The crows continued to circle, but as they circled they spiraled lower and lower, finally coming together, wings and bodies blending, black feathers flying, and somehow compressing themselves into the shape of a girl just their age.
The girl landed in a crouch, looking more like a wild thing than a child. Slowly she straightened, until she was standing a little taller than Avery, a little shorter than Zib, slotting into the space they made between them like it had been measured out to her specifications.
She had black hair and yellow eyes, and a dress made of black feathers that ended just above her knees. Her feet were bare and her nails were long and raggedy, like no one had ever trimmed them but let them grow until they could be used to climb the walls of the world. Avery looked at her and felt fear run all through him, cold and biting. Zib looked at her and thought she was the most wonderful thing in the entire world.
“Who are you?” asked Zib, all awe.
Avery had to swallow the urge to pull her away. She would stay there forever if he let her, of that much he was sure: she was so enchanted by this stranger, by this adventure, that she would never realize when she was in danger, and without her, he would never be able to go home. He was already forgetting that she had saved him, or done her best to save him, when the mud began to flow. Fear has a way of doing that to people.
“I’m a Crow Girl,” said the stranger. She cocked her head. “Who are you?”
“I’m Avery, and this is Zib,” said Avery. “Please, do you know where we are?”
“Why, this is the Up-and-Under, of course, and the Kingdom of the Queen of Swords,” said the Crow Girl. She cocked her head in the opposite direction. “You must not be very clever, if you don’t even know where you are. I blame the shoes.”
“Shoes?” asked Zib, glancing down at her own stocking-clad toes. She didn’t like this stranger, this Crow Girl, saying that she wasn’t clever. She’d been plenty clever since climbing over the wall. Not knowing where she was wasn’t a failure of cleverness, it was a failure of the people who were supposed to make the maps.
“Shoes.” The Crow Girl held up her bare left foot and waggled her toes extravagantly. “If you can’t feel where you’re going, how will you ever know where you’ve been? Skies for wings and roads for feet, that’s what the world is made of.”
“How can something be up and under?” asked Avery. He had many more questions clawing at his throat, like “How were you just a flock of crows?” and “Why does your dress look like feathers?” and “Why am I so afraid of the symbol on the ground?” All of them felt too big and too wild and too strange, like asking them would change the world in a way it couldn’t come back from. Better to ask the obvious, and maybe start to understand a little better what was going on.
“Up a tree’s still under the sky,” said the Crow Girl. “Here in the Up-and-Under, we’re both things at once, always, and we’re never anything in-between. It’s good here. We’re happy.” A thin edge of strain came into her voice. She sounded like a little kid trying to claim that they hadn’t stolen the last of the cookies. “We’re all happy, always, because that’s what it means to be in the Up-and-Under. Now that you’re here, you’ll be happy too.”
“How do you know we’re not from here?” asked Zib.
“If you were from here, you’d know where you were,” said the Crow Girl. “You’d understand. You wouldn’t be asking questions and questions and questions, like a bunch of chicks just out of the nest. It’s fine not knowing things. Not knowing things means you have room to learn, and learning’s about the most important thing there is, so the more ignorant you are, the more important you can be. But first step is saying that you know you don’t know. Pretending to know things you don’t never helped anyone.”
“We were looking for the Impossible City,” said Avery. “A man we met near the Forest of Borders said that the Queen of Wands would be able to give us an ending and send us home if we went there. Do you know which way the Impossible City is from here?”
“People certainly do like the word ‘of’ around here,” said Zib. “Of this and of that.”
“I like ‘if’ better,” said the Crow Girl. She fixed Avery with one yellow eye. “Are you sure you want an ending? Endings are tricky things. They wiggle and writhe like worms, and once you have them, you can’t give them back again. You can hang them on hooks and sail the seas for sequels, if you realize you don’t like where your story stopped, but you’ll always have had an ending, and there will always be people who won’t follow you past that line. You lose things when you have an ending. Big things. Important things. Better not to end at all, if you can help it.”
“I didn’t ask to begin,” protested Avery. “All I wanted to do was go to school and take my spelling test and spell all the words right. I don’t like mud and I don’t like falling and I don’t like clouds steered by crows and I don’t like birds turning into girls!” He clapped his hands over his mouth, eyes going wide as he realized that he had said more than he intended to.
The Crow Girl turned her head back and forth, looking at him first out of one eye, and then out of the other. “Do you like drowning?” she asked. “Because you were awfully close to drowning. You fell out of the lands of the King of Coins and into the lands of the Queen of Swords. Earth and air together make for unquiet bedfellows. If I hadn’t decided to be a girl instead of a murder of crows, you would have gone down, down, down, and you wouldn’t even have joined the Drowned Boys, not here, not so very far from the sea.”
“I’m sorry,” said Avery. “I didn’t mean…” And he stopped, because he didn’t know what else to say.
Zib stepped forward, holding out her open hand. In it was her lucky seashell. All the mud had been rinsed away, leaving it gleaming. “Here,” she said. “A present. To thank you for helping us. Do you like presents?”
“Everyone likes presents,” said the Crow Girl. She inched closer. “For me? Really? No tricks or treachery?”
“No,” said Zib. “Just a present.”
“A present!” The Crow Girl snatched the seashell out of Zib’s hand, turning it greedily over in her hands before tucking it away in the feathers of her dress, where it vanished without a trace. She looked at Zib. “I’ll give you a present, too. I’ll walk with you, because the ending you’ll find with me is better than the ending you’ll find without me. Won’t that be nice?”
“Yes,” said Zib.
Avery, who didn’t know the answer, said nothing at all.
FIVE
THE BUMBLE BEAR AND THE TANGLE
The rolling green hills and the bright glassine ribbon of the improbable road were high above them, on the other side of the mudslide, which had tapered off to nothing more than the occasional colorful plop. Avery and Zib stood side by side and looked glumly up at the cliff.
“I don’t think I can climb that,” said Zib. “My shoes are up there.”
“I know I can’t climb that,” said Avery. “Quartz is up there. Do you think he’ll come looking for us? Do you think he’ll bring a rope?”