“You’ll have to go through me first,” said the Crow Girl.
The Page of Frozen Waters snorted. “Through you? The coward? I think not, broken little thing that you are. You don’t even know how much of you has flown away. Leave, before you find yourself remembered.”
The other Crow Girls watched with blank, avian eyes, neither approving nor disapproving, and Avery shivered again—this time, not with cold. There was something wrong with them, something missing.
The Page of Frozen Waters followed his gaze. Her smile widened.
“They thought they were allowed to fight, and fly, and flee,” she said. “They came before that one”—she gestured sharply to the Crow Girl—“but they tried to follow after her, and that simply can’t be allowed. Your heart won’t be the first one I cut from its moorings, nor the first to freeze. It’s peaceful. You’ll see, if you keep threatening your betters, just how cold a heart can grow.”
“Get out of here, Avery!” shouted Zib. There was a hint of a crow’s harsh caw in her words as she shook the bars of her cage. “It doesn’t matter if you can’t go home without me, I’ll be fine, I’ll be…” Her voice broke, tapering out. Finally, she whispered, “I always wanted to fly.”
“I’m not leaving without you,” said Avery. He tried to keep an eye on the Page of Frozen Waters, his hands tight on the hilt of his sword. It was sharp. It was so sharp. He was sure it could cut through anything he needed it to cut. He was less sure about his own ability to cut through a living person. Even the Page of Frozen Waters was alive, and deserved to stay that way.
“Then you’re not leaving, child,” said the Page of Frozen Waters. “I’m sure you’ll come to love it here. I did.” She raised her trident into place, as if to strike.
The Crow Girl stepped in front of Avery. “No,” she said, voice clear and calm.
The Page of Frozen Waters faltered. “Move,” she ordered.
“No,” the Crow Girl repeated. Then she laughed. “It’s so easy, isn’t it? No, and no, and no. There’s a glory in refusal that I never thought I’d see. No to you. No forever. I won’t move, and you won’t hurt the boy, and you won’t have the girl. No.”
“You feathered fool,” said the Page. “You don’t have the right to stop me anymore. You gave it up when you landed here.”
“Did I?” asked the Crow Girl. “I don’t remember, so I suppose it doesn’t matter. If I can’t remember saying that I wouldn’t do a thing, I can’t be expected to abide by it.” She winked to Avery then, bold and broad, and he stiffened in sudden excitement, realizing what he had to do.
His mother hated crows. They stole crops from her garden and frightened the neighborhood dogs so that they started barking in the early hours of the morning, breaking the peace into shards that couldn’t be pieced back together. But most of all, she hated the way they worked together. One crow would distract a cat while three more emptied out the food dish; one crow would swoop in front of a car while another hurried the fledglings away from the road. The Crow Girl was doing that for him. She was puffing her feathers and raising her voice and keeping the Page of Frozen Waters looking at anything but him.
He’d seen crows dead in the road before, hit by cars while they were trying to take care of their flocks, and he’d seen crows with broken, buckshot-peppered wings, shot by farmers who wanted to feed their cats more than they wanted to feed the crows. What she was doing was dangerous. He owed it to her to take the gift she was offering, and to take it quickly.
Zib’s eyes widened as he moved toward the cage. She seemed to understand what he was doing, though; she was silent as she let go of the bars and moved away. He took the point of the sword and slipped it into the lock, jiggling it until it went as deep as it could possibly go. Then he began to twist.
Avery had never picked a lock before, and had never done anything with a sword before, and he was pretty sure he was doing this wrong. But as he twisted, the lock grew stiff with frost, and finally, it splintered, breaking with a soft cracking noise. He dropped the sword in his surprise. It clattered against the frozen ground.
The Page of Frozen Waters whipped around, her eyes going wide as she realized what had happened. “You!” she shouted. “How dare you!” She raised her trident, stabbing it toward Avery in a gesture clearly intended to pierce his heart.
