Avery plodded, not speaking, not looking to the left or right. Zib stole looks in his direction, feeling dimly as if he, too, had become a sort of sharp thorn, something she could easily prick herself upon.
When the first of the glowing bricks appeared in the dirt, Zib gasped and exclaimed, “The improbable road! Why, Avery, it’s found us even here! I didn’t know roads could do that!”
The crows, which had been flying merrily all around them, began to flock together, becoming a twister of black wings and black feathers and wind, until they finally solidified into the body of the Crow Girl, who laughed and danced backward, causing more bricks to light up in the muddy ground.
“The road can follow you anywhere, as long as you’re following the rules,” she said. “It can find a feather in a hurricane or a bubble at the bottom of the sea. Two children and a Crow Girl, that’s no trouble at all!”
“Why,” said Avery, in a dull, soft voice. The word was not a question on his lips: it was a condemnation, a quiet statement of fact.
The Crow Girl cocked her head to the side. “Why what? Why is the road like this? The road goes everywhere in the Up-and-Under, into the clouds and down to the depths, because the road is for everyone, and something for everyone needs to be everywhere, or it isn’t really for everyone at all. A garden behind a gate isn’t everybody’s garden, no matter what the gardeners may try to say. No, it isn’t for everyone at all.”
“Why didn’t you help us?” Avery lifted his head and looked at her, as bleak as a midwinter morning. The sparkle, tame and tranquil as it was, had gone out of his eyes; he was a shadow of himself. “You were there, you were right there, and you could have helped us with the Bumble Bear, but you didn’t help us at all. You stayed crows in the brambles, and you let it threaten us, and scare us, and t-take things from us. You’re no friend at all. You’re a coward.”
“Everything with wings is a coward,” said the Crow Girl. “Even the things that want to be brave, the hawks and eagles and vultures and pelicans, they’re all cowards. To have wings is to know how to fly away.” She paused before adding, thoughtfully, “Maybe emus aren’t cowards. They have wings, but they’ve forgotten how to fly. Maybe they can learn to be brave.”
“Is that why you didn’t help us?” asked Avery. “Because you were afraid?” Angry as he was, hurt as he was, he could understand some of what it meant to be afraid. Avery was a clean, polite, patient child in a world where children were encouraged to be those things at home, but something entirely other in the company of their peers. He had never mastered pretending to be something or someone that he wasn’t.
“Oh, no,” said the Crow Girl. “Even a coward can harry and strike. Sometimes it’s better to be a coward. The brave rush in, the brave think they know what’s what and who’s who, and the brave get buried in soft green moss, with stones to rest their heads upon. I’m not a creature of stone or moss, though, and a coward can be careful. Cowards take their time. Cowards find the way that’s right, instead of the way that’s easy.”
“Then why…”
“The Queen of Swords made me,” said the Crow Girl. Her voice was soft, and simple, and sad. She looked at the children in front of her, wrapping her bare arms around her feathered body as if she thought she could hold herself in place. “She didn’t steal me from a hive or anything like that. I went willing, we all go willing, because she offered me transformation, transfiguration, transmutation from something I didn’t want to be into something I did. I was someone else before I came to her, and I wasn’t happy then, but I’m happy now, yes, I’m happy now. I serve the Queen and I’m happy. She loves me so, she’ll keep me forever.”
“The Bumble Bear belonged to her,” said Zib slowly.
“So many things do,” said the Crow Girl. “I didn’t know it would be there, I promise that. There was never a beast of any kind at that bramble break before. The Queen must have heard us coming and placed a guard.”
“Why would she do that if she loves you?” asked Zib.
“Because she wants to love you, too. She wants to love all the children who walk the improbable road, to gather them close and keep them warm and safe and free from the temptations of the Impossible City, the allure of the alchemical aurora. She wants us to be wild and bestial and home forever, nevermore to roam.” The Crow Girl glanced around, suddenly anxious, suddenly seeming more like a wild creature than she ever had before, like the part of her that was human was less important than the part of her that was bird. She stepped closer to Avery and Zib, bobbing her head low, so that her words would be spilled only between the three of them and not into the wider world.
