Along the Saltwise Sea

by A. Deborah Baker

  And so this is where, after so much reminding of what has come before, we enter the story, which is already in progress, and has been in progress for a long, long time. Two children, both a little muddy and unkempt, but one with clothing that is still untorn, still largely perfectly pressed, and the other with a mended skirt and hair so wide and wild it looks as if it hungers to consume the entire world, walk down a road of glittering, glistening, improbable bricks, alongside a taller girl with feathers barely contained beneath the surface of her skin and another near their own age who leaves a trail of dampness behind her as she walks. They are on their way to something glorious.

  They don’t yet know what it is. Let us follow them, and be there when they find out.

  TWO

  HOW MANY CHILDREN CAN FIT IN A BUCKET?

  Zib had never thought, once in her life, that she might regret being barefoot. Barefoot had always seemed to her to be a person’s natural state, something to be coveted and aspired to, especially when parents and teachers and other adults who had forgotten the simple joy of grass between their toes yelled for her to put her shoes back on. People who wore shoes too often got soft, their feet growing tender, until they could barely walk down the driveway without yelping in pain. She never wanted to be one of those tender-footed people, unable to run out the door without stopping to strap her feet into confining leather cages.

  Now, after what felt like hours of walking along the improbable road, she was starting to wonder if they might not have had a point. Her feet ached and throbbed until they took up almost the entirety of her thoughts, pushing everything else into a corner of her mind. She was on a fabulous adventure, doing things she had never done or considered doing before, talking to owls, walking with drowned girls, and here she was, thinking about how much her feet hurt.

  But as much as she wanted to raise her voice in complaint, to demand that everything be rendered soft and soothing and kind, she knew that Avery had to feel worse than she did. She was a climber of trees and a runner in fields; she had spent her life to date barefoot more often than not. Avery couldn’t say any of those things. Avery was a solid, sensible creature, accustomed to solid, sensible shoes, and his feet were as tender as any adult’s. Zib couldn’t even imagine a life with as little running and climbing as the one he’d lived so far; it seemed to her that it must have been a terribly dull thing indeed.

  The Crow Girl had tired of walking some time ago, and had burst into birds as easily as anything, taking to the air in a great swirl of black feathers and beating wings. She perched in the bushes and trees they passed, rested her talons on the shoulders and heads of her companions, and was light enough, being made mostly of hollow bones and longing, that none of them objected, not even Avery. Niamh looked positively amused each time a crow settled on her shoulder, only to take off and flap away in disgust as the water that perpetually dripped from the drowned girl’s hair dampened its feathers.

  The fields to either side of the improbable road were green and verdant, dotted with patches of the most beautiful wildflowers Zib had ever seen. They seemed to come in every color of the rainbow, and a few colors the rainbow had forgotten. Apart from the Crow Girl, there were no other birds, although butterflies and fat, rainbow-striped bees flitted from bloom to bloom. They were the sort of fields designed by the universe for running through and rolling in, and the possibility of bee sting or bramble only made them more appealing. Or would have, under ordinary circumstances. Zib looked at the fields and realized she had no desire to run through them.

  Suddenly overcome with the unjustness of it all, Zib sat heavily and abruptly in the grass by the side of the road. “I’m tired,” she declared. “I’m tired and my feet hurt, and I thought we were only going to walk for long enough to find someplace to stay the night, not for forever!” She raked her hands through the tangled, curled, riotous mass of her hair, dislodging several twigs and a pencil, and flopped backward into the grass. “I can’t do it. I can’t walk any more than I’ve walked already.”

  There was a rustling of wings and a rushing sound as the Crow Girl came back together and landed with a thump at the edge of the improbable road, looking down on Zib. “You said you’d never been to the Up-and-Under before, and you don’t know anything, so I suppose I thought you were telling the truth.”

