Zib, though, had what felt like a more important question. “Who is the Page of Frozen Waters?”
Niamh sobered. “She is the worst of all the King’s subjects, because she loves him and hates him at the same time, and would do anything to please him. She commands the crows, and they do her bidding. For him, she gathers every strange thing that comes into the Up-and-Under, even stealing them from under the nose of the Queen of Swords, who is wicked in her own way, but never so much as the King of Cups. The Page will gather you, if you’re not careful.”
Avery and Zib exchanged a glance and stepped closer together, suddenly afraid of this glittering girl, and of everything her presence might entail.
Avery thought of the Crow Girl, of her promise that the skeleton key and its lock would allow them to pass over the protectorate of the King of Cups without attracting his attention. But here they were, soaked and cold and on their own, and he knew—knew—that they hadn’t passed over the King’s protectorate at all. They had fallen right down into the middle of it, and the Crow Girl had vanished.
Zib thought of the Crow Girl as well, but she thought of the way the girl had tried to help them, the way she had broken into birds and fled, the way she had balked at the idea of control by kings or queens of any kind. The Page of Frozen Waters must have been her greatest nightmare, and if she never came back, Zib didn’t know if she’d be able to blame her, and if she never came back, Zib didn’t know if she’d be able to forgive her, either. It was all so complicated, and she was cold. So cold.
Niamh looked at the shivering children with sympathy. She looked somewhat younger than they were, yes, but she was a daughter of the city beneath the lake, the city that had—that needed—no name, for how many spectacular cities of shell and silver could one world contain? She was old enough to have seen so many stories spin themselves across the shore, and she was sorry to see children suffer.
“Come with me,” she said. “Your Crow Girl will find us, if she’s free to do so, or not find us, if the Page of Frozen Waters has seized hold of her, for the Page trades cleverness for cruelty, and rarely remembers to ask the proper questions. I can make a fire. You can get warm and dry and decide what happens next.”
“Won’t you melt?” blurted Zib.
Niamh smiled. “I come from the ice, but I’m not ice. You come from the earth, but you’re not earth. You don’t melt to mud in water, and I don’t melt when confronted by fire. Although…” She leaned forward, squinting at the two of them. “Maybe you don’t both come from earth. There’s something mismatched about you. There could be other elements.”
“We come from the same town,” said Avery, and took Zib’s hand, and held it stubbornly tight, a challenging expression on his face.
The glittering girl didn’t argue. She simply nodded, and said, “Follow me,” as she turned to walk back the way she had come, back into the crevasse which gaped, silent and crystalline, in the mountain’s side.
Before the wall, before the mudslide and the tunnel of mist, before the girls who came from crows and the owls that talked, Avery and Zib might have stayed where they were, watching the stranger dwindle in the distance. They might have chosen to run, to seek other ways of warming themselves, for they were both reasonably cautious children with no interest in breaking their parents’ hearts. But they were cold, and they were wet, and the Up-and-Under had a way of wearing such kinds of caution away, a little bit at a time, replacing them with curiosity and the quiet conviction that sometimes, the right thing was to follow.
So they followed.
The air inside of the crevasse was even colder than the air outside. It bit and stung their skins, until Avery looked over his shoulder, clearly thinking of going back. The opening had disappeared in a fog of ice and cold, and he could no longer be sure that it existed. The only way out was forward, following Niamh. The thought that this could be a terrible trap occurred to him, and was quickly denied. That sort of thinking would do him no good and might do him a great deal of ill. He glanced at Zib.
Her clothing was still soaked, but her hair seemed to have wrung itself out, once again rising in a glorious and terrible tangle, as frizzy and unconfined as ever. It was a relief, of a kind, to see her hair so defiant of gravity, and wetness, and a dozen other forces he didn’t have a name for. As long as her hair was alert, she was still Zib, and as long as she was still Zib, he was still Avery, and they could make it through this. They could.
The tunnel around them widened out abruptly enough to be disorienting, and they were suddenly standing on a clear patch of earth, dotted with scrubby flowers and low berry plants that looked something like strawberries, and something like basil, and something like nothing he had ever seen before. Niamh was already in motion, gathering twigs and branches from the stretch of ground against the cliff face and piling them into a heap in the center of the clear space.
Straight rock walls defined the space on two sides, like a folded piece of paper standing on a table. A swift-moving river defined it on the third, rushing to fall down, down, down, in a cascade of falling water and hissing foam. The fourth side was nothingness, the land dropping away to provide the waterfall something to fall over, the clouds someplace
