“This way,” he said, and pointed downriver, in the direction of the swirling, eddying rapids. “She would have gone this way.”
The Crow Girl nodded. “So walk,” she said, “and I’ll follow.” She burst into birds then, wings catching the sky as she swirled around him.
A crow landed on Avery’s head. Another landed on each of his shoulders. Standing as straight and tall as he could, he began to walk.
After the bright colors and tangled vegetation of the protectorates held by the King of Coins and the Queen of Swords, the land claimed by the King of Cups was sere and strange. Bright stone glittered everywhere Avery looked, creating the impression of a world that had frozen solid, replacing everything that was soft and gentle with hard, rigid lines and sharp, cutting edges. The ground hurt his feet. The air hurt his throat. Even the crows seemed troubled by it; they circled back again and again, taking turns resting on his head and shoulders, letting him carry them along.
The more exhausted he became, the less he felt inclined to begrudge them. He envied them more than he would have thought possible, envied the fact that they had someone to carry them where they needed to go, while he needed to walk. He could remember, dimly, a time when he’d been small enough to be carried by his parents, their arms warm and safe around him, their strength extending to become his own. But that was in the past, in the safe, sensible world on the other side of the wall, and he was here, and it was his turn to be the strong one.
“I don’t think I like to be the strong one,” he muttered sourly to himself. “I don’t think I like it at all.”
The crow currently atop his head cawed in sympathy, and dug its claws a little deeper into his hair, holding tight as Avery walked on.
Avery couldn’t have said how long he had been walking. It felt like it had been longer than a day, but that couldn’t be true, because the light had never changed. The sun was hidden somewhere far away, behind the layers on layers of fog and mist and cloud, and everything was gray, gray, gray. It was not so bright as noon, nor so dark as midnight, but seemed to exist in an eternal gloomy middle space, unchanging, unchangeable. Still Avery walked on, until he wasn’t sure he could go any farther.
He was tired. He thought he had never really known what tired was before today: he had heard of being tired, but he’d never really felt it. Tired went all the way down to his bones, wrapping around them like ribbons, until his legs were lead and his arms were sacks of sand suspended from his shoulders. Tired sapped the faint remaining color out of the world, turning everything dull and lifeless. Tired hung weights from his eyelashes. Whenever he blinked, he thought his eyes might refuse to open again.
There was a bundle of rags on the riverbank, covered in glittering silver dust, like fish scales or moonlight. Avery paused. Rags didn’t normally have bare, dirty feet, or tangled, uncombed hair.
Avery found that he could run after all. The crows lifted off his head and shoulders, flying around him in a frantic, crowing cloud as he ran toward the bundle, toward the body, toward the girl he had walked so far to save. The crows settled on the nearby rocks, cawing and screaming, until everything was noise and nothing was the way it ought to be. He kept running until he had reached Zib’s side. Then and only then he dropped to his knees, reaching for her, rolling her over.
“Zib,” he said, breathless. “Zib, are you okay? Please be okay. I didn’t mean any of the things I said before, really I didn’t. I only need you to be all right. Please, please, for me, please be all right, please be okay, please.”
Her hair covered her face, obscuring it. The crows cried and cried as he pushed it aside, revealing not the wide, friendly features of the girl from the wall but the sharp, somehow predatory face of the Page of Frozen Waters, who smiled her razorblade smile as she pulled away from his hands and sat smoothly, seamlessly up. What he had taken for Zib’s hair slid off her head, revealing itself for a mass of tangled water weeds.
“Lose something?” the Page asked. She glanced past him to the crows. Her smile faded. “You’re a fool to show your faces here. We don’t love traitors in this protectorate.”
The crows took off, launching themselves skyward in a great flutter of black wings. The Page returned her attention to Avery, smile blooming once again.
“I never expected you to follow her this far,” she said. “You’re all alone now, little boy, but you intrigue me enough that I’ll make you an offer. You should consider it closely, because you’ll never hear its like again.”
She stood, as easy as the sun shining through the clouds, and held her hands out toward him, like she expected him to take them willingly, to let her draw him easily in.
“Come with me,” she said. “I can see that you’re a child who likes ease and order, who likes to know how things will fall together. In the court of my king, fire always burns, water is always wet. Things do as they’re told. We can give you everything you want, everything you need. I can make you a prince, if you’ll let me, and perhaps one day, all this will be yours.”
Avery blinked at her slowly. There was something wrong with her offer, something wicked and cruel, but it was hard for him to see it. He was so tired, and of course she hadn’t been