  “I was telling the truth!” Zib protested peevishly, and threw an arm across her eyes, blocking out both the light and the sight of the Crow Girl’s clever, inquisitive eyes, set as they were in a face that was just barely too sharp to pass for human.

  “But you can’t have been, or you wouldn’t be so sure that you’ve gotten where you’re supposed to be going!” The Crow Girl stepped back. “I guess you must know what to do when the brambles wake up and come to carry you away.”

  “Brambles?” asked Zib, who had seen a wall of brambles spring out of the ground to keep Quartz from setting foot on the improbable road all the way back at the Forest of Borders, at the beginning of their increasingly exhausting adventure.

  “Brambles,” said Niamh, a hint of amusement in her voice. “They sleep during the day, but when the sun goes down, all these fields will belong to them. You don’t want to be out in the open when they decide to take what’s theirs.”

  “I think I can walk a little more,” said Zib, springing to her feet. Avery, who had been leaning forward, taking advantage of the break, offered her a pale smile. He didn’t have it in him to make a scene, not without substantially more motivation than aching feet—if ever there was a child who had internalized “children should be seen and not heard,” it was Avery—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be grateful when a scene came along to save him. Scenes had a lot of power like that. Zib stepped up beside them, and the two children resumed their plodding trek along the improbable road.

  Niamh, whose feet did not get tired because they were forever halfway frozen through, looked at the children and frowned. She could see that they were suffering, and they had been good friends to her; if she wanted to be a good friend to them, it seemed only reasonable that she find some way to make their suffering less. They were still close enough to the Impossible City to be in the protectorate of the Queen of Wands, where fire and inspiration reigned supreme. Fire lessened her ability to help, but inspiration made so many things possible. She looked to the Crow Girl.

  “Can we call on the owls to help us?” she asked.

  “The owls have gone back to their nests, their own places, and they have better things to do than whisk a bunch of vagabonds along a road,” said the Crow Girl, somewhat anxiously. “It’s better that way. They’re so much bigger than I am, they fill me with the need to harry, to make them fly away from my territory. I don’t think that would be a good thing. Harrying the owls might be the last thing I ever decided to do.”

  Niamh, who lacked a corvid’s instinct to protect, nodded as understandingly as she knew how to do. “Yes,” she said. “It would be best if you didn’t do that.” Going back would change nothing; it would only put two barefoot children through even more miles of road, and deposit them all at the border of a city they couldn’t enter. Losing the Crow Girl to an angry owl’s talons would change everything.

  She looked toward the horizon. It was no different than the slice of field where they were standing, green and delicately sloping as it faded into the distance. There were no buildings to break the inherently gentle view. There were no trees or towers or mountains. Viewed from where she stood, the principality of the Queen of Wands could have been nothing more or less than an unending field.

  The children would collapse long before they reached that horizon. There were no clear water sources here, no bonberry bushes or flavor fruit trees. Between Avery and the Crow Girl, they had three flavor fruits, and one of those was already half-gone. The improbable road was supposed to help them get where they were going, but right now, it didn’t seem all that interested in anything but distance.

  Niamh kicked the bricks in front of her with vicious
swiftness. “Hey,” she said, voice clear and carrying. “We can’t walk forever. Human children get tired. Human children need water, and soft places to rest. What do you think you’re doing?”

  It was improbable that a road should listen when lectured, and even more improbable that the road should be able to do anything about the lecture. Roads were, by and large, stationary, unyielding things, staying where they were put, following a single, predictable path until they were worn away by weather, traffic, and time. But this was the improbable road, which existed primarily to do things that roads weren’t meant to do. Sunlight glittered off the bricks. Zib, who was no longer picking up her feet quite as well as she had been when they’d started walking, cried out as her toe hooked on a brick and she pitched forward, catching herself on hands and knees before her face could meet the ground. Avery hurried to help her back to her feet, and in the process, she looked back the way they’d come, and gasped.

