Avery, who didn’t trust himself to speak, simply nodded. Zib needed them.
TENWHAT ISN’T YOURS
“I’ve been here before,” said the Crow Girl, and started walking toward the gray and unforgiving cliff. “I was here for longer than anyone should have been, and the King knows my name, even though I gave it up and can’t know it anymore, and when I left, I said I’d never come back again. I still know the way, though. I can still take us where we need to be.”
“How do you know where we need to be?”
“We’ve seen the Page and paid a price, and stories take a certain shape here, if you let them. We’re in it now. There’s no going back to where we were.”
Avery clutched his sword. He would rather have had his ruler, but that was lost now, along with the shine from his shoes, and so very many other things. “Is it safe?”
“Is anything safe? Walk outside on a clear spring morning and you can still find yourself beaten and broken on the dewy ground. There’s no such thing as ‘safe,’ and anyone who tells you there is is lying, either to themselves, or to you. Or to both, I suppose. Some people are surprisingly good at lying to themselves.” The Crow Girl stopped at the base of the cliff, looking up. “Even I’m surprisingly good at lying to myself. I said I’d never come back, but here I am, and I suppose I knew I would be as soon as I pulled you out of the mud. Lies always come back to bite you in the end.”
“So it’s dangerous,” said Avery.
“Very,” said the Crow Girl, and began to climb.
Avery hesitated, looking from the Crow Girl to the cliff to the sword in his hand. Zib was up there somewhere. Zib needed him. No one had ever needed him before, not really, not like that. He didn’t owe it to her to try, exactly, but he felt he should. He felt like, given time, he should owe her the world.
The Crow Girl climbed. Avery followed.
There were narrow stairs cut into the side of the mountain, all but invisible from any distance away; by watching where the Crow Girl put her feet, he found that he could keep himself anchored to the cliffside, and thus keep himself from falling. He didn’t look back, and he didn’t look down. He had heard, somewhere, that looking back—that looking down—was the most dangerous thing a person could do while they were climbing up a mountain. He had no reason to think the adults who had told him this were lying.
As for the Crow Girl, she seemed to find every crack and fissure in the rock, driving her fingers into them and holding on fast. The feathers that made up her dress and tangled in her hair fluttered in the wind that blew around them, making her seem alien and impossibly strange. She didn’t look back either. Avery thought that looking back must be very frightening, if the girl who knew how to fly wasn’t willing to do it either. He wanted to drop the sword and free his other hand to help him climb, but didn’t dare; he might need it, and soon.
He spared a thought for Niamh, who must still be in the river, who had probably given him the sword. She didn’t know what was going on; she might never know. Like Quartz, like the owls, she had been left behind. The Up-and-Under seemed to do that quite a lot. It offered him companions, and then, one way or another, it whisked them away.
“I won’t let them take you away,” he muttered, and he didn’t know whether he was talking to Zib or to the Crow Girl, and the both of them kept on climbing, kept on climbing, kept on climbing toward the sky.
The Crow Girl hesitated only once, when her questing fingers found the top of the cliff: he saw her reach up, catch hold of nothing, and pull her hands back down. She tucked her chin down against her chest, and when she began to speak, although her voice was low, he could hear every word.
“What happens next … I’m free, I’m my own bird and my own girl and the Queen of Swords is the only one who holds me at all, but the King of Cups made me. I was his once, and he might forget that he doesn’t own me anymore. If he tries to take me, I may have to run away to keep him from doing it. I would be … I would be more dangerous to you in his keeping than I would be able to help. Do you understand?” Her tone was pained. She was begging him, she was pleading with him not to be angry.
Avery realized her words hurt in two directions at the same time. Thinking she might leave him hurt. Thinking she might be in danger if she didn’t hurt even more. “Sure I do,” he said. “I know you’ll find us again. You’re like the improbable road. You always come back.”
The Crow Girl was quiet for a time before she said, “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me,” and untucked her chin, and raised her hand, and pulled herself over the edge of the cliff, onto whatever solid ground lay beyond.
Avery didn’t want to follow her. He wanted to run, to go back to the bottom where Niamh was waiting and the Page of Frozen Waters wasn’t. Instead, he reached up with his free hand, and pulled himself up after her, onto a sheet of ground rimed with bone-white frost. The air was so cold that it