Avery and Zib found themselves leaning in to catch every syllable, not allowing any of them to fall to the muddy earth, to the returning road. These were crumbs for their ears, and theirs alone.
“I can’t fight what belongs to the Queen, for they are my brothers and my sisters and my siblings all, and she doesn’t allow fighting in her family; she judges it most harshly, and when she punishes us, it aches for years on end. So no, I couldn’t help you against her beast, and I won’t help you against any other beasts we happen to encounter, not when they belong to her. She would love you too, if you allowed her to, and her love would be everything you had ever wanted, and nothing that you needed. If you trust her, you’ll never make it home. You’ll never have your ending, good or bad or in-between, for all endings here belong to the Queen of Swords, and she doesn’t share. Be careful. Be cowards. Courage belongs to the brave and the foolish, and they are always, always the first to fall before her glory.”
The Crow Girl straightened abruptly, dancing back onto the glimmering bricks of the improbable road, a bright smile on her thin, hard-lipped mouth. “I promised you food! Better than a napple! Come, children, come, cowards, come, come, come!”
Zib, hesitant but hungry, began to follow, and stopped as Avery reached out and grabbed her wrist. She looked at his hand, tight and trembling, holding her fast; then she looked at his face, and nearly shied away from the wildness there.
“We should run,” he said. “While she’s distracted.”
“Where?” she asked. “There’s only one tunnel through the briars, and the Bumble Bear is at one end of it, and the other end is ahead of us, with the Crow Girl in our way. Even if we went back—even if we could go back—there’s nothing but stairs and a mountain to fall from, and a stone circle to shiver and starve in. The Queen of Swords doesn’t know we’re here. She doesn’t want us yet, she can’t. I need food, and a good place to sit, and something to cover my feet. Let me go, Avery, and walk. We have to walk if we’re to reach the Impossible City.”
Reluctantly, Avery released her wrist. “This is the wrong thing to do,” he said.
“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” said Zib. “It’s what we have right now.”
She turned back to the road, the scattered, glimmering bricks all the brighter now that the Crow Girl had stepped on them and reminded them that they had a job to do. She began to follow it, making the bricks grow brighter still. Avery watched, trembling. He wanted to be brave. He wanted to stand alone in the brambles, to let the darkness come down around him, and to know that he was not afraid.
He was afraid. He was so very afraid. Something rustled in the brambles and he was running, racing after Zib and the Crow Girl, running through the Tangle until the tunnel of briars ended around him and he was standing in sunlight once again. He stopped, chest heaving, heart pounding, and looked around himself with wide, bewildered eyes.
The improbable road was no longer made of scattered bricks. It was shining and complete, stretching ahead of him in a pearlescent ribbon that wove between berry bushes and high trees whose branches were alive with birds he had never seen before and couldn’t name. The ground to either side of the road was windswept and dusted with sparse, sere-looking grass, like the fields at the end of the growing season. Zib was up ahead, plucking bright pink berries from a bush twice as tall as she was. The Crow Gi
rl was nowhere to be seen.
Avery stopped in the middle of the road, scowling. Zib looked content, almost, like this was normal, ordinary—like this was the way the world was supposed to be, and not proof that something had gone terribly, horribly, awfully wrong. Roads weren’t supposed to glow, or to follow people. Flocks of crows weren’t supposed to turn into girls, and girls weren’t supposed to turn into flocks of crows. Berries weren’t supposed to be as pink as sugar candy, and somehow that was the worst offense of all, because it was such a small one. Everything else had been a huge offense, mudslides and monsters and boulders that talked and owls that gave advice. It had been like walking in a terrible, complicated, frustrating dream. But this …
Berries were simple. Berries were small, ordinary things, served in bowls with cream for dessert, or maybe baked into pies. They didn’t belong in dreams, and yet there they were, staining Zib’s fingers and lips with their juices. If there were berries here, this wasn’t a dream, and if this wasn’t a dream, it was really happening. Avery didn’t want it to be really happening. He didn’t want that at all.
