The Crow Girl looked around, and frowned. “Where are they?” she asked, looking to Niamh. “Where are the children?”
But Niamh could only cry.
NINE
THE PAGE OF FROZEN WATERS
There are many different kinds of falling, as many different kinds of falling as there are opportunities to fall. There is falling through earth, surrounded by mud, with something to hold you up and keep you from harm. There is falling through water, through mist and ice, with something soft at the end to render the landing gentle, if not quite safe. There is falling through fire, which is painful but mercifully short. And then there is falling through nothing at all. Air is a necessary part of life on land. Air fills our lungs and steers our steps, gentle winds pushing us where we are meant to go. But air cannot stop a fall without something to fill, and Zib dropped through the layers of cloud like a stone, unable to slow herself, unable to see where she was going.
Perhaps I will land in another lake, with another drowned girl to pull me to safety, she thought, and knew it for a lie, but held it tightly all the same, for there was nothing else to do. The wind whipped her tears away as fast as they could fall, and there was no one coming to save her. No one at all.
She fell, and she fell, and it seemed that she must fall forever, that she would grow old and die still in the process of falling. It was almost a comforting thought, given the alternative, and so she closed her eyes and let the falling have her.
“Hello, child,” said a voice. “What are you doing here? You don’t appear to be a bird, although of course, I have been wrong before. So many people are birds and never realize it, and so many birds are people and never know, that I suppose a child might decide to fly away, if given proper incentive.”
Zib cracked open one eye. The other followed, and she stared.
The owl which circled her now was the largest she had yet seen, larger than Meadowsweet, with her blue feathers, and larger than Broom, with his white feathers. This owl was all shades of red, from deepest crimson to palest pink, and had eyes as orange as any autumn leaf, and she could not say if it was male or female, nor see any reason for it to matter. An owl this large could be whatever it liked, and no one would dare to tell it no.
“Please,” she said, and the wind ripped her words away, turning them into a sob, into a gasp, into a shadow of themselves. “Please, owl, won’t you help me? I’m not a bird, and I’m falling, and I’m afraid.”
“My name is Oak,” said the owl. “If you’re not a bird, why are you here? This isn’t where a child belongs.”
The owl sounded so puzzled, and so caring, that Zib’s last frayed scrap of calm came apart, and she began to sob. She was still sobbing when the owl moved, so that she drifted down into the thick blanket of its feathers, so that its wings bore her up and slowed her descent. It smelled, not of a downy comforter or of the wild woods, but of roses, countless roses, sweet and comforting. Zib’s tears slowed as she breathed in the scent of the owl’s feathers, which were so strangely familiar that she found she could no longer be sad.
“Please, Oak,” she said. “Can you take me back to the top? My friends are there, and they must be concerned for me.”
“I wish I could,” said the owl, and there was genuine regret in its voice. “But even as large as I am, you are heavy, and I can slow your fall but cannot lift you up. I will take you safely to the bottom, and perhaps there, you can find a way to climb to where your friends are waiting.”
Zib wanted to argue, but knew that help, even when offered, could be snatched away from the ungrateful, and had no desire to resume her uncontrolled plummet. She held tightly to Oak’s feathers instead, and together they spiraled down, down, down through the mist and the fog and the clouds, until they reached a crystalline river running through a channel of glittering stone. Oak settled to the ground, spreading its wings slightly, so that she might dismount.
The ground was slippery with spray from the river. Zib’s bare feet gripped it easily. She looked at Oak, hands clasped in front of herself, hair wilder than ever after her fall.
“If there’s ever anything I can do for you, I’ll do it, and gladly,” she said. “You’ve saved me, and I won’t forget you.”
Oak raised one massive talon and scratched at the flat disk of its face, where the feathers were lightest, pink trending into cream. “The parliament of owls will remember this offer,” it said. “One night, perhaps, you’ll hear us calling, and you will know your debt is due. Only stay safe until that hour, for we can collect no payment from a dead girl, nor wring any blood from a stone.”