Avery thought of the crows in the road, and knew that he was finished; knew that he couldn’t move quickly enough to get out of the way. He closed his eyes.
The sound of ice shattering shocked him out of his stillness. He opened his eyes again, and there was Zib, standing between him and the Page of Frozen Waters, even as the Crow Girl had done—but unlike the Crow Girl, she was holding the sword, and had it raised in front of her, stopping the Page’s trident from striking him. Two of the tines on the trident had shattered into so many frozen shards, and the third was locked against her blade, unable to separate.
The Page, eyes gone wide and almost frightened, was standing her ground, but Avery thought she wouldn’t continue to do that for very long. She didn’t seem like the sort of person who was very good at being afraid. “You can’t fight me,” she said. “You belong to me.”
“I still have my slingshot, and I still have a dime and three acorns, and I guess as long as I have those, I don’t belong to anyone, because property doesn’t have property,” snarled Zib. She twisted the sword, knocking the trident from the Page’s hands, so that it fell to the ground. It shattered where it landed. She stepped forward. “I don’t like people who put me in cages.”
“Oh,” said the Crow Girl. Her voice was very soft.
Avery turned.
The King of Cups was rising from his throne.
He moved slowly, sheets of ice cracking and falling away with every gesture. They carried the years with them; the man who finally, glacially came to his feet was no older than Avery’s father, and had the same implacable dignity, as if no one would ever dare to question him in his place of power. This was his place of power, absolutely, his protectorate in a world that was otherwise set against him. The Page of Frozen Waters turned and fled to his side, sliding half behind him, letting him be her barrier.
The Crow Girl did not move. Did not even seem to breathe as the King of Cups stepped toward them, his eyes going from her feathered form to Avery, and finally to Zib.
“You,” he said. “You were to be mine.”
There was a question in his voice, a confusion, as if he couldn’t understand why Zib would be anything other than captive and cloaked in feathers. But her skin was smooth, and there were no feathers in her hair. Strange she might be, and dirty and disheveled, but she was still wholly and completely human.
“I never said that,” said Zib tightly. “I wasn’t looking for you. I didn’t ask for a cage.”
The King turned, still slow, and looked at the Page. “Is this true?” he asked.
“She came here,” protested the Page. “If they come here, they want your blessings! That’s how it’s always been, and how it’s meant to be! She didn’t have to say anything for me to know what she wanted.”
The King frowned. “We can’t keep what’s been improperly taken,” he said. “You know that.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“But you did it.” He looked to the Crow Girl. “You, though … you belong to me.”
“I belong to the Queen of Swords now,” she said, voice small. “You let me go, and she took me in. I’m not your bird and not your girl and not your pretty toy.”
“And if I told you I’d let the children go, if only you’d agree to stay?”
The Crow Girl went still. Avery looked at her, and Zib looked at her, and both of them knew that she wasn’t going to save them: that she would, in the end, only be able to save herself.
“I would say that you were wrong to do that to me,” said the Crow Girl. “I would say that when you let me go, you never said anything about tricking me back one day. I would say a strong king doesn’t need to play that
kind of game with the people he claims to be protecting. I would say it wasn’t fair. The children don’t belong to you, and that means you shouldn’t be using them for bargaining. But I would say that if that was the price, I’d do it. I’ll never be yours. I’ll never be still, or quiet, or good. But I would stay.”
The King of Cups sighed heavily. Zib shivered, inching closer to Avery, as if he could protect her from the cold.
“Fine,” he said. “All of you, get gone. I want nothing more to do with you.”
“But—” began the Page of Frozen Waters.
He turned and looked at her, and she became very still, like a rat facing the narrow-eyed gaze of the family cat.
The Crow Girl grabbed Avery by one arm, and Zib by the other, and ran, as fast as she could, for the edge of the cliff. The children let her haul them in her wake, until she ran past the end of the stone, out into empty nothingness.
