His mother hated crows. They stole crops from her garden and frightened the neighborhood dogs so that they started barking in the early hours of the morning, breaking the peace into shards that couldn’t be pieced back together. But most of all, she hated the way they worked together. One crow would distract a cat while three more emptied out the food dish; one crow would swoop in front of a car while another hurried the fledglings away from the road. The Crow Girl was doing that for him. She was puffing her feathers and raising her voice and keeping the Page of Frozen Waters looking at anything but him.
He’d seen crows dead in the road before, hit by cars while they were trying to take care of their flocks, and he’d seen crows with broken, buckshot-peppered wings, shot by farmers who wanted to feed their cats more than they wanted to feed the crows. What she was doing was dangerous. He owed it to her to take the gift she was offering, and to take it quickly.
Zib’s eyes widened as he moved toward the cage. She seemed to understand what he was doing, though; she was silent as she let go of the bars and moved away. He took the point of the sword and slipped it into the lock, jiggling it until it went as deep as it could possibly go. Then he began to twist.
Avery had never picked a lock before, and had never done anything with a sword before, and he was pretty sure he was doing this wrong. But as he twisted, the lock grew stiff with frost, and finally, it splintered, breaking with a soft cracking noise. He dropped the sword in his surprise. It clattered against the frozen ground.
The Page of Frozen Waters whipped around, her eyes going wide as she realized what had happened. “You!” she shouted. “How dare you!” She raised her trident, stabbing it toward Avery in a gesture clearly intended to pierce his heart.
Avery thought of the crows in the road, and knew that he was finished; knew that he couldn’t move quickly enough to get out of the way. He closed his eyes.
The sound of ice shattering shocked him out of his stillness. He opened his eyes again, and there was Zib, standing between him and the Page of Frozen Waters, even as the Crow Girl had done—but unlike the Crow Girl, she was holding the sword, and had it raised in front of her, stopping the Page’s trident from striking him. Two of the tines on the trident had shattered into so many frozen shards, and the third was locked against her blade, unable to separate.
The Page, eyes gone wide and almost frightened, was standing her ground, but Avery thought she wouldn’t continue to do that for very long. She didn’t seem like the sort of person who was very good at being afraid. “You can’t fight me,” she said. “You belong to me.”
“I still have my slingshot, and I still have a dime and three acorns, and I guess as long as I have those, I don’t belong to anyone, because property doesn’t have property,” snarled Zib. She twisted the sword, knocking the trident from the Page’s hands, so that it fell to the ground. It shattered where it landed. She stepped forward. “I don’t like people who put me in cages.”
“Oh,” said the Crow Girl. Her voice was very soft.
Avery turned.
The King of Cups was rising from his throne.
He moved slowly, sheets of ice cracking and falling away with every gesture. They carried the years with them; the man who finally, glacially came to his feet was no older than Avery’s father, and had the same implacable dignity, as if no one would ever dare to question him in his place of power. This was his place of power, absolutely, his protectorate in a world that was otherwise set against him. The Page of Frozen Waters turned and fled to his side, sliding half behind him, letting him be her barrier.
The Crow Girl did not move. Did not even seem to breathe as the King of Cups stepped toward them, his eyes going from her feathered form to Avery, and finally to Zib.
“You,” he said. “You were to be mine.”
There was a question in his voice, a confusion, as if he couldn’t understand why Zib would be anything other than captive and cloaked in feathers. But her skin was smooth, and there were no feathers in her hair. Strange she might be, and dirty and disheveled, but she was still wholly and completely human.
“I never said that,” said Zib tightly. “I wasn’t looking for you. I didn’t ask for a cage.”
The King turned, still slow, and looked at the Page. “Is this true?” he asked.
“She came here,” protested the Page. “If they come here, they want your blessings! That’s how it’s always been, and how it’s meant to be! She didn’t have to say anything for me to know what she wanted.”
The King frowned. “We can’t keep what’s been improperly taken,” he said. “You know that.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“But you did it.” He looked to the Crow Girl. “You, though … you belong to me.”
“I belong to the Queen of Swords now,” she said, voice small. “You let me go, and she took me in. I’m not your bird and not your girl and not your pretty toy.”
“And if I told you I’d let the children go, if only you’d agree to stay?”
The Crow Girl went still. Avery looked at her, and Zib looked at her, and both of them knew that she wasn’t going to save them: that she would, in the end, only be
