The more exhausted he became, the less he felt inclined to begrudge them. He envied them more than he would have thought possible, envied the fact that they had someone to carry them where they needed to go, while he needed to walk. He could remember, dimly, a time when he’d been small enough to be carried by his parents, their arms warm and safe around him, their strength extending to become his own. But that was in the past, in the safe, sensible world on the other side of the wall, and he was here, and it was his turn to be the strong one.
“I don’t think I like to be the strong one,” he muttered sourly to himself. “I don’t think I like it at all.”
The crow currently atop his head cawed in sympathy, and dug its claws a little deeper into his hair, holding tight as Avery walked on.
Avery couldn’t have said how long he had been walking. It felt like it had been longer than a day, but that couldn’t be true, because the light had never changed. The sun was hidden somewhere far away, behind the layers on layers of fog and mist and cloud, and everything was gray, gray, gray. It was not so bright as noon, nor so dark as midnight, but seemed to exist in an eternal gloomy middle space, unchanging, unchangeable. Still Avery walked on, until he wasn’t sure he could go any farther.
He was tired. He thought he had never really known what tired was before today: he had heard of being tired, but he’d never really felt it. Tired went all the way down to his bones, wrapping around them like ribbons, until his legs were lead and his arms were sacks of sand suspended from his shoulders. Tired sapped the faint remaining color out of the world, turning everything dull and lifeless. Tired hung weights from his eyelashes. Whenever he blinked, he thought his eyes might refuse to open again.
There was a bundle of rags on the riverbank, covered in glittering silver dust, like fish scales or moonlight. Avery paused. Rags didn’t normally have bare, dirty feet, or tangled, uncombed hair.
Avery found that he could run after all. The crows lifted off his head and shoulders, flying around him in a frantic, crowing cloud as he ran toward the bundle, toward the body, toward the girl he had walked so far to save. The crows settled on the nearby rocks, cawing and screaming, until everything was noise and nothing was the way it ought to be. He kept running until he had reached Zib’s side. Then and only then he dropped to his knees, reaching for her, rolling her over.
“Zib,” he said, breathless. “Zib, are you okay? Please be okay. I didn’t mean any of the things I said before, really I didn’t. I only need you to be all right. Please, please, for me, please be all right, please be okay, please.”
Her hair covered her face, obscuring it. The crows cried and cried as he pushed it aside, revealing not the wide, friendly features of the girl from the wall but the sharp, somehow predatory face of the Page of Frozen Waters, who smiled her razorblade smile as she pulled away from his hands and sat smoothly, seamlessly up. What he had taken for Zib’s hair slid off her head, revealing itself for a mass of tangled water weeds.
“Lose something?” the Page asked. She glanced past him to the crows. Her smile faded. “You’re a fool to show your faces here. We don’t love traitors in this protectorate.”
The crows took off, launching themselves skyward in a great flutter of black wings. The Page returned her attention to Avery, smile blooming once again.
“I never expected you to follow her this far,” she said. “You’re all alone now, little boy, but you intrigue me enough that I’ll make you an offer. You should consider it closely, because you’ll never hear its like again.”
She stood, as easy as the sun shining through the clouds, and held her hands out toward him, like she expected him to take them willingly, to let her draw him easily in.
“Come with me,” she said. “I can see that you’re a child who likes ease and order, who likes to know how things will fall together. In the court of my king, fire always burns, water is always wet. Things do as they’re told. We can give you everything you want, everything you need. I can make you a prince, if you’ll let me, and perhaps one day, all this will be yours.”
Avery blinked at her slowly. There was something wrong with her offer, something wicked and cruel, but it was hard for him to see it. He was so tired, and of course she hadn’t been Zib, because why would Zib make things easy on him like that? Zib didn’t make things easy on anyone, not even herself. Maybe he should listen to the Page of Frozen Waters. Maybe he should go with her to meet the King of Cups—Zib had met the Queen of Swords, after all, and it seemed only fair that each of them should have the opportunity to spend time with royalty. He’d never seen a real king before. The King of Cups must be awfully important, to have control over a place like this, to have someone like the Page of Frozen Waters at his command. Why, he might just be the most important, most magical person in the whole world! How could going and paying proper respects hurt anything?
