The owl feather in Zib’s hair twisted, like it was trying to cup her hair; she heard voices, soft and distant but crystal clear, and she smiled.
“Oh,” she said. “I think that’s where you’re wrong.”
TWELVE
THE TRUTH ABOUT OWLS
“… and that’s when you came,” said Zib matter-of-factly. “You showed up just in time.”
Zib stopped speaking. Avery stared at her for a moment, eyes wide and round and horrified, before he threw himself at her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and pulling her as close as he could, holding her as tightly as a strand of ivy holds a tree.
“Never do that again,” he commanded. “Never, ever do that again.” Her skin was smooth under his hands, with no hint of quill or feather, but he knew he would see her bursting into birds in his nightmares for the rest of his life. He could be old, older than his parents, older than the trees, and still he’d see her coming apart, dissolving and flying away.
The Crow Girl was less dramatic, although no less concerned. “Let me see your arm,” she commanded.
Silently, Zib obliged. The Crow Girl gripped her wrist, fingers surprisingly gentle despite their claw-like nails, and turned Zib’s arm gingerly over as she studied the place where the feather had sprouted. Finally, she exhaled.
“They’re going back to bone,” she said. “All children have feathers on their bones, waiting for the chance to sprout and fly away. Sometimes the trick is in keeping them there.”
“Children don’t have feathers,” said Avery, letting go of Zib so he could frown at the Crow Girl. “I would know.”
“Maybe they don’t where you come from, but here, in the Up-and-Under, they do, and you’re here now, so what’s true for one is true for all.” The Crow Girl glanced at the ground. “The road’s not here. We should find it and be on our way.”
“Can we find Niamh, too?” asked Zib. “She shouldn’t be alone.”
“We can watch for her,” said the Crow Girl. “Now come, come, come. We’re still in his protectorate, and even if he let us go, he forgets things sometimes. He could forget forgiving us, and then we’d have to do this all again. But no one else forgets. That’s the trouble with having a memory of ice. It melts, and you get the good again for the very first time, while the people all around you sharpen their swords against the bad.”
“Swords…” said Avery. He glanced at the blade in Zib’s hand, her fingers curled possessively around the hilt. “You should keep the sword. I don’t think it was ever really meant for me. I don’t want to fight people.”
“I don’t want to fight people either,” said Zib, making no move to offer the sword back to him. “That doesn’t mean I won’t, if they make me. I’ll keep you safe.”
Avery smiled. “I know you will,” he said.
The ground beneath their feet began to glitter, as if a fountain of fireflies had opened somewhere beneath the icy stone. Zib gasped in delight.
“The improbable road!” she said. “It’s found us!”
“It always does,” said the Crow Girl smugly. “Come. Come. We have a long way left to go.”
She began to walk, and the children followed her. Avery reached out, almost timidly, and slid the fingers of his free hand into Zib’s. She glanced at him and smiled, sidelong and shy, and everything was going to be all right. They had survived the court of the King of Cups; the feathers under Zib’s skin were gone. Niamh would find them, rising out of the river alongside the road like a fountain, and they would reach the Impossible City, and they would go home.
Home. It was a shining star of an idea, impossible and infinitely appealing. It was a dream that had no ending and no beginning, only a complex, clean middle. Nothing would have changed. Oh, his parents might be angry at him for missing a day of school, but his mother would cover his face in kisses, and his father would clap a hand on his shoulder, welcoming him back to a world where children didn’t have feathers wrapped around their bones, where fruit always tasted the same way, and where girls never burst into crows.
Girls. He looked at Zib. She was smiling as she walked, the sword in her hand looking like it had always belonged there, like she had been somehow incomplete before she held a weapon against the world. She was scrawny and scruffy and her hair was somehow more tangled than it had been before, standing up and out from her head like a thorn briar, equally full of secrets. She was not the kind of child his parents had always encouraged him to play with, the kind who would grow up to be serious and quiet and just like him. She was loud, and wild, and his mother would frown at the state of her hands, and his father would frown at the state of her clothes, and it would be so much easier to believe this journey hadn’t changed him if he was only willing to leave her behind.
He wasn’t willing to leave her behind.
The realization blossomed like a flower in his chest, and he tightened his hand on hers, until his grip was hard enough that she glanced at him again, questioning and confused. The Crow Girl walked in front of them, blissfully oblivious.
“What’s wrong?” asked Zib.
Avery hesitated before blurting, “I don’t understand why there are so many owls. I’ve never seen this many owls in my whole life, and now they’re everywhere. Why are there so many owls?”
“I don’t know,” said Zib. “I like them, though.” She didn’t have a hand free to touch the feather in her hair, and so she tossed her head a little, so that it brushed her cheek like a caress. “They’ve all been nice.”
“They must want something,” said Avery staunchly. He felt confident of that, at least: his parents had always told him that people were only nice when they wanted something, and that the appropriate thing to do was smile, and nod, and walk away as soon as he possibly could. “I don’t know what owls want.”
“The same thing everyone wants,” said the Crow Girl, without turning. “A warm place to sleep, a soft place to land, and something to fill their bellies when the wind blows cold. No one’s as different from anyone else as they want to think they are. No one’s as the same, either. It’s the paradox of living.”
“What’s a paradox?” asked Zib.
“Two places to tie your boat,” said the Crow Girl, and cawed harsh, impolite laughter to the sky.
Avery frowned, and was on the verge of saying something when strong talons gripped his shoulders and yanked him off the improbable road, up into the cloudy air. It was so abrupt that his hand left Zib’s, so that she was holding nothing but the memory of where he had been, and that his shineless shoes came quite off of his feet, remaining behind on the improbable road as he vanished into the fog.
Zib whirled around, sword raised, but there was nothing for her to cut. The Crow Girl squawked and spun, her feathers fluffed out in all directions, but there was nothing for her to startle.
“Where … where did he go?” asked Zib.
“I don’t know,” said the Crow Girl.
“Get him back! You have to get him back!”
“I don’t know how.”
Zib stared at Avery’s shoes and then up into the fog. It was difficult to remember exactly where Avery had been before he went away. He had taken his shadow with him, which seemed suddenly, unspeakably rude, even though Zib had never thought of it that way before. Shadows should stay behind when someone was planning on coming back, to mark the place they were going to be.