“I will,” said Zib.
Oak bobbed once, as if bowing to her. Then it launched itself into the sky on silent wings and vanished into the mist, there and gone in the span of a second, and Zib was alone on the shore.
Far above her, in the concealing layers of the fog and all without her knowledge, Avery was still falling. He had tucked himself into a ball, as if for his own protection, and while his arms were perhaps less likely to be broken, and his legs less likely to strike some unexpected protrusion, he had also made himself small and comfortably compact, and so was falling faster than anything large and sprawling. Unfortunately for him, he had not considered this, being too afraid to do anything but hug his own knees and hope against all logic to land safely.
I shouldn’t be here, he thought. I should be in class, I should be home, I should be somewhere safe and reasonable and ordinary.
Ordinary. He remembered what it was to be ordinary, to have shoes that shined and friends who knew him, who didn’t try to lead him on wild adventures for the sake of seeing something new. He fumbled to pull the ruler from his pocket, suddenly thinking that he needed to hold something he could understand. Its edges bit into his palm, and it brought him no comfort. Furious, he uncurled enough to stab it away from him, into the fog.
There was no way this would be enough to save him; physics said no, gravity said impossible, probability said forbidden. And perhaps those truths were, more than anything else, the reasons that Avery’s ruler found, not empty air, but the side of the cliff, and the angle at which it struck was such that it slid between two stones and stuck there, pulling Avery up short as it jammed into the mountain. Avery gasped, scrambling to keep his grasp on the ruler, and hung, still bouncing slightly up and down. Once he had his breath back, he reached out with his free hand and found the cliff, scrabbling until he wedged his fingers into another crack.
“Help,” he said softly, and then, with more strength, “Help!” That was the skeleton key that unlocked his voice, and he began to howl, shouting, “Help! Help!” over and over again, until the entire valley rang with the sound of his fear.
A crow dropped down, through the fog, and landed on the ruler. “Caw,” it said, cocking its head to the side and considering him carefully.
“Are you … are you the Crow Girl?” he gasped.
“Caw.”
“She pushed me. She pushed me and I fell. Can you help me?”
“Caw,” said the crow again, and took off, flying away into the fog.
Avery dangled from his ruler—which was a sturdy, faithful tool but had never been intended to support the full weight of a boy, however small—and wondered how long it would be before he was falling again. Would it hurt less, because he had stopped it for a little while? Or would it hurt more, because now he would have to begin the whole process over again? The shock, the realization that no one was coming to catch him, the dawning comprehension that just because he had fallen twice and been saved both times didn’t mean he’d be saved a third time, no matter how much he wanted to be?
He would have said that falling was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, if not for the slow bruise blossoming on his heart, the bruise with Zib’s wide, unhappy eyes looking back at him in the moment before she’d fallen out of view. He wanted to survive, yes, he wanted to go home, but he didn’t want to do it at the expense of the people he was coming to care about.
He didn’t want Zib to be gone. He certainly didn’t want her to be gone believing that he hated her. This was his fault, this was all his fault, and he didn’t know how to fix it.
The air grew colder around him. He felt his fingers starting to slip. Avery strained to keep hold of the ruler, afraid of what might be waiting in the fog below.
“Let go.”
Avery looked wildly around. “Niamh?”
“Trust me,” she said. “Let go.”
Avery did not want to let go. Avery thought he would rather dangle forever than let go, even a little. But Zib was gone, and it was all his fault; if he couldn’t start trusting the people who were left, he was going to fall, just like she did.
Avery let go.
His fall was short, and stopped when he struck something cold and solid and slippery, landing on his bottom. He tried to stand up, and his feet slid out from under him, leaving him seated. Niamh turned to offer him a slight, strained smile. Her hands were raised, and her hair was billowing around her like a wave, even though there was no wind to stir it.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “This is perfectly safe. Just try to enjoy it.”
“Enjoy what?” he asked.