Avery reached his hand out toward the Page of Frozen Waters, who reached back. Their fingers were only inches apart when three things happened, very, very quickly and at the same time:
A crow landed on Avery’s shoulder and pecked him briskly in the side of the head, not quite breaking the skin, but setting his ears ringing like church bells, and
A sword came flying out of the river, the blade ripe with rust and blossoming with frost, the hilt studded with tiny crystals, rounded and sanded down by the motion of the water, until they became safe to hold, and
The Page of Frozen Waters suddenly looked less like a pleasantly smiling girl a few years older than Avery was, and more like a waterlogged corpse that had somehow forgotten that it was no longer meant to be up and moving around. Her skin had a soft, spongy-looking quality to it, and her hair was tangled with waterweeds, not the natural, exuberant tangle of Zib’s hair, which had never met a hairbrush it didn’t want to steal, or the feathery chaos of the Crow Girl’s hair, or even the gentle disarray of Niamh’s hair. This was an elf knot, the sort of snarl that could be corrected only with prayer and a pair of scissors, and no one who would allow their hair to become so uncontrolled and uncontrollable could possibly understand what it was to be a child who believed in starched shirts and polished shoes and keeping his word because it was right, and not because he wanted to.
Avery recoiled, one hand dipping to grab the sword in automatic defensiveness. He raised its blunted edge toward the Page of Frozen Waters, and the rust and ice fell away from the blade in a shivering sheet, leaving behind what looked like a sharpened razor made of glass, so sharp that it could slice the very air in two. It was impossible. He no longer knew quite what that word was meant to mean.
The Page of Frozen Waters recoiled. The crow on Avery’s shoulder cawed furious victory. The Page narrowed her eyes.
“If that’s what you choose, that’s what you’ve chosen,” she said. “Don’t think this will be forgotten, either of you.” She pointed a finger at the crow, the gesture sharp and furious, before making a shooing gesture with the whole of her hand.
The crow fell.
Avery whirled around, surprise overtaking anger, then transforming into horror. “No!” he yelped, the sword falling from his fingers as he dropped to his knees and gathered the fallen crow in his hands. The tiny, feathered body was stiff, its eyes open and already glazing over.
He barely heard the soft splash from behind him. When he turned, the Page of Frozen Waters was gone.
“That’s not fair,” he said. Niamh, who he assumed had thrown him the sword, did not appear or reply. “It’s not fair,” he said again, louder. “She didn’t do anything to you!”
“Oh, but I did, didn’t I?” said the Crow Girl, sounding wearier than he had ever heard her sound before. He turned, and there she was, in her black dress and her bare feet, standing a few feet away. None of her seemed to be missing, but it was impossible to see every part of a person, wasn’t it? People were like treasure chests, full of secrets that never saw the light of day. That crow could have been almost any part of her, and its loss might kill her slowly, o
r it might not kill her at all, but either way, it was gone. It had saved him, and it had died for its trouble.
Gingerly, she reached down and took the crow from his hands, cradling it against her chest. She looked at it with a depth of sorrow Avery wouldn’t have believed possible. He remembered his own mother looking at him like that, when he’d skinned his knees or come home from school crying over some playground fight or other. The Crow Girl sighed.
“Gone,” she said. “This was a part of me and now it’s gone, and it’s never going to come back again, and I don’t know what it was before it left me; I can’t know, because once a thing is broken past repairing, it doesn’t return. I should be angry, I suppose—she did this to punish me more than to punish you—and I should be afraid, since she could do this to any other part of me she likes, but all I am is sad. Is that strange, that I should be more sad over this than over anything else?”