“Avery!”
He blinked, and focused. Zib had seen him. She was waving one pink-stained hand, a bright smile on her face.
“They’re safe to eat,” she said, and held out her other hand, showing him the berries cupped in her palm. “They’re called bonberries, and they grow everywhere around here.”
“Where’s the Crow Girl?” he asked. His stomach rumbled and grumbled, reminding him that it had been a long time and a lot of walking since breakfast. He tried to push the feeling aside. He didn’t want to eat those berries. He didn’t want to look at them. They made the Up-and-Under too real, and they didn’t belong here.
“She went to get us some fish and bigger fruit,” said Zib. “She told me to stay here for when you came out of the brambles, because you’d want to know where she was.”
Avery scowled again. “I don’t want to eat anything she brings. I don’t want to put this place in my stomach and let it be a part of me. I want to leave. I want to go home. Why are you so happy? You shouldn’t be happy. This is a bad place.”
“This is an adventure,” said Zib. “Shouldn’t you be happy? I thought everyone wanted an adventure.”
“Not me!” Avery realized he was shouting. He realized he didn’t know how to stop. Most of all, he realized that he didn’t want to. “I want to go to school and go home and do my chores and go to bed and be safe! I want to tell my father about my day and have him laugh and say I’m smart and good and just the sort of son he always hoped he’d have! I want my books and my room and my things and not this!” He stomped his foot for emphasis, then ground out, every word a stone: “I. Want. My. Shoes. To. Shine.”
Zib’s face fell. “Oh. I—”
“Don’t. I don’t want to talk to you. I want to go home.” Avery began to pace from one side of the road to the other, turning back every time it seemed like he might touch the windswept ground.
The berries that had been so sweet a few seconds before didn’t taste very good anymore. Zib looked at the squashed pink mass in her hand, wrinkled her nose, and flung it as far from the road as she could. Then she sat and hugged her knees to her chest, watching Avery pace back and forth across the rainbow sheen of the improbable road, his hands in his pockets and a frown on his face.
Avery paced. Zib began counting silently to one hundred, ticking off his steps. When she reached a hundred, she started again, and again, until it seemed like she had always been counting, until it seemed like surely, she’d counted enough.
“Are you done being angry with me yet?” she called.
“No,” he replied, voice sullen. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
Zib didn’t have to ask what she’d done: it was obvious. “We needed to give something to the Bumble Bear if we wanted it to let us pass. It couldn’t be my slingshot, and it couldn’t be your ruler. The shine from your shoes was something we could lose. It didn’t hurt us.”
“It hurt me,” said Avery. He finally stopped pacing and turned to look at her again, expression bleak. Something about him seemed so lost that Zib stopped looking at him and started seeing him, which was something else altogether. People look at things all day long and never really see them; look at the shelves without seeing their contents, look at the houses without seeing the people who live inside.
Look at their friends and neighbors without seeing the harmony and horror in their hearts.
Without their shine, Avery’s shoes were ordinary brown leather, like any kid out on the playground might be wearing. They didn’t reflect him anymore. They were too scuffed to reflect anything. His shirt seemed just a little less starched without them reflecting its crispness; his hair seemed just a little less combed. He looked like an ordinary boy. Zib hadn’t known him for very long, but she already knew that that was wrong.
She felt fear tickle her ribs. If they had to lose themselves to walk this road, would it ever really be able to lead them home?
“I have birthday money,” she said. “I keep it in a pickle jar I bury in the backyard. I move it every weekend, in case pirates come looking for the buried treasure. I’ll dig it up when we get home, and we’ll buy you a new pair of shoes. The brightest, shiniest shoes you ever saw. Shoes like stars.”
“Stars fall down a lot,” said Avery.
“So every time you fall down, you can make a wish on your shoes, and it’ll come true,” said Zib.
She sounded so earnest that it startled a laugh out of him, and that laugh broke the shell of his anger, letting it all leak out and away. He laughed again, happier now. Maybe it didn’t matter if these shoes were shiny: there were other shoes in the world. Shinier shoes, even, shoes like stars.