The fall was sharp, and short, and brutal. Zib screamed. Avery wailed. The Crow Girl burst into birds, all the pieces of the murder swirling around them in a skirl of dark feathers, wings beating frantically, until the children realized they were no longer falling but were rolling down a bridge of birds, their descent slowed to something stately, something almost kind.
When they reached the ground, the Crow Girl re-formed, dropping to her knees on the rocky shore and panting. Finally, she looked up through her feathered bangs and smiled wanly.
“See?” she said. “Got you out. I’m clever.”
“Yes,” said Avery. “You are.” He looked to Zib, then. “But what happened?”
Zib took a deep breath, and said, “I met an owl…”
ELEVEN
WHERE ZIB WENT, AND HOW IT HAPPENED
Oak soared on vast red wings, and Zib snuggled into the owl’s feathers, warm and safe and lost. It was strange, to think that she could be safe and lost at the same time; the two conditions felt as if they ought to contradict one another, leaving her either safe at home or lost and in danger, but with the owl all around her, the world seemed like a kinder place.
The fog was more shades of gray than she had ever thought possible, pale as a pearl and dark as a stone after the rain. She watched it swirl around them until her eyelids felt heavy and her whole body felt thick, the way it sometimes did when she stayed up too far past her bedtime. She couldn’t think of how long it had been since she’d slept.
Surely the school day was over by now. Surely her father was home from dropping off other people’s children, stepping into the living room, hanging his coat on the peg, and calling, “Where’s my little piece of pumpkin pie?” with the expectant air of a man whose questions were answered more often than not.
Her mother, wrapped in her painting as she so often was, probably wouldn’t have noticed that she had never come home, had never grabbed an apple from the counter or called hello before rushing back off to the woods, back to her private adventures. She’d say that Zib had been there, surely Zib had been there, and so neither of them would worry. Not until the sun was going down and she was still nowhere to be seen.
How long would it be before they moved from confusion to anger, and then finally to fear? Would they call their friends—surely they must have friends, friends couldn’t be a thing that ended with childhood, no one would ever choose to grow up if they couldn’t be adults and have friends at the same time—and go into the woods looking for her?
Would they find the wall?
Zib didn’t think they would.
She was so sunk in the owl’s warmth and in her own uneasy thoughts that she didn’t notice the air getting colder around them, or the fog getting darker, until it was less pearl and more stone, until she could barely see through her almost-closed eyes.
Then Oak cried out, a high, pained sound, and fell out of the sky, twisting around and around like a leaf caught in a sudden gale. The great owl slammed into the ground, Zib cushioned by the feathers of its breast, and she gasped, the wind knocked out of her by the impact.
“You shouldn’t be here, bird.” The voice was old, and cold, and almost disdainful. Zib opened her eyes and beheld the man who stood above her.
He was tall, and thin, and looked even older than he sounded, as old as wishes, as old as winter. His hair was white and his eyes were blue, and ice formed and cracked on his eyelashes, falling away every time he blinked. His robes were heavy velvet patterned with cascades of water flowing from weighty chalices, and she knew him for the King of Cups, and she knew she was in danger, for all that his attention was wholly focused on the owl.
“I was helping the girl,” said Oak, one wing curling protectively around her.
The King of Cups tilted his head before turning his attention on Zib. “Were you, now?” he asked. “Hello, child. You must be precious indeed, if old Oak would risk capture for your sake. What is your name?”
“Hepzibah Jones,” she replied, before she could stop herself. She didn’t want to give the King of Cups her proper name—had not, in fact, intended it—but something about the way he spoke left no room for argument, no room for hesitation.
“You are not of my protectorate, are you?”
“No.” She hesitated. “Sir.”
The King of Cups laughed. “A polite child is a rare treasure! Tell me, child, do you wish to be of my protectorate? To be kept, and comforted, and safe, for all the days of your life? You could be happy here.”
Zib thought he must be lying. Adults didn’t smile that fixed, glossy smile, or speak with so much sharpness, when they were telling her the truth. Oak was shivering behind her, with fear as much as cold, and she felt a stab of pity. The owl had only been trying to help her. This fight—if it was a fight—was hers, and hers alone.