  “Avery, look!” she said. “The city’s gone!” She shook off the hand that still held her elbow as if it were nothing at all, and started walking in the other direction. “The city’s gone, and there’s a well!”

  Somehow, the presence of the well was even more exciting than the absence of the city. Wells meant water, after all, and water meant a way to cool and soothe her aching feet.

  Avery followed more slowly. He had seen wells before—of course he had, his parents could only shelter him so much from the world—but he had never actually used one. In his world, drinking water was delivered to the house three times a week by the water-carrier, and washing water came out of the sink, carried by buried pipes that half his classmates happily drank from. His father didn’t trust the water system yet, said it was too new and complicated and that some things shouldn’t be changed as long as they were working properly. Only a fool would drink water that had traveled so far underground, trapped in shadows, spinning inward on itself and turning sour. Well water was supposed to be an acceptable substitute for drinking, if you were out in the country and didn’t have any alternatives.

  Well, they were truly out in the country now. The Impossible City, which was the only city he’d even heard of in the Up-and-Under, was gone, and they had nothing left to their name but fields, the improbable road, and now the well that Zib was hurling herself against, gripping the edge as she knocked the air out of her own body with the impact.

  Zib had more experience with wells than Avery did. Her father had been born on a farm, and his parents still owned the property. She spent every summer with them, running feral through the fields of corn and strawberries, getting twigs tangled in her hair and stealing warm eggs out from under broody hens. She felt around until her hands found the handle on the well’s side, and then she began to crank, reeling in the rope and the bucket at its end.

  When it finally came into view, it was sleek and silver, with not a hint of rust or tarnish, and filled with water so clear and perfect that Zib knew even without tasting it how sweet it would be. She reached for it with shaking hands, as the others walked up behind her.

  “This is a wishing well,” said Niamh, sounding pleased. “They’re generally harmless, and not home to misplaced river hags or unspeakable curses.”

  “They grant wishes?” asked Avery, as Zib pulled the bucket toward herself.

  “No, not at all,” said Niamh. “What a queer notion, a well granting wishes! Might as well ask for grass to set the table, or clouds to control the weather. No, wishing wells are wells that have been wished for. They go where they’re most needed. Or where they’re brought. I suspect the improbable road went and fetched this one for us.” She gave the bricks at her feet a hard look.

  The improbable road twinkled in the sunlight, silent and smug.

  Zib grasped the bucket and brought it to her mouth, taking her first sip of the cleanest, sweetest water she had ever tasted. It was also freezing cold, and she gasped, losing her grip and dumping the contents of the bucket down her front, drenching herself and rinsing the dust and dirt of her adventures away. Squealing in dismay, she released the empty bucket, which fell back into the well with a noisy splash.

  Avery looked at his sodden companion and laughed, barely catching it in his hand. Zib glared at him. He laughed harder, unable to keep it penned inside. Zib lost her glare and grinned. She was cold, yes, but she was growing accustomed to being cold; the Up-and-Under seemed to take a sour pleasure in drenching them at every turn, like its ultimate goal was to make sea creatures of them all. She was cold, and she was closer to clean than she had been in days, and the water numbing her toes made it easier for her to stand up straight without complaining.

  “Do you want some water?” she asked, and Avery nodded, and she began cranking up the bucket again, leaning into the movement, so that it happened quickly enough to be worth doing.

  The Crow Girl leaned over the edge of the well, peering down into its shadowy depths. “What’s down there?” she asked.

  “Water,” said Zib. “Frogs, maybe. Not fish, usually. Fish can’t get enough to eat in a well.”

  “Do frogs?”

  “Frogs fall in and then they can’t get out,” said Zib.

  “Does that mean the water is full of dead frogs?”

  It was an unsettlingly squishy question. Zib hesitated before she saw the flicker of alarm in Avery’s eyes and said, firmly, “No. If there are any dead frogs, they sink to the bottom, and we’re only taking water from the top. It tastes wonderfully fine. Not like frog at all.”

