Along the Saltwise Sea

by A. Deborah Baker

  She was lying, of course, although not as badly as she could have been. Fog from the sea was perfectly normal, and she had seen it enough times to sound confident in her falsehood. Fog this thick, moving this far inland, was far from normal. It was unusual, and would have frightened Zib, who had never seen the fog swirl through the drowned places. If Zib became frightened, she would wake Avery, and Avery was more aggressive in his fear; he would splash it around like it was a wonderful gift that needed to be given as freely as possible. Niamh didn’t want to be afraid right now. She wanted to watch the fog as it danced around her, and dream about the things it could contain.

  “Oh,” said Zib. She slid out of the bed, only wincing a little as her feet hit the cold cottage floor, and crept through the fog toward the window, peering out it at the whitewashed world. She could see no details through the fog, not even the crow-speckled garden. It was misty white, as far as her eyes could see.

  “It’s not safe to go outside right now,” said Niamh. “You could walk right into the sea and never realize it.”

  “When will the fog lift?” asked Zib. She felt around until she found the pump Avery had used the night before. She couldn’t find the cup, so she simply stuck her head beneath it and opened her mouth, pumping freezing water over her face. She came up sputtering and licking her lips, enough water in her mouth to make her tongue feel less like a strip of cotton wool.

  “The sun should burn it away in a few hours.”

  “Oh,” said Zib. “Good.” Her stomach rumbled. She pressed a hand over it and looked longingly at the window. “I can’t even go out into the garden?”

  “There are brambles in the garden. If you tripped and fell into them, I wouldn’t be able to come and help you get untangled. You could hurt yourself very badly.”

  “But the Crow Girl is out there.”

  “No, the murder of crows is out there. She came apart before she went to sleep, and they’re not going to fly around while they can’t see. Crows are clever that way, even if they’re not smart the way you or I would measure smartness. She’ll stay in pieces, in the trees, until it’s safe for her to fly. Once it’s safe, you can go picking bonberries.”

  Zib frowned a little, almost asking how Niamh, who had not traveled with them from the Forest of Borders, wound up in charge. She swallowed the words like the poisoned pills they were. Niamh was in charge right now because she knew what the fog was, and how to survive dealing with it. Whoever knew the most was in charge, and that was how it had been since they entered the Up-and-Under, and that was the way things needed to continue if they wanted to have any chance of finding the Queen of Wands and getting home.

  Zib had never been a particularly biddable child. Family stories aside, her first word hadn’t been “why?”—it had been “no,” which was almost as accurate to her personality—and she had never been terribly interested in following rules that weren’t thoroughly and accurately explained. She wasn’t stubborn or willful so much as she was simply curious. Adults seemed to understand everything, or at least spoke as if they did. She wanted to understand everything too. One of the things she had managed to understand so far was that it was best to let the person who understood the most be in charge, as long as they were willing to stop being in charge as soon as they weren’t the most knowledgeable anymore.

  With nowhere to go and nothing to do, Zib walked back to the bed and sat down on the edge, careful to give Avery as much space as she could. She was only just starting to realize that they’d shared the same bed. Her cheeks flushed pink at the thought of what her father would say if he knew that she’d been sleeping with a boy, even if she hadn’t changed into her pajamas, even if she didn’t remember anything other than the sleep itself. She sometimes thought that when her father blustered about boys, he was using words she knew—like “sleep” and “play”—to mean something she’d never heard before and didn’t want to understand.

  Avery was still out cold. That made sense, Zib reasoned; she’d known almost as soon as she met him that he wasn’t the sort of person who saw a tree and started trying to figure out how to climb it, or who saw a field and wondered how long it would take to run across it. If the last few days had exhausted her, they would have done even worse to him. Avery was delicate. He would wake up when he was ready.

