“I hate you,” said Zib, voice gone dull. “You are a terrible person.”
“Maybe, but I’m not the one in the cage.” The Page twinkled at her, as bright and cold and deadly as a star. “I’m not the one who’ll be dressed in feathers and forgotten. You should be nicer to me while you have the choice. You won’t, soon, and I’ll remember what you said while you still thought you could be free.”
Zib got up onto her knees, clutching the bars to bring herself as close as possible to the Page as she glared. “You are bad,” she said. “You are rotten and twisted and awful inside, and you can dress me in feathers and make me a murder, but I know something you don’t know.”
The Page lost her smile, expression turning wary. “What’s that?”
“The ground beneath your feet doesn’t glitter,” said Zib. “The improbable road has never chosen you, not even once, because if it had, you wouldn’t be here; you’d be off on an adventure, not sitting by a man who lets you hurt people and doesn’t tell you that it’s wrong. You’d go to the Impossible City. You haven’t because you can’t. I could, if you opened this cage, and you can never take that away from me. I’ll always be the girl who could do what you couldn’t.”
The Page of Frozen Waters hissed fury and reached into the air like she was reaching into a pocket, pulling out a trident that looked like it was made of nothing but ice. She pointed it at Zib. “I don’t want your stupid city, and I don’t want your useless road, and you’re going to be mine to command, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
The owl feather in Zib’s hair twisted, like it was trying to cup her hair; she heard voices, soft and distant but crystal clear, and she smiled.
“Oh,” she said. “I think that’s where you’re wrong.”
TWELVETHE TRUTH ABOUT OWLS
“… and that’s when you came,” said Zib matter-of-factly. “You showed up just in time.”
Zib stopped speaking. Avery stared at her for a moment, eyes wide and round and horrified, before he threw himself at her, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and pulling her as close as he could, holding her as tightly as a strand of ivy holds a tree.
“Never do that again,” he commanded. “Never, ever do that again.” Her skin was smooth under his hands, with no hint of quill or feather, but he knew he would see her bursting into birds in his nightmares for the rest of his life. He could be old, older than his parents, older than the trees, and still he’d see her coming apart, dissolving and flying away.
The Crow Girl was less dramatic, although no less concerned. “Let me see your arm,” she commanded.
Silently, Zib obliged. The Crow Girl gripped her wrist, fingers surprisingly gentle despite their claw-like nails, and turned Zib’s arm gingerly over as she studied the place where the feather had sprouted. Finally, she exhaled.
“They’re going back to bone,” she said. “All children have feathers on their bones, waiting for the chance to sprout and fly away. Sometimes the trick is in keeping them there.”
“Children don’t have feathers,” said Avery, letting go of Zib so he could frown at the Crow Girl. “I would know.”
“Maybe they don’t where you come from, but here, in the Up-and-Under, they do, and you’re here now, so what’s true for one is true for all.” The Crow Girl glanced at the ground. “The road’s not here. We should find it and be on our way.”
“Can we find Niamh, too?” asked Zib. “She shouldn’t be alone.”
“We can watch for her,” said the Crow Girl. “Now come, come, come. We’re still in his protectorate, and even if he let us go, he forgets things sometimes. He could forget forgiving us, and then we’d have to do this all again. But no one else forgets. That’s the trouble with having a memory of ice. It melts, and you get the good again for the very first time, while the people all around you sharpen their swords against the bad.”
“Swords…” said Avery. He glanced at the blade in Zib’s hand, her fingers curled possessively around the hilt. “You should keep the sword. I don’t think it was ever really meant for me. I don’t want to fight people.”
“I don’t want to fight people either,” said Zib, making no move to offer the sword back to him. “That doesn’t mean I won’t, if they make me. I’ll keep you safe.”
Avery smiled. “I know you will,” he said.
The ground beneath their feet began to glitter, as if a fountain of fireflies had opened somewhere beneath the icy stone. Zib gasped in delight.
“The improbable road!” she said. “It’s found us!”
“It always does,” said the Crow Girl smugly. “Come. Come. We have a long way left to go.”
She began to walk, and the children followed her. Avery reached out, almost timidly, and slid the fingers of his free hand into Zib’s. She glanced at him and smiled, sidelong and shy, and everything was going to be all right. They had survived the court of the King of Cups; the feathers under Zib’s skin were gone. Niamh would find them, rising out of the river alongside the road like a fountain, and they would reach the Impossible City, and they would go home.
Home. It was a shining star of an idea, impossible and infinitely appealing. It was a dream that had no ending and no beginning, only a complex, clean middle. Nothing would have changed. Oh, his parents might be angry at him for missing a day of school, but his mother would cover his face in kisses, and his father would clap a hand on his shoulder, welcoming him back to a world where children didn’t have feathers wrapped around their bones, where fruit always tasted the same way, and where girls never burst into crows.
Girls. He looked at Zib. She was
