“But we have questions,” said Avery.
“Having them doesn’t have to mean asking them. I don’t want to hear whatever questions you might have.”
“Why are you afraid of the wind?” asked Zib.
The captain’s face darkened, like clouds rolling across a previously sunlit sky. She took a step backward into her cabin, beckoning the children to follow her inside. Only once the last of them was past the threshold did she close the door and ask, “Have you met the Queen of Swords?”
“Of course I have,” said the Crow Girl. “She makes monsters. She made me.”
“Do you remember what that means?”
“I—” The Crow Girl paused, her face falling. “No. I traded my name for my wings, and a name is a big thing to give away. It carries so much of who you are and who you were, all wrapped up in however many letters, and without it, those things are lost as well. I’m not who I was before I became a monster. I won’t ever be that person again, not unless we have my name back from her, and I’d have to give my wings away for that, so it’s not going to happen.”
“It means she ripped out your heart and replaced it with a black-winged bird,” said the captain grimly. “She can do almost anything, if it’s allowed. The knives of the wind are the sharpest of all. They flense skin from flesh and flesh from bone when they blow. Her winds blow even here, and if she hears the Lady’s name, she may turn her terrible gaze in our direction. Her Page is not so fearsome as the King of Cups’s, but he’s frightening enough, if you don’t have any way to block him out.”
“Do all the Kings and Queens have scary Pages?” asked Zib.
“There are many pages in a story,” said the captain implacably. “The Queen of Wands is served by the Page of Gentle Embers, who is a kind soul, and hardly ever burns anything important into ash, and the King of Coins is served by the Page of Smelted Silver, who is much more concerned with the making of money than he is with the breaking of hearts. Only Swords and Cups are truly terrifying.”
“We’ve met the Page of Frozen Waters,” said Avery. “Who serves the Queen of Swords?”
There was a rumble from outside, as if a terrible storm was upon them. The ship shook in the water, buffeted by a sudden howling wind. The captain grimaced. “The Page of Ceaseless Storms,” she said. “He swings the wind like a whip, and stirs up all manner of terrible things. I have to go. They’ll need me on the deck.”
She turned for the door then, pausing only to say, “You should stay in here until the storm passes. He loses interest quickly when no one is attracting his attention.”
Then she was gone, out into the gale, and the four children were left alone.
The ship shook and rocked and leapt in the water, sending books cascading to the floor. Avery made a small, shouted sound of dismay, moving toward them, and stopped as he saw Zib hurling herself at the door. “Where are you going?” he demanded.
“To help the captain!” she said, and opened the door, and was gone, out into the howling maelstrom of the storm.
The Crow Girl squawked and ran after her, and Niamh was close behind, both of them vanishing into the rain. Avery hesitated. It was warm and dry inside. It was safe inside. They were his friends, yes, but did friendship really demand that he endanger himself for the sake of the people who shared it? The Crow Girl was a survivor, and Niamh had already drowned; she wouldn’t die the same way a second time.
Zib, on the other hand, was an ordinary little girl from his own ordinary town. She could drown. She could be blown away. One sword with barnacles on the hilt wasn’t going to save her if something as terrible and inhuman as the Page of Frozen Waters—and he had to assume that the Page of Ceaseless Storms was of the same unspeakable breed—decided to have its way with her. Swallowing his own fears and protests, Avery ran for the door and plunged after the others, out into the storm.
Outside on the deck, the wind howled so loudly that it became a roar, a monster in its own right. The rain lashed down in sheets, turning the day into midnight’s darkness. Try as he might, he couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. “Zib!” he shouted, and the wind ripped his words away.
Avery spun in a circle, suddenly very aware that while everything he had told himself to get the courage to follow his friends outside was unquestionably true, he was also an ordinary kid from an ordinary town. He couldn’t breathe water or break into birds and fly away; he didn’t even have Zib’s sword.
He was still trying to stop himself from panicking over the ordinariness of it all when there was a thump in front of him, so close that it was audible despite the wind. He looked in that direction, and paled as he saw a gray-skinned, white-haired child of about his own age balancing lightly on the deck, a trident in one hand.
“Hello,” said the child, and somehow his voice was perfectly audible above the wind. “Are you the one who was yelling for the Lady of Salt and Sorrow?”
“No,” whispered Avery. “Are you the Page of Ceaseless Storms?”
“I am!” said the child proudly. “The Queen of Swords has me listening for that name, because as long as the Lady is gone, the King of Cups is too busy dozing and dreaming and waiting for her to come home to challenge for more territory. It’s better when they don’t fight, so it’s better that the Lady stay gone. I’m to watch for signs of her, and strike her down if she appears.”
“My friends,” said Avery. “They came out here to face you. Please, where are they? One was a Crow Girl, and one was a drowned girl, and one was a girl like me, with a sword in her hand and a whole summer tied up and captive in her hair.”
“Oh,” said the Page dismissively. “They’ve gone over the side. I can send you after them, if you would like. I’m sure they’re still floating somewhere close enough to the surface for you to find.”