“I don’t think so,” whispered Avery. He bent and picked up the sword that had been flung from the river. Niamh was still nowhere to be seen. He didn’t even know for sure that the blade had come from her. He simply assumed, because he knew no one else who could have done it. Quartz had no reason to be here, and the owls … owls did not, for the most part, swim.
“I’m glad,” said the Crow Girl. Gently, she pushed the dead crow into the black feathers at her breast. It slipped inside with ease, and when she pulled her hands away, it didn’t fall. Tears ran down her cheeks, slow and heavy and oil-slick bright. She looked at Avery and smiled, unevenly. “I suppose my side is set now; I suppose there’s no going back. She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have done any of this. Let’s break her like a bone and leave her for the sun to steal.”
Avery, who didn’t trust himself to speak, simply nodded. Zib needed them.
TEN
WHAT ISN’T YOURS
“I’ve been here before,” said the Crow Girl, and started walking toward the gray and unforgiving cliff. “I was here for longer than anyone should have been, and the King knows my name, even though I gave it up and can’t know it anymore, and when I left, I said I’d never come back again. I still know the way, though. I can still take us where we need to be.”
“How do you know where we need to be?”
“We’ve seen the Page and paid a price, and stories take a certain shape here, if you let them. We’re in it now. There’s no going back to where we were.”
Avery clutched his sword. He would rather have had his ruler, but that was lost now, along with the shine from his shoes, and so very many other things. “Is it safe?”
“Is anything safe? Walk outside on a clear spring morning and you can still find yourself beaten and broken on the dewy ground. There’s no such thing as ‘safe,’ and anyone who tells you there is is lying, either to themselves, or to you. Or to both, I suppose. Some people are surprisingly good at lying to themselves.” The Crow Girl stopped at the base of the cliff, looking up. “Even I’m surprisingly good at lying to myself. I said I’d never come back, but here I am, and I suppose I knew I would be as soon as I pulled you out of the mud. Lies always come back to bite you in the end.”
“So it’s dangerous,” said Avery.
“Very,” said the Crow Girl, and began to climb.
Avery hesitated, looking from the Crow Girl to the cliff to the sword in his hand. Zib was up there somewhere. Zib needed him. No one had ever needed him before, not really, not like that. He didn’t owe it to her to try, exactly, but he felt he should. He felt like, given time, he should owe her the world.
The Crow Girl climbed. Avery followed.
There were narrow stairs cut into the side of the mountain, all but invisible from any distance away; by watching where the Crow Girl put her feet, he found that he could keep himself anchored to the cliffside, and thus keep himself from falling. He didn’t look back, and he didn’t look down. He had heard, somewhere, that looking back—that looking down—was the most dangerous thing a person could do while they were climbing up a mountain. He had no reason to think the adults who had told him this were lying.
As for the Crow Girl, she seemed to find every crack and fissure in the rock, driving her fingers into them and holding on fast. The feathers that made up her dress and tangled in her hair fluttered in the wind that blew around them, making her seem alien and impossibly strange. She didn’t look back either. Avery thought that looking back must be very frightening, if the girl who knew how to fly wasn’t willing to do it either. He wanted to drop the sword and free his other hand to help him climb, but didn’t dare; he might need it, and soon.
He spared a thought for Niamh, who must still be in the river, who had probably given him the sword. She didn’t know what was going on; she might never know. Like Quartz, like the owls, she had been left behind. The Up-and-Under seemed to do that quite a lot. It offered him companions, and then, one way or another, it whisked them away.
“I won’t let them take you away,” he muttered, and he didn’t know whether he was talking to Zib or to the Crow Girl, and the both of them kept on climbing, kept on climbing, kept on climbing toward the sky.
The Crow Girl hesitated only once, when her questing fingers found the top of the cliff: he saw her reach up, catch hold of nothing, and pull her hands back down. She tucked her chin down against her chest, and when she began to speak, although her voice was low, he could hear every word.