  If Zib had been a little older, she might have understood what her father was afraid of, and more, she might have felt jealousy at the idea that Avery was somehow delicate enough to need more time and attention and a softer bed than she did. If she’d been a little older, she might have started seizing on the adult ideas of equality, which is almost never equal at all, because it pretends that if everyone is given exactly the same amount of everything, the world will somehow twist inward on itself and turn fair. Giving Avery the entire bed because he was delicate would have been unfair to Zib, who was just as tired and sore. But giving it to her because she was a girl would have been unfair to Avery, and giving it to Niamh because she was older would have been unfair to all of them. They were not, and would never be, all entirely the same. It was unreasonable to ask them to be. Zib yawned and got up for more water, wondering how it was that children seemed to understand what fairness looked like, but lost that understanding as they grew up, wearing it away like the shine on a pair of polished shoes.

  The fog inside the cottage was getting thinner; she was able to find the cup this time, rather than needing to stick her head entirely under the spigot. She pumped twice to fill it with cold, clear water, and drank deeply before refilling the cup and offering it to Niamh. “Did you want some?”

  “Thank you,” said Niamh politely, and took the cup, and dumped it out over her head, dousing herself. She was always damp, had been damp before pouring water on herself, but for one shining moment, she was actually wet. Then her hair and skin seemed to drink the water down, and it vanished, leaving her looking as if she’d gone for a swim in the sea about an hour before, and was now well on her way to full dryness.

  It would have been unsettling, once, for the Zib who had existed before she’d seen a girl break into birds, before she’d felt the feathers splintering off from her own bones and struggling to break through the skin. Now, a girl who drank with her entire body seemed only reasonable. Zib reclaimed the cup and carried it back to the sink. They might be trespassing on someone else’s property, but they could at least be polite while they were breaking and entering.

  Outside the window, the faint outlines of the cliff and the trees in the garden were returning; it no longer seemed quite as possible to get lost in the fog and fall into the sea. Zib gave Niamh a hopeful look. Niamh nodded, and was still in the process of nodding when Zib shot out the door like a conker flung by a slingshot, moving so fast that it was a wonder her feet didn’t get tied together and send her sprawling.

  The ground outside was much colder than the floor of the cottage. Zib, motivated by both hunger and her innate fear of confinement—a fear that had only grown worse after the Page of Frozen Waters had flung her into a cage—barely noticed. She plunged into the fog, pursuing the hulking shape of what she assumed was a bonberry bush, and stopped only when her fingers brushed foliage. She closed her eyes, correctly assuming that having no sight would be less confusing than having blurred, irregular sight, letting her fingers skirt through the leaves until they found the round, reassuring bodies of the bonberries.

  One by one, she plucked them and popped them into her mouth, letting them burst into sweetness that coated her throat and tongue before trickling deliciously down to fill her stomach. A weight settled on her left shoulder. She offered the next bonberry she plucked to the crow that had landed there, and smiled again when the fruit was taken from her fingers. Steadily, she ate and ate as more crows landed on her head and arms, and when one of them rasped a bright morning caw, she opened her eyes and beheld the garden.

  The fog was still there, hanging thick and cottony among the brambles and branches, but it had pulled back enough that she could see
the flowers on their stems and the cobwebs glittering with morning dew. The garden had returned as the sunlight pouring down from above in great, buttery shafts came to burn the fog away. There was so much fog in the air that everything was still dim and gray, like it was twilight rather than morning.

  More and more crows were beginning to stir. Zib looked at the one that had come to her first, seated on her shoulder with its beak still sticky with bonberry juice.

  “I would like it if we could have a conversation, and if you could help me pick berries to take inside for Avery and Niamh,” she said. “Crows are wonderful, but you’re not so good for talking to, unless I want to really be talking to myself.”

  The crow cocked its head, regarding her for a moment before it made a small croaking sound and flung itself into the air. Zib had never seen birds that took flight the way the Crow Girl did. She flew as if she was attacking the sky and expected to be repelled at any moment by the creatures that actually belonged there. All across the garden, crows took wing, crashing toward each other and finally colliding a few feet away from Zib in a great cacophony of wings and feathers that consolidated into the shape of one skinny teenage girl in a black feather dress.

