The Girl Who Sold the Wind · novelette

1The Ninth Waystation

Now, I have told this tale three ways in my life — the way that made me the hero, the way that made me the fool, and the true way — and since you have paid for a bottle and a story both, you shall have the true one, which is the only one that cost me anything.

I was fourteen, and I was the best wind-seller at the Ninth Waystation, and I will not pretend I was modest about it, because I was not, and a tale should start with the truth even when the truth is not flattering. Give me any bottle off any shelf, corked and blind, and I could tell you its wind by the weight of it in the dark: the dawn wind light as a promise, the grief wind heavy as a wet cloak, the homesick wind heaviest of all, for longing is the heaviest weather there is. I could haggle a salt-merchant to tears and send him off thanking me. I meant to own the whole striped stall by the time I was twenty, and after that the waystation, and after that, who knew — enough, at last, and then a little more than enough, forever, so that the hungry orphan I had been could starve in memory only.

That is the thing about enough, which I did not yet know and which this tale taught me: it is not a number. You may pour coin into it all your days and never once hear it strike the bottom.

The Ninth Waystation sat at the deep middle of the Bright Waste, a thousand days from anywhere, a huddle of striped cloth and blue bottles where the caravans stopped to water and to buy an air they needed for the road ahead. And the winds we sold were true winds, mind — not perfumes, not tricks. A man bound into grief would buy the dawn wind to breathe at his lowest hour and be lifted, once. A woman parted from her country would buy the homesick wind and, uncorking it, be carried home for the space of a single breath, to stand in her mother’s doorway in the smell of her mother’s cooking before the wind was spent and the desert took her back. Powerful things. Costly things. And bound by the oldest rule of the Road, which every seller learns before she learns her letters: a wind, once sold, cannot be recalled. What leaves your shelf leaves your hands forever. There is no buying it back.

I knew the rule. I could have recited it in my sleep. I want that understood, so that you do not think me merely ignorant, for I was not ignorant. I was greedy, which is worse, because greed knows the rule and sells past it anyway.

The stranger came at the hot white hour when no one travels, which should have been my first warning and was instead only my first customer of a slow afternoon. Veiled head to foot in road-grey cloth, tall, and moving oddly — flowing, almost, as though the wind rather than walked — and asking, in a voice like air through a door-crack, for the homesick wind. The good one. The strong one. The wind that carries you home.

“That’s my dearest bottle,” said I, brightening, for the homesick wind is the costliest thing I sell and I smelled a fat sale the way I smell weather. “Triple weight of any other, and worth it. Where’s home for you, then, traveller? Long road behind you?”

“Long road,” said the stranger, “and a longer one before. The price is nothing. Name it thrice and I will pay it thrice.” And a hand came out of the grey cloth and laid on my table three coins of a metal I did not know, warm as skin, and I confess my heart went up like a kite, for I had never in my life been paid triple without a single haggle, and I did not stop to ask why a traveller would pay a fortune and not once beat me down, which any true traveller does as naturally as breathing.

I should have asked. A seller who does not wonder why the bargain is too good is not clever; she is only lucky, and luck, on the Salt Road, is a debt you have not yet been asked to pay.

I took down the homesick wind — my dearest bottle, tall and blue and heavy with all the longing in the world — and I set it in that warm grey hand, and the coins were mine, and the sale was made, and bound, and done, under the oldest rule of the Road: a wind, once sold, cannot be recalled.

The stranger held the bottle up to the white sky a moment, the way you hold up a thing you have waited a very long time for. And then the veil turned to me, and in the shadow of it I saw — I will swear this to the end of my days — not a face, but a drift, a curl of grey air where a face should be, and the door-crack voice said, almost kindly:

“You have sold the homesick wind to the homesick, little seller. Now we shall both go home.” And the stranger turned, and did not walk but blew, grey cloth and blue bottle and all, out of the striped shade and into the glare, eastward, toward the one city in all the world that should never, ever be made to remember how much it was missed.

I stood with three warm coins in my fist and the slow, cold understanding coming over me — cold, in all that heat — that I had just sold a wind to a wind, and that whatever I had set loose on the Bright Waste, I had set it loose forever, because a wind, once sold, cannot be recalled.

Unless, of course, the seller goes and fetches it back herself. Which is the rest of the tale, and the part where I stopped being the hero of it.