And he was laughing.
It seemed strange that he should laugh while he was being dragged across a meadow by a girl he’d only barely met and who wasn’t at all the sort of friend he was invited to bring home for lemonade and cookies. His mother would have sniffed at Zib’s hair, and his father would have scowled at Zib’s clothes, but here they were together, having an adventure, and he knew, deep down, that as long as she held on to his hand, he would be just fine.
He was still marveling over this impossible truth when his foot hit a stone and he went sprawling, his hand yanked from Zib’s by gravity. The grass, which had seemed dry when they were running across it, had pulled the trick beloved of grasses everywhere and hidden its wetness away down among its roots: as soon as Avery fell, he began to slide, slowly at first, then with growing speed, as his weight pressed the wetness out of the grass and into the soil beneath him.
The mud was candy-striped, pink and blue and purple, streaked with veins of golden glitter. Avery was too busy shrieking to appreciate it.
“Avery!”
Zib had been happy running through the meadow with her strange new friend beside her. Unlike Avery, she had always seen the value in being able to run faster than anyone expected, and she had been so delighted with her own cleverness that it had never occurred to her that he might feel differently. Now, watching him wheeze and yell as a sudden cascade of colorful mud carried him away, she wondered whether it might not have been a good idea to go a little slower.
There was a plopping, cascading sound. Zib ran along the stream of mud, which was swelling so that she thought soon it might be better to call it a river, and stared in horror as she saw what was happening: the mud was pouring over a cliff, and soon, Avery would pour over the cliff too.
“Avery, swim!”
Avery stopped thrashing as he turned and gave her a wide-eyed, open-mouthed look. “It’s mud!”
“I noticed!”
“I can’t swim in mud!”
“Why not? Try!” The cliff was getting closer. Zib couldn’t decide whether telling him would be a good thing—a motivation—or a bad thing, since no one really likes to hear that they’re about to be swept over a cliff and maybe drowned in mud.
Avery, to his credit, tried. He kicked his legs and flailed his arms, and all he managed to do was go under the mud, disappearing for one heart-stopping moment before he bobbed back to the surface, choking and coughing, with blue and purple streaks on his face. “I can’t!” he wailed.
Zib ran alongside the river of mud—when had it become wide enough for her to think of it as a river? This wasn’t improbable, this was impossible, and her heart rebelled from it even as her mind began looking for ways to make it go away—and considered her options as quickly as she could. If she dove in, they could both be swept over the cliff. She didn’t know Avery very well. Maybe she could find the Impossible City without him. The mud looked soft; he would probably be fine.
But then she would always, forever, be the kind of person who didn’t dive in when she saw that a friend who had made a little, simple mistake was being swept away by consequences he could never have predicted. She would walk in the shadow of that decision for the rest of her life. She would see that person in the mirror.
Zib took a deep breath, kicked off her shoes, which had never fit that well in the first place, and threw herself into the river of mud.
Avery had been right about one thing: it was difficult to swim in the mud. Zib, who had spent substantially more time in mudholes and ditches than he had, thought there was something strange about that; normally, moving through mud was a little difficult but not altogether impossible. This mud was almost like thin taffy. It grabbed at her arms and legs, pulling them down, keeping her from getting any sort of traction. She fought against it all the same, and reached Avery, grabbing hold of his wrist, barely a second before the river of mud carried them both over the cliff.
The mud roared as it slid around them. The mud thundered. Zib, who had never considered the voice of the earth, screamed. Mud flowed into her mouth. She screamed harder. Avery clung to her, his own mouth stubbornly shut, his face jammed against her shoulder, like denial could somehow change the situation unfolding around them. There had been no time to see how far the fall would be, no way to brace for it or to cushion the landing to come. There was only dropping through the air, surrounded by a sticky rainbow of taffy slime, out of control.
For the first time, Zib realized that “adventure” was not always another way of saying “an exciting new experience” but could also be a way of saying “bad things happening very quickly, with no way to make them stop.” She held tight to Avery, who had already known that sometimes adventures could be cruel, who had already known enough to be afraid.
Neither of them could see the cliff they fell past, but if they had, they would have understood the mud a little better, for the stone was banded in pink and blue and purple, stripes of one color sitting atop the next, like something from a storybook. But storybooks didn’t usually try to kill the people who read them, and as Avery and Zib plummeted through the air, they were both quite sure that they were going to die.
At the bottom of the cliff, the mud had formed a sticky, stripy pool, like the runoff from a candy machine. Avery and Zib tumbled down in a cascade of falling mud; they struck the surface together and sank like small, terrified stones into the terrible depths. Without Avery to press the mud from the grass above, the river stopped flowing, and the last of the mud fell after them with a sucking, slurping sound.
Everything was still. Everything was cold, and possible, and finished. Yes. There was a finality to the scene, as if the world had grown weary of two children on an unintentional adventure and simply declared their journeys to be over and finished, and not of any importance to anyone else in the world. Their parents would weep and wonder. Their classmates would stare at empty chairs and make up stories about what had happened to them, where they could possibly have gone. The police would search, and find nothing, for there would be nothing to find.