  “I’m going down to look,” said the Crow Girl, and burst into birds before spiraling into the well, a whirlwind of black wings flying down into the darkness. Zib laughed as she continued to reel in the bucket. Avery peered nervously after the Crow Girl.

  “Can she fly with wet wings?” he asked.

  Niamh nodded. “She can fly in a hurricane. All Crow Girls can, especially when they have their whole murder in one place. Don’t worry about her.”

  The bucket inched slowly into view, a crow riding on its rim.

  “Get off of there,” scolded Zib. “You don’t weigh much, but water does, and I don’t need the bucket to be any heavier than it already is.”

  The crow hopped off the bucket with an obliging squawk, fluttering its wings as it moved to the rim of the well. Zib assumed it was a girl crow, although she’d never asked; maybe the murder was made up of girl crows and boy crows, and it didn’t matter. It felt like it should matter. It also felt like a deeply personal question that she had no business asking. Feelings were sometimes difficult.

  Taking the bucket off the hook that held it, Zib offered it to Avery. He looked at the water warily, as if he expected the rumored frogs to appear and start croaking to him about their days. Zib sighed, still holding out the bucket.

  “Don’t you want something to drink?” she asked. “Because if you don’t, I’m pouring this back in the well. It’s heavy. I don’t want to stand here holding it forever.”

  “I don’t want to drink a frog,” he said, still studying the water. Finally seeming to satisfy himself that there weren’t any frogs in the bucket, he reached out and took it gingerly from her hands, lifting it toward his mouth.

  The water was as sweet as Zib had said. It tasted better than fresh milk or pop from the corner store. He would never have believed that water could be so delicious, or leave him so eager for more. When he had drunk so much his belly felt fat and distended with water, he lowered the bucket and offered it back to Zib. “Here.”

  “I feel better now,” said Zib, before taking a swig from the remaining water in the bucket and offering it to Niamh. Niamh took the bucket and drank deeply, closing her eyes. She didn’t bother checking for frogs. She also didn’t bother breathing. Both Avery and Zib watched with wide, awed eyes as the drowned girl finished the contents of the bucket in a single long gulp, lowering it to reveal wetted lips and flushed cheeks.

  “That was lovely,” she said, placing the bucket back onto the hook before climbing into it, givi
ng the rope an experimental tug. She looked back to Zib and Avery. “Well? Come along.”

  “You’re in a bucket,” said Zib, with careful delicacy.

  “Yes, I had noticed,” said Niamh. “I got into it on purpose. You can come into it too, if you would like.”

  “I don’t think it’s big enough,” said Zib.

  “This is a wishing well,” said Niamh, patiently. “The bucket is exactly as large as we need for it to be.”

  “Oh, then, I’ve never been in a bucket before,” said Zib, and pulled herself up onto the well’s edge before reaching for Niamh. The drowned girl took her hands and tugged her gently forward, and Zib tumbled into the bucket, finding herself seated quite securely on the lip, with her bare feet against the cool wood of the bottom.

  It was quite the most comfortable seat she’d had in hours, and so she turned a sunshine smile on Avery, and said, “Come on, Avery. We’ll all fit in this bucket if we try, and it feels so nice.”

  Avery, who had noticed the Crow Girl’s failure to return from the bottom of the well, and who had a slightly more developed sense of narrative structure than Zib did, having always been rather more interested in staying in his room to read, bit his lip and looked at the bucket. “If I get in the bucket, will the rope break and drop us all to the bottom of the well?”

  “No,” said Niamh. “I promise, the rope won’t break.”

  “All right, then.” Carefully, he climbed up onto the edge of the well and followed Zib’s path to the bucket itself, tumbling in after the two girls. It was as comfortable as Zib had said, and as large as Niamh had: there was no possible way the three of them, even as small as they were, could have fit in the bucket, but there they all were, and there the bucket was, and when Avery looked at himself, he didn’t feel as if he was any smaller.