  “Are there other things like you?” blurted Zib. It was a rude question, but she wasn’t sorry to have asked it. It felt like the sort of thing that needed to be answered, either now or in the future, and she was growing increasingly tired of pushing things into the future rather than handling them in the aching, immediate now.

  “You saw the rest of the flock when the King tried to take you,” said the Crow Girl.

  “No, I mean, I know there are other crows, but are there other things?” Zib frowned earnestly, her hands busying themselves with the picking of ripe pink berries. “Are there boys who are also knots of toads, or girls who are a camp of bats when they don’t feel like walking on two legs? I know you traded your name for feathers. Can people trade for other things?”

  “Ah,” said the Crow Girl, and “Oh,” said the Crow Girl, and “Yes, and no,” said the Crow Girl. She began her own berry-picking, clever fingers clearing branches in seconds as she pulled the fruit into her palms. She kept her eye on the bush, not looking at Zib. “That was where I had the idea, you see. There was a boy, when I was younger, and he could become a whole shoal of salmon when he didn’t want to think like a boy did, when he wanted to swim freely and be left alone. I had the idea that maybe I could be like him, if I tried hard enough. That I could have freedom when I wanted it, and a cage when I wanted that instead. So I went looking. I slipped away from the people who were meant to keep watch over me, and their faces went with my name, so now I don’t even know who I left behind.”

  Zib gazed at her for a moment before plucking a last few berries and turning toward the cottage. “Avery should be awake by now,” she said. “He’ll be hungry. We didn’t eat much last night. Do you think flavor fruit trees will grow this close to the water?”

  “I think this is where Coins meet Cups, and the Queen of Wands created the flavor fruit,” said the Crow Girl, sounding relieved by the change of subject. “Her magic doesn’t work well here, where two forces oppose her. Wands center on fire, creating and destroying both. Coins stand for earth, and Cups for water. I think it’s bonberries and whatever comes out of the sea for as long as we’re here.”

  Zib turned back to her, mouth curving upward in the beginning of a laugh, and froze at the sight of a silhouette behind the fog. It was tall and elegant, and she knew it at once, for all that she had never in her life been this close to a seashore. “A ship!” she cried. “A ship, a ship!”

  She whirled then, and ran into the cottage, her hands full of berries and pink stains around her mouth. The Crow Girl ran after her.

  Inside, Avery was still sleeping soundly. Zib dropped the berries onto the mattress next to his head and gave him a hearty shake. “There’s a ship coming!” she shouted. “It’s sailing out of the fog! Eat fast, it must be the owner!”

  Her reasoning was easy to follow, for all that it would be strange to see a man walking down a street and assume that he owned every house around him. There was only this one cottage along the long sweep of the beach, and it was well-tended enough that it clearly belonged to someone. Now there was a single ship coming toward the shore, willing to risk the dangers posed by the fog, and it was reasonable to guess that it belonged either to the cottage’s owner, or to someone who had reason to wish them ill.

  Avery opened his eyes, squinting blearily at Zib for a moment before he sat up and began gathering berries off the bedcovers. He squashed a few of them in the process, and would have felt worse about it had Zib not so clearly been worked up and worried, moving to pull Niamh from her seat and hurry her toward the door. They nearly collided with the Crow Girl in the doorway, the three of them becoming a brief, unscheduled slapstick show as the Crow Girl tried not to drop the berries she had gathered, and Niamh tried not to trip and fall.

  Avery got out of the bed, hands full of berries, and cast one longing look toward the sink before joining the others at the door.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” chanted Zib, single-minded in her need to get them outside before the ship in the fog could dock and its occupant could make their way to the cottage. She was moving faster than circumstances warranted, but Zib had never been one to take things slow, not even when it might have been the better choice for the situation.

  The Crow Girl took a step back, allowing Zib to push Niamh outside. Zib took her hands off the drowned girl’s shoulders, and Niamh took a deep breath, pushing her damp hair out of her eyes. “What happened?” she asked, looking from Zib to the Crow Girl.