Too many adventures end with this sort of finality, which is terrible and true and all too probable. But Avery and Zib had been following the improbable road, had stepped upon it the instant they stepped away from the comforting fiction of a straight line and glittering bricks winding through the landscape. So it was that they had barely vanished beneath the surface of the mud when an entire murder of crows swooped down from the cliffside above them, landing on the bank and falling into the shape of a girl.
Crows do not, as a rule, become little girls casually, and perhaps that was why this girl, who was midway between Avery and Zib in size, was still so clearly a crow. She had simply found a means of being a little girl at the same time. She wore a short dress of black feathers, glossy and sleek and growing out of her skin, so that removing them would have meant plucking her bloody. Her nose was sharper than a nose should have been, but her eyes were sharper still, so that it seemed she could see everything, no matter how well concealed, and have an opinion about it. Her lips were thin and her toes were long, gripping the ground like a crow’s talons grip a scarecrow’s shoulder.
“Hello?” she said, to the pool of striped mud. “Are you mud-breathers? Are you breathing the mud right now?”
The mud did not respond.
“I don’t think you are, no, no, I don’t think you are, you looked like human children, lots of things can look like human children, but only the gnomes can look like human children and breathe mud, and you didn’t look like gnomes. Gnomes would have been laughing more. Happy things, gnomes are, when they get to ride a mudslide someplace new. I don’t think you can breathe down there.”
The mud did not respond.
The girl who was a crow who was a girl frowned with her thin lips, leaning forward until the tip of her nose almost touched the surface of the mud. “Are you drowning? Don’t say anything if you’re drowning, and I’ll know that means ‘yes.’” She paused, a quizzical look flashi
ng across her face. “But you probably don’t want to be drowning, do you? You didn’t look like you wanted to be drowning when you fell. Do you want to be saved? I want to save you, but if I do, you’ll have to face the consequences, and maybe you don’t want that.”
The mud did not respond.
The crow girl straightened up, so that she was standing as straight as she could. Her arms drew up against her sides as she did, folding naturally into the shape of wings, for all that they didn’t have any feathers on them, for all that she still had fingers, and hands, and other things an ordinary crow wouldn’t have at all.
“I think I should save you,” she said. “If you’re angry, remember, you’re the ones who didn’t tell me not to, and if you don’t like the consequences, well, they’re probably better than being lost at the bottom of a mudslide, belly full of silt and lungs full of sorrow. Probably, probably, probably.”
She bobbed her head, once, twice, three times, and then she dove into the pool of mud, vanishing quite completely. There was a long moment of silence before a bubble broke the surface, popping with a wet splattering sound, sending mud flying in all directions. The silence returned.
Then, with a gasp and a groan and a yell of triumph, the crow girl’s head broke the surface. She had one arm wrapped around Avery, and one arm wrapped around Zib, and both of them started coughing and spitting out mud as soon as they were in the open air.
“Hold on, hold on,” chattered the crow girl. “We’re closer to there than we are to anywhere else, but you have to hold on.”
Inch by inch, she pulled them to the shore. She flung Avery onto the bank first. He rolled away from the pool, coughing up more mud, so that it ran down his chin in cascades of pink and blue and purple. His shirt, which had been so white and so pristine and so perfect, was covered in swirls of color, so that he looked like he was wearing the results of a half-finished taffy pull. He lay there, limp and dripping, and watched with dull eyes as the crow girl maneuvered Zib to the pool’s edge.
Zib’s hair, that remarkable, untamable mass of curls and frizzes, was plastered down by the mud, forming a hard shell, like a helmet, like a jawbreaker. She barely looked like Zib without it to stand sentry for the rest of her. It was strange, strange, strange to look at her and not see her hair first. Avery closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look at strange things anymore. He wanted to look at simple, ordinary things, things he already knew how to understand.
“This won’t do,” chided a new voice. “No, this won’t do at all. Stay here, all right? Stay here, and I’ll make it better.”
There was a wet splatting sound, like a bag of laundry being thrown onto concrete. It was followed by the sound of wings, so many wings, uncountable wings clawing at the sky.
“Avery?”
The voice was Zib’s, but it was barely a whisper. It was so close. Avery reached out, eyes still closed, and stopped when he felt his fingertips brush something solid.
“Avery, I’m scared.”
“I’m scared too,” he whispered, and somehow, that made it better. If they were both scared together, maybe things weren’t so scary after all. Fear was a large and terrible monster, but fear could be conquered if enough people stood up against it.
They lay there in silence. For how long, neither of them could say, but they felt the mud hardening all over their bodies, until they couldn’t have moved if they had wanted to. That should have been worrisome: Avery didn’t like being dirty, and Zib didn’t like being still, and here they were being both dirty and still, and they had no way to stop it. But they were so tired, and the sun was so warm, and maybe it was better to wait for the stranger who had rescued them to come back. Maybe it was safer.
