When hands grasped the collars of their shirts, both stiffened but did not try to break away. Avery assumed it was the Crow Girl, come to save them once again, as she had in the mudslide. Zib assumed it was the Queen of Swords, having changed her mind about the shrillness of Zib’s screaming. Either way, it would get them out of the water, and so they stopped fighting, stopped thrashing, and let themselves be pulled from the depths.
The girl walked out of the water as easily as she had walked in, dragging the two children with her. When they were safely free of the lake, she let them go, and they collapsed, coughing and wheezing and spitting up water, while she watched from a polite distance.
Avery was the first to recover. He was very fond of baths, and laundry, and anything else that left him clean, after all, and while the lake had been colder than a winter bath, he was young and inclined to briskness. He spat out the last traces of lake water and clambered to his feet, wiping wet hands on wet trousers before turning to offer Zib his hands.
Zib, it should be said, was much the worse for wear. She was not as fond of baths, or cleanliness, as Avery was; viewed them, for the most part, as necessary evils. Her hair was matted down against her head, as heavy with water as a sponge, and her skirt clung to her legs like the scales of a mermaid. She took Avery’s hands despite that, letting him pull her to her feet, wobbling and leaning against him for the strength she no longer seemed to have.
“Where’s the Crow Girl?” she asked, glancing to the lake with some alarm. She was cold and she was tired and she wasn’t sure she’d ever see the surface again if she dove in even one more time.
“She went to scout the mountain roads,” said an unfamiliar voice.
Zib and Avery turned.
The girl was very pale, with waterweeds in her hair and tangled around her toes. Her feet were bare, and all of her glistened with a silvery sheen, like she had been dusted in glitter and set out into the world to see what could be seen.
“Who are you?” asked Avery.
“What are you?” asked Zib, forgetting her manners in the face of her awe. Avery stuck an elbow in her side, but it was too late: the question had been asked.
“My name is Niamh,” said the girl. “I pulled you out of the water. I come from a city deep beneath the surface of a lake, in a place so cold that the ice only thaws once every hundred years.”
“People don’t live under lakes,” said Avery. “There’s no air. Only water. People don’t breathe water.”
“Oh, but you see, the people where I’m from don’t breathe at all.” Niamh smiled, showing teeth like pearls. “And only when the ice melts do we come up to the surface to see how other people live. But while I was on the shore gathering stones, a storm came, and the Page of Frozen Waters appeared, and snatched me up, and carried me to the King of Cups. He’s a very cruel king, and he kept me for so long that the ice froze solid again, and now I’m just a drowned girl with no city at all, until the next time the thaw comes.”
“A hundred years is a very long while,” said Avery. He couldn’t let himself think too hard about the way her skin glistened, or her claims to come from a place where people didn’t breathe. Surely she was kidding. “Won’t you be too old then to swim?”
“Not at all. When I’m home, I don’t breathe, and when I’m here, I don’t age. That way, I can always make it back to the ice, if I’m clever.”
Zib, though, had what felt like a more important question. “Who is the Page of Frozen Waters?”
Niamh sobered. “She is the worst of all the King’s subjects, because she loves him and hates him at the same time, and would do anything to please him. She commands the crows, and they do her bidding. For him, she gathers every strange thing that comes into the Up-and-Under, even stealing them from under the nose of the Queen of Swords, who is wicked in her own way, but never so much as the King of Cups. The Page will gather you, if you’re not careful.”
Avery and Zib exchanged a glance and stepped closer together, suddenly afraid of this glittering girl, and of everything her presence might entail.
Avery thought of the Crow Girl, of her promise that the skeleton key and its lock would allow them to pass over the protectorate of the King of Cups without attracting his attention. But here they were, soaked and cold and on their own, and he knew—knew—that they hadn’t passed over the King’s protectorate at all. They had fallen right down into the middle of it, and the Crow Girl had vanished.
