Avery did not want to let go. Avery thought he would rather dangle forever than let go, even a little. But Zib was gone, and it was all his fault; if he couldn’t start trusting the people who were left, he was going to fall, just like she did.
Avery let go.
His fall was short, and stopped when he struck something cold and solid and slippery, landing on his bottom. He tried to stand up, and his feet slid out from under him, leaving him seated. Niamh turned to offer him a slight, strained smile. Her hands were raised, and her hair was billowing around her like a wave, even though there was no wind to stir it.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “This is perfectly safe. Just try to enjoy it.”
“Enjoy what?” he asked.
Niamh’s smile grew. She didn’t answer, only sat down on the slippery surface. crows flew out of the fog, roosting all over the two of them, covering them in warm, feathery bodies. Avery looked wildly around, trying to understand what was happening. The crows began flapping their wings, and Avery and Niamh began inching along the surface—ice, it was ice, they were sitting on a long ribbon of ice that curved and twisted like a carnival slide—until the force of the dozens and dozens of flapping wings became enough to propel them along at a greater and greater speed. They slid down the icy ribbon like they were sitting on polished sleds, fast and graceful and secure, Avery’s shriek of dismay accompanying them all the way down.
The ice slide ended at the bottom of the cliffs, dumping them onto the frozen, stony ground. Avery scrambled to his feet, shedding crows in all directions, and looked frantically around. There was nothing but stone, glittering quartz and shimmering opal and a dozen shades of topaz, creating a cruel rainbow of cold. The crows began to spiral together, reforming themselves into the body of the Crow Girl. Niamh sat on a large quartz boulder, head bowed and shoulders shaking, trying to catch her breath. The tips of her fingers and toes were blue from the strain of spinning a ribbon of ice all the way down into the chasm.
Avery barely noticed any of this. He had yet to even realize that his ruler had been lost, left wedged into the cliffs high above. He was spinning in place, scanning the shore. Zib—stupid Zib, who thought she knew everything—was supposed to be somewhere around here. That’s what the Page of Frozen Waters had said, before pushing him over the waterfall. He needed to find Zib. He needed to tell her he was sorry.
She wasn’t there.
“Where is she?” he asked, barely aware that his voice was raising into a wail. A hand touched his shoulder. He stopped, and turned, and looked into the solemn, avian eyes of the Crow Girl.
“You came together, and you won’t find an ending alone,” she said, and her voice was soft, and sad, and more serious than he had ever heard her. “That doesn’t mean you can’t have all the middle your heart can hold. You don’t have to stay here. You don’t have to follow her. The Page of Frozen Waters has her now, and you won’t get her back the way you lost her. Endings are tricky things. Remember, I told you that, when we’d barely met at all. Endings don’t forgive. So have a middle. Let her go.”
Avery gaped at her. “How can you say that?”
“I lied to you.” The Crow Girl looked at him gravely. “I told you the Queen of Swords made me, the same way as she made the Bumble Bear, and I lied, because what’s true isn’t always what’s right. She didn’t make me. She broke the chains that were on me, and I told her I’d be loyal, because every caged thing wants to be loyal to the one who lets it out, but she didn’t make me. I went to her willing. I didn’t go to him willing.”
“The Page of Frozen Waters commands the crows,” said Niamh. Avery, who had almost forgotten she was there, turned to look at her. All her attention was for the Crow Girl. “She tells them where to go and what to do, and they serve as her eyes and her spies, all across the Up-and-Under. Are you spying for her still?”
“No,” whispered the Crow Girl. “Not for days and days and days, not since before the Queen of Wands went—” Her eyes widened and she clapped her hands over her mouth, like she could somehow cram the words back inside.
“Since the Queen of Wands went where?” asked Avery.
The Crow Girl lowered her hands. “Missing,” she said miserably. “Since the Queen of Wands went missing. Everyone blamed everyone else, and the King of Cups told the Page of Frozen Waters to see what she could see, and so she let the crows fly, she let us all fly, and not all of us … not all of us came back. Some were eaten, yes, and some were lost, and some found another way.”
“The Queen of Swords,” said Niamh.
The Crow Girl nodded. “She can cut old bonds. She cut me free, and all she asked was that I stay and serve her, be a crow in her court, and not in anybody else’s. But I was and am and will be a crow still, because some things can’t be taken back, and so she doesn’t mind when I join children on quests, or steal fruit from her orchards. It’s having me, not taming me, that matters. I’m had, I truly am.”
“But where’s Zib?” asked Avery. “She’s not with the Queen of Wands. She’s lost and she fell and no one made an ice slide to catch her, she didn’t have a ruler to break her fall. She could be hurt. We have to find her.”
“No one has to do anything,” said the Crow Girl. “You could learn how to be happy without her, I know you could.”
Avery blinked at her slowly, like her words made no sense at all. Of course he could be happy without Zib. He wasn’t entirely sure he knew how to be happy with her. They’d only been together since the wall, and most of their time in the Up-and-Under had been strange and frightening and not what he’d call “happy” at all. Zib wasn’t where his happiness was harbored.
But she was his friend, still, and she’d gone out of her way to help him, even when he hadn’t been very nice to her, even when it would have been easier for her to walk away. She could be happy here in the Up-and-Under, where things only made as much sense as they absolutely had to, where beasts could talk and fruit could taste like anything it wanted. Maybe if they couldn’t be happy together, they could be unhappy together, and maybe … maybe that was just as good. As long as they weren’t alone.
“It doesn’t matter whether I’m happy or not,” he said. “I have to find her.”
The Crow Girl shivered, shaking herself so that the feathers of her dress and in her hair puffed out. It should have looked silly. Somehow, it just looked scared. “Then I’ll help you,” she said.
“I won’t,” said Niamh. They both turned. The drowned girl looked at them with weary eyes, spreading her empty hands in front of herself. “I can’t. The Page of Frozen Waters is there, and all my ice can’t touch her, because there’s nothing in her left to freeze. She’ll catch me again, catch me and cage me, and this time, I won’t be able to get away. I’ll mark the path from the king’s protectorate back to the improbable road, and I’ll wait for you there, but I won’t help you. Please don’t ask that of me.”
“I won’t,” said Avery, who knew what it was to be afraid. “Only be safe, if you can, and we’ll see you when all this is over. All three of us will see you.”