Avery reached his hand out toward the Page of Frozen Waters, who reached back. Their fingers were only inches apart when three things happened, very, very quickly and at the same time:
A crow landed on Avery’s shoulder and pecked him briskly in the side of the head, not quite breaking the skin, but setting his ears ringing like church bells, and
A sword came flying out of the river, the blade ripe with rust and blossoming with frost, the hilt studded with tiny crystals, rounded and sanded down by the motion of the water, until they became safe to hold, and
The Page of Frozen Waters suddenly looked less like a pleasantly smiling girl a few years older than Avery was, and more like a waterlogged corpse that had somehow forgotten that it was no longer meant to be up and moving around. Her skin had a soft, spongy-looking quality to it, and her hair was tangled with waterweeds, not the natural, exuberant tangle of Zib’s hair, which had never met a hairbrush it didn’t want to steal, or the feathery chaos of the Crow Girl’s hair, or even the gentle disarray of Niamh’s hair. This was an elf knot, the sort of snarl that could be corrected only with prayer and a pair of scissors, and no one who would allow their hair to become so uncontrolled and uncontrollable could possibly understand what it was to be a child who believed in starched shirts and polished shoes and keeping his word because it was right, and not because he wanted to.
Avery recoiled, one hand dipping to grab the sword in automatic defensiveness. He raised its blunted edge toward the Page of Frozen Waters, and the rust and ice fell away from the blade in a shivering sheet, leaving behind what looked like a sharpened razor made of glass, so sharp that it could slice the very air in two. It was impossible. He no longer knew quite what that word was meant to mean.
The Page of Frozen Waters recoiled. The crow on Avery’s shoulder cawed furious victory. The Page narrowed her eyes.
“If that’s what you choose, that’s what you’ve chosen,” she said. “Don’t think this will be forgotten, either of you.” She pointed a finger at the crow, the gesture sharp and furious, before making a shooing gesture with the whole of her hand.
The crow fell.
Avery whirled around, surprise overtaking anger, then transforming into horror. “No!” he yelped, the sword falling from his fingers as he dropped to his knees and gathered the fallen crow in his hands. The tiny, feathered body was stiff, its eyes open and already glazing over.
He barely heard the soft splash from behind him. When he turned, the Page of Frozen Waters was gone.
“That’s not fair,” he said. Niamh, who he assumed had thrown him the sword, did not appear or reply. “It’s not fair,” he said again, louder. “She didn’t do anything to you!”
“Oh, but I did, didn’t I?” said the Crow Girl, sounding wearier than he had ever heard her sound before. He turned, and there she was, in her black dress and her bare feet, standing a few feet away. None of her seemed to be missing, but it was impossible to see every part of a person, wasn’t it? People were like treasure chests, full of secrets that never saw the light of day. That crow could have been almost any part of her, and its loss might kill her slowly, or it might not kill her at all, but either way, it was gone. It had saved him, and it had died for its trouble.
Gingerly, she reached down and took the crow from his hands, cradling it against her chest. She looked at it with a depth of sorrow Avery wouldn’t have believed possible. He remembered his own mother looking at him like that, when he’d skinned his knees or come home from school crying over some playground fight or other. The Crow Girl sighed.
“Gone,” she said. “This was a part of me and now it’s gone, and it’s never going to come back again, and I don’t know what it was before it left me; I can’t know, because once a thing is broken past repairing, it doesn’t return. I should be angry, I suppose—she did this to punish me more than to punish you—and I should be afraid, since she could do this to any other part of me she likes, but all I am is sad. Is that strange, that I should be more sad over this than over anything else?”
“I don’t think so,” whispered Avery. He bent and picked up the sword that had been flung from the river. Niamh was still nowhere to be seen. He didn’t even know for sure that the blade had come from her. He simply assumed, because he knew no one else who could have done it. Quartz had no reason to be here, and the owls … owls did not, for the most part, swim.
“I’m glad,” said the Crow Girl. Gently, she pushed the dead crow into the black feathers at her breast. It slipped inside with ease, and when she pulled her hands away, it didn’t fall. Tears ran down her cheeks, slow and heavy and oil-slick bright. She looked at Avery and smiled, unevenly. “I suppose my side is set now; I suppose there’s no going back. She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have done any of this. Let’s break her like a bone and leave her for the sun to steal.”
Avery, who didn’t trust himself to speak, simply nodded. Zib needed them.
TEN
WHAT ISN’T YOURS
“I’ve been here before,” said the Crow Girl, and started walking toward the gray and unforgiving cliff. “I was here for longer than anyone should have been, and the King knows my name, even though I gave it up and can’t know it anymore, and when I left, I said I’d never come back again. I still know the way, though. I can still take us where we need to be.”
“How do you know where we need to be?”
“We’ve seen the Page and paid a price, and stories take a certain shape here, if you let them. We’re in it now. There’s no going back to where we were.”
Avery clutched his sword. He would rather have had his ruler, but that was lost now, along with the shine from his shoes, and so very many other things. “Is it safe?”
“Is anything safe? Walk outside on a clear spring morning and you can still find yourself beaten and broken on the dewy ground. There’s no such thing as ‘safe,’ and anyone who tells you there is is lying, either to themselves, or to you. Or to both, I suppose. Some people are surprisingly good at lying to themselves.” The Crow Girl stopped at the base of the cliff, looking up. “Even I’m surprisingly good at lying to myself. I said I’d never come back, but here I am, and I suppose I knew I would be as soon as I pulled you out of the mud. Lies always come back to bite you in the end.”
“So it’s dangerous,” said Avery.
“Very,” said the Crow Girl, and began to climb.
Avery hesitated, looking from the Crow Girl to the cliff to the sword in his hand. Zib was up there somewhere. Zib needed him. No one had ever needed him before, not really, not like that. He didn’t owe it to her to try, exactly, but he felt he should. He felt like, given time, he should owe her the world.
The Crow Girl climbed. Avery followed.
There were narrow stairs cut into the side of the mountain, all but invisible from any distance away; by watching where the Crow Girl put her feet, he found that he could keep himself anchored to the cliffside, and thus keep himself from falling. He didn’t look back, and he didn’t look down. He had heard, somewhere, that looking back—that looking down—was the most dangerous thing a person could do while they were climbing up a mountain. He had no reason to think the adults who had told him this were lying.