Niamh’s smile grew. She didn’t answer, only sat down on the slippery surface. crows flew out of the fog, roosting all over the two of them, covering them in warm, feathery bodies. Avery looked wildly around, trying to understand what was happening. The crows began flapping their wings, and Avery and Niamh began inching along the surface—ice, it was ice, they were sitting on a long ribbon of ice that curved and twisted like a carnival slide—until the force of the dozens and dozens of flapping wings became enough to propel them along at a greater and greater speed. They slid down the icy ribbon like they were sitting on polished sleds, fast and graceful and secure, Avery’s shriek of dismay accompanying them all the way down.
The ice slide ended at the bottom of the cliffs, dumping them onto the frozen, stony ground. Avery scrambled to his feet, shedding crows in all directions, and looked frantically around. There was nothing but stone, glittering quartz and shimmering opal and a dozen shades of topaz, creating a cruel rainbow of cold. The crows began to spiral together, reforming themselves into the body of the Crow Girl. Niamh sat on a large quartz boulder, head bowed and shoulders shaking, trying to catch her breath. The tips of her fingers and toes were blue from the strain of spinning a ribbon of ice all the way down into the chasm.
Avery barely noticed any of this. He had yet to even realize that his ruler had been lost, left wedged into the cliffs high above. He was spinning in place, scanning the shore. Zib—stupid Zib, who thought she knew everything—was supposed to be somewhere around here. That’s what the Page of Frozen Waters had said, before pushing him over the waterfall. He needed to find Zib. He needed to tell her he was sorry.
She wasn’t there.
“Where is she?” he asked, barely aware that his voice was raising into a wail. A hand touched his shoulder. He stopped, and turned, and looked into the solemn, avian eyes of the Crow Girl.
“You came together, and you won’t find an ending alone,” she said, and her voice was soft, and sad, and more serious than he had ever heard her. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have all the middle your heart can hold. You don’t have to stay here. You don’t have to follow her. The Page of Frozen Waters has her now, and you won’t get her back the way you lost her. Endings are tricky things. Remember, I told you that, when we’d barely met at all. Endings don’t forgive. So have a middle. Let her go.”
Avery gaped at her. “How can you say that?”
“I lied to you.” The Crow Girl looked at him gravely. “I told you the Queen of Swords made me, the same way as she made the Bumble Bear, and I lied, because what’s true isn’t always what’s right. She didn’t make me. She broke the chains that were on me, and I told her I’d be loyal, because every caged thing wants to be loyal to the one who lets it out, but she didn’t make me. I went to her willing. I didn’t go to him willing.”
“The Page of Frozen Waters commands the crows,” said Niamh. Avery, who had almost forgotten she was there, turned to look at her. All her attention was for the Crow Girl. “She tells them where to go and what to do, and they serve as her eyes and her spies, all across the Up-and-Under. Are you spying for her still?”
“No,” whispered the Crow Girl. “Not for days and days and days, not since before the Queen of Wands went—” Her eyes widened and she clapped her hands over her mouth, like she could somehow cram the words back inside.
“Since the Queen of Wands went where?” asked Avery.
The Crow Girl lowered her hands. “Missing,” she said miserably. “Since the Queen of Wands went missing. Everyone blamed everyone else, and the King of Cups told the Page of Frozen Waters to see what she could see, and so she let the crows fly, she let us all fly, and not all of us … not all of us came back. Some were eaten, yes, and some were lost, and some found another way.”
“The Queen of Swords,” said Niamh.
The Crow Girl nodded. “She can cut old bonds. She cut me free, and all she asked was that I stay and serve her, be a crow in her court, and not in anybody else’s. But I was and am and will be a crow still, because some things can’t be taken back, and so she doesn’t mind when I join children on quests, or steal fruit from her orchards. It’s having me, not taming me, that matters. I’m had, I truly am.”
“But where’s Zib?” asked Avery. “She’s not with the Queen of Wands. She’s lost and she fell and no one made an ice slide to catch her, she didn’t have a ruler to break her fall. She could be hurt. We have to find her.”
