“Quartz?” asked the Crow Girl.
“A man who is also a boulder who told us we had to go to the Impossible City,” said Zib.
“Oh,” said the Crow Girl. “You met a royal gnome. He can’t follow you here. Royal gnomes belong to the King of Coins, and the Queen doesn’t like them much.”
“But he was going with us to the Impossible City,” protested Avery. “He wanted to see the Queen of Wands.”
“Of course he did. The Queen of Wands favors fire, you see, and gnomes aren’t born from fire, but they like the way it tingles. They’re not afraid of her. Many of them love her very much, and some of them belong to her court. As long as she holds the City, the road is open to gnomes and salamanders, and not so much to sylphs and undines. The Queen of Swords and the King of Cups have to find ways around her barriers when they want to get anything done.” The Crow Girl sobered. “Be careful of them.”
“Of who?” asked Zib.
“The ways around,” said the Crow Girl. “None of them are what they were, and it’s hard to remember how to play fair when you don’t remember where you left your heart.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” said Avery. His stomach grumbled. He sighed. “I don’t understand any of this and I’m hungry.”
“I have an apple,” said Zib.
“I know where we can find more than a napple,” said the Crow Girl. “What’s a napple? Is it some kind of cake? I would like to try the cake from wherever it is you came from.”
“It’s a kind of fruit,” said Zib.
“Oh,” said the Crow Girl. “Well, then, I shouldn’t like to eat that at all, and you shouldn’t want to eat it either. Come on, come on, both of you, come on.” She jumped back, turned, and ran to the edge of the stone circle, where she paused and looked over her shoulder. “Are you coming?”
Avery and Zib hesitated.
“This seems very unsafe,” said Avery.
“Yes,” said Zib. “But that’s what makes it improbable. Come on!” She scampered after the Crow Girl. After a moment, Avery followed her. There was nothing else for him to do.
At the edge of the stone circle was another cliff, this one high and sheer and terrifying. Set into the side of the cliff was a stone stairway, winding down toward the ground far, far below. The Crow Girl all but danced onto the steps, and kept dancing downward, toward the layer of mist that hung above the distant countryside. Zib followed more cautiously, and Avery followed more cautiously still, until they were like beads on a string, separated by great streaks of open distance.
The Crow Girl looked back several times, calling encouragement, but the wind took her words and whisked them away like prizes, keeping them from ever reaching the children. Zib watched the mist as it got closer, and the countryside as it began to form houses and farms and great flower gardens, hedge mazes and fields and other lovely, enticing things. Avery watched the back of Zib’s head. Her hair, wild and tangled and ridiculous as it was, had somehow become an anchor. It didn’t change. It was always improbable, always doing as it liked, with no regard for anyone around it. If he focused on her hair, he could pretend they were still on the road, where there had been no reason to fall, where—if he somehow had fallen—he wouldn’t have tumbled to his doom.
The mist, when they passed through it, was cold and cloying and smelled like lavender, like the sachets Avery’s mother liked to put in with the fresh linens. Breathing it made him feel faintly homesick. He wanted his mother to tuck him into bed and tell him he’d been a good boy. He wanted his father to clap him on the shoulder and call him “sport” and “champ” and “scout.” He wanted to be anywhere but here.
But Zib … ah, Zib. She would have told anyone who asked that she was happy at home, and she wouldn’t have been lying, because she had always been happy at home, in the same way a bird who has grown up in a cage can be quietly, unwittingly happy there. She had based happiness on the way she felt when she looked at the sensible, probable walls and went through the sensible, probable patterns of her days. Now, though, now she felt like she might finally be learning to understand what happy really was. Happy was descending a cliff with a new friend in front of her and a new friend behind her, and so many wonderful things to see, and do, and discover. Happiness was the Up-and-Under.
Bit by bit, the distance fell behind them, until they could see the bottom of the stairs. It ended at a wide tunnel made of briars and brambles. The Crow Girl made a sound of wordless delight and dashed forward, skipping down the last of the stairs and diving for the tunnel. She was almost inside when a vast paw darted out of the darkness, claws as long as dinner knives swiping for the Crow Girl’s chest.
This time, her wordless exclamation was less delight and more dismay. She danced backward. The paw swiped again, and the Crow Girl broke into a hundred black-winged pieces, exploding into the murder of crows she had originally been. They scattered into the briars and branches, cawing angrily.
Zib froze, and stayed frozen as Avery slammed into her, sending them both teetering. They stayed there, staring, as the great beast came stalking out of the shadows, and roared.
The sound was as wide as the sky and as deep as the sea. It echoed; it challenged; it set the hairs on the back of Avery’s neck standing on edge. The hairs on the back of Zib’s neck were already standing on edge, as was all the rest of the hair on her head, but her skin made up the difference, pulling itself into painful lumps of gooseflesh. The beast roared again, and it was like the world was shaking, no longer content to be a stationary thing.
As for the beast itself, it was a thing that befit its roar, which is to say, huge and terrible and strange. If Avery had been asked to guess at what it was, on penalty of being thrown to the creature, he would have called it some sort of bear, for it was hulking and shaggy and possessed of terrible claws and even more terrible jaws, which bristled with truly terrible teeth. Had Zib been asked the same question, she would have called it some sort of nightmare bee, for it was striped yellow and black, and its backside tapered into a wicked point, a stinger the size of a fisherman’s harpoon. They would both have been right, in their own ways, and they would both have been wrong.
The beast roared a third time. Then it coughed into one paw, fixed the children with a cold, calculating eye, and said, “You are trespassing on my path. What will you give me not to kill you?”
Avery did not consider himself a terribly brave person. Still, he knew a wrong thing when he heard it. “This isn’t your path,” he said, stepping forward, so that he and Zib were clustered together on the same stone step. “At the top, we saw the sigil of the Queen of Swords. She wouldn’t give the road that leads to her sign to someone else. I think you’re pretending to own something that doesn’t belong to you. I think the Queen of Swords would be very interested in hearing about that.”
The crows cackled with laughter as the beast took a thudding step backward, safely away from the children.
“Maybe that’s so and maybe that’s not so,” it grumbled. “Maybe this is her path, but I’m still a beast of the brambles, and I’m allowed to eat. So what will you give me not to kill you?”