“No, thank you,” she said, and moved so that she was no longer in the sheltering coil of Oak’s wing but was standing between the great owl and the king. “I am on the improbable road to the Impossible City, you see, and I haven’t the time to stop and be a part of someone else’s protectorate. I need to find my friends.”
“They must not be terribly good friends, to be lost so easily.”
Zib bristled. “They weren’t lost. I was taken away from them. A dreadful girl who calls herself the Page of Frozen Waters pushed me off the side of a cliff, and I fell for quite a long way, and Oak came to stop me from being harmed. Now I’m on my way back to where I should have been, so I can finish going where I’m supposed to be. Please, do you know the way?”
The King of Cups smiled like a winter storm rolling in. He looked younger when he smiled. He looked no less terrible. “The Page of Frozen Waters is a part of my protectorate,” he said. “She gathers the lost things and brings them to me, and it seems she has gathered you, because here you are, and aren’t you lovely? Aren’t you rare and fine? I’ll make you better, child. I’ll make you more than you ever thought you’d be. You’ll be happy in my company, for you’ll know that you’re precisely where you belong.”
“Run,” whispered Oak. There was no flurry of wings, for owls are silent in flight, but there was a sudden feeling of absence, and Zib knew that the great owl was gone.
Zib couldn’t blame her brief companion for fleeing. She would have fled, had she known how, although she thought she wouldn’t have been quite so quick to leave someone else behind—she thought she would have stayed until she knew Oak could be free, if she had been the one with wings. Still, she took the owl’s parting advice seriously, stepping nervously backward as she prepared to run.
Something sharp pressed against the skin between her shoulders, stopping her. She could no more keep moving, knowing it would impale her, than she could have flown away.
“I see you found your way,” said the Page of Frozen Waters, sweet and bright and overjoyed, and Zib knew that she was lost.
“She’s lovely,” said the King of Cups. “Wherever did you find her?”
“The Queen of Swords gave her and her companions a skeleton lock,” said the Page. “They were meant to land nearer
to the Impossible City, but it was a cold wind that blew them, and I was able to convince it to freeze and bring them here instead.”
“Companions?” asked the King.
“A boy child and the traitor Crow. They’re somewhere off in the mist. It’s no matter. I knew this was the one you’d want.”
Zib balled her fists and stomped her foot and said, “I’m right here! It’s rude to talk about a person like they aren’t in the room when they are!”
“Ah, but this isn’t a room, and moreover, I am a king; the rules are different for me.” The King of Cups stepped smoothly forward and grasped Zib’s chin in his cold, cold hand. With the blade at her back, she couldn’t even pull away. “Yes, you’ll do nicely, child. You’ll learn to love it here, with me, and I’ll give you something all children want, in their secret hearts, which are hungry, hungry things, and will devour whatever they are offered. I’ll give you wings.”
Zib tried to shake her head, to break his hold on her, but her body refused to listen, and the cold swept over her, and it was easier to be still; it was easier to be calm, and quiet, and frozen, and cold, cold, cold, and then she was falling again, falling into the mist, which had no end and no beginning, which was everything …
As she fell, she thought she felt feathers brush against her cheek.
I am sorry, whispered a voice. Meadowsweet: the first of the three great owls. How queer, to hear that long-left bird speaking to her here. I am not strong enough.
Strong enough for what? Zib thought, but could not speak, and then the voice was gone, and she was alone, again, and falling.
I am sorry, whispered another voice. Broom: second and coldest of the great owls. He sounded genuinely unhappy, which did not make things any better. I am not swift enough.
Swift enough for what? Zib thought, and did not expect an answer.
I am sorry, whispered a third voice. Oak, and this voice ached most of all, for of the three great owls, Oak was the only one to have left her. I am not sure enough.
Over the Woodward Wall Page 12