“What happens next … I’m free, I’m my own bird and my own girl and the Queen of Swords is the only one who holds me at all, but the King of Cups made me. I was his once, and he might forget that he doesn’t own me anymore. If he tries to take me, I may have to run away to keep him from doing it. I would be … I would be more dangerous to you in his keeping than I would be able to help. Do you understand?” Her tone was pained. She was begging him, she was pleading with him not to be angry.
Avery realized her words hurt in two directions at the same time. Thinking she might leave him hurt. Thinking she might be in danger if she didn’t hurt even more. “Sure I do,” he said. “I know you’ll find us again. You’re like the improbable road. You always come back.”
The Crow Girl was quiet for a time before she said, “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” and untucked her chin, and raised her hand, and pulled herself over the edge of the cliff, onto whatever solid ground lay beyond.
Avery didn’t want to follow her. He wanted to run, to go back to the bottom where Niamh was waiting and the Page of Frozen Waters wasn’t. Instead, he reached up with his free hand, and pulled himself up after her, onto a sheet of ground rimed with bone-white frost. The air was so cold that it burned his skin, hurting him.
There was a long stretch of open, icy ground. On it was a throne, and on it sat a very old man, his skin crusted over with sheets of ice, his hair and beard and eyebrows tangled with still more, making him look ancient and aged and weary. Three girls who looked like the Crow Girl in all the ways that didn’t matter, and nothing like her in any of the ways that did, knelt at his feet. They didn’t shiver. The feathers atop their heads were sleek and shining, as if they didn’t feel the cold, while the feathers atop the head of his Crow Girl, their Crow Girl, stood at shuddering attention.
There was a cage, and in it was Zib, shivering hard enough to make up for the Crow Girls who weren’t, her hands wrapped tight around the bars, like she thought she could pull them out of their sockets and set herself free. There was a feather in her hair, red as fresh-spilled blood, banded with darker streaks, and it hadn’t come from a crow, and Avery couldn’t have said where she had found it, but he knew it hadn’t been there when she’d fallen. In front of the cage stood the Page of Frozen Waters, a trident of ice held loosely in her hands and a slight smirk on her face as she gazed at the pair of them.
“So,” she said. “You decided not to be cowards after all. How nice. I’ve been meaning to finish things with her”—a nod toward the Crow Girl—“since she decided to run away. It’s always sad when someone
refuses the good things you offer them, isn’t it?”
The King of Cups, frozen in his throne, said nothing, only blinked lazily and watched them with the disinterested air of a man who had seen little of interest in a very, very long time.
Avery took a step forward. His knees were shaking. His teeth were chattering. His whole skeleton felt like it was coming apart at the joints, like it was going to fall into so many bones on the floor. He wanted to turn. He wanted to run away. He didn’t belong here. This was between the Crow Girl and the man she’d run away from, between Zib and the Page of Frozen Waters. This wasn’t his fight at all.
But Zib was clinging to the bars of her cage, and he could see the black feathers pushing against her skin, trying to burst free, to turn her into a Crow Girl like all the others. She wouldn’t be Zib if he let that happen. She wouldn’t be Hepzibah, either. She’d be something else, something wilder and stranger and not his at all. He hadn’t known her long enough to care as much as he did. He cared anyway. He couldn’t let the Page have her.
“You have to give her back,” he said. “She’s my friend, and she doesn’t belong to you.”
The Page of Frozen Waters smiled her razorblade smile. “Why should I?” she asked.
“Because…” Avery took a deep breath. “Because I asked, and because I’ll cut you into ribbons if you don’t.”
The King of Cups blinked, a slow and thoughtful gesture, like a stone rolling in the depths of the sea. The Page of Frozen Waters narrowed her eyes.
“I think not,” she said. “I’m better than you, and I’m bigger than you, and I’m faster than you for all of that. If you try, I’ll cut your heart out and give it to my lord and master as a token of my esteem.”
Over the Woodward Wall Page 11