Avery opened his mouth to protest, but it was too late; the Page waved his hand and the wind slammed into Avery’s chest like a hammer slams into an anvil, and then he was falling, over the rail and tumbling along the length of the hull toward the waiting, hungry sea.
TWELVE
PIECES OF A PERSON
Avery hadn’t been aware, before he struck the waves, that water could be a sort of stone; that it could be just as rigid and unyielding as anything else. The only mystery was how it could be rigid and unyielding, and fluid and shifting at the same time. The waves danced around him even as they dragged him down, and his lungs were empty and aching, and the contradiction didn’t really matter, because he was going to drown.
He forced his eyes to stay open despite the stinging of the salt all around him, scanning the dark water for signs that he wasn’t alone. At first, he couldn’t find any. Then he saw a flicker of white at the very edge of his vision, and Niamh came swimming toward him. Her hair floated around her in a vast cloud, as did the white folds of her dress; her iron shoes were gone, probably knocked off her feet by the impact. He thrashed in the water, doing his best to swim toward her, but had made virtually no progress before she was upon him, looping her arm around his waist and hauling him toward the turbulent surface.
Avery spat and sputtered when she pulled him back into the air, trying to catch his breath. Niamh did no such thing, continuing to breathe as easily as if she hadn’t just been submerged. Spitting out a last mouthful of salt, he demanded, “Where is Zib?”
Niamh shook her head. “We didn’t fall together,” she said. “The Crow Girl caught herself in a net hanging from the side of the ship before she hit the water, but Zib and I both fell all the way.”
Avery looked up, and sure enough, there was the black blotch of the Crow Girl dangling from a sheet of netting, iron shoes still on her feet and hands clutching at the weave. She waved when she saw him, so tangled that this did nothing to change her position.
“Oh,” he said, and pulled away from Niamh, doing his best to tread water unassisted. “We have to find her!”
“Can she swim?”
Avery didn’t know. There was so much he didn
’t know about Zib, thanks to geography and parental opinions about what kinds of friends they should associate with keeping them from growing up with their hands in each other’s pockets, as they maybe should have done. He shook his head, and Niamh dove again, leaving him alone.
There was a whistling sound overhead, cutting through the roaring of the wind. He looked up, and saw the small figure of the Page of Ceaseless Storms standing on the ship’s rail. The Page saw him as well, and tipped his head in a mocking nod before stepping out onto the air, or rather, onto the lashing tendrils of the wind itself. He did not fall, but walked as confidently as if he were on solid ground. He dwindled with each step, becoming smaller and smaller, until he was entirely gone.
The storm followed after him, the winds quieting and the rain tapering off, although the waves, whipped to a frenzy as they were, continued their churning. Avery looked around again, splashing, frantic to find Zib.
It was the Crow Girl’s startled squawk that caught his attention. Avery looked up again. The captain was standing on the rail, the woman from the locked room beside her. They were holding hands, fingers woven together like the strands of the net that held the Crow Girl. Together, they stepped off the edge and fell, plummeted, to the waiting, welcoming sea.
The water seemed to pull back as they fell toward it, creating a hole for them to tumble into. It closed again over their heads, and they were gone, leaving Avery alone. He struggled to stay afloat.
Zib was gone. Niamh was gone. Now even the captain and her prisoner were gone, and he had no idea how he was going to get back onto the deck. He was going to drown here, cold and wet and miserable and lonely, and his parents would never know what had happened to him. Somehow, that was the worst part of all, that his parents should spend the rest of their lives waiting for the door to open and him to come walking back in, a little late from school but otherwise none the worse for wear. He was never going to see his father smile again, or ask his mother for an extra piece of toast. (And there was something wrong with that thought, that his sorrow over his father should be tied to what Avery could do to make him happy, while his sorrow over his mother should be tied to what she could do to make Avery happy, but he was on the edge of drowning, and didn’t have time to question his own mind…)
A column of water rose out of the sea, and standing atop it was a woman he both knew and did not know, with Zib cradled, motionless in her arms. This woman was tall, with broad shoulders and strong legs and hair the color of seafoam, white and gray and endlessly tangled. Her face was beautiful, if not especially kind; warmth seemed to be something unfamiliar to her. She looked something like Niamh, with a certain essential dampness to her form, like she belonged at the bottom of the ocean.
The column shortened beneath her, until she was standing directly in front of him, somehow balanced on the waves themselves. Avery sputtered and thrashed in his efforts to keep from going under; she lifted a hand, and the water beneath him slowly became as solid as stone, until he was sitting on dry ground.
“I believe this is yours,” she said, in a voice like the crashing of waves against the shore, and held Zib out to him.
Avery gathered the girl into his arms as best as he could, receiving a mouthful of wet, salty hair for his troubles, and asked, “Who are you?”
“I am who I was before I was someone I was not, and my name is best unspoken in the open air,” said the woman.
Niamh surfaced next to Avery’s feet, and gasped at the sight of the woman atop the water. “My … my lady!”
“Not any longer, but once,” said the woman, and bent to offer a hand to Niamh, to pull her up onto the hardened water next to Avery. “My lord has taken another into his confidence, and left no space by his side for me. I have been hiding, split into my two aspects—a woman of salt and a woman of sorrow—to keep myself unseen. But neither salt nor sorrow can allow children to die without cause. I suppose I am revealed now, and all my revels to be ended.”