The sound of wings drifted over them, distant at first, but growing louder and louder, until it felt like they were at the center of a thunderstorm made entirely of birds. Then, without warning, water came pouring from the sky above them, soaking them both to the skin in an instant. Zib sat up with a gasp, shaking water out of her hair, which immediately stood at attention, like she had turned into a lightning rod under her sphere of mud and silence. Avery sat up more slowly, and watched in awe as the unwanted colors bled out of his shirt and ran down to the muddy ground, which was quickly washing clear, revealing itself as a great stone symbol.
It was made of brick, red brick and black brick and those strange glittering bricks that had comprised the road that wasn’t the improbable road, not really. Avery squinted at it, trying to understand. It was a sword, he thought, a sword with vast black wings fanning out from where the hilt should have been, and looking at it made him feel cold in a way he couldn’t understand, because the rain was warm, and he was free, and he shouldn’t have been cold.
Zib, meanwhile, sprang to her feet and gaped up at the sky, where crows—so many crows, a flock of crows, a murder of crows—circled around a dwindling, captive cloud. It was bruise-dark with rain, and lightning rippled across its surface as the crows darted in, nimbly avoiding the sparks of light and power, pecking its surface to send more water cascading down until the last of the mud was gone and the last of the cloud burst with a soft, sad popping sound.
The crows continued to circle, but as they circled they spiraled lower and lower, finally coming together, wings and bodies blending, black feathers flying, and somehow compressing themselves into the shape of a girl just their age.
The girl landed in a crouch, looking more like a wild thing than a child. Slowly she straightened, until she was standing a little taller than Avery, a little shorter than Zib, slotting into the space they made between them like it had been measured out to her specifications.
She had black hair and yellow eyes, and a dress made of black feathers that ended just above her knees. Her feet were bare and her nails were long and raggedy, like no one had ever trimmed them but let them grow until they could be used to climb the walls of the world. Avery looked at her and felt fear run all through him, cold and biting. Zib looked at her and thought she was the most wonderful thing in the entire world.
“Who are you?” asked Zib, all awe.
Avery had to swallow the urge to pull her away. She would stay there forever if he let her, of that much he was sure: she was so enchanted by this stranger, by this adventure, that she would never realize when she was in danger, and without her, he would never be able to go home. He was already forgetting that she had saved him, or done her best to save him, when the mud began to flow. Fear has a way of doing that to people.
“I’m a Crow Girl,” said the stranger. She cocked her head. “Who are you?”
“I’m Avery, and this is Zib,” said Avery. “Please, do you know where we are?”
“Why, this is the Up-and-Under, of course, and the Kingdom of the Queen of Swords,” said the Crow Girl. She cocked her head in the opposite direction. “You must not be very clever, if you don’t even know where you are. I blame the shoes.”
“Shoes?” asked Zib, glancing down at her own stocking-clad toes. She didn’t like this stranger, this Crow Girl, saying that she wasn’t clever. She’d been plenty clever since climbing over the wall. Not knowing where she was wasn’t a failure of cleverness, it was a failure of the people who were supposed to make the maps.
“Shoes.” The Crow Girl held up her bare left foot and waggled her toes extravagantly. “If you can’t feel where you’re going, how will you ever know where you’ve been? Skies for wings and roads for feet, that’s what the world is made of.”
“How can something be up and under?” asked Avery. He had many more questions clawing at his throat, like “How were you just a flock of crows?” and “Why does your dress look like feathers?” and “Why am I so afraid of the symbol on the ground?” All of them felt too big and too wild and too strange, like asking them would change the world in a way it couldn’t come back from. Better to ask the obvious, and maybe start to understand a little better what was going on.
“Up a tree’s still under the sky,” said the Crow Girl. “Here i
n the Up-and-Under, we’re both things at once, always, and we’re never anything in-between. It’s good here. We’re happy.” A thin edge of strain came into her voice. She sounded like a little kid trying to claim that they hadn’t stolen the last of the cookies. “We’re all happy, always, because that’s what it means to be in the Up-and-Under. Now that you’re here, you’ll be happy too.”
“How do you know we’re not from here?” asked Zib.
“If you were from here, you’d know where you were,” said the Crow Girl. “You’d understand. You wouldn’t be asking questions and questions and questions, like a bunch of chicks just out of the nest. It’s fine not knowing things. Not knowing things means you have room to learn, and learning’s about the most important thing there is, so the more ignorant you are, the more important you can be. But first step is saying that you know you don’t know. Pretending to know things you don’t never helped anyone.”
“We were looking for the Impossible City,” said Avery. “A man we met near the Forest of Borders said that the Queen of Wands would be able to give us an ending and send us home if we went there. Do you know which way the Impossible City is from here?”
“People certainly do like the word ‘of’ around here,” said Zib. “Of this and of that.”
“I like ‘if’ better,” said the Crow Girl. She fixed Avery with one yellow eye. “Are you sure you want an ending? Endings are tricky things. They wiggle and writhe like worms, and once you have them, you can’t give them back again. You can hang them on hooks and sail the seas for sequels, if you realize you don’t like where your story stopped, but you’ll always have had an ending, and there will always be people who won’t follow you past that line. You lose things when you have an ending. Big things. Important things. Better not to end at all, if you can help it.”
Over the Woodward Wall Page 4
