A hand touched her shoulder. She looked up to find the Crow Girl smiling at her encouragingly, the shadow of a strain in her avian eyes.
“It’s all right,” she said. “He’ll be back, safe and sound, you’ll see.”
“How do you know?” asked Zib.
“Why, because we’re on the improbable road to the Impossible City, and right now, what could be more improbable, or impossible, than your friend coming back to you?” The Crow Girl smiled a bright and earnest smile. “There’s no possible way it could happen, and that means it’s virtually guaranteed.”
Zib stared at her for a moment before bursting, noisily, into tears. She was still crying when the great blue owl swept down from the sky and grabbed her by the shoulders, yanking her off her feet and carrying her away.
The Crow Girl stood where she was, gaping at the absence of both her traveling companions. She tilted her head back and looked at the sky, which was absent of both children and great owls. She began to frown.
“That wasn’t very kind,” she said. “They were mine to look after, and you took them.” She knew, somewhere in the jumbled back of her mind—which was something like a rummage sale, all broken pottery and old shoes with holes in the bottoms and treasures whose owners have forgotten why they were so precious in the first place—that she needed those children. They were taking her somewhere, somewhere she needed to be, somewhere she couldn’t go on her own. They mattered, and now she had lost them.
She needed to get them back. That much was terribly clear. She could break into birds and take to the sky, but thinking when she was more than one thing was hard. It made her heads hurt and her wings forget which way they were supposed to be flapping. Once, she’d tried to fly up and read over someone’s shoulder, and she’d found herself flying backward for the better part of a day. It hadn’t been pleasant, that was for sure and certain, and she didn’t want to do it again. She could save someone who was falling, but she couldn’t braid their hair.
More, and more dangerously, the King of Cups was so awfully near, and crows were so much simpler. They didn’t think about things like freedom and cruelty. They thought about food and safety and knowing that there were no predators to take their neighbors or their suppers away. She’d had all those things with the King. It was only the ability to choose her own direction that she’d been missing.
She was still thinking about what she was going to do next when a pair of talons clamped down on her shoulders and she was lifted off the ground. Her whole body shivered, her skin aching to open like a wound and let her fly in a dozen directions at the same time, away from whatever had seized hold of her. She swallowed the feeling down and tilted her head back, looking up at the pale pink belly of the great red owl.
Oak returned her gaze, implacable as ever. “I am sorry for this interruption,” said the owl. “Your friends are waiting.”
The owl’s voice was steady and cold, and it made the Crow Girl’s heart hurt inside her chest, unable to decide how it should feel. She managed to smile, if only a little, and said, “Good. I was trying to decide which way to start looking, and now you can carry me there.”
“Crows are lazy creatures,” said Oak. There was something sad in the great owl’s voice. “You would have been better suited as an owl.”
The Crow Girl frowned, slow as sunset in the summer. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No,” said Oak. “You wouldn’t.”
The great red owl flew on and on, until the fog began to lift, until the Crow Girl could see the towering tops of broad-branched trees. They were tall, twisting trees, made up of dozens of gently curving branches as thick around as a grown man’s leg, weaving in and out of their vast canopy as they formed a lattice of leaves and boughs and bowers, each one sweetly inviting. Oak flew on, and the Crow Girl saw the land appear around the trees, fertile and flowering, ripe with fields yearning for the harvest. Everything looked good, and warm, and welcoming, and for no reason she could name, the Crow Girl began to cry.
She was still crying when Oak came gliding into the canopy itself, dropping her into a nest woven from grasses and willow boughs before taking a place on one of the twisted branches, right between Meadowsweet and Broom.
“You’re here!” cried Zib in delight, slinging her arms around the Crow Girl’s neck.
Avery was more subdued. He waved shyly with his free hand; the other was occupied by holding tight to a piece of flavor fruit, a hole already gnawed in the rind.
And there, sitting a few feet away, in a small puddle of water that had rolled off her skin and clothing, was Niamh. She smiled at the sight of the Crow Girl.
“I knew they would find you,” she said.
“I thought we were looking for you,” said the Crow Girl.
“Everything is more than one thing, if you look at it the right way,” said Niamh.
The Crow Girl laughed, bright and merry. “Then here we are, and there you are, and we’re all together again! What a beautiful, beautiful day!”
“Together, and in the protectorate of the Queen of Wands,” said Meadowsweet. The great blue owl fluffed her feathers out, almost doubling in size. “We can’t stay here for long. We’re each of us banned from this place, for one reason or another.”
“None of them important now,” said Broom. “You made it almost to the border before we intervened.”
“So why intervene at all?” asked Avery. “We could have followed the road. We could have—”
“Your companions have not deceived you intentionally,” said Broom. “They have told you the truth as they know it, and if that truth failed to serve you top to bottom, side to side, that was less fault and more failure. No one can reveal what they don’t know. Please don’t blame them.”
“But deception is still deception,” said Oak, picking up the thread smoothly. “And the lie would not have turned to truth at the border. Did you not wonder why, when the Queen of Swords had promised you passage, that same passage placed you precisely where you didn’t want to be? Where you couldn’t safely be?”
“There are always obstacles in the Up-and-Under,” said Meadowsweet. “What is a journey without obstacles? A meal must have variety; a year must change its weather. But those obstacles are rarely so close to deadly. You have been tried, and tried, and tried, and every trial has been set with the sole purpose of slowing your steps long enough for your journey to be ended. Why do you think that might have been?”
Zib and Avery exchanged a look. Turning back to the owls, Zib ventured, “Because there are a lot of monsters in the Up-and-Under, and children are delicious?”
“She has a point there,” said the Crow Girl. “My old friend the Bumble Bear says that children are definitely delicious.”
“I don’t think people are supposed to be food,” said Avery. “Please don’t eat us.”
“They were trying to keep you from reaching the border,” said Oak. “The improbable road has one job: to go from wherever it is to the borders of the Impossible City. It doesn’t care about dynasties, or successions, or anything so trivial as who sits upon a throne.”