In Avery’s arms, Zib stirred and coughed, water spilling from her lips. The Lady sighed.
“Wake, child,” she said, and Zib opened her eyes, sitting upright and striking Avery in the face with her hair once again. The Lady laughed. It was the sweetest sound any of them had ever heard.
“But … you could have come home,” said Niamh.
“The ice, when frozen for one, is frozen for all,” said the Lady. “If you are an exile, I am an exile as well, and nothing to be done for it. But take heart, child of my city: while we both live, the door may yet swing open once again.”
“Now that you’re yourself, and not two people, will you go to the King of Cups?” asked Avery.
“I could challenge his Page,” said the Lady. “But the Queen of Swords might stop me, and I lack the strength to set myself against entire Courts. I had no intention of coming back together this soon.”
“We’re glad you did,” said Avery. “Thank you.”
Zib’s iron shoes were still on her feet. They clinked dully on the hardened water as she shifted herself out of Avery’s arms and stood. Above them in the netting, the Crow Girl burst into birds, and circled their heads before landing on their arms and shoulders. Zib laughed, bright and glorious and gay as anything.
The Lady smiled. “I am sorry to have confined your friend to a single shape before. To keep myself from reuniting, I had to block all magical reunion. Now that I am in one piece, she can be in as many as she likes.”
“Magic is confusing,” said Avery.
“Much of it is sympathetic; telling a thing that because it is similar to something else, they are the same. Usually, that improves the world. Sometimes, however, it casts barriers where none would otherwise have been.”
Zib looked down, and gasped. Once the Crow Girl had joined them, and the four children were together once again, the hardened water beneath their feet had begun to gleam with a glittering, pearlescent light. “The improbable road!” she said, for indeed, that rare and fickle passage had found them once again.
The Lady looked down as well, and smiled. “I suppose your time on my ship is ended,” she said. “If the road has come to claim you, you must go with it, or you could lose it forever.”
“But we’re wet,” said Avery.
“You’re walking on the sea,” said the Lady.
“Come on, Avery,” said Zib, and took a few steps away, following the gleam. The water continued to bear her up, solid as anything. “We need to find the Queen of Wands.”
“Yes,” said Niamh, and followed her.
Avery sighed, and turned to bow his head to the Lady. “We have to go,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” she agreed, and watched him as he rejoined his friends, forming a line of children, covered in crows, walking on the surface of the sea. It was an improbable thing, but no more so than anything else that had happened, and she was smiling as she turned away from them.
EPILOGUE
IN WHICH COURTS ARE MADE CLEAR
The Queen of Swords has a reputation for making monsters, and most of the Pages are monsters in their own way, but she does not forge most of them, nor have anything to do with their creation. Each ruler crafts their own Court, claiming them from the resources of their land. A Consort, when desired, Lord or Lady; a Knight, to carry their will across the protectorates; and, at times, a Page, who serves as living weapon for their regnant. Many Consorts will refuse to share space with a Page, for so many of them are monsters.
The Pages are heartless, all of them, even the kindest, you see. They act according to their own ideals, and not to the ideals of the gentle or the merciful. The Page of Frozen Waters is the worst of them, and always has been, having been crafted from ice and the drowned, but without the natural mercies to which those ordinary things are heir. And if the Page of Gentle Embers is the best of them, it is only because the Queen of Wands could envision no cruelty when she crafted her companion. They are not human. They are monsters, and that the Queen of Swords is forever blamed for the making of mons
ters when the Pages exist is one more piece of proof that the world is ever and always essentially unfair.
But all of them, once they have the scent of something to be destroyed, will return again and again, and to make an enemy of a Page is to make an enemy of the elements themselves, in their rawest, cruelest form.
Avery and Zib walked on, all unaware that both the wind and water were set against them now, in different ways, or that their journey was so very far from over as to be barely begun …
AS A. DEBORAH BAKER
Over the Woodward Wall
Along the Saltwise Sea
AS SEANAN MCGUIRE
Middlegame
Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day
Deadlands: Boneyard
Dying With Her Cheer Pants On
Laughter at the Academy
THE WAYWARD CHILDREN SERIES
Every Heart a Doorway
Down Among the Sticks and Bones
Beneath the Sugar Sky
In an Absent Dream
Come Tumbling Down
Across the Green Grass Fields
Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children, Volumes 1–3 (boxed set)
THE OCTOBER DAYE SERIES
Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Late Eclipses
One Salt Sea
Ashes of Honor
Chimes at Midnight
The Winter Long
A Red-Rose Chain
Once Broken Faith
The Brightest Fell
Night and Silence
The Unkindest Tide
A Killing Frost
When Sorrows Come
THE INCRYPTID SERIES
Discount Armageddon
Midnight Blue-Light Special
Half-Off Ragnarok
Pocket Apocalypse
Chaos Choreography
Magic for Nothing
Tricks for Free
That Ain’t Witchcraft
Imaginary Numbers
Along the Saltwise Sea Page 14
