, and I audit myself for something I can afford to want.

That she never finds out — no. Not that. She'd hate that wish, and lately I find I can't want things she'd hate.

That it's true, the lie I live — no shape to that either. Alex is right. Time doesn't work.

In the end it's simple, and I don't say it out loud, because rule's a rule, and I don't write it down either.

Some things you carry instead of saying.

I kiss the coin. I throw.

From the dark behind me, Nihil's voice, conversational: "You know it's just a moon, boy."

"You know we're on a flying castle, old man."

"...Fair," he says, and the two of us stand there in the cricket-dark, a liar and a mystery, watching the last light die on the moon of wishes.

Tomorrow: a town. Living people. A lesson in being nobody.

I flex my hand, where a coin used to be, and find I'm looking forward to it.