  The Crow Girl took a deep breath as she solemnly poured the berries in her hands into Niamh’s. “There’s a ship,” she said portentously. “Sailing through the fog toward us. Zib thinks it’s the owner of this cottage, and they might not like us being here when they land.”

  Zib nodded, so vigorously that her hair wound up in her mouth, and she had to spit it out and cough a little before she said, “People don’t like trespassers much. I went into the backyard of my next-door neighbor once, and she threw a brick at me! All I did was eat a couple of her tomatoes!”

  Niamh, whose hands were sticky with berry juice, nodded more slowly. “Then we should probably get back to the beach. Avery?”

  “I’m right here,” said Avery, nudging Zib outside so that he could pull the door shut behind himself. For a moment, the four of them stood motionless in the garden, two with hands full of berries, two with berry stains on their lips and fingers. Then, as one, they started moving, back toward the endless sweep of sand.

  The outline of the ship was clearer now, like a cutout in the fog, which had continued to thin and waft away as the sunlight tore at its substance. The edge of the beach was obscured by the fog; it was impossible in that moment to tell how far from land the ship actually was. Still, they hurried down to the beach, Avery and Niamh eating out of their hands like horses as they walked, until the berries were gone, and only faint pink stains remained.

  “I wish there had been time to get some water,” remarked Avery. “I’m thirsty as anything.”

  “You can drink from the sea,” said Niamh.

  “Saltwater only makes people thirstier,” said Avery.

  Niamh blinked. “Ah, but this is the Saltwise Sea,” she said, as if that statement made all the sense in the world. “If you ask it to move the salt aside for you, it will. Don’t oceans work that way where you come from?”

  “Wished-for wells, help-kelp, and now a Saltwise Sea,” said Avery, crossness washing away the last of his exhaustion. “Is there anything in the Up-and-Under that doesn’t speak English?”

  “What’s English?” asked the Crow Girl.

  Avery turned to blink at her, too stunned to speak for a long moment. When he finally found his voice, it was to say, “The language we’re all using. It’s called English.”

  “No, it’s not,” said Niamh. “W
hy would we speak a language called ‘English’ here? Who are the Eng? Where is their country?”

  “Uh,” said Avery. “The English people live in a country called ‘England.’ Zib and I live in a country called ‘America.’ It was colonized by the English a whole bunch of years ago, and they left their language behind when they left.”

  “Why did they leave?” asked the Crow Girl.

  “We got tired of them being in charge of us, and so we fought a war against them,” said Avery. “That’s what people do, when they don’t want to be colonized anymore. They fight wars, and if they win them, they get to become their own country.”

  “But are you really your own country if you’re still speaking English, even after the people who taught it to you are gone?” asked Niamh. “Weren’t there people in your country before it was colonized? Did they speak American? Why didn’t you go and learn American from them after the English left?”

  “Um,” said Avery, suddenly uncomfortable. “I think because the English killed them all in order to take their land away.”

  “Oh,” said the Crow Girl, “You speak the language of murder. No wonder I like you so much!”

  “Here in the Up-and-Under, we speak the language of whoever holds the Impossible City,” said Niamh. “Right now, that means we all speak Wandish. You’ve been speaking Wandish since you got here. If someone else seizes the City, the language will change.”

  “It sounds like English to me,” said Zib. “It’s sounded like English the whole time. How will we know if the language changes?”

  “I never learned Coinage,” said Niamh. “Earth and Water are not friends, although we can form borders together, and sometimes mud. Mud is a friend. It’s complicated.”

  “This is all very confusing,” said Avery.

  “Look,” said Zib. “There’s a rowboat.”

  They all turned and looked, and indeed, there was a small boat rowing from the larger ship toward the shore. The ship had stopped some distance away, anchoring itself in both the sea and the fog. There only seemed to be one person doing the rowing. For all that they had the newcomer solidly outnumbered, the four children took a big step backward, away from the tideline, toward the solid, patient cliffs.