“Buy me shoes and we’re square,” said Avery.
“Deal,” said Zib. “Do you want some berries now?”
Avery’s stomach growled, and he found that indeed, he did.
When the Crow Girl returned, on foot—becoming a murder of crows was a useful thing in many situations, but not when she needed to carry a picnic hamper big enough to use both hands—she found the children with sticky pink mouths and sticky pink fingers, sitting contentedly in the shadow of a large berry bush. She cocked her head to the side, considering them.
This is not the Crow Girl’s story: if ever that story were to be told, it would not begin in an ordinary town, or on an ordinary street. But she is important enough to this story that certain things must be said. First, that she meant well in all ways; second, that she was not well beloved of the Queen of Swords before she chose to rescue two children from a muddy grave; and third, that because she was both child and corvid, her heart was ever divided against itself, like a house with too many locked doors. She looked at Avery and Zib and felt a great longing wash over her. She wanted to be loved as carelessly as they were growing to love each other. She wanted to be comfortable enough to sit silently, berry juice on her fingers and the improbable road under her behind. Most of all, she wanted to spare them from the road ahead.
She was still standing there, trying to decide, when Avery saw her and waved a greeting. She blinked. Of the two of them, she had assumed that Zib would be happiest to see her, but Zib was watching a beetle crawl across a rock and hadn’t noticed her at all. The Crow Girl smiled like the sun coming out and skipped toward the pair, holding up her picnic hamper.
“Fish!” she proclaimed. “Fish and bread and I promised you something better than a napple, didn’t I? Well, here it is!” She set the hamper down with a thump and flipped its lid open, reaching in and pulling out what could have been a very small, pale, fleshy octopus, if it had possessed eyes, or suckers, or any of the other attributes that distinguish “octopus” from “a thing which has many tentacles.”
Zib blinked. “What is it?”
“This is a flavor fruit!” said the Crow Girl triumphantly. She thrust it at Zib. “Here! Try!”
Zib looked dubiously at the flavor fruit, an
d had the distinct, unsettling impression that it was looking back at her. But the Crow Girl looked so proud, and somehow the thought of disappointing her was even more unsettling than the impression of being stared at by a bundle of tentacles. Cautiously, Zib reached out and took the fruit. It was soft and warm, with a surface that felt like the skin of a peach, lightly fuzzy in an almost animal way.
“How do I eat it?” asked Zib. “Is it like—” She stopped. The Crow Girl didn’t know what an apple was. Why would she understand words like “banana” or “orange” or any of the other fruits Zib could ask about? This wasn’t home. This wasn’t anything like home. The longer they walked, the less like home the Up-and-Under seemed.
“You break off the arms, silly,” said the Crow Girl. She grasped one of the flavor fruit’s twisty tentacles and twisted, snapping it neatly off. The flesh of the fruit was white as bone or custard, pale and scentless. The Crow Girl sat back on her heels, beginning to gnaw the tentacle. She didn’t remove the skin or check for seeds.
Cautiously, Zib grasped a tentacle and mimicked the Crow Girl’s motion. It came off easily, as easily as plucking a ripe tomato from the plants in the backyard. The Crow Girl nodded encouragement, and Zib raised the tentacle to her mouth. Then she gasped, eyes going wide.
“It tastes like my grandmother’s gingerbread!” she said. “It’s warm, and sweet, and— How is this possible?”
“Try another one,” said the Crow Girl.
Zib greedily stuffed the rest of the tentacle into her mouth, reveling in the taste of every Christmas she had shared with her grandmother, molasses and spice and sugar. The flavor still clung to her teeth as she broke off another tentacle and took her first bite, only to gasp again.
“Ice cream at the beach in summer! Strawberry ice cream!”
“I don’t know what a strawberry is, but I know ice cream,” said the Crow Girl. She broke another tentacle off her flavor fruit, offering it to Avery. “Here. Try it and see!”
Over the Woodward Wall Page 6