“No one has to do anything,” said the Crow Girl. “You could learn how to be happy without her, I know you could.”
Avery blinked at her slowly, like her words made no sense at all. Of course he could be happy without Zib. He wasn’t entirely sure he knew how to be happy with her. They’d only been together since the wall, and most of their time in the Up-and-Under had been strange and frightening and not what he’d call “happy” at all. Zib wasn’t where his happiness was harbored.
But she was his friend, still, and she’d gone out of her way to help him, even when he hadn’t been very nice to her, even when it would have been easier for her to walk away. She could be happy here in the Up-and-Under, where things only made as much sense as they absolutely had to, where beasts could talk and fruit could taste like anything it wanted. Maybe if they couldn’t be happy together, they could be unhappy together, and maybe … maybe that was just as good. As long as they weren’t alone.
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m happy or not,” he said. “I have to find her.”
The Crow Girl shivered, shaking herself so that the feathers of her dress and in her hair puffed out. It should have looked silly. Somehow, it just looked scared. “Then I’ll help you,” she said.
“I won’t,” said Niamh. They both turned. The drowned girl looked at them with weary eyes, spreading her empty hands in front of herself. “I can’t. The Page of Frozen Waters is there, and all my ice can’t touch her, because there’s nothing in her left to freeze. She’ll catch me again, catch me and cage me, and this time, I won’t be able to get away. I’ll mark the path from the king’s protectorate back to the improbable road, and I’ll wait for you there, but I won’t help you. Please don’t ask that of me.”
“I won’t,” said Avery, who knew what it was to be afraid. “Only be safe, if you can, and we’ll see you when all this is over. All three of us will see you.”
“I wish you well,” said Niamh, and stepped into the rushing water of the river, and was gone.
Avery looked at the Crow Girl. “I’m frightened,” he said.
“As am I,” she said. Then she smiled, big and bright and earnest. “But that’s a good thing! Frightened means you’ve the sense to be afraid, and it’s cowards who get things done, more often than not. Now. She’s your friend, and part of your quest, like it or not. Which way would she go
?”
Avery hesitated, thinking as hard as he could about Zib. He knew distressingly little about her, and maybe that was reasonable—it wasn’t as if they’d ever met before, or like they’d had time to spare since their journey began. Everything had been place to place, and no pauses for care or comfort or the trading of stories. But maybe that was part of the answer. Zib liked to move. Of course she hadn’t stayed still and waited for them to come and find her. He’d pushed her away, away from him. He’d left her vulnerable to the Page of Frozen Waters. She’d fallen, and then she’d gone somewhere.
Somewhere else.
If she had landed in the water—and he didn’t want to think about her landing in the water, didn’t want to think about her falling that far without anything to break her fall and hitting the surface of the river hard enough to break something else—she would have been swept along with it, away from the cliffs. If she had somehow managed to avoid the water, and avoid hurting herself too badly to move, she would probably have traveled in the same direction, because going back to the cliffs would have meant she wanted to find a way up to him, and she couldn’t possibly want that, not after what he’d done.
“This way,” he said, and pointed downriver, in the direction of the swirling, eddying rapids. “She would have gone this way.”
The Crow Girl nodded. “So walk,” she said, “and I’ll follow.” She burst into birds then, wings catching the sky as she swirled around him.
A crow landed on Avery’s head. Another landed on each of his shoulders. Standing as straight and tall as he could, he began to walk.
After the bright colors and tangled vegetation of the protectorates held by the King of Coins and the Queen of Swords, the land claimed by the King of Cups was sere and strange. Bright stone glittered everywhere Avery looked, creating the impression of a world that had frozen solid, replacing everything that was soft and gentle with hard, rigid lines and sharp, cutting edges. The ground hurt his feet. The air hurt his throat. Even the crows seemed troubled by it; they circled back again and again, taking turns resting on his head and shoulders, letting him carry them along.
Over the Woodward Wall Page 10
