He wasn’t willing to leave her behind.
The realization blossomed like a flower in his chest, and he tightened his hand on hers, until his grip was hard enough that she glanced at him again, questioning and confused. The Crow Girl walked in front of them, blissfully oblivious.
“What’s wrong?” asked Zib.
Avery hesitated before blurting, “I don’t understand why there are so many owls. I’ve never seen this many owls in my whole life, and now they’re everywhere. Why are there so many owls?”
“I don’t know,” said Zib. “I like them, though.” She didn’t have a hand free to touch the feather in her hair, and so she tossed her head a little, so that it brushed her cheek like a caress. “They’ve all been nice.”
“They must want something,” said Avery staunchly. He felt confident of that, at least: his parents had always told him that people were only nice when they wanted something, and that the appropriate thing to do was smile, and nod, and walk away as soon as he possibly could. “I don’t know what owls want.”
“The same thing everyone wants,” said the Crow Girl, without turning. “A warm place to sleep, a soft place to land, and something to fill their bellies when the wind blows cold. No one’s as different from anyone else as they want to think they are. No one’s as the same, either. It’s the paradox of living.”
“What’s a paradox?” asked Zib.
“Two places to tie your boat,” said the Crow Girl, and cawed harsh, impolite laughter to the sky.
Avery frowned, and was on the verge of saying something when strong talons gripped his shoulders and yanked him off the improbable road, up into the cloudy air. It was so abrupt that his hand left Zib’s, so that she was holding nothing but the memory of where he had been, and that his shineless shoes came quite off of his feet, remaining behind on the improbable road as he vanished into the fog.
Zib whirled around, sword raised, but there was nothing for her to cut. The Crow Girl squawked and spun, her feathers fluffed out in all directions, but there was nothing for her to startle.
“Where … where did he go?” asked Zib.
“I don’t know,” said the Crow Girl.
“Get him back! You have to get him back!”
“I don’t know how.”
Zib stared at Avery’s shoes and then up into the fog. It was difficult to remember exactly where Avery had been before he went away. He had taken his shadow with him, which seemed suddenly, unspeakably rude, even though Zib had never thought of it that way before. Shadows should stay behind when someone was planning on coming back, to mark the place they were going to be.
A hand touched her shoulder. She looked up to find the Crow Girl smiling at her encouragingly, the shadow of a strain in her avian eyes.
“It’s all right,” she said. “He’ll be back, safe and sound, you’ll see.”
“How do you know?” asked Zib.
“Why, because we’re on the improbable road to the Impossible City, and right now, what could be more improbable, or impossible, than your friend coming back to you?” The Crow Girl smiled a bright and earnest smile. “There’s no possible way it could happen, and that means it’s virtually guaranteed.”
Zib stared at her for a moment before bursting, noisily, into tears. She was still crying when the great blue owl swept down from the sky and grabbed her by the shoulders, yanking her off her feet and carrying her away.
The Crow Girl stood where she was, gaping at the absence of both her traveling companions. She tilted her head back and looked at the sky, which was absent of both children and great owls. She began to frown.
“That wasn’t very kind,” she said. “They were mine to look after, and you took them.” She knew, somewhere in the jumbled back of her mind—which was something like a rummage sale, all broken pottery and old shoes with holes in the bottoms and treasures whose owners have forgotten why they were so precious in the first place—that she needed those children. They were taking her somewhere, somewhere she needed to be, somewhere she couldn’t go on her own. They mattered, and now she had lost them.
She needed to get them back. That much was terribly clear. She could break into birds and take to the sky, but thinking when she was more than one thing was hard. It made her heads hurt and her wings forget which way they were supposed to be flapping. Once, she’d tried to fly up and read over someone’s shoulder, and she’d found herself flying backward for the better part of a day. It hadn’t been pleasant, that was for sure and certain, and she didn’t want to do it again. She could save someone who was falling, but she couldn’t braid their hair.
More, and more dangerously, the King of Cups was so awfully near, and crows were so much simpler. They didn’t think about things like freedom and cruelty. They thought about food and safety and knowing that there were no predators to take their neighbors or their suppers away. She’d had