Zib thought of the Crow Girl as well, but she thought of the way the girl had tried to help them, the way she had broken into birds and fled, the way she had balked at the idea of control by kings or queens of any kind. The Page of Frozen Waters must have been her greatest nightmare, and if she never came back, Zib didn’t know if she’d be able to blame her, and if she never came back, Zib didn’t know if she’d be able to forgive her, either. It was all so complicated, and she was cold. So cold.
Niamh looked at the shivering children with sympathy. She looked somewhat younger than they were, yes, but she was a daughter of the city beneath the lake, the city that had—that needed—no name, for how many spectacular cities of shell and silver could one world contain? She was old enough to have seen so many stories spin themselves across the shore, and she was sorry to see children suffer.
“Come with me,” she said. “Your Crow Girl will find us, if she’s free to do so, or not find us, if the Page of Frozen Waters has seized hold of her, for the Page trades cleverness for cruelty, and rarely remembers to ask the proper questions. I can make a fire. You can get warm and dry and decide what happens next.”
“Won’t you melt?” blurted Zib.
Niamh smiled. “I come from the ice, but I’m not ice. You come from the earth, but you’re not earth. You don’t melt to mud in water, and I don’t melt when confronted by fire. Although…” She leaned forward, squinting at the two of them. “Maybe you don’t both come from earth. There’s something mismatched about you. There could be other elements.”
“We come from the same town,” said Avery, and took Zib’s hand, and held it stubbornly tight, a challenging expression on his face.
The glittering girl didn’t argue. She simply nodded, and said, “Follow me,” as she turned to walk back the way she had come, back into the crevasse which gaped, silent and crystalline, in the mountain’s side.
Before the wall, before the mudslide and the tunnel of mist, before the girls who came from crows and the owls that talked, Avery and Zib might have stayed where they were, watching the stranger dwindle in the distance. They might have chosen to run, to seek other ways of warming themselves, for they were both reasonably cautious children with no interest in breaking their parents’ hearts. But they were cold, and they were wet, and the Up-and-Under had a way of wearing such kinds of caution away, a little bit at a time, replacing them with curiosity and the quiet conviction that sometimes, the right thing was to follow.
So they followed.
The air inside of the crevasse was even colder than the air outside. It bit and stung their skins, until Avery looked over his shoulder, clearly thinking of going back. The opening had disappeared in a fog of ice and cold, and he could no longer be sure that it existed. The only way out was forward, following Niamh. The thought that this could be a terrible trap occurred to him, and was quickly denied. That sort of thinking would do him no good and might do him a great deal of ill. He glanced at Zib.
Her clothing was still soaked, but her hair seemed to have wrung itself out, once again rising in a glorious and terrible tangle, as frizzy and unconfined as ever. It was a relief, of a kind, to see her hair so defiant of gravity, and wetness, and a dozen other forces he didn’t have a name for. As long as her hair was alert, she was still Zib, and as long as she was still Zib, he was still Avery, and they could make it through this. They could.
The tunnel around them widened out abruptly enough to be disorienting, and they were suddenly standing on a clear patch of earth, dotted with scrubby flowers and low berry
plants that looked something like strawberries, and something like basil, and something like nothing he had ever seen before. Niamh was already in motion, gathering twigs and branches from the stretch of ground against the cliff face and piling them into a heap in the center of the clear space.
Straight rock walls defined the space on two sides, like a folded piece of paper standing on a table. A swift-moving river defined it on the third, rushing to fall down, down, down, in a cascade of falling water and hissing foam. The fourth side was nothingness, the land dropping away to provide the waterfall something to fall over, the clouds someplace to hang. What was below those clouds could not be seen, for they were too dense, too clustered together. It could have been the end of the world, for all that he could see.
“I’m getting tired of cliffs,” said Avery, and turned, and looked up at what seemed to be the tallest, sheerest stretch of rock he had ever seen. Trees grew all along the top; one dropped a branch as he watched, and Niamh was quick to dart over and retrieve it. “What’s at the top?”
“The protectorate of the Queen of Swords,” said Niamh. “She and the King of Cups are unhappy neighbors, both quite sure the other is planning something. Although, I suppose it should be said, neither of them is wrong. They are both terrible people.”
