“The improbable road!” Zib said.
“Keep walking,” urged the Crow Girl. “It’s figuring out where we were!”
They kept walking, and the grass grew thinner under their feet, the glitter of the improbable road showing through more and more clearly, until the grass was gone and they were walking on glittering stones, walking toward the top of a gentle rise, its slopes peppered with brightly colored flowers. The Crow Girl stopped her circling and fell back to walk by Avery’s side, so that they formed a line: first Niamh, then Zib, then Avery, and finally the Crow Girl, all of them walking in easy harmony.
They crested the rise, and there, before them, was the Impossible City.
The first impossibility was this: it was impossible that they had not been able to see it from a distance, for it was made of towers and spires and twisting, delicate peaks, all of them straining toward the sky like they thought to pierce the sun, to harness the moon. Clouds skittered among their peaks, tangling on balconies and obscuring windows.
The second impossibility was this: it was impossible for a city of such vast size and complexity to exist without changing the land around it, yet the Impossible City—surrounded by a wall of glittering, glistening stone, like a loop of the improbable road had somehow been coaxed into standing on its side—rose whole and shining out of field and farmland. There were no scattered settlements, no clear-cut forests, no quarries. It could have been conjured out of the earth already constructed, complete and unchangeable, pristine and perfect.
Avery and Zib stood hand-in-hand, looking at the great towers of the Impossible City, their mouths hanging open and their eyes filled with wonders. The buildings here weren’t like any other buildings they had ever seen. They moved, changing shape and form and function according to the needs of the people who walked on their high terraces, moving between the buildings like dreams. Stairways formed and came apart; bridges danced themselves into existence and back out of it again.
Beside them, Niamh sighed.
“What’s wrong?” asked Zib.
“I lived here once,” said Niamh. “I never will again.”
“Why not?”
“Because drowned girls are very possible, and the Impossible City only welcomes impossible things. Girls like me happen too often to ever make it our home.” Niamh shook her head. “It is a fine and lovely and glorious place to live. It is kinder than it needs to be, and cruel enough to be real. But it isn’t mine anymore, and it won’t be tomorrow, or the day after that.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Zib stubbornly. “If it’s not your home, it won’t be our home, either. You can come back over the wall with us. We have a guest room, and my mother won’t care if you get the sheets all wet. You can stand in her garden and water it without doing anything, and she’ll call you her favorite and bake you all the cookies you want.”
Avery, whose mother would have minded a perpetually damp houseguest, said, “We’re not going there anyway, not now. The improbable road will have to take us somewhere else. No one goes home if we don’t find the Queen of Wands.”
“I haven’t got a home to go to,” said the Crow Girl. “I gave it away, wherever it was, when I gave my name to the King of Cups. I don’t remember anything about it, except that it was beautiful, and I loved it very much, and I had to leave.”
“Why?” asked Zib.
“I don’t remember that, either.” The corner of the Crow Girl’s mouth quirked upward. “Awful, isn’t it? I must have been very frightened, to give so many things away without getting anything but feathers in return. I like my feathers well enough. I might have liked a feather bed even more, once upon a time that I’ve forgotten.”
“It’s better to forget a home than to lose it,” said Niamh.
The Crow Girl looked at her. “Is it?” she asked.
Niamh didn’t have an answer.
The sky was finally growing darker, the sun dipping low on the distant line of the horizon. Avery dropped Zib’s hand in order to shade his eyes, looking around.
“If we can’t go to the city, we need to find a place to spend the night,” he said. “We’ll start looking for the Queen of Wands in the morning.”
Zib nodded. “Where will we go?”
“Anywhere you want. Adventures follow the people who are having them.”
“Will you stay with me?”
Avery reached for Zib’s hand again. She let him take it, and they tangled their fingers together like the roots of a tree, so tight that they might never come apart.
“Always,” he said.
They turned away from the great, glittering jewel of the Impossible City, Niamh and the Crow Girl by their sides. They started to walk.
The improbable road was there to meet them.
EPILOGUE
IN WHICH TWO CHILDREN ARE MISSING
In the same ordinary town, on the same ordinary street, two ordinary households were watching the sidewalk with fear and trepidation. They were waiting for their children—their ordinary, everyday, predictable children—to come home. They had been waiting for hours. They felt like they had been waiting for years.
How surprised they would have been, those children, if they had been able to see the fear on their parents’ faces, the way they scanned the distance in every possible direction, the way their hands shook as they held tightly to whatever they could find! It was easy to believe their parents had other concerns to keep them occupied. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Unaware of how far their children had gone, or how far they had left to go, their parents watched, and waited, and hoped for a quick and easy ending, the sort of tidy thing that only ever comes in stories, and so rarely graces us here, in the real world, where real costs can be incurred, and real prices must be paid.
They would be waiting for a very long time.