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.”