“That seems like an unkind way to speak of your king,” said Avery, who had never had a king of his own, but assumed they were something like teachers, or fathers, in the amount of respect they were expected to receive.
“He is an unkind king, at best, and besides, he isn’t mine,” said Niamh. “The city beneath the lake is its own protectorate, and we answer to no king, having decided that ours was more useful as an eel many centuries ago.”
“An eel?” asked Zib.
“He’s very happy this way, and as he makes fewer proclamations, so are we.” Niamh held her hands above the pile of wood, which burst into vigorous flame. Zib made a small sound of wordless joy and ran to warm herself. Avery followed, more slowly.
“How did you do that?” he asked. “I thought you said you came from the ice.”
“Yes,” said Niamh. “I took the cold away from the wood, so all it had left was heat, and heat wants to be fire more than anything else in the world, so when it had the opportunity, it was very happy to burn. When you take something away, there’s room for everything that’s left to be bigger, if it wants to.”
Avery wanted to argue with this, but he couldn’t find the words. He joined Zib next to the fire. The warmth was good, as long as he didn’t stand close enough for it to burn him.
Zib was not so careful. Her clothes steamed with escaping lake water; her hair crisped and danced back from the flame, barely escaping being singed. It was offensive, almost, how careless she was being, when he needed her to get home.
Anger bubbled up in his chest, hot and poisonous. Sometimes anger is a good, true thing, because the world is so often unfair, and unfairness deserves to be acknowledged. But all too often, anger is another feeling in its Sunday clothes, sadness or envy or—most dangerous of all—fear. Avery was afraid of losing Zib. He was afraid of being alone in this strange place, and most of all, he was afraid of never going home. All that fear swirled together, until it hung around his heart like a shroud, weighing it down, turning furious and foul.
She reached out, like she was going to touch the flame with her naked hand. Something inside him snapped.
“Stop that!” he shouted, and pushed her, away from the fire, toward the edge of the drop-off. “You keep doing that! You keep acting like it doesn’t matter if something happens to you, but it does matter, it does, because if something happens to you, I don’t get to go home, ever! Stupid! Selfish!”
Niamh, who was older than she looked, watched with solemn, grieving eyes, for she knew that the words Avery hurled at Zib like knives were the words that he was secretly hurling at himself, the words that stabbed deep into his heart and opened wounds that nothing but time would ever start to heal. She did not yet know these children well enough to feel as if she were allowed to intervene, but could only wait, and watch, and hope that they would find their way to peace without outside assistance.
Zib stumbled back, horror and confusion on her face. Her hair drooped, weighted down with dismay. “What are you … what are you talking about?” she stammered. “I only wanted to be warm! I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Avery could have answered her. Could have said that he was afraid, that he didn’t want her to risk herself because he didn’t know what he would do without her. Could have told her all manner of things, true things, things that she needed to hear, things that would, by coming out into the open, have made them both better.
He pushed her again.
Zib stared at him, eyes gone huge and mouth gone small. Then she shuddered, like she was shaking away the clinging film of a particularly unpleasant dream, and stood up as straight as she could. She would have been taller than him even without her hair. With it, she towered, and he felt small, and ashamed, and backed away.
“Fine,” she said. “I don’t know why I thought you’d be my friend, anyway. You’re mean and you’re selfish and you’re … you’re narrow. You look at things and you think you’re the only one who knows what they’re supposed to be and that anyone who thinks different from you is wrong, wrong, wrong. But maybe you’re wrong. Did you ever think of that? Maybe all the people telling you it’s a forest are the ones who’re right, and you’re the only one insisting that it’s nothing but a tree! I don’t want to be your friend. I don’t want to do anything with you. I wish I weren’t anywhere near you!”
Someone laughed. It was a bright, merry sound, like the pealing of bells from a carousel calliope as it started to move, or the gossiping of birds on the first day of spring. It should have been a sweet sound—but there was something poisonous to it, something rotten. It was the twitter of a bird about to ram its beak through a toad’s skull, or the ringing of a bell attached to a carousel damaged by fire. It was wrong, and it was wicked, and it was oh so very close.
