“That must have been very surprising for the spider,” said the Crow Girl. “You stay all in one piece when you sleep? How queer. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to be all one piece and try to rest at the same time. I think I’d shake myself apart even trying.”
“We’re always in one piece,” said Avery.
“No one is always in one piece,” said the Crow Girl. “Your heart wants one thing and your head wants something else and your lungs are pig-in-the-middle trying to argue with the both of them. Your spine wants to sit and your feet want to go and your hands want to grab, and they can’t all have their way. No wonder you look so confused and cranky! When all the parts of me start arguing, I pull them apart until they calm down. You, though, you keep holding them together.”
“We don’t mind,” said Zib. “I would think it very strange, if my hands and my feet went off in different directions at the same time.”
“You get used to it,” said the Crow Girl, and took a hearty bite of her own flavor fruit, smiling blissfully. “Carrion pie. Just like home.”
Neither Zib nor Avery knew what that tasted like, and they didn’t want to: they were happy to eat their own flavor fruit and then, once it was gone, to eat the fish and bread the Crow Girl had promised. The fish was juicy and sweet, roasted with unfamiliar greens and more of the little pink berries, which had burst as they cooked, spreading seeds across the fish’s skin. They popped between the teeth, adding a delightful sensation to their supper. The bread was soft and fresh, and there was cheese and butter and oh! Such a lovely meal it was that both children quite forgot how much they wanted another flavor fruit, and simply ate what had been set in front of them.
When they were finished, the plates licked clean and the hamper empty and their bellies aching pleasantly, as they always did after a good meal, they sat back in comfortable quiet. Zib leaned until her head rested on Avery’s shoulder, that insouciant hair brushing his cheek, and it seemed so right for her to be there that he didn’t object.
“That was wonderful,” he said, for his parents had always stressed the importance of remembering his manners. “Thank you. Did you cook it all yourself?”
“Oh, no,” said the Crow Girl. “I stole it!”
Avery gasped. Zib sat bolt upright, and it seemed like her hair sat up even straighter, so that she looked like she’d been struck by lightning.
“Stole it?” asked Avery. “From whom?”
“Why, the Queen of Swords, of course. Everything here belongs to her. Every beast and briar, every hill and hearth. All the crows have to steal if we want to eat. The Queen doesn’t mind. She’s the one who made us this way, and she knows that we don’t mean any harm by it.” The Crow Girl cocked her head thoughtfully to the side. “Although I suppose if you still want to get to the Impossible City, we should start walking again. The Queen doesn’t like things she doesn’t own, so she’ll come to try and own you soon. It’s the only way to keep everything exactly as she wants it and not a bit as she doesn’t.”
“So you stole our lunch from the woman who doesn’t want us here, and you don’t think that’s bad,” said Zib. She scrambled to her feet, one sock snagging on the uneven brick and pulling away from her foot, leaving her toes bare. “That’s all you stole, though, right? You didn’t take anything else?”
“Only one other thing. Catch!” The Crow Girl reached into her dress and pulled out a key, tossing it to Avery, who caught it without thinking. Then he gasped, nearly dropping it again.
It was a key, yes, but a key a foot long, carved from what looked like a single piece of bone. The surface was covered in scrimshaw swirls, showing two children walking the long length of a ribbon road. To make the point even clearer, the lines of the road had been picked out in mother-of-pearl, so that it glittered and gleamed against the white. It was stark and terrible and beautiful, all at the same time, for all things can be many things, under the right conditions.
“It’s a skeleton key,” said the Crow Girl smugly. “They’re supposed to be guarded, oh yes, locked away from the likes of me and us and we all together, but I got one. I snatched it and cached it and now all we need to do is find the lock that fits it and you can move on to the protectorate of the Queen of Wands. She isn’t there now, no, she isn’t there at all, what with the Impossible City needing all her time, but if we can’t find it—” Her face fell. She finished, almost in a whisper, “If we can’t find it, we have to go the long way round, through the protectorate of the King of Cups. You don’t want that, not at all. You want to stay safe and dry and well away from him.”
“Why do you have so many kings and queens around here, and why do we have to be afraid of half of them?” demanded Zib.
“Well, because if you belonged to one of them, you wouldn’t have to be afraid of them, and maybe you’d be afraid of the other half, which can be a nice change.” The Crow Girl stood and stretched, yawning at the same time. “Up, up, up. We need to be moving before we decide that sleeping would be better. Nothing can force you off the improbable road, not even queens and kings, but that doesn’t mean they can’t try, and sometimes the road goes on adventures of its own, and then you’re stuck. So get up, up, up. It’s time to walk.”
Zib was already standing. She