The woman who stepped out of the fog—stepped out of the empty air, where nothing but clouds should have been light enough to stay suspended—looked to be of an age with the high school girls Avery sometimes saw walking home in the first light of evening, their shirts pressed and their skirts prim and their books carried exactly so. She was tall, slim, straight as an arrow, with a long, graceful neck and the carriage of a bird of prey, smooth and assured in every motion. Her hair was the color of charcoal, bound back in an elaborate braid studded with chunks of polished glass. Her eyes were the color of the fog around her, and she was dressed like a dancer, in smooth gray hose and a belted tunic that seemed archaic and accurate at the same time. Someone like her could never have dressed any other way.
Niamh took a step backward, her eyes going wide. She raised her hands in front of her in a warding gesture. “Quickly, both of you, come here,” she said, and her voice was tight with fear. “It will be all right, but you must come now.”
“Who is she?” asked Avery, and took two stumbling steps back, toward the drowned girl.
Perhaps that was what saved him. Or perhaps Zib had already been lost, had been lost the moment her careless words summoned this specter out of the fog. It can be so difficult to tell, even with the graces of hindsight, which shows all but forgives nothing.
The woman settled her feet on the cliff, blew Avery a kiss, and said, “Why, I am the Page of Frozen Waters, of course, and everything here belongs to my lord and master, which means everything here belongs to me, which means you should be grateful that the toll is tiny as it is. A mere token, really. Nothing of concern.”
Zib, seeming to suddenly realize that the Page was standing between her and her friends, tried to run forward. The Page spun on one booted heel and planted her hands on Zib’s shoulders, pushing her easily back, so that her bare feet lost traction on the stone, so that she was standing on nothing at all. Zib was no Page of Frozen Waters, to dan
ce on fog and clouds. She was as simple and solid as any child who has ever climbed trees, or hunted frogs through mud puddles, or refused to brush her hair. She fell without a sound, eyes wide and solemn, hands reaching for the help they could not grasp.
The Page of Frozen Waters turned back to Avery and Niamh. She bowed mockingly, a sweet smile on her face as she straightened. “I thank you, and my lord thanks you, and her bones may dream a thousand years in the rocks at the bottom, or they may not, and it’s none of your concern either way.”
“It is my concern!” Avery ran toward her, past the fire, hands outstretched, and for one terrible moment, it seemed as if he might push the Page of Frozen Waters after Zib, might have his revenge in one terrible, irrevocable gesture. Instead, he grabbed the front of her tunic and yanked her toward him, shouting, “You go bring her back! You bring her back right now!”
“Oh, you want the little thing now? That’s not what I heard before. It seemed to me that I was doing you a favor.” The Page of Frozen Waters crouched down until their eyes were level. She was smiling again, but there was nothing of sweetness in her now. “Are you saying I was wrong?”
“Don’t touch him,” said Niamh, and came no closer.
“He touched me first, child; that means your protection is over.” The Page of Frozen Waters kept her eyes on Avery. “Are you saying I was wrong?” she repeated.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Then I suppose a reunion is in order.” She leaned closer, closer still, and whispered, next to his ear, “You’ll find her at the bottom, if you’re fortunate enough to find her at all.” Then she straightened, grabbing him by the arm and spinning him around as she did, so that he teetered on the edge of the abyss.
“Goodbye,” she said, and pushed him over. He screamed as he fell. She glanced back to Niamh, winked, and stepped into the empty air, plummeting quickly out of sight.
Niamh stood on the other side of the fire, clutching her gown above her heart, tears springing to her eyes and freezing there, so that they fell like silent diamonds to the ground at her feet. She was still standing there, weeping, when a murder of crows dropped from the sky and pieced itself together in front of her, a puzzle happening in the blink of an eye, and became the familiar shape of the Crow Girl.
Over the Woodward